Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 [Hardcover ed.] 0812249836, 9780812249835

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ENTANGLED EMPIRES

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ENTANGLED EMPIRES THE ANGLO -­I BERIAN ATLANTIC, 1500–1830

EDITED BY

JORGE CAÑIZARES-­E SGUERRA

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104​-­4 112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Cañizares-­E sguerra, Jorge, editor. Title: Entangled empires : the Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic,   1500–1830 / edited by Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra. Other titles: Entangled empires (2018) Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of   Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017027109 | ISBN 9780812249835   (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Atlantic Ocean Region—­History. | Iberian   Peninsula—­History. | ­Great Britain—­Foreign relations—­   Spain. | Spain—­Foreign relations—­Great Britain. |  ­Great Britain—­Foreign relations—­Portugal. | Portugal—­   Foreign relations—­Great Britain. | Civilization, Modern. |   History, Modern. Classification: LCC D210 .E57 2018 | DDC   303.48/218210903— ­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2017027109

To Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara and his generous, transoceanic life

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contents

Introduction 1 Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra

PART I. SEVERED HISTORIES

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Chapter 1. The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? En­glish Merchants Navigating the Iberian Atlantic

19

Mark Sheaves

Chapter 2. Agents of Empire: Africans and the Origins of En­glish Colonialism in the Amer­ic­ as

42

Michael Guasco

Chapter 3. Empires on Drugs: Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Go-­Betweens and the Anglo-­Portuguese Alliance

63

Benjamin Breen

PART II. BROKERS AND TR ANSLATORS

83

Chapter 4. Marrying Utopia: Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the En­glish Alchemy of Spanish Peru

85

Christopher Heaney

Chapter 5. The Pegs of a Wider Frame: Jewish Merchants in Anglo-­Iberian Trade Holly Snyder

105

viii C o nt ents

Chapter 6. Entangled Irishman: George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-­Spanish Imperial Rivalry

124

Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara

Chapter 7. Planters and Powerbrokers: George J. F. Clarke, Interracial Love, and Allegiance in the Revolutionary Circum-­Caribbean

142

Cameron B. Strang

PART III. POSSESSION, SOVEREIGNTY, AND LEGITIMACY

159

Chapter 8. The “Iberian” Justifications of Territorial Possession by Pilgrims and Puritans in the Colonization of Amer­i­ca

161

Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra

Chapter 9. “As the Spaniards Always Have Done”: The Legacy of Florida’s Missions for Carolina Indian Relations and the Origins of the Yamasee War

178

Bradley Dixon

PART IV. TR ADE AND WAR

195

Chapter 10. Reluctant Petitioners: En­glish Officials and the Spanish Ca­rib­be­an

197

April Lee Hatfield

Chapter 11. Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement: Empires, Sailors, and Coastal ­Peoples in the British-Spanish Ca­rib­be­an

217

Ernesto Bassi

Chapter 12. The Seven Years’ War and the Globalization of Anglo-­Iberian Imperial Entanglement: The View from Manila

236

Kristie Patricia Flannery

Afterword 255 Eliga H. Gould

C o nt ents

ix

Notes 259 List of Contributors

321

Index 323 Acknowl­edgments

331

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Introduction jorg e ca ñ i z a res -­es gu e r r a

Like Nehemiah, Thomas Dale rebuilt the ­temple of Jerusalem. As marshal and then governor of V ­ irginia between 1611 and 1616, Dale brought marshal law to the disor­ga­nized V ­ irginia plantation, introduced a new regime of private property to fi­nally put an end to chronic famine, established peace treaties with the Powhatan and the Chickahominy, and had new cities like Henricus and Bermuda City built. The secretary of the V ­ irginia Com­pany Ralph Hamor devoted his 1615 True Discourse of the Pres­ent Estate of ­Virginia to the successes of the new Nehemiah in the new Jerusalem that was V ­ irginia. Whereas Nehemiah had foreign Ammonites and Horonites, like Sanballath and Tobiah, willing to make pacts with treasonous local Jewish Levites to undermine the reconstruction of Jerusalem, Dale had foreign papists and irreligious merchant adventurers plotting against the success of the plantation. According to Hamor, success in V ­ irginia meant the conversion of the natives away from the clutches of both Satan and Spain. Hamor thought that Algonquian heathens would “be brought to entertain the honour of the name and glory of Gospel of our Blessed Saviour.” One day, the natives would realize how lucky they w ­ ere and “­shall break out and cry in rapture of so inexplicable mercie: blessed be the King [James] and Prince [Henry] of ­England; blessed be the En­glish Nation; blessed for ever be the most High God . . . ​that sent ­these En­glish as angels to bring such glad tidings to us.”1 Any casual reading of Hamor’s True Discourse shows the importance of the Spanish colonial experience to the En­glish colonization of the New World. Like the Spaniards, the En­glish sought to “civilize” and convert the Indians and subordinate them as tributaries of the crown. To describe this pro­cess, Hamor used the very term the Spaniards deployed, namely, to “reduce” (from the Latin to lead back): “What more honourable vnto our country, then to

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reduce a farre disiyoned forraingne nation u ­ nder the due obedience of our dread Soveraingne, the Kings Maistie?”2 The Spaniards appear in Hamor’s pages explic­itly as papist enemies whose caravels and galleons constantly threaten the survival of the young Virginian plantation.3 But their colonies also appear implicitly as the reference upon which to mea­sure both failure and success: plantations with well laid out cities and vibrant private export agriculture and mining; colonies or­g a­nized around the transformation of the Indians into tributaries and members of a composite monarchy. Hamor implicitly holds Hernán Cortés’s Mexico as ­Virginia’s antithesis and model. Hamor, for example, pres­ents Dale as a new Joshua-­cum-­Caleb who, however, is not bent on destroying the Indian-­Canaanites “by force of armes as the Israelites did then by warrant of God (nor by utterly destroying of them as some have cruelly done since) as by gentleness, love, amity, and Religion.”4 Hamor organizes his account on the pacification of Chickahominy with the history of Cortés in mind. The Chickahominy appear as a Tlaxcalan republic of eight senators that had never had a king and whose e­ nemy was Powhatan-­ Montezuma, an emperor tyrant. To fight Powhatan the Chickahominy willingly declare themselves “En­glish” tributaries and vassals to fight a common foe.5 The Powhatan, in contrast, appear as Cortés’s Mexica. Dale has Powhatan’s ­daughter, Pocahontas, kidnapped and seeks to have her exchanged in lieu of En­glish captives and stolen arms. Along with an armed platoon, Dale takes Pocahontas upriver, looking for Powhatan. A ­ fter a few skirmishes in which Dale razes towns, crops, canoes, and fisheries, the natives fi­nally acquiesce. Dale retreats with Pocahontas back to Jamestown and has her baptized as Rebecca. Powhatan considers his d ­ aughter’s marriage to the planter John Rolfe as a peace treaty. Rolfe, in turn, dismisses the biblical injunction to the sons of Levi not to marry foreign wives for the sake of the plantation’s survival.6 In Hamor’s hands, Rebecca becomes the potential founder of a new mestizo Israel, the m ­ other of a New World Jacob.7 Spanish Amer­i­ca is the unspoken shadow that organizes Hamor’s early history of ­Virginia. Hamor goes out of his way to pres­ent En­glish V ­ irginia as the antithesis of Spanish colonization. According to Hamor, Dale is no Spanish conquistador who, Joshua-­cum-­Caleb-­like, cruelly strives to enslave and eliminate all the original inhabitants of the Promised Land. While seeking to draw distinctions between the colonial experience of north and south, Hamor silently uses the Spanish model to judge ­Virginia’s success or lack thereof: the “reduction” of the natives into Christian tributary status, the establishment of export mining and agricultural economies, the building of cities, and the

Introduction 3

creation of mestizo kingdoms. The entangled histories of the colonial Amer­i­ cas, north and south, have long been forgotten ­because since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries t­ here have been ­those like Hamor who have deliberately sought to keep the connections between t­ hese histories hidden. According to Hamor, the reason the Chickahominy ­were willing to join the En­glish in the fight against any potential Spanish intruder was ­because the tyrannous Powhatan had come to V ­ irginia exiled from the Spanish West Indies. Th ­ ere was, however, an easier explanation: Spain first occupied V ­ irginia and established Jesuit missions that had been destroyed by the Chickahominy thirty years earlier. Acknowledging this would have undermined all claims to En­glish sovereignty in ­Virginia through the title of first “discovery.”8 This book seeks to make explicit what remains implicit in Hamor’s treatise: the entangled histories of Iberian and British “Atlantics” and the archival pro­cesses that rendered ­those interconnected and common histories invisible.

* * * The many p ­ eoples that lived on the Atlantic basin w ­ ere connected to countless other communities outside the formal bound­aries of empire. E ­ very region in the vast Atlantic basin should, in fact, be considered a mosaic of interdigitated Atlantic histories.9 The lit­er­a­ture on commodities, piracy, slavery, and smuggling has made ­these entanglements transparent. ­W hether it was cod, mahogany, cochineal, Madeira wine, brazilwood, sugar, silver, tobacco, choco­ late, rhubarb, emeralds, or cowry shells, the production, distribution, and commercialization of any staple triggered a series of commercial and ethnic entanglements that rendered the entire Atlantic basin into a large borderland of porous bound­aries.10 Take, for example, the case of tobacco. Cigars for puffing, powders mixed with spices for snuffing, and aromatic cured leaves for chewing first moved away from the control of Amerindian elites into the informal world of Ca­rib­bean Euro-­A frican sailors. In Spain, it was Portuguese conversos who farmed out the tax that sought to regulate the distribution and consumption of tobacco. This was the entangled world of tobacco: Amerindian Mesoamerican staples moved to British V ­ irginia and Jamaica, where they ­were purchased by Portuguese conversos to sustain the fiscal balances of the Spanish monarchy in Madrid.11 This book, however, studies only the entangled histories of the Iberian and British Atlantics b­ ecause it ultimately seeks to bring into focus the centrality of the Iberian-­Latino past to the very constitution of the history of this

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nation. A historiography that brings Latinos into the narrative as “minorities,” whose voices need to be heard, is itself complicit in their marginalization. Amerindians, Blacks, and Latinos ­ought not to be considered minorities to be incorporated into a larger narrative canvas. This book seeks to demonstrate that without “Latinos” ­there is no canvas. The book explores the entangled histories of the Iberian and British worlds from three distinctly separate perspectives, namely, that of brokers, trade, and knowledge. Connections happened ­because ­t here ­were ­people who moved across linguistic and po­liti­cal bound­aries. Willingly or unwillingly, African slaves and Amerindians facilitated communication across empires. This book demonstrates how early experiences of Amerindians with the Spanish in Florida led the Amerindians to understand the workings of justice through treaties, protections, and ­legal privileges. Amerindians expected the same from the En­glish in Georgia and South Carolina. The En­glish authorities complied. Like the Spaniards, the En­glish considered themselves to be evangelizing, tributary, territorial, and just.12 African interactions with the Iberians in Senegal, Gambia, and West Central Africa also created a set of expectations on the nature of slavery in the British Amer­i­cas. Africans arrived as slaves to Portuguese and Spanish ports where they enjoyed some rights, including the right to marry, have property, and purchase their own freedom. Africans eventually became settlers and vecinos in Portuguese Cape Verde and Gambia and in the Spanish Greater Ca­rib­be­an.13 As the British began to smuggle slaves into Spanish Amer­i­ca and to establish alliances with maroon communities to undermine Spanish colonial power, the British suddenly found themselves forced to follow the same rules. As this book demonstrates, t­ hese implicit rules would eventually dis­appear as British American urban slavery gave way to the large integrated plantation in Barbados, Jamaica, V ­ irginia, and South Carolina.14 The book also sheds light on two other groups that played significant roles in connecting both Atlantics: the Irish and Jewish-­converso Portuguese merchants. Trade was the linchpin that connected ­these Iberian-­British Atlantics. The British colonies in the Amer­i­cas began as pirate nests, preying on Spanish trade and commodities for survival. It was only by the late seventeenth c­ entury that the British American economy of raids gave way to commercially v­ iable and self-­sustaining intercolonial networks.15 Even a­ fter piracy came to be regarded as a crime against the monarchy and empire, the British American Atlantic continued to grow and expand on the back of Spanish American silver obtained through smuggling.16 Almost ­every chapter in this collection explores

Introduction 5

one or another aspect of the multiple commercial networks that tied ­these two Atlantics tightly together. The same is true for knowledge. This book is part of a larger historiographical re­orientation in intellectual history. Scholars are just now beginning to realize that the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance and Enlightenment ­were not Eu­ro­pean inventions but vast encyclopedias of hybrid global knowledge pro­cessed and packaged in Eu­rope.17 ­Until recently the history of science offered us lone travelers and scientists roaming American and African lands in pursuit of curiosities and collections. ­Under closer scrutiny, however, this world of Eu­ro­pean travelers, cosmographers, and naturalists appears far less Eu­ro­pean and much more Atlantic and hybrid. Discovery, it turns out, was often nothing more than disguised translation or piracy. It was typical of Iberian, Dutch, and British crews to force locals to pi­lot their ships to navigate local currents and waterways. Eu­ro­pe­ans struck alliances with locals to set up workshops to translate useful information, which informed Eu­ro­pean “discoveries.”18 This book takes many insights and bodies of knowledge long seen as exclusively British and returns them to their proper context: Iberian Atlantic. Fi­nally, this book is preoccupied with archives and the role they play in obscuring and fixing narratives of origin and modernity.19 One of the reasons why the history of Iberian-­British Atlantic entanglements explored in this book is not well known has to do with both deliberate and unconscious pro­ cesses of erasing, misplacing, and misfiling documentation. By and large, archives ­were originally set up to elucidate and celebrate the history of single empires and nations. By definition, therefore, archives do not classify documents around transimperial and transnational categories. Many of the chapters in this book seek to clarify archival practices that rendered the entangled histories of t­ hese two Atlantics invisible.

* * * Part I of this volume explores how the histories of the two Atlantics slowly began to be remembered as two entirely separate pro­cesses, deliberately obfuscating interconnections and shared events. It shows how similarities, commonalities, and entanglements came to be substituted by narratives of opposites and contrasts. In Chapter 1, Mark Sheaves shows that during the sixteenth ­century, hundreds of En­glish merchants lived at the heart of port cities across the Iberian Atlantic. They commonly changed their names and married into local families, establishing themselves in t­ hese socie­ties. From bases in the

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Iberian Peninsula, most significantly Seville, they built transoceanic commercial networks with merchants and venture cap­i­tal­ists from across the globe, trading legitimately with ports in the Ca­rib­bean, Africa, and the Philippines. Some even settled in the New World as part of emerging transnational communities. Chapter 1 traces the experiences of two merchants of En­glish origins who produced reports about the Iberian Atlantic. The chapter highlights the role of the Inquisition in Spain and of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations in ­England in forcing the two culturally ambidextrous merchants into choosing among sharply differentiated national identities. Sheaves follows the same individuals through two dif­fer­ent archives to demonstrate that ­these merchants, who in the sources appeared to be dif­fer­ent ­people, ­were the same p ­ eople, with Spanish and En­g lish names. Pressed by the Inquisition, the merchants chose to define themselves as pious Catholics, members of extended Sevillano families. Pressed by Hakluyt, however, they cast themselves as En­glish patriots. The Anglo-­Spanish geopo­liti­cal conflict that followed the Reformation led to the creation of two distinct national archives. ­These two archives, in turn, have made it very difficult for historians to see as one a system of commercial networks that once brought merchants in ­England and Spain together into the same communities. They w ­ ere members of shared cities and trades, not dif­fer­ent nations. It is clear that the Reformation ­shaped the historiographies of the Atlantic in radical new ways by obfuscating the common entangled national origins of the Atlantic imperial expansion (as well as the African slave trade). The Reformation would lead to the creation of separate archives that would ­later constitute the foundation of differentiated imperial and national historiographies. In Chapter 2, Michael Guasco argues that Africans enabled the En­glish to access an Atlantic world s­ haped, largely, by the Iberian powers. Like Sheaves, Guasco highlights the importance of the politics of archives in the way the entangled histories of the Iberian and British Atlantic came to be blurred. The desire to draw sharp ideological differences between the freedom-­loving En­glish and the tyrannical Iberians has not only obfuscated the role of English-­ Iberian merchants in the fifteenth-­and sixteenth-­c entury origins of the Atlantic slave trade, but it has also radically altered the early history of Anglo-­ African slavery in the Amer­i­cas. Guasco shows that the En­glish originally interacted with African traders and slaves within frameworks first established by the Portuguese. Early Anglo-­A frica slavery was not the hereditary racial regime that it became in the late seventeenth c­ entury in V ­ irginia, Carolina, and the Ca­rib­bean. Like the Iberians, En­glish traders created mestizo families

Introduction 7

on the African coast and learned that the moral po­liti­cal economy of African slavery included respecting a set of protections for slaves, namely, the right to self-­manumission and marriage, the right of slaves to seek self-­employment and property (including slaves) of their own, and the right of slaves to create fictive f­amily ties with their masters as godparents. Marronage was an institution slaves could use to rectify moral wrongs. The En­glish, in fact, expected Afro-­Iberian maroons in Panama and Jamaica to be allies against a common Spanish ­enemy. Late seventeenth-­century plantation slavery and the transformation of Africans into commodities did away with t­ hese early Afro-­Iberian institutions in the British Atlantic. The growing sharpening of racial ideologies, in turn, led to the invention of the narrative of an original En­glish reluctance to introduce slavery in the Amer­i­cas and to the cleansing of the original Afro-­Iberian roots of the Anglo-­A frican slave trade. In Chapter 3, Ben Breen traces the roots of the British Empire back to Portuguese commercial and epistemological networks. The historiography has long assumed that it was the Dutch who in the second quarter of the seventeenth c­ entury replaced the Portuguese in the tropics, from Brazil to West Africa, to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Japan. Yet Dutch victories proved fleeting. It was the British who truly inherited the Portuguese Empire. The 1662 marriage alliance of Catherine Braganza of Portugal and Charles II of ­England best symbolized this pro­cess. The alliance included a huge dowry as well as the transference of the port cities of Bengal and Tangiers. Catherine also brought with her to E ­ ngland cha from India, a plant the En­glish would come to know as tea. Breen argues that the British inherited from the Portuguese not only lands, capital, and trading networks but also massive amounts of botanical and anthropological knowledge. Breen describes in detail how Portuguese empirical encyclopedias of global, tropical materia medica became rapidly modified as publications of the Royal Society of London by the likes of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Yet ­those Luso-­tropical experts from whom the British savants learned ­were never to appear among the sources the British acknowledged in print. Again, Breen highlights how the peculiar construction of British history through the deliberate forgetting of entire archives has ­shaped the historiographies on Anglo-­Iberian entanglements. It was in the late seventeenth ­century the British’s growing racialization of the Portuguese in the tropics as unreliable inferiors that explains this curious, deliberate erasure of derivative origins.

* * *

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Part II is devoted to the role of brokers and translators in e­ ither facilitating or obscuring Anglo-­Iberian entanglements. In Chapter 4, Christopher Heaney studies the role of print in the entangled histories of the Amer­i­cas before the deliberate creation of separate archives. Prior to the beginning of full-­scale colonization at Roanoke, ­Virginia, in the 1580s, the En­glish consumed and translated chronicles of Spanish discovery. Heaney demonstrates that as a manual for f­ uture En­glish experience it was the Spanish archive on Peru that most mattered. The En­glish search for a Peru of their own might have first begun before the arrival of Philip II to ­England as the consort of Queen Mary. The En­glish saw with growing envy and concern the rise of a global Catholic monarchy on the back of the silver riches of Potosí. News of the civil wars in Peru and of the laws passed by Charles V to quell the conquistadors generated En­glish plans to take over the Andes with expeditions via the Amazon and the River Plate. When Philip II arrived in E ­ ngland, however, the plans for an En­glish Peru became plans of collaboration. Philip landed with Peruvian trea­sure, an entourage of individuals who have served in the Andes, and chronicles that spoke to the sophistication of the Inca. Heaney shows that Richard Eden’s De­cades of the New Worlde or West India (1555), allegedly just a translation of the earliest “de­cades” of Pietro Martire’s De Orbe Novo, was in fact the first printed text to make an argument for an En­glish Peru while also seeking to honor the Spanish conquest. Eden’s translation of De Orbe Novo drew on countless witnesses and chroniclers, including López de Gómara, Fernández de Oviedo, and Augustín de Zárate, who accompanied Philip II to London before his chronicle of Peru had been printed. Eden also drew on his own training as an alchemist and on his reading of Thomas More’s Utopia as an American text. Heaney argues that Eden’s introduction, marginalia, and translation in the De­cades offered an alchemical vision of Peru as land with gold to be had, delivered by peaceful, civilized Christian l­abor. More’s Utopia did have a location: Peru. Heaney suggests that Eden’s text afterward became a blueprint for En­glish colonization, no longer as a collaborative Anglo-­ Spanish proj­ect but as a competitive, rival one. The Elizabethans, as Walter Raleigh suggested, set out to find in Guyana, Florida, ­Virginia, and Newfoundland the Inca of Inglaterra. In Chapter 5, Holly Snyder shows the importance of Iberian conversos to the British imperial expansion. Historians have explored in ­great detail the role of Portuguese Jewish trading networks in the rise of seventeenth-­century Dutch global power. Snyder widens the scope and demonstrates the centrality of Spanish “Jews” to the making of the British Atlantic. Not unlike con-

Introduction 9

versos in Iberian Atlantic, “Jews” in the Anglo-­Atlantic embraced many forms of self-­identification: Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, depending on the contingencies of local political-­religious balances. In Elizabethan ­England, Iberian conversos preferred Protestant identities but kept Spanish surnames. ­Under the Stuarts, ­t hese same conversos embraced Catholic identities, as conflict with Spain subsided. It was only in the wake of the En­glish Civil War and the rise of parliamentary Calvinist millenarian radical politics (a movement that both demonized Iberian Catholics and sought to reassemble Jews on the eve of the second coming of Christ) that Iberian conversos in E ­ ngland began to openly embrace a Jewish Sephardic identity. Regardless of their changing identities, En­glish Iberian conversos remained outsiders, pegged into professions and trades fitting for individuals of Jewish descent: physicians, money lenders, merchants. In places like Jamaica and Gibraltar, Anglo-­Iberian conversos embraced Jewish identities and helped smooth the transition from Spanish to British colonial rule. Their role as brokers allowed t­ hese Jews not only to build g­ reat fortunes but also to become targets of resentment and discrimination. By the early eigh­teenth ­century, writers such as Joseph Addison could declare the history of diaspora and discrimination of British Iberian Jews the very reason to consider the Jewish “race” the “peg upon which to build the wider frame” of the British Empire. The history of early modern Jews in ­England is the history of the entangled histories of the Iberian and British empires, from the Mediterranean to the Ca­rib­bean and beyond. In Chapter 6, Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara reminds us of the role of the Irish as members of a polity in between the Iberian Catholic south and the Anglican Calvinist British north. Schmidt-­Nowara focuses on three influential Irishmen who from the 1760s to the 1820s framed the debate in the Spanish Atlantic over African slavery. Alejandro O’Reilly, Joseph Blanco White, and George Flinter each translated British perspectives into Iberian idioms to support e­ ither the expansion of slavery or its abolition. O’Reilly grew to become one of the most impor­tant military and economic reformers of the Bourbon Spanish monarchy as commander of the Hibernian Regiment in the Seven Years’ War. O’Reilly was responsible for the liberalization of the slave trade in the Ca­rib­bean, helping to dismantle the asiento, so Cuba and Puerto Rico could rival British Jamaica and Barbados as plantations socie­ties. Blanco White became the leading liberal Spanish ideologue of the Age of Revolutions via Spanish-­language periodicals printed in London. Schmidt-­Nowara pres­ents Blanco White as a particularly effective cultural translator for Spanish Catholic audiences of the Protestant abolitionist views of William

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Wilberforce. Schmidt-­Nowara, however, devotes most of Chapter 6 to George Flinter, a con­temporary of Blanco White with considerable experience as a British officer in occupied Dutch Curaçao during the wars of in­de­pen­dence in Venezuela. Flinter’s stint in Curaçao caused him to pin both loyalist and patriot vio­lence in Venezuela on the unraveling of racial hierarchies. Flinter would eventually move to Puerto Rico and Spain to become a military officer of liberal persuasion and a leading promoter of the expansion of slavery in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean, in open defiance of the British naval campaigns to suppress the Atlantic slave trade. Schmidt-­Nowara demonstrates the importance of the Irish as cultural brokers in the Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic in the Age of Revolution, an age that witnessed both black emancipation and the expansion of black slavery. In Chapter 7, Cameron B. Strang argues for the importance of local brokers in the way the entangled Atlantic histories occurred in the borderlands. George (Jorge) J. F. Clark was born and lived in East Florida. He made a fortune trading on ­cattle, timber, cotton, oranges, and indigo in vast slave-­ operated ranches he owned on the banks of the St. Mary River, at the borderland with Georgia. Clarke was born in British Florida right before the province went back into Spanish control. As a distinguished, baptized Spanish vecino, Jorge Clarke was to witness the vari­ous attempts of Spanish American revolutionaries, French privateers, Georgian slaveholders, and the roaming U.S. army to seize control of Amelia Island and the city of Fernandina. Clarke remained loyal to Spain throughout and helped the Spanish governors of St. Augustine beat back vari­ous filibustering republics, first the one led the U.S.-­supported George Mathews (1811–13) and ­later that of the Spanish American revolutionaries of Gregor MacGregor and the French privateer Luis Aury (1817). Strang shows that Clarke and vari­ous other wealthy planters such as the power­ful Zephaniah Kingsley adamantly sought to be part of the Spanish Empire largely ­because they valued the racial regime Spain had established in the circum-­Caribbean, one in which ­there w ­ ere manumitted slaves and ­free blacks enjoying upward social mobility. Both Clarke and Kingsley set up large families with their own African female slaves. Th ­ ese planters considered the Georgian filibusters and the U.S. army a threat to the liberty and ­future of their own mulatto ­children and manumitted wives. By the same token, Clarke and Kingsley rejected the republics of MacGregor and Aury, for t­ hese filibuster republics threatened slavery through a commitment to Jacobin abolitionism. All outsiders, including the Spanish governors, courted and feared East Floridian planters ­because the outsiders understood that access to ­actual pos-

Introduction 11

session and sovereignty rested on the legitimacy granted by the likes of Clarke and Kingsley. Amelia fell in late 1817 to a U.S. army led by Andrew Jackson (in his first campaign to exterminate the Seminoles in Pensacola), and the ­whole of East Florida was formally transferred to the United States in 1821. ­A fter 1821, the mediating power Clarke had long enjoyed among the many competing empires began to dis­appear along with his dreams of a slaveholding society with room for the racially mixed. Strang demonstrates that Anglo-­ Iberian entanglements varied widely according to local conditions and that we should avoid sweeping generalizations. By working outward from Florida and decentering Spain and the United States, this chapter shows that the construction of imperial power and knowledge depended on incorporating or challenging planters’ local authority as powerbrokers.

* * * Part III explores the entangled nature of seemingly antithetical Anglo-­Iberian discourses of sovereignty, legitimacy, and possession to reveal a world of common assumptions. Chapter  8, by Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, shows that Spanish Catholic and En­glish Calvinist discourses of dominium and sovereignty in the Amer­i­cas w ­ ere remarkably similar, notwithstanding the scholarship that seeks to draw distinctions. A careful reading of the foundational texts by Pilgrims and Puritans justifying their migration to ­Virginia and New E ­ ngland in the 1620s and 1630s reveals religious medieval arguments of possession that are strikingly similar to ­those deployed by Spain a ­century before. Iberians made a distinction between spiritual and temporal sovereignties and claimed that the pope had only the authority of delegating monarchs with the task of conversion. Monarchs had no temporal rights whatsoever to the new lands. To justify territorial possession and po­liti­c al dominium became therefore an exercise in justifying “just war” as bridge: legalese to circumvent the wall of separation between the right of spreading the gospel and the lack of authority to take land and po­liti­cal authority away from the rightful native o­ wners. Pilgrim and Puritan discourses of conquest and dispossession had no need of separating spiritual and temporal sovereignties: the monarch enjoyed both. Paradoxically and despite their alienation from the Stuart monarchs as the heads of the Anglican church, the En­glish Calvinists (­either separatists, Pilgrims, or nonseparatists, Puritans) simply sought to gain the crown’s ­legal sanction by securing “commercial charters.” Unlike that of the Iberians, Calvinist legalese focused on where to

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locate the headquarters of the chartered com­pany so as to wrest effective po­liti­c al dominium from the crown. Remarkably, Calvinists began with the premise that Native Americans w ­ ere willingly transferring dominium and sovereignty to the En­glish crown. Calvinists also assumed that dominium rested on the conversion of natives. This l­egal edifice came crumbling down once Roger Williams posited the same radical separation between spiritual and temporal sovereignties that had long characterized the thinking of such Iberian intellectuals as Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria. It was only in the wake of Williams’s trenchant “Iberian” critique of Puritan rights in Amer­i­ca that Calvinist discourses of dominium began to claim all sovereignty to be based on the “rightful” purchase of natives’ “empty” lands. In Chapter 9, Brad Dixon shows that the British, following in the footsteps of the Spanish, sought to incorporate the indigenous ­peoples of the Amer­ i­cas as Christian vassals who would rely on the sovereignty of the monarch for justice. Dixon suggests that the British understood that Spanish stability in the Indies rested on their ability to incorporate the natives within a República de Indios led by converted indigenous lords who accepted the monarch as the ultimate dispenser of justice. Dixon reinterprets the history of South Carolina, from its inception in the mid-­seventeenth ­century to the Yamasee War in 1715, as an effort on the part of the British to emulate the Spanish co-­option of indigenous elites. The Franciscan missions in Florida deeply ­shaped the way natives came to understand relations of justice and reciprocity, not only among ­those who ­were part of the missions themselves, like the Apalachee in Tallahassee, but also among t­ hose who fought the missions, like the Yamasee. Both the Apalachee and Yamasee expected Carolinians to behave like the friars and Spanish settlers did in Florida. And the Carolinians obliged. The very constitution of Carolina, drafted by John Locke and Lord Shaftsbury in 1669, sought to establish a system of co-­opted Indian En­glish cacicazgos modeled on the Spanish República de Indios. When the British began to attack and capture the Apalachee from missions in Tallahassee, the authorities also made sure to introduce missionaries from the recently created Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. According to Dixon, it was the failure of the Carolinian settlers to fully meet the reciprocity expectations of their Yamasee allies, s­ haped by de­cades of interactions with the Spaniards, that led to the outbreak of the war in 1715.

* * *

Introduction 13

The final section of the book, Part IV, explores the role of trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the creation of Anglo-­Iberian entanglements. In Chapter 10, April Lee Hatfield describes the transition in the Ca­rib­bean from Spanish to En­glish commercial and military dominance. Despite this shift, local En­glish governors in places like Jamaica, Antigua, and Barbados did not gain the ability to control the terms of diplomatic exchanges with their peers in Cartagena, Habana, and Yucatan. From the fall of Jamaica in 1655 to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Anglo-­Spanish Ca­rib­bean witnessed a gradual change from warfare to peaceful intercolonial trade. En­glish traders seized control over the provision of African slaves in the Spanish Atlantic, gaining access to all major Spanish Ca­rib­bean ports. The En­glish no longer had to smuggle wares at coves in the secrecy of the night, bribing local officials. Now they could do so openly. Large-­scale smuggling via the asiento allowed the En­glish to gain access to Spanish silver without recourse to piracy and privateering. Hatfield shows that formal Anglo-­Spanish diplomatic exchanges, however, did not keep pace with t­ hese new economic realities. En­glish Ca­rib­bean governors bitterly complained that the Spanish authorities in Cartagena, Havana, and Yucatan treated them not as equals but as subordinate or even hostile petitioners. Such implicit demonstrations of diplomatic Iberian superiority can be partly explained by the long history of Spanish hegemony in the circum-­Caribbean. The Spanish simply assumed the En­glish to be illegitimate newcomers. But their sense of superiority also came from the power mining granted the Spanish. The Dutch and the French competed with the British over access to the same trove of Spanish American silver. Interimperial commercial rivalries over a scarce global commodity gave local Spanish Ca­rib­bean authorities diplomatic leverage. En­glish officials, however, wanted diplomacy to acknowledge the En­glish’s growing economic regional dominance. Hatfield pres­ents the paradoxes of entangled Anglo-­Iberian histories in the Ca­rib­be­an: diplomatic and cultural dominance ­were not a natu­ral corollary of economic or even military dominance. The entangled economic histories of Cartagena, Habana, and Jamaica did not necessarily cause cultural, po­liti­cal, and diplomatic cooperation. In Chapter 11, Ernesto Bassi offers an analy­sis of Kingston and seven ports in the Colombian Ca­rib­bean as a single integrated sea space in the Age of Revolutions. Bassi shows that ­these ports in northern Nueva Granada ­were perhaps more deeply connected to Jamaica than to each other or to the cities of the Colombian highlands. Smaller ports (Sabanilla, Chagres, Rioacha, and San Andres) trafficked in smuggled goods and handled smaller vessels. Larger

14

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ports (Portobelo, Cartagena, and Santa Marta) had official bureaucracies and custom­houses. Yet the larger ports took advantage of the dismantling of the asiento and the commercial liberalization of the slave trade in Spanish Amer­i­ca to engage in smuggling, too. As the pace of both smuggling and interimperial trade (promoted by both empires in the wake of the Seven Years’ War) picked up in the late eigh­teenth ­century, the lives of coastal Colombians became more deeply connected to the British Atlantic in general and to Jamaica in par­tic­u­lar. The entangled history of the two Ca­rib­bean Atlantics went well beyond commerce, however. Bassi shows how bribes, gossip, textiles, guns, liquors, and revolutionary pamphlets affected every­one, from the highest officials to the sovereign Native American tribes of Darien, Guajira, and Orinoco. More than commodities and slaves came from Jamaica to Nueva Granada’s Ca­rib­bean coasts. As Nuevo Granadinos redeployed ideas and goods to fit new contexts, they generated news ways of life that w ­ ere both deeply local and cosmopolitan. In Chapter 12, Kristie Flannery takes the history of Anglo-­Iberian entanglements into East and South Asia. The British occupation of Manila in the Seven Years’ War brought a rising British Empire in Asia into head-on collision with the one Spain had created in East Asia since the mid-­sixteenth ­century. Flannery highlights how the British mobilized soldiers and resources from India (including French troops and Indian sepoys) while the Spaniards drew on their age-­old allies, the indigenous Pampanga, who had helped spread Catholicism and empire as far as the Marianas. Flannery shows that the British occupation of Manila did not just ultimately fail; it actually changed the nature of Anglo-­Spanish entanglements. The war erased the differences both the British and the Spaniards had worked very hard to build. The conflict created conditions for soldiers to move between empires. French, Indian, and En­glish soldiers in the British army defected in droves to the governor Simón de Anda y Salazar. The Irish, who had faithfully served the Spanish in the Philippines, defected to the British. Worse, indigenous allies of the Spaniards in the northern provinces of Ilocos and Pangasinan used the British assault to revolt against their Spanish overlords. The segregated Chinese population of Manila split their support unevenly among the two imperial rivals. Some Chinese sought to convince the Spaniards of their faithfulness by creating militias to fight alongside the Pampanga. But the majority of segregated Chinese actively helped the British. The battlefield also became a fertile ground for interimperial emulation. The British tried to imitate the Spanish when dealing with the Pampanga and the Chinese. The Spaniards, in turn, sought to re-

Introduction 15

construct Manila’s fortifications using En­glish military engineers. The British made alliances with the Muslim sultanate of Jolo in the south (the traditional Moro enemies of the Spaniards in East Asia), and the Spaniards established a foothold in the sultanate of Mysore in India to check the spread of the En­glish into the Carnatic. The war and its aftermath fleetingly reor­ga­ nized and polarized identities. The Spaniards expelled all the Chinese from Manila and banned even En­glish Catholics from remaining in the city. Both populations would eventually be allowed to come back. Even though it became difficult for individuals to cross bridges between the Spanish and British colonies in the postwar era, the war ultimately bound ­these colonies more tightly together, drawing them into a web of diplomatic relationships that traversed the seas separating Manila and Madras.

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PA RT I

Severed Histories

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chapter 1

The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? En­glish Merchants Navigating the Iberian Atlantic ma rk s h eaves

In 1567, the merchant Pedro Sánchez left his home and wife in Malaga to sail across the Atlantic, seeking to capitalize on commercial opportunities in the New World and beginning an adventure that would lead him to the heart of the En­glish imperialist proj­ect. The House of Trade in Seville approved his travel license judging him an Old Christian, a necessary condition for this journey, but within a year in New Spain the Inquisition arrested him for “heretical words.”1 In 1571, before his trial was complete, he fled Guadalajara for ­England.2 Settling in London, his knowledge of New Spain represented a valuable asset. He penned a brief report detailing the ­people, places, and rich supply of commodities he witnessed during his travels that ended up as part of a growing corpus of New World knowledge on the desk of Richard Hakluyt the elder (commonly referred to as “the ­lawyer”).3 Sánchez’s words ­were now outside his control. In 1589, this text appeared u ­ nder the name Henry Hawks in Principal Navigations, one of the key books of New World knowledge compiled by influential propagandist for En­glish overseas expansion Richard Hakluyt, the younger cousin of the l­awyer.4 Sánchez’s journey sheds light on the strong commercial connections linking En­glish and Iberian Atlantic port cities throughout the sixteenth ­century. Born in Bristol, this wool merchant maintained strong trading ties in ­England through his membership with the Drapers Livery Com­pany, where he went

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by his baptismal name Henry Hawkes.5 But he married a Malagueña, lived in Malaga, and participated in the lucrative Anglo-­Iberian trade as well as the growing commercial markets across the Atlantic.6 This individual spent most of his life moving freely between Anglo and Iberian port cities, and he defies easy classification in terms of his allegiance to ­either crown or kingdom. Sánchez formed part of a wider community of merchants who had traded between port cities in West ­England and the Iberian Atlantic world since the second half of the fifteenth c­ entury, when Henry VII’s friendly relations with the Crown of Castile increased Anglo-­Iberian trading opportunities.7 Hundreds of traders, ­factors, and apprentices moved to Iberian port cities in the last de­cades of the fifteenth c­ entury and the early sixteenth c­ entury. Th ­ ese individuals commonly changed their names, married into local families, and participated in the early West African slave trade and emerging transatlantic commercial networks with counter­parts from across the globe.8 Despite the Crown of Castile imposing numerous trade embargoes following Henry VIII’s rejection of papal authority in the 1530s, several royal decrees granted select En­glish traders the right to continue trading in the Iberian Atlantic, and trade between the two spheres increased into the 1550s.9 When Mary Tudor of ­England married Philip of Spain in 1554, ideas, ­people, and products had been flowing between Anglo and Iberian port cities such as Bristol, San Lucar, Seville, and the Canary Islands in a shared maritime world for over half a ­century. Traders such as Sánchez appeared well placed to take advantage of a period of peaceful ­union between the crowns, and they represented a vision for the f­ uture for the unified kingdom. Yet Mary’s death and the succession to the throne of the Protestant Elizabeth in 1558 dealt a serious blow to merchants involved in Anglo-­Iberian trade. The Crown of Castile decreed a series of trade embargoes on ­t hese commercial routes—­notably in 1563, 1568–74, and 1585–1604—­and heightened their restrictions on En­glish merchants engaged in trade across the Iberian Atlantic world.10 Although some traders developed subterfuge tactics to continue operating between the two spheres during ­these periods, merchants with En­glish connections ­were vulnerable to accusations of Lutheranism or heresy.11 In the second half of the sixteenth c­ entury, the Inquisition systematically tried at least 150 merchants with connections to E ­ ngland across the Iberian 12 Atlantic. With the Castilian crown’s tightening control of its dominions, particularly a­ fter the Dutch revolts (1566 and 1568–1648), a growing number of merchants with En­glish origins naturalized as Spaniards,13 a common trend



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 21

evident in the cases of the French, Dutch, and Flemish merchants also based ­ ere exiled to in Iberian port cities.14 Individuals like Sánchez, however, w ­England ­after being tried by the Inquisition. Squeezed out of the Iberian Atlantic world, ­these entrepreneurial figures embraced their En­glish origins and contributed their Iberian experiences and New World knowledge to the emerging imperial ambitions of the En­glish. Sánchez’s story opens a win­dow onto the lives of hundreds of merchants navigating an increasingly hostile Iberian-­A nglo Atlantic world in the second half of the sixteenth c­ entury. In this period, governing elites in both spheres sought to take control over the prosperous activities of t­ hese autonomous commercial networks, in the context of the Reformation, rising confessionalism, and heightening imperial rivalries. The experiences and movements of an individual like Sánchez reveal how the changing geopo­liti­cal situation affected individuals who had previously operated between the two spheres but now found the borders between the Anglo and Iberian worlds tightening and an increasing necessity to choose allegiance to one of the kingdoms. Many ­were forced out of their Iberian lives and moved to ­England. In the pro­cess, ­these individuals and the knowledge they carried became definitively En­glish, totally stripped of their Iberian foundation. The knowledge and experiences they carried with them, first through trade and then through exile, demonstrate the under­lying connections linking the Iberian Atlantic expansion with the En­glish overseas proj­ects of the early seventeenth c­ entury. It is widely noted that En­glish advocates for overseas expansion drew on Spanish colonial experiences in the New World. John Elliott has argued that the sixteenth-­century Spanish prosperity in the Indies attracted the attention of key figures organ­izing British imperial proj­ects and that t­ hese individuals followed Spanish models of colonial settlement.15 ­Others have highlighted the shared colonizing discourses of the Hispanic conquistadors and the En­glish puritans and the ways Spanish texts provided impor­tant models for sixteenth-­ century En­glish writers, whose plays commonly promoted En­glish overseas expansion.16 In ­these accounts, scholars largely stress the importance of published books and translations as a key to understanding the inspiration for English overseas expansion and the similarities between the colonial proj­ects in the Amer­i­cas.17 The publications of Richard Hakluyt in par­tic­u­lar are credited as vital sources of information for the foundation of the En­glish Empire.18 Yet few studies have systematically analyzed the lives of ­those who carried Iberian New World knowledge to ­England, during periods of peace, when

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commercial networks linked port cities in both Anglo and Iberian worlds, and during declining dynastic relations in the second half of the sixteenth ­century, the subject of this chapter. The contributions by Michael Guasco (Chapter 2) and Holly Schneider (Chapter 5) in this volume reveal, respectively, the ways that ­free and enslaved black Africans and Jewish merchants acted as carriers of Iberian knowledge to the En­glish empire builders. But what about t­ hose who lived between the worlds before the breakdown in royal relations? By focusing on t­ hese individuals, this chapter reveals an underexplored group of merchants living and operating largely outside of national bound­aries and thus demonstrates the Iberian foundation of Richard Hakluyt’s New World texts. A growing body of studies that explore concrete links between the En­glish and Spanish settlements in the New World offer inspiration for reconfiguring how historians approach connections between E ­ ngland and Spain in the sixteenth-­century Western Atlantic. In 2007, Eliga Gould argued for a greater focus on exchange between the entangled borderland regions in the Amer­i­cas.19 He suggested that they should be considered as “part of the same hemispheric system or community” ­because ideas, commodities, and ­people circulated across the formal bound­a ries of empires and nations.20 He also stressed that this system “was fundamentally asymmetrical,” with Spain the dominant partner.21 Most subsequent studies adopting an entangled approach have concentrated on the Ca­rib­bean, with a par­tic­u­lar emphasis on smuggling, the borderland regions in the Amer­i­cas, or global pro­cesses such as the slave trade.22 In their chapters in this volume, both April Lee Hatfield (Chapter 10) and Ernesto Bassi (Chapter 11) highlight the importance of considering the ways smuggling connected Anglo and Iberian worlds in the Ca­rib­bean. In a dif­fer­ent vein, in Chapter  9 Brad Dixon highlights that the En­g lish and Spanish settlements in Florida seem to have operated as part of a united system, particularly in relation to their shared experiences dealing with the Indian nations. Yet key questions remain: How solid ­were the bound­a ries between ­England and Spain—in terms of identities and po­liti­cal, social, economic, and cultural connections—­and to whom ­were they impor­tant? Could ­England and Spain also be considered as part of the same hemispheric system or community during the sixteenth c­ entury, and how did this change in the lead up to the Armada war in 1588? To address t­ hese questions, the remainder of this chapter explores the experiences of Pedro Sánchez/Henry Hawks and Robert Tomson, another merchant of En­glish origins who traveled between Anglo and Iberian port cities



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 23

throughout the 1550s and 1560s. The Inquisition in New Spain tried both individuals in the 1560s, and both went on to write a text published in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations.23 Whereas the lives of other merchants involved in the Anglo-­Iberian trade can be pieced together from the large body of Inquisition cases, economic histories of Anglo-­Iberian trade, and notarial archives in key port cities, t­ hese two individuals are unique b­ ecause they left significant traces in both the En­glish and Spanish archives. Combining En­glish and Spanish sources, this chapter places ­these two merchants in the wider context of the Anglo-­Iberian commercial networks that connected locales in the Iberian Peninsula, the Canary Islands, the Indies, and New Spain. It examines the ways bureaucracies and influential individuals like Hakluyt increasingly sought to classify such individuals into national categories in the context of the Reformation and heightening imperial rivalry. Yet it also highlights the ways t­hese individuals navigated between the Iberian Catholic and En­glish Catholic and Protestant spheres by shifting identities and building personal and business ties with an underexplored network of Hispanicized En­g lish merchants living in port cities across the Iberian Atlantic. While my primary focus is on the ways that the growing importance of national and religious labels affected ­these merchants, I also highlight the importance of local ties such as ­family, guild, and “friendship” to t­hese networks throughout the sixteenth c­ entury. By d ­ oing so, I demonstrate the extent to which the commercial networks that connected nodes in both Anglo and Iberian worlds formed an integral part of the Atlantic world, with significant individuals holding key positions of po­liti­cal power.

National Labels in the Sixteenth-­Century Atlantic World: Anglicizing Pedro Sánchez The Hakluyt reports attributed to Henry Hawks and Robert Tomson have commonly been understood as texts written by En­glish patriots, with no reference to the Anglo-­Iberian trade connections detailed earlier. Hakluyt expert Peter Mancall, for example, describes Henry Hawks as an “En­glish explorer” pirating knowledge in the New World in the ser­vice of his country, without registering his Spanish name, Pedro Sánchez.24 ­There is good reason given that in the text, the author clearly identifies as an En­g lishman, in contrast to “the Spanyards” who are always described as “they.”25 The narrative and rhetorical strategies of this text Anglicize the author and the

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knowledge he provides his En­glish audience, while completely obscuring his Iberian life and the Anglo-­Iberian commercial networks that he participated in previously. Although the author may have actively positioned himself as an En­glish patriot given the anti-­Spanish hostility that engulfed ­England in the second half of the sixteenth ­century, it is also impor­tant to consider that Hakluyt may well have imposed this “En­glishness” on the text; he was prone to edit reports prior to publication. Scholarship has clearly demonstrated that during the second half of the sixteenth c­ entury, propagandists like Hakluyt, as well as poets, playwrights, and o­ thers, took part in a concerted effort to define En­g lishness, particularly in contrast to the Spanish. The second half of the sixteenth ­century has been understood as the vital period for the emergence of an En­glish national identity, and an allegiance to the nation began to supersede other forms of identity in this period.26 The result has been that individuals like Hawks and Tomson have generally been understood as ­En­glish rather than in relation to the historical context in which they lived. The Hakluyt text attributed to Hawks positions the author as En­glish for patriotic reasons, but what did the national label mean to t­ hose participating in Anglo-­Iberian trade in the second half of the sixteenth ­century? In this section, I seek to answer the following questions by analyzing the Hakluyt report attributed to Henry Hawks, juxtaposing it with Spanish sources, and drawing on scholarship on national identity in the early modern Atlantic world: How fixed was the En­glish national label in this period? To whom did it m ­ atter? And why? What did it mean in dif­fer­ent temporal and geo­graph­i­ cal contexts? How did national labels intersect with other social categories, including religion, social status, and allegiance to a par­tic­u­lar monarch? Recent studies on the concept of the nation in early modern Spain, and the Atlantic world more generally, reveal the ambiguity of such categories of identification in relation to other forms of allegiance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, individuals assimilated into Iberian socie­ties regardless of birthplace if they demonstrated their status as Old Christians, connections to the local society, as well as linguistic and cultural competence. Furthermore, it was impor­tant to maintain social capital by building networks of trusted individuals to vouch for the individual’s good character. Th ­ ese areas w ­ ere considered impor­tant for the official channels for naturalization discussed in Eberhard Crailsheim’s work on sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Flemish and French merchants in Seville.27 Tamar Herzog has shown that as late as the eigh­teenth ­century in Spain and Spanish Amer­i­ca, distinctions based on



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 25

national origins, race, or other forms of identity ­were not as impor­tant as ­ hether individuals a­ dopted the customs and duties of the local community.28 w The research of Manuel Fernández Chaves and Mercedes Gamero Rojas on Irish merchants in eighteenth-­century Seville also emphasizes that while the nation was an impor­tant administrative category, transnational f­ amily, business, and kinship ties w ­ ere much more impor­tant for establishing communities.29 Taken together ­these studies highlight the fact that an ability to demonstrate religious allegiance and an ac­cep­tance of cultural customs was more impor­tant than the national category for individuals to be assimilated in local socie­ties in the early modern Iberian Atlantic world. Approaching the question of national identity from the perspective of individual agency, multiple micro-­histories of the early modern period highlight the ways that specific figures fashioned identities in order to survive and move between dif­fer­ent religious and imperial worlds.30 Kristen Block, for example, has demonstrated the ways that ordinary p ­ eople in the seventeenth-­ century Ca­rib­bean performed dif­fer­ent religious identities in order to navigate between dif­fer­ent imperial spheres.31 Alison Games also highlights performativity and the agency of En­g lish merchants, adventurers, and ministers to adapt to religious and cultural customs as they settled in sites across the globe in the sixteenth c­ entury.32 At the level of the individuals, t­ hese studies demonstrate the fluidity by which individuals could shift between inclusion and exclusion in par­tic­u­lar socie­ties at dif­fer­ent times. Specifically focused on the importance of national identity to individuals trading in Anglo-­Iberian commercial routes in the sixteenth c­ entury, Barbara Fuchs analyzed Hakluyt’s texts by highlighting the Iberian lives that the authors describe. Fuchs examines the text ascribed to Miles Philips, an En­glish sailor tried by the Inquisition. Although Philips clearly stated that he would focus “specially of [Spanish] cruelties used to our En­glishmen,” Fuchs highlights the many passages where the author discussed his ability to assimilate as a Spaniard.33 For example, when arrested by the Inquisition, Philips had been taken not as an En­glish man but as “a gentlemans sonne of Mexico, that was runne away from his f­ ather.”34 Furthermore, when he did escape the Inquisition, he posed as a Spanish weaver and then reenlisted on the galleys. For Fuchs, the “dizzying confusion of identities, both individual and corporate, suggests that for all the En­glish protestations of the difference between ­England and Spain as national entities and colonizing powers, their subjects cannot necessarily be distinguished from one another.”35 Fuchs, then, highlights the difference between affirmative statements of national identity and

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the social real­ity of how En­glish and Spaniards could easily pass for one another, shifting identities almost seamlessly across the Atlantic world. This points to the importance of reading the Hakluyt texts as products not of En­glishmen, despite the patriotic rhe­toric, but of individuals who lived between the Anglo and Iberian worlds, adopting dif­fer­ent social identities as they did so. Other Hakluyt reports reveal a similar ambiguity ­toward national identity when one considers how the authors describe their lives in Iberian spaces. John Chilton’s report on his travels through New Spain, for example, focuses on the wealth he witnesses in the Iberian Atlantic.36 He discusses his trading relations with a wide coterie of individuals in the Iberian Atlantic, including Spaniards and Indians. His report also laments the piratical activities of Francis Drake, whom he fell victim to—in this act, the category of the nation was entirely irrelevant in comparison to commercial priorities.37 Also focused on commerce, Thomas Nicholas wrote the history of the Canary Islands as a joint venture involving both En­glish and Spaniards and described how the Spaniards first conquered t­ hese islands “with divers En­glish Gentlemen in their companie whose descendents this pres­ent date remaine.”38 Although the national label is used, Nicholas highlights the transnational colonization of the Canary Islands. Nicholas’s narrative discusses the long-­standing connections between the Anglo and Iberian Atlantic world and the continuance of ­these Anglo-­Iberian commercial networks linking the two spaces. In both of the texts attributed to Chilton and Nicholas, the authors describe their connections with many individuals from across the globe while paying ­little attention to national identity; commerce trumped nation in t­ hese texts. The Hakluyt text attributed to Henry Hawks also reveals an individual whose national allegiance is not fixed. The narrative of this report is almost entirely uncritical of the Spanish and is largely full of praise for the success and prosperity of the Iberian overseas ventures in the Amer­i­cas, particularly in terms of the commercial networks the author was involved in.39 The text offers a positive account of Iberian models of politics and law and of the many places that the author visited in the New World. No mention is made of his Inquisition trial. It could be argued that this reflected Hawks’s attempt to protect his wife and assets still in Spain, thus suggesting that he had hoped to return to his Iberian life. The author might also have been hedging his bets, given that he lived through a volatile period when the En­glish crown swung between Protestantism and Catholicism on numerous occasions. The author of this text, then, portrays a positive account of the Iberian Atlantic world and



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 27

emphasizes his own place within that world without due consideration for national allegiance. A similar analytical method can be applied to the Spanish sources related to Sánchez/Hawks. Despite using the name Pedro Sánchez in notary, royal, and Inquisition documents, all of t­ hese sources classify this figure in relation to his En­glish origins. The Inquisitors fixated on his En­glishness, which they associated with Lutheranism several times.40 They emphasized his En­glish name and probed his knowledge of developments in his m ­ other country.41 This was common in all ­trials involving merchants with En­glish connections, as the national category became more closely tied to religion and the Inquisition gathered knowledge on international affairs. As in the Hakluyt text, the Inquisitors imposed an affirmative and overriding En­glish identity on Hawks in the context of the Reformation and increasing hostilities between the crowns. Yet even the Inquisition case offer hints of the complicated and entangled life of Sánchez/Hawks, living in and between the Iberian and Anglo Atlantic worlds. The Inquisitorial proceedings and a body of supplementary letters that accompany the trial transcript reveal his connections to a large commercial-­political network involving Hispanicized En­glish merchants and his trading relationships with counter­parts from across the globe, both discussed l­ater in this chapter.42 This individual’s mercantile activities and personal life linked the En­glish and Iberian Atlantic world in the sixteenth ­century and involved a wide range of dif­fer­ent individuals largely unor­ga­nized by the category of the nation. Furthermore, En­glish connections raised suspicions of heresy in the eyes of the Inquisition but certainly w ­ ere not cause to condemn individuals. ­These ­trials aimed to ascertain ­whether the defendant could prove an Old Christian status and demonstrate that he maintained full commitment to the Catholic faith, En­glish or other­wise. Although the Spanish archival documents and Hakluyt text label Pedro Sánchez/Henry Hawks as En­glish, this category was not of overriding importance to the individual or the socie­ties in which he lived. In all of ­these sources, it is pos­si­ble to look beneath the affirmative use of the national label and discover an individual with ties to both the En­glish and Iberian Atlantic world. It was the bureaucracies and notables like Richard Hakluyt who imposed such categories on traders like Sánchez/Hawks in the context of the Reformation and heightening imperial rivalries. In real­ity, ­these figures had spent most of their lives in a world not or­ga­nized into such neat national bound­aries. Furthermore, in dif­fer­ent contexts this label carried dif­fer­ent connotations. Although it could be used to defend an individual’s patriotism or raise

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suspicion of heresy, it was also not a definitive category in determining inclusion or exclusion to local socie­ties. Notable figures like Hakluyt and the Inquisitional authorities increasingly associated national labels with Catholicism and Protestantism. But religion and dynastic allegiance remained the principal category of identification, particularly in the Iberian world. The Reformation and the ensuing hostility between the Castilian and En­glish crowns resulted in the category of the nation being increasingly impor­ tant in both kingdoms, but in dif­fer­ent ways. For the Inquisition, and broader Iberian society, individuals with En­glish connections w ­ ere increasingly suspected of heresy, and thus national origins became more impor­tant in the Iberian world. But the national label did not determine ­whether an individual could be considered part of local society. The number of En­glish merchants who naturalized as Spaniards, or remained untouched by the Inquisition, by demonstrating their Old Christian status and cultural competence illustrates the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion in the Iberian world. In ­these cases, ­there was no contradiction between being born in E ­ ngland and being considered a Spaniard. In contrast, in the En­glish world the national label became a central component of the propaganda proj­ects of notable individuals like Richard Hakluyt, both through affirmative statements of loyalty to E ­ ngland and in the demonization of Spain. While the texts, such as that attributed to Henry Hawks, reveal the complex lives of ­these individuals, they also formed part of a broader movement in ­England that sought to define national identity and make it key to inclusion in En­glish society. In the Anglo and Iberian contexts considered ­here, a dif­fer­ent degree of importance was placed on the En­glish national identity, but the ways in which this label evolved in each sphere w ­ ere connected. As the Iberian Inquisition tried merchants for their links to ­England, En­glish nationalists sought to differentiate their kingdom from Catholic Spain, specifically emphasizing the cruelty of the Spanish Inquisition. In the pro­cess, the national label became increasingly impor­tant in the second half of the sixteenth ­century, but in dif­fer­ent ways in E ­ ngland and the Iberian Atlantic world.

Navigating the Iberian Atlantic: The Case of Robert Tomson and Shifting Identities The Hakluyt text attributed to Robert Tomson offers a win­dow onto how an individual merchant involved in Anglo-­Iberian trade identified in dif­fer­ent contexts. Juxtaposing this text with Spanish sources, most notably the Inqui-



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 29

sition documents, reveals the agency of such individuals to adjust the ways they identified in front of dif­fer­ent bureaucracies as they navigated the Iberian Atlantic world. This approach also opens up wider questions regarding the ways that the national label intersected with religious and other social categories in this period. In the “Voyage of Robert Tomson, marchant, in to Nova Hispania in the yeere 1555,” published in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, the author is affirmatively En­glish.43 This text traces the journey of the twenty-­year-­old Hampshire-­born Robert Tomson, who sailed from Bristol to Seville in March 1553 in order to “learnes the Castillian tongue” and “to see the ­orders of the country and the customes of the ­people.”44 ­A fter spending two years living in the ­house­hold of another “En­glish” merchant, John Fields, “who had dwelt in the said citie of sivil 18. Or 20. Yeres married with wife and ­children,” Tomson embarked on a transatlantic journey.45 His decision was motivated by the wealth of commodities he witnessed coming into the booming port city from the New World: “the fleetes of shippes come out of the Indies to that citie, with such g­ reat quantitie of gold and silver, pearles, precious stones, suger, hides, ginger, and divers other rich commodities.”46 The narrative ends with a thorough description of the precious metals, minerals, and botanical products that he had witnessed during his journey from San Lucar de Barremeda, through extended stays in the Canary Islands, Santo Domingo, and Veracruz, before eventually arriving in Mexico City in 1557, where he settled. The Inquisitional authorities arrested Tomson on a charge of Lutheranism in 1559, leading to a lengthy trial. Condemned to exile from New Spain and one year of imprisonment in Seville’s dungeon, he somewhat remarkably married a wealthy Sevillian on his release from prison and subsequently lived for many more years in that city. In this Hakluyt text, Robert Tomson appears as an in­de­pen­dently wealthy merchant exploring the Iberian Atlantic in order to gain useful knowledge for E ­ ngland. In the text, Tomson is positioned as an En­glish patriot and defender of the Protestant faith at key moments. Several explic­itly anti-­Catholic statements appear throughout. The author writes with disdain of the “Papists” who “cast reliques into the sea” during a storm and “beleeve and worship such vaine ­things and toyes.”47 Recounting why the Inquisition had arrested him, he wrote that while he had been dining with “many principall ­people” they had asked him if E ­ ngland “had overthrowen all their Churches and h ­ ouses of Religion.”48 The fellow guests at this dinner party then challenged Tomson on his belief in saints given his nationality. He replied that God calls upon h ­ umans with

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his own words and that t­ here was no need for saints.49 When describing his auto-­de-­fé, he pres­ents sections of the population of New Spain as sympathetic Protestants repressed by religious and governing elites: “how the five or six thousand” p ­ eople who came to watch his punishment looked upon him and the other prisoners and cried that they had “never sawe goodlier men in all their lives” and proceeded to question the tyranny of the friars for condemning ­people as good as ­these men.50 In each of ­these statements, the text systematically casts the author in direct opposition to Catholic Spain. But was Tomson ­really such a firmly Protestant, proud En­glish merchant throughout his time in the Iberian Atlantic world? His Hakluyt text included the many references to his connections with a diverse coterie of individuals in the Iberian Atlantic world through trade and marriage, and recourse to his Inquisition testimony from 1559 offers impor­tant details that allow for a fuller reconstruction of his background. He was born in Andover in Hampshire ­England to Duarte (Edward) and Tanar Tomson in 1534.51 Seeking a foothold in the world, he first served as a ­factor or servant in France for his “Master” John Faber, participating in the wine and cloth trade that flourished between French ports and En­glish ports like Bristol and Southampton.52 Fields, with whom Tomson lived upon arrival in Seville, was one such merchant with close ties to t­ hese Anglo-­Spanish trade routes, and the Drapers Livery Com­pany in London may well have brought ­these two figures together. In 1548, at the age of fourteen, Tomson started an apprenticeship at that guild.53 Like many young men, his early connection with the Drapers involved deployment overseas.54 Thus, when Tomson disembarked in Seville around the age of twenty, it is likely that he moved t­ here to become an apprentice or servant in Fields’s ­house­hold. As such, it was Fields and not Tomson who deci­ded to embark on a transatlantic adventure, purchasing a license to travel to the Indies with his ­family, and he included the young apprentice as part of his h ­ ouse­hold. The Inquisition case also demonstrates Tomson’s lowly and impoverished position the w ­ hole time he lived in New Spain: relying on the charity of the Hospital of Our Lady for support when ill; taking a job as a servant in the ­house­hold of Gonzalo de Cerezo, High Constable of the Court (Alguazil mayor de corte); and seeking assistance from both the ecclesiastical authorities and a fellow prisoner “on account of poverty” during his Inquisition trial.55 Tomson, then, should be understood as an apprentice seeking his wealth rather than an En­glish interloper devoted to gathering useful knowledge, as his Hakluyt text suggested.



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 31

Available evidence demonstrates that Tomson identified as a Catholic during his time in the Iberian Atlantic. In his Inquisition hearings, he resolutely denied holding Lutheran beliefs and proclaimed to be dedicated to the Roman church. He argued that any heretical remarks reflected his ignorance and lack of education rather than “any bad intentions.”56 He accepted that he had denied the importance of praying to images of saints but claimed that he did so b­ ecause he had learned this argument when he overheard a debate between a student and “professor from Paris” in France and was merely repeating the story.57 He claimed to have been baptized in one of the “five or six” churches in Andover and that he believed in the sacrament of Penitence and Confession. The only book he possessed was the Hours of Our Lord.58 When challenged to recount the prayers of the church, he wrote them out in En­glish and then translated them word for word into Castilian.59 He concluded his testimony by submitting “himself to the correction of our Holy ­Mother Church.”60 It is impossible to say ­whether Tomson was a committed Catholic when tried by the Inquisition. Although he may have learned the prayers for such occasions and knew ignorance offered the best strategy for a light sentence when dealing with the Inquisition, it is just as pos­si­ble that he identified as a Catholic. The Inquisition testimony of many merchants with En­glish connections reveals continuous statements that they had been raised as Catholics in ­England and ­were fully committed to the faith. Given Tomson’s relatively low status, his theological understandings reflected a fragmented religious education, and his ignorance of certain doctrine should not be taken as evidence of his lack of commitment to Catholicism. Studies such as Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms reveal the disparate ways religious teaching was received and constructed by individuals far from the theological disputes between men of knowledge during the Reformation era.61 In this context, at least, Tomson ­adopted a resolutely Catholic identity, and his lenient punishment suggests that the Inquisitional authorities largely accepted his argument. Tomson also pledged allegiance to King Phillip II of Spain in his Inquisition testimony. He described the Castilian king as “our sovereign Lord and King, Don Felipe.”62 Referencing Phillip’s marriage to Mary, which united the crowns between 1554 and 1558, he explained how the king saved ­England from Lutheran doctrine.63 Given that his trial took place in 1559, Tomson may not have known that Mary’s death had ended the u ­ nion. His departure from ­England in 1553 coincided almost exactly with the accession of

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Catholic Mary, at a time when trade between the Anglo and Spanish worlds was increasing. Living during a tumultuous period of Eu­ro­pean po­liti­c al and religious history, Tomson shifted his identity to the most favorable one, depending on the context. This propensity to shift religious identities is also evident in the activities of En­glish corsairs, merchants, and other significant individuals during this period. In Chapter 4, Christopher Heaney demonstrates the ways individuals such as Richard Eden at the En­glish court adjusted their allegiances when Philip II arrived in the second half of the 1550s. Similarly, the sixteenth-­ century corsair and slave trader John Hawkins altered his own religious loyalty in response to the changing political-­religious landscape across Eu­rope in this period.64 Like Tomson, Hawkins lived during a period when four successive En­glish monarchs changed from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic and back again. In this period, p ­ eople living in E ­ ngland learned to pragmatically adopt the religion of each of ­these rulers. This ability served Hawkins well when operating in the Iberian Atlantic. In 1568, he appealed to King Phillip II of Castile as a Catholic for the return of his possessions seized by Spanish officials during a failed deal in the New World.65 Though unproven, it is thought that during his marriage to Mary Tudor, Philip II had knighted Hawkins.66 Similarly, the sailors that Hawkins left b­ ehind in New Spain ­after the b­ attle of San Ulua in 1567 demonstrated a general ambivalence to the question of both nation and religion. Paul Hawkins, the nephew of John Hawkins, for example, rebuilt his life in New Spain, where he was known as Pablo Haquines de la Crus.67 Given the tumultuous religious situation in sixteenth-­century E ­ ngland, successful merchants and pirates might adopt both Protestant and Catholic identities as they navigated across the early modern Atlantic world, forcing us to examine their lives in the relation to the contexts in which they lived rather than the narratives they told in response to changing conditions. Even during two key periods when royal decrees prohibited trade between the two spheres in the latter half of the sixteenth-­century—1568–74 and 1585–1604—­trade continued as merchants sought intricate ways around the embargoes, for they “did not see ­England and Spain as locked in a cosmic strug­gle of ideologies.”68 To maintain the trade during periods of hostility, merchants would adopt the identities and trading seals of nonprohibited nations, trade through neutral ports, and alter ship names.69 This type of activity is hinted at in the cases of vari­ous individuals navigating through the Iberian Atlantic, as demonstrated by the lengthy testimony on such practices by Bartholomew Cole, an En­glish merchant in the Canary Islands, who pledged



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 33

his allegiance to the Spanish crown.70 In his testimony, he explained that he had been prepared to travel to Seville to assume a Spanish identity in order to partake in such trade. He had been brought up on San Miguel in the Azores islands and was married to a Spanish lady t­here. Dragged in front of the Inquisition, Cole’s case reveals that this was a world in huge flux in terms of modes of identification for individuals trading between the Anglo and Iberian worlds. For such individuals, the Anglo-­Iberian trade trumped any allegiance to a nation, but this did not stop individuals like Hakluyt and the Spanish bureaucracies from applying national labels.

Reconstructing Anglo-­Iberian Commercial Networks Another approach that nuances the national labels imposed on Sánchez/Hawks and Tomson by the Hakluyt texts and the Inquisition documents is to place ­these two individuals in the wider historical context of the Anglo-­Iberian commercial networks with which they engaged. A particularly fruitful starting point is two letters addressed to Henry Hawks in 1567, the year he set sail across the Atlantic, that can be found in his Inquisition case.71 One letter is from Robert Tomson and the other from Leonard Chilton, a merchant based in Cadiz. Offering advice on ­people to meet across the Iberian Atlantic world, as well as bringing news of “friends,” ­these letters reveal the existence of a tight network of Hispanicized En­glish merchants based in vari­ous sites across the Iberian Atlantic and largely operating outside of the direct control of ­either royal government but with connections to power­ful individuals in port cities. Retracing the journey by exploring the individuals Sánchez/Hawks and Tomson engaged with reveals a hitherto unexplored commercial-­political network spread across the Iberian Atlantic World with figures based in key nodes such as Seville, Cadiz, San Lucar de Barrameda, Santa Cruz (Tenerife), and Texcoco (just outside of Mexico City in New Spain). The first t­ hing to note about this network is that it was anchored by Hispanicized En­glish merchants who had established themselves in the socie­ ties of Iberian port cities and provided support in each node. When Tomson arrived in Seville he was a newcomer and relied on his master, John Field, to provide the first impor­tant connection in bringing him to Spain and the means to travel in the Iberian Atlantic and establish relationships with similar individuals. Fields offered not only money, shelter, and support but also connections to Sevillian society and was in a position to legally travel to the New World.

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Although Spanish law forbade most foreigners from traveling to the Indies, he was an exception given his marriage into a Spanish ­family, his owner­ship of property in the Iberian Peninsula, and his residency t­ here for over fifteen years. In 1505, King Ferdinand had declared that anyone who had lived in Spain for over fifteen years, owned real estate, and had settled with families should be considered as Spaniards for the purposes of trade with the New World so long as they did so in association with Spanish merchants and employed Spaniards as ­factors.72 As Heather Dalton has revealed in her studies of four En­glish merchants based in Seville in the 1520s, such individuals commonly conducted legitimate New World trade by virtue of their marriages to Spanish ­women and their long periods of stay in Iberian cities.73 Fields was another example of this trend, and this opened the door for Tomson, who was deemed part of his h ­ ouse­hold. Fields also demonstrates that ­these individuals did not restrict their spheres to other En­glish merchants. He had a close relationship with Gonzalo Ruíz de Córdoba, the son of Hernán Ruíz de Córdoba, one of the most successful early settlers of central Veracruz.74 Tomson reveals this connection in his Hakluyt text. When approaching the port of San Juan de Uloa, a violent storm destroyed the ship he traveled on and the passengers lost every­thing. Fortunately, Fields chanced to meet “an old acquaintance of Spaine,” Gonzalo Ruíz de Córdoba. He gave them new clothes, money, men, and the h ­ orses to allow them to continue their journey onto Mexico City. Fields, then, had established close personal and commercial ties with extremely influential Spaniards, particularly t­ hose with connections to the New World expansion. Tomson’s journey to the New World reveals another group of merchants who are described as En­glish but who also had significant connections with influential individuals, including Florentine and Spanish governing elites. When discussing his passage from the Canary Islands to Veracruz in 1556, Tomson mentions John Sweeting, the owner of the boat, and Leonard Chilton, the ship’s captain and the “sonne in law to the sayde John Sweeting.”75 Both individuals are described as En­glish merchants based and “maried in Cadiz.”76 In Mexico, John Sweeting’s son, Robert, had married and settled in Texcoco, just outside Mexico City, and represented the key node of this network across the Atlantic.77 As was true for Fields, their marriages allowed the Sweeting-­ Chilton ­family to trade with the Amer­i­cas and take up impor­tant positions such as ship captains. This ­family had built impor­tant political-­commercial networks across the Iberian Atlantic, with members in Cadiz, the Canary Islands, and New Spain.



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 35

Vital to the success of the Sweeting-­Chilton ­family was their familial and commercial connections to elite noble merchant families from Florence who had established themselves in Cadiz: the Botis, Peris, Fantonis, and Federighis. The latter two families had been involved in the Castilian settlement of the Canary Islands and transatlantic trade from the early sixteenth ­century.78 ­These Florentine elites connecting the Hispanicized En­glish merchants to the local po­liti­cal structures in Cadiz and the wider Iberian Atlantic world.79 The beginnings of this relationship can be traced to two deals made by John Sweeting recorded in the notarial archive of Seville, one in 1549 and one in 1551, which involved the Florentines Jacome Boti and Andrea Peri.80 ­These commercial connections continued with the forging of a business partnership between Esteban Chilton (the son of Leonard Chilton and Bartoloma Sweeting) and Juan Andrea Fantoni y Peri; both ­were involved in transatlantic commerce and are described as vecinos and regidores perpetua of Cadiz, evidence of the establishment of both families in Cadiz local po­liti­cal structures.81 Through a complex set of marriages, t­ hese families built a commercial and po­liti­cal network with individuals spread across the Iberian Atlantic. They established connections with the En­glish Colleges of the Iberian Peninsula, and one of their ancestors would eventually become the first duke of Jimera de Líbar.82 By building relationships with the Florentine elites, the Sweetings and the Chiltons established themselves with po­liti­c al authority in Cadiz, and it was through their connections that Robert Tomson traveled across the Atlantic in the 1550s. On the other side of the Atlantic, Robert Sweeting played an impor­tant po­liti­cal role in New Spain, working as a translator for the Inquisition in the 1570s, for example, during the trial of John Farenton in 1573.83 Miles Philips also recounts how Sweeting defended the Catholicism of the En­glish in Inquisition ­trials, explaining that they know “the pater noster, the Ave Maria, & the Creed” in their own “countrey speech . . . ​a lthough not word for word as they w ­ ere in Latin.”84 It is unclear to what extent Sweeting’s role as a translator for the Inquisition signifies a genuine attempt to represent individuals from his homeland, or if his allegiance lay with the Inquisition. It does, however, reveal a significant contradiction in the way that the category of En­glish was associated with religion in this period: while the Inquisition charged merchants on the grounds that their En­g lishness associated them with Lutheranism, Sweeting’s En­glishness does not seem to have figured as impor­tant. Robert Sweeting represented a trusted individual in the Iberian Atlantic, and it was such individuals who provided the support for Tomson and ­others like him as they navigated t­ hese worlds.

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Another key member of this ­family was John Chilton, the ­brother of Leonard Chilton, who traveled throughout the Iberian Atlantic conducting trade for a period of seventeen years.85 In a report published by Hakluyt in 1589, John Chilton describes the towns he encountered on both the East and West Coasts of the Amer­i­cas, noting the chief commodities and the relationships between Spaniards and Indians.86 Along this journey he conducted commerce, noting that at New Biscay, for example, “I solde my merchandise for exchange of silver.”87 He describes a range of transactions throughout his time ­there, including traveling to the province of Sonsonate in the kingdom of Guatemala in 1570 in order to carry “divers merchandize of Spaine, all by land on mules backs.”88 He also recounts losing about one thousand ducats when Francis Drake attacked Aguatulco in 1579 and provides evidence of how the Castilian crown’s tightening control over its dominions in the 1560s and 1570s threatened commercial activity.89 He writes how the king’s prohibitions on foreign trade vexed the locals: “the Christians and Indians are weary with ­these infinite taxes and customes, which of late he hath imposed upon them, more then in the yeeres before.”90 John Chilton’s movements not only demonstrate the freedom this merchant had to travel and trade in the Iberian Atlantic in this period but also highlight the involvement of the Chilton-­ Sweeting ­family in transatlantic commercial networks. Robert Tomson encountered the Sweetings and Chiltons during his journey across the Atlantic, but unlike Tomson and Hawks none of this f­amily faced an Inquisitional trial. They had been settled in Iberian socie­ties for several de­cades and had established personal, po­liti­cal, and commercial connections with impor­tant individuals in ­these worlds. While Hawks and Tomson escaped to E ­ ngland a­ fter their Inquisitional t­ rials, the Chilton-­Sweeting f­ amily eventually merged into Spanish society, thus demonstrating that members of ­these Anglo-­Iberian commercial networks forged dif­fer­ent paths as the relations between the two kingdoms broke down, leading to warfare and centuries of imperial rivalries. During his journey, Tomson also encountered Hugh Tipton, the British consul in Seville. Tipton had gained recognition from a variety of power brokers across the Iberian Atlantic, despite being tried by the Inquisition when working as an apprentice for William Sprat in San Sebastian in the 1530s.91 In 1538, King Henry VIII, the Castilian Royal Court and the Dukes of Medina Cidonia named him the “consul for the En­glish nation.”92 In 1561, King Philip II of Spain described Tipton as a “persona honrizada y rica [an honorable and noble person]” in a royal decree.93 Tipton was not only connected to the



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 37

Castilian authorities but also the Papal Office and the Dukes of Florence, as evidenced in a letter from Robert Hogan, the Earl of Leicester, in 1570, in which Hogan reported that Tipton had received a gift of 600,000 ducats from the pope and 200,000 ducats from the Duke of Florence in aid of En­glish Catholics.94 Perhaps the most impor­tant connection for Tipton was the Duke and Duchess of Feria, based in Zafra.95 The duchess, Lady Dormer, had been a lady in waiting to Mary Tudor and came to play an impor­tant role as an advocate for En­glish merchants. In the 1570s, when several En­glish sailors languished in Seville’s dungeons, an agreement was reached for Tipton to deliver them food and the Duchess of Feria to give them a daily allowance. In the wider Iberian and Catholic world, Tipton had established an impor­tant position of trust, while also maintaining connections with the En­glish world through his relationship with Sir Thomas Challoner, the En­glish ambassador in Madrid, and the Duchess of Zafra. In his role as the En­glish consul, Tipton advocated for En­glish merchants imprisoned by the Inquisition in Mexico, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and numerous other sites across Southern Andalusia. Along with the Seville-­based Roger Bodenham and Leonard Chilton in Cadiz, Tipton wrote letters to Challoner, requesting the intervention of the king in accordance with the trading privileges afforded to En­glish merchants.96 He also advocated for ­those detained in the Inquisitional jail in Seville. For example, when Tomson returned to Seville ­after his Inquisition trial in Mexico City, he spent one year in the Dungeon, before being helped by Tipton, whom Tomson describes as a “merchant of ­great d ­ oing.” Tipton facilitated the marriage between Tomson and Maria de la Maria de Barrera, the d ­ aughter of an extremely wealth Spanish merchant who had made a fortune in the transatlantic slave trade.97 It seems extraordinary that Tomson, an En­glish prisoner who just a few years earlier was a servant and had been condemned by the Inquisition, suddenly found himself married to an elite Sevillian lady. This case reveals that Tipton had significant connections in Seville elite society. Fi­nally, Tomson also encountered individuals with direct connections to ­England. In the Canary Islands, he described the good ­will of the ­factors who received him: “­there found certaine En­glishmen marchants servants of one Anthony Hickman and Edward Castelin, marchants of the citie of London that lay t­ here is traffique of whom we received g­ reat courtesie and much good cheere.”98 Both members of the Mercers Livery Com­pany, Hickman and Castelin w ­ ere two of the most influential importers of Canary Island sugar and wine into E ­ ngland, and their families had a long-­standing connection to

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the Iberian Atlantic world. In Principal Navigations, Richard Hakluyt included a text titled “The second voyage to Guinea set out by Sir George Barne, Sir John Yorke, Thomas Lok, Anthonie Hickman and Edward Castelin in the yeere 1554” further emphasizing their connections to New World trade within the Iberian Atlantic world.99 Edward Castelin, for example, was related to Jacome Castelin, who had captained the ship San Jorje between E ­ ngland, Cadiz, and El Puerto de Santa Maria in the 1530s.100 This individual’s surname suggests that he was an Anglicized Spaniard living in London, opening a vista onto the many Iberians who settled in E ­ ngland during this period, although shedding light on the experiences of t­ hese individuals requires more work. While I have not been able to establish a direct connection between Hickman and Castelin in ­England and the Sweetings and Chiltons in Cadiz, the fact that Tomson interacted with individuals related to both groups suggests that they formed part of the same decentralized commercial-­political network. This connection shows not only the involvement of En­glish merchants in New World adventures but also how ­these networks included influential individuals in both the Anglo and Iberian spheres. That Tomson interacted with the ­factors reveals how individuals of dif­ fer­ent statuses also tried to build relations in local socie­ties. The case of Thomas Nicholas in the Canary Islands demonstrates that within localized contexts such individuals built significant relationships with a wide range of individuals. Nicholas’s Inquisition case highlights his relationships with Luis Leal, a Frenchman and established pharmacist in La Laguna, and a Genoese medic called Juan Baptista Forne, both of whom acted as witnesses to his good character.101 Furthermore, Nicholas made frequent journeys to La Palma, where he built trust with a notary, Alonso Camacho, and planned to marry his ­daughter.102 The specific details of Nicholas’s relationships with a coterie of dif­fer­ent individuals in the Canary Islands provide an impor­tant reminder that alongside the Anglo-­Iberian networks that transcended vast spaces, the ability of ­these individuals to integrate into the texture of localized socie­ties was equally impor­tant. However, lower status individuals like Nicholas, Tomson, and Hawks never achieved the level of integration of the Sweetings and the Chiltons. All three ended up being tried by the Inquisition and traveling to ­England, where they contributed texts about the Iberian Atlantic that would be published in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations. Reconstructing the journey of Robert Tomson through the Iberian Atlantic exposes a network of individuals that si­mul­ta­neously linked merchants with En­glish connections and a hugely complex set of governing elites, mer-



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 39

chants, and institutions that defy categorization into ­either the En­glish or Iberian worlds. This network of individuals was not centrally controlled but self-­organizing, tying together individuals and institutions, including local po­ liti­cal structures in Cadiz and Seville, London guilds, En­glish Jesuit colleges in the Iberian Peninsula, merchant trading colonies, royal politics, notary offices, editors, publishers, and the Inquisition. For individuals like Tomson and Hawks and the wider community of merchants engaged in Anglo-­Iberian trade, the impor­tant question is not ­whether they belong in the En­glish or Spanish world but how they navigated through networks that transcended ­these imperial bound­aries. In short, this approach demonstrates the connections between regions and local spaces that reached across the borders of what we now consider E ­ ngland and Spain. Although much more research is needed on this network and on broader connections between individuals and institutions in both the En­glish and Spanish spheres, this initial reconstruction suggests that t­ hese commercial networks should be considered impor­tant in shaping the early modern Atlantic world across imperial bound­aries.

* * * To conclude, I return to the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter: How solid w ­ ere the bound­aries between ­England and Spain—in terms of identities and po­ liti­ cal, social, economic, and cultural connections—­ and to whom w ­ ere they impor­tant? Could ­England and Spain also be considered part of the same hemispheric system or community during the sixteenth c­ entury, and how did this change in the lead-up to the Armada war of 1588? Throughout the chapter, I have demonstrated the ways in which the category of the nation used in archival sources and the Hakluyt texts have obscured historians from seeing the commercial connections that linked En­glish and Iberian port cities since the late fifteenth ­century and throughout much of the sixteenth ­century. While the Hakluyt texts explic­itly tried to position the authors as En­glish patriots, a closer reading of the narrative reveals the lives of individuals born in ­England who built lives in the Iberian Atlantic world through marriage, commerce, and by demonstrating linguistic and cultural competence and establishing relationships with notable individuals—in short, by developing the social capital required to prove Old Christian status and an allegiance to Catholicism. Similarly, while Spanish Inquisitorial and notarial documents also applied the En­glish label ubiquitously, the category of the nation could be applied in

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vari­ous ways depending on the historical context. The changing religious situation in E ­ ngland created conditions where Anglo-­Iberian merchants shifted religious affiliations to suit dif­fer­ent contexts during this period. With the Reformation and heightening imperial rivalries in the late sixteenth ­century, the category of the nation became more impor­tant to bureaucratic institutions and influential individuals like Hakluyt, but individuals could adjust the way they identified depending on the context. Yet in the Iberian world, the En­glish label, and national labels more generally, did not necessarily lead to the exclusion of individuals from ­these socie­ ties. Although ­those with En­glish connections increasingly raised suspicion of heresy in the eyes of the Inquisition, this was not as impor­t ant as demonstrating an allegiance to the crown, Catholicism, and the customs of the local socie­ties, as well as having a network of notable individuals to provide support. The Inquisition tried individuals, like Robert Tomson and Paul Hawkins, who would then successfully build lives in Seville and Mexico City, respectively. In t­ hese cases, their En­glish origins ­were subordinated to religious and cultural identities. In other examples, prominent individuals and families such as Hugh Tipton and the Sweeting-­Chiltons remained very much a part of the Iberian socie­ties they lived in despite their connections to ­England. They ­were never suspected of heresy and continued to hold prominent positions throughout the Reformation and in spite of the declining relationship between the Castilian and En­glish crowns that led to war. Individuals like Hawks and Tomson easily defied categorization into ­either the En­glish or Spanish worlds, living and operating in self-­organizing commercial and po­liti­c al networks that connected individuals in dif­fer­ent nodes sprawled across the Anglo-­Iberian world. Although individuals with connections to E ­ ngland anchored this network, in each locale they established relationships with significant individuals, such as governing elites and merchants from across the globe. ­ These networks transcended imperial bound­aries and tied together individuals and institutions in both spheres. However, in the course of the lives of Robert Tomson and Pedro Sánchez/ Henry Hawks, the communities that made up the entangled Anglo-­Iberian commercial world increasingly divided into the two separate spheres ­under pressure from notable individuals and governing elites, and the bound­aries dividing ­England and Spain tightened. Rooted in their proper Anglo-­Iberian context, the Hakluyt texts produced by ­these two authors should not be considered as “En­glish” but as representative of the knowledge circulating in the Anglo-­Iberian world in which they



The Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as a Hemispheric System? 41

­were produced. It is no won­der that t­here are so many similarities between the Spanish overseas ventures in the New World and t­ hose of the En­glish in the early seventeenth c­ entury. Anglo-­Iberian commercial ties ensured a steady flow of texts, knowledge, p ­ eople, and products between E ­ ngland and Spain throughout much of the sixteenth ­century.

chapter 2

Agents of Empire Africans and the Origins of En­glish Colonialism in the Amer­i­cas mich a el g ua s co

It remains unclear when En­glishmen and Africans formally inaugurated their complicated relationship in the early modern Atlantic world. Evidence suggests that at least a few individuals of sub-­Saharan origin or heritage could be found in the British Isles during the early sixteenth c­ entury. Logic also dictates, even where the sources are sparse, that En­glish merchants, diplomats, pilgrims, and travelers who ventured beyond Britain’s borders, especially in the direction of southern Eu­rope, must have crossed paths with numerous African men and w ­ omen—­some ­free, some enslaved. Even the less adventurous, whose circumstances or disposition kept them close to home and hearth, could easily read about Africans in the increasingly prevalent printed works on history, geography, and global travel. Certainly, perceptive En­glish men and ­women knew that Africans had already been targeted by predatory Eu­ ro­pe­ans for enslavement in the Atlantic world. African and En­glish ­peoples also knew each other, worked together for their mutual advantage, and even formed intimate relationships during the sixteenth ­century. That much we can say with certainty. But that is also a pretty hazy beginning to a story.1 The En­glish merchant John Lok’s return to ­England from a voyage to the African coast in 1555 with “certayne blacke slaves” in tow, however, has a ­great deal of certainty about it and has therefore proven to be a compelling “first,” having, as it does, both a consideration of ­human difference and an invoca-



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tion of ­human bondage built into the narrative. B ­ ecause scholars routinely plug Africans into Anglo-­Atlantic narratives concerned with the eventual triumph of the plantation complex and racial ideology, John Lok’s story helps set the stage for what was to come. Thus, it is more than a l­ ittle bit in­ter­est­ing that Richard Eden, the editor and publisher of Lok’s exploits, labeled ­these Africans “slaves” and claimed that African bodies w ­ ere not well suited for northern climes. “Sum w ­ ere taule and stronge men,” Eden recounted, “and could well agree with owr meates and drynkes.” At the same time, the “coulde and moyst ayer dooth sumwhat offende them.”2 What is often ignored, however, are two other aspects of the story that may not be as revealing about what would ultimately come to pass two hundred years l­ ater but certainly highlight how ­things stood between Africans and the En­glish in the early modern period: (1) the En­glish ­imagined that Africans ­were useful, ancillary agents in their expanding world; and (2) Africans enabled the En­glish to access an Atlantic world ­shaped, largely, by the Iberian powers. Lok’s Africans w ­ ere not slaves in the modern sense of the term. The five men transported into ­England (­whether against their ­will or not) ­were considered to be valuable as cultural mediators rather than bondmen. William Towerson, a London merchant who traveled to Africa in Lok’s wake, reported to a group of Africans that their countrymen “­were in E ­ ngland well used, and ­were ­there kept till they could speake the language.” Once they had mastered the ability to facilitate communication, “they should be brought againe to be a helpe to En­glishmen in this Countrey.”3 Towerson, like Lok before him, voyaged to Africa for trade. Since the West African coast had been visited by the Portuguese more frequently, communication could be difficult (even if many En­glish ships carried Portuguese pi­lots and crewmen as guides and translators). When three of the original five Africans who had been taken to ­England returned to Africa with Towerson on one of his subsequent voyages, then, the En­glish hoped that the African men would serve as agents in the En­glish effort to tap into the profitable local trade in gold, pepper, and ivory. And t­ here was no doubt about their value. Towerson reported meeting some Africans who “would not come to us, but at the last by the perswasion of our owne Negros, one boat came to us, and with him we sent George our Negro a shore, and ­a fter he had talked with them, they came aboord our boates without feare.”4 ­There was much to learn from the Spanish and Portuguese in Amer­i­ca and the broader Atlantic world. Most En­glishmen, however, hesitated to acknowledge this fact, especially ­after Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne in 1558.

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Indeed, early En­glish characterizations of Iberian activities repeatedly emphasized that if the northern Eu­ro­pe­ans w ­ ere ever g­ oing to get involved in transatlantic enterprises, they would be wise to consider the actions of their pre­de­ces­sors and then try to avoid making the same ­mistakes. In par­tic­u­lar, En­glish and other Protestant authors routinely characterized the Spanish model of colonialism in the Amer­i­cas as callous, barbaric even, especially the way Spanish invaders abused the indigenous inhabitants. Yet, En­glish observers, from the moment of their first arrival in disparate Atlantic entrepôts, never doubted that the Spanish—­a nd Portuguese for that m ­ atter—­were perfectly pragmatic and even worthy of emulation in their embrace of slavery (as both a l­abor system and form of social control) and incorporation of African p ­ eoples into their emerging transatlantic community. In this regard, as much as the En­glish tried to create ideological distance between themselves and the Spanish and Portuguese they claimed to abhor, ­there was no escaping the prob­lem that they hoped not so much to do ­things differently in the Atlantic world as they planned on d ­ oing t­ hings better. Early En­glish efforts to exploit the material benefits of the world beyond their shores ­were therefore necessarily conditioned by the prevailing circumstances of an Iberian Atlantic world that was more than a c­ entury in the making. And nowhere was this complicated real­ity—­where the En­glish si­mul­ta­neously had to controvert and embrace the rules established by their competitors—­more crucial than in the disparate paths the En­glish ­were willing to walk when it came to Africans in both Africa and the Amer­i­cas. En­glish merchants and mari­ners in Africa and settlers in the Amer­i­cas, prior to the mid-­seventeenth ­century, recognized that Africans had a g­ reat deal to offer—­sometimes as commodities but more often as allies—­and that the success of En­glish ventures often hinged on African complicity. How En­glish actors navigated the intricacies of their own complicated ideas about race and slavery in this era is, of course, a story worth telling. Yet En­glishmen and Africans interacted in several ways in the pre-­plantation Atlantic world, which is what makes John Lok’s Africans so in­ter­est­ing. Certainly, we can see in the use of the word “slave” and the emphasis on “difference” an indication of what was to come. But if we ignore the context of the times and the fail to pay attention to the subtle gradations the surviving evidence, we risk missing the fact that the En­glish needed Africans as agents and allies if they hoped to succeed, much less survive, their early modern ventures.

* * *



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Standard accounts of En­glish encounters with Africa and Africans tend to suggest that the En­glish ­were fascinated—­mesmerized, almost—by the appearance of the ­people who inhabited sub-­Saharan Africa. Numerous scholars have followed in the tradition of Winthrop Jordan by emphasizing the shock the En­glish experienced when they first met Africans.5 Certainly, some En­glish writers dwelled on the physical appearance of sub-­Saharan Africans and theorized aloud on the pos­si­ble explanations for outward differences that seemed to characterize ­people who inhabited dif­fer­ent parts of the world. But that sort of curiosity was rarely a product of firsthand encounters between En­glish merchants and mari­ners and African ­peoples in Africa itself.6 The small number of En­glish travelers who voyaged to Africa had more impor­tant ­things to worry about in the ­century before the mid-­seventeenth ­century—­namely, the wrath of other Eu­ro­pe­ans in the region. En­glish merchants and mari­ners knew that the greatest threat to their well-­being was the Portuguese and, beginning in the 1630s, Dutch. In that context, worrying about the physical appearance of Africans served l­ittle purpose—­that kind of intellectual curiosity was a luxury reserved for t­ hose at home who did not have to worry about w ­ hether their pres­ent circumstances might cost them their lives. For En­glish mari­ners and merchants, then, the appearance and nature of Africans in Africa ­were of ­little interest. The ability of Africans to facilitate En­glish ambitions in the region, however, and especially in the context of the challenges presented by the Portuguese and Dutch who dominated large parts of the African coastline, was another m ­ atter entirely. An early case in point is the story of Robert Baker, who barely survived two voyages to Africa in the early 1560s and eventually returned to ­England to pen a poetic account of his experiences that was apparently held in such low regard in his own time that Richard Hakluyt chose not to include it in the 1598–1600 version of his comprehensive Principal Navigations.7 Only a small number of En­glish ships journeyed to Africa during the second half of the sixteenth c­ entury, and only a minority of the fifty or so voyages from this period produced documentary evidence.8 The Guinea trade was a dangerous business, and only the most adventurous (or ­those with the greatest thirst for gold, ivory, pepper, and other exotic commodities) seem to have seen much value in the enterprise. Baker knew better than to risk a second voyage but nonetheless did so. During the course of his second voyage, Baker and several companions ­were separated from their shipmates and forced to fend for their own survival. Two options immediately presented themselves: they could throw themselves on the mercy of the Portuguese traders in the region

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(being, as they ­were, in the vicinity of the trading fort at São Jorge da Mina), or they could seek relief from the locals—­the Africans with whom they had always intended to do business. Based on their greater fear of the unknown and ste­reo­types that pervaded the En­g lish imagination at this very early stage of Anglo-­A frican interaction, the En­glish castaways deci­ded to cast their lot with the Portuguese, regardless of the likelihood that they would be punished as pirates and heretics (crimes that ­were g­ oing to result in slavery or death).9 What Baker had to say about Africans up to this point in the narrative has preoccupied scholars who have considered this episode. The most in­ter­ est­ing ­thing about Baker’s narrative, it has been argued, was that sub-­Saharan Africans appeared in it as “wilde” men, “blacke beast[s],” “brutish blacke ­people,” “blacke burnt men,” “beastly savage p ­ eople,” and “fiends more fierce than ­those in hell.” Yet, to claim that Baker “reacted to blackness with horror and revulsion,” as one scholar has claimed, is somewhat misleading.10 In fact, once the En­glish ­were chased off by the Portuguese with vio­lence, they deci­ ded to seek help from Africans, including the son of the local ruler. Thus, while the Portuguese assumed a menacing stance ­toward the En­glish refugees, a nearby African prince “had ­great pitie on us” and invited the En­glish to come ashore. As they did, their ship was swamped, but the weakened En­glishmen ­were rescued by their benefactors. H ­ ere, in strikingly dif­fer­ent language from that used earlier in the poem, Baker commented favorably on the king’s son (“a stout and valiant man, / In whom I thinke Nature i’wis [certainly], / hath wrought all that she can”) and the natives’ generosity (“And gave to us, even such as they / themselves do daily eate”).11 In other words, if the En­glish mari­ ners had voyaged to Africa with preconceptions that led them to fear the natives, experience taught them that ­there ­were friends and allies to be found in the region. The lesson learned by Baker was not lost on other En­glishmen. Success, survival even, depended on adaptive expertise. Circumstances, which could vary greatly from place to place and time to time, dictated En­glish actions more so than abstract ideas. As a result, when Edward Fenton and his men stepped ashore in Sierra Leone in 1582, they happily conducted business with both “Portugals and Negros.” Affairs proceeded smoothly as the En­glish, Portuguese, and African traders enriched each other and celebrated their good fortune aboard ship and on shore with a hint of concern. Notably, ­after several weeks in the region, the En­glish had e­ ither purchased or acquired as gifts a small number of slaves. Yet, less than a de­cade ­later, Richard Rainolds had



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a rather dif­fer­ent experience and returned to the sentiment expressed by Robert Baker when he lamented the “vile treacherous meanes of the Portugals” who desired nothing more than to do harm to the En­glish. Relations with local Africans ­were quite dif­fer­ent. Everywhere they went, Rainolds said, they “­were well beloved and as courteously entertained of the Negros, as if they had bene naturally borne in the countrey.” W ­ hether it was ­because they found themselves in a dif­fer­ent place or ­because Fenton’s amicable trade with the Portuguese was simply an exceptional moment, by the early 1590s in Senegambia Rainolds and a local African king could agree that the Portuguese ­were a “­people of no truth.”12 En­glish merchants and mari­ners ­were in the business of making money, and in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth ­century, that meant gold, ivory, and a variety of other mundane and exotic commodities. To get ahold of t­ hese items, En­glish traders benefited from engaging Africans as trading partners, not as slaves. Although they operated from a position of weakness vis-­à-­vis the Iberian powers, and scholars have generally been more interested in the origins of racism and slavery in the Anglo-­Atlantic world, it is worth remembering that the filthy lucre that drove En­glish ships down the west coast of Africa was nothing more exciting than hides, gum Arabic, wax, and redwood. It was for t­ hese ends that the crown repeatedly issued licenses to En­glish merchants to trade in Senegambia (1588 and 1598) and Sierra Leone (1592) and began chartering companies in the seventeenth c­ entury—­the Com­pany of Adventurers of London Trading to the Parts of Africa (the “Guinea Com­pany”) in 1618 and the Com­pany of Merchants Trading to Guinea in 1631.13 Significantly, in each of t­ hese cases, Africans w ­ ere conceived of as a p ­ eople with whom the En­glish might do business, not a ­people in whom they might do business. Richard Jobson offers a case in point, in large part b­ ecause his comment upon being offered “certaine young blacke ­women” as slaves in the early 1620s has exercised considerable influence on how scholars have thought about the En­glish in Africa in the years before they ­were fully invested in the transatlantic slave trade. Jobson, who was in Africa to exploit the gold trade, claimed that he told an African merchant that “we w ­ ere a p ­ eople, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.” When told by the local merchant that he had sold plenty of slaves “to white men, who earnestly desired them, especially such young ­women,” Jobson could reply only that the whites his putative trading partners spoke of “­were another kinde of ­people dif­fer­ent from us.”14 Jobson’s version of the En­glish set them up as virtuous and honorable (at least with regard

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to the proffered young w ­ omen), as well as liberty-­loving, f­ree, and quite unlike the rest of the world when it came to the subject of slavery. A generous reading of Jobson’s characterization of what the En­glish ­were unwilling to do, at least with regard to slavery in the early seventeenth ­century, would be that he may have been unaware of the activities of his fellow countrymen throughout the Atlantic world during the previous half c­ entury. Jobson was correct that En­glishmen consistently expressed their disapproval of slavery when it appeared to be governed by market considerations rather than tradition. The indiscriminant buying and selling of h ­ uman beings routinely came in for criticism during this era by En­glish authors. But, of course, the En­glish had also previously bought and sold Africans in the Atlantic world and had even begun to do so in their own colonies by the 1620s. Most famously, John Hawkins and John Lovell had combined to transport more than 1,500 Africans into slavery in Spain’s Atlantic world during the 1560s. Less well known, but more impor­tant, was the routine practice of kidnaping, ransoming, reselling, and occasionally even maintaining possession of small numbers of Africans that En­glish mari­ners encountered at sea and in Spanish and Portuguese coastal settlements. The pilfering of Africans with the intention of benefiting from ­either their ­labor or retail value was commonplace among the En­glish by the time Jobson was claiming that the En­glish would never stoop to such a ­thing.15 Jobson’s passage about his refusal to buy female African slaves fits neatly into an early modern En­glish antislavery narrative, but the remainder of the text tells a more compelling story of Anglo-­A frican interaction that highlights how much the En­glish relied on African ­peoples in their endeavors. If Jobson is to be believed, African traders and local rulers w ­ ere skillful, knowledgeable, trustworthy, and desirable partners. He described the “Mandingos” as being astute and willing traders, although they tended to be “fearefull to speake with any shipping” ­because “they have beene many times, by severall nations, surprised, taken and carried away.” Africa was as dangerous for the natives as it was for the En­glish, who sympathized with Africans who had to deal with “the vagrant Portingall.” Jobson, like Baker and Rainolds, witnessed Iberian duplicity. He recounted how, when a group of En­glish merchants found themselves stranded as a result of Portuguese treachery, the local inhabitants “tooke such compassion upon them” and “fed them, and lodged them, with a ­great deale of loving care.” Further, they escorted the En­glishmen overland, “from one Kind to another,” ­until “they safely arrived” and “found con­ve­ nient shipping home.”16



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­Because he recognized that En­glish fortunes ­were inextricably tied to the security and well-­being of indigenous African actors, Jobson maintained a spirit of friendship and cooperation with an eye t­oward the rewards the En­glish might reap through peaceful trade. During the course of his inland journey to meet with an African merchant named Buckor Sano, Jobson traveled with four “Black-­men” who served him as guides and translators. One “pretty youth called Samgulley” had previously worked with George Thompson (Jobson’s pre­de­ces­sor in the region) and other En­glish merchants “and followed their affaires, so as hee was come to speake our tongue, very handsomely, and him I used many times as an Interpreter.” With the assistance of guides and translators, the En­glish eventually met up with Buckor Sano, who greeted the foreign traders riverside with his large retinue of men and ­women—he would be the one to offer Jobson the female slaves. In an extended discussion of what followed (almost entirely lacking in any sense of shock or revulsion on the part of the En­glish), Jobson laid out an exceptionally promising situation and described meeting with other local leaders and intermingling with nearby inhabitants. To his mind, the ­f uture promised a profitable and amicable trading relationship. If only the En­g lish learned to avoid “suspicious enemies” (the “vagrant Portingall”) and “shunned watering in the very height of unseasonablenesse,” the trade in Africa would be as easy and reliable as “the voyage into Muscovie” and the journey up the Gambia River no more risky than “our Westerne passages up the River of Thames.”17 The En­glish would eventually commit themselves fully to an Anglo-­ African relationship premised on the singular importance of the transatlantic slave trade. That eventuality, however, did not prevent En­glish merchants and mari­ners from coordinating their activities with Africans. Prior to the late seventeenth c­ entury, En­glish and Africans sought each other out for relief and protection ­because of their shared concerns about the Portuguese and, ­later, Dutch. For the En­glish, this consideration meant that they needed to cultivate intermediaries. Writing to James Pope in September 1651, leaders of the Guinea Com­pany informed their local ­factor that he should “buy for us 15 or 20 young lusty Negers of about 15 yeares of age” and “bring them home with you for London.” W ­ hether or not they w ­ ere aware of John Lok having done much the same ­thing nearly a ­century before, they ­were clearly following in his footsteps. The Guinea Com­pany already employed “a son of the King of Aguna, who was taught En­glish,” but many more Africans promised to improve f­ uture prospects even more. Seventeenth-­century traders still knew that

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their prospects hinged on the ability of a few African individuals to facilitate ­things for the En­glish.18 In light of the tensions between the En­glish and the Dutch on the coast of West Africa during the 1650s and 1660s (a period in which the two nations would fight two wars), the En­glish also sought to make use of African allies for coastal defense.19 Organizers i­magined that t­ here would be a main body of En­glish at the “­castle of Cape Corso,” including a garrison of “50 En­glish soldiers and 30 negro slaves.” Four additional coastal outposts would be similarly manned, with Anashan having “10 En­glish soldiers, and eight negroes” while “Commenda, Aga, and Acra” would each have “two soldiers, and two ­ ere equally inclined to make use of Afnegroes.”20 Unfortunately, the Dutch w rican allies, which contributed to En­glish defeats when a state of war between the two nations resumed in 1664 (at least on the coast of Africa). ­Things did not go well for the En­glish, but even in defeat they celebrated the assistance of African allies. As 1664 came to a close, “the Dutch went against Tacorady with g­ reat store of men, but w ­ ere repulsed by 10 En­glish and negroes.” The small Anglo-­A frican forces ­were eventually overwhelmed, however, by “1,000 negroes from their [the Dutch] factory,” who “burnt the town and blew up the ­castle, stripping the En­glish naked.” Luckily, “at Commenda the ­factor was preserved by the negroes.”21 By their own account, local African allies sometimes put up a more stubborn defense of En­glish interests in Africa than the En­glish themselves. As the conflict raged into early 1665, the Dutch ­were repulsed by “John Cabessa, a negro.” But eventually, “Anamabo was blown up, and the Dutch took down the Royal Com­pany’s colours.” The En­glish may not have won, but they celebrated John Cabessa’s heroic actions. Once Cabessa saw “the En­glish hang out a flag of truce, [he] cut off one of his men’s heads, and with his own hanger cut his own throat.” Thus, while the En­glish cowered in the face of superior Dutch forces, Cabessa and his men fought to the death. “John Cabessa was truer to the En­glish than any of his Majesty’s subjects t­ here; he had formerly preserved the c­ astle from many dangers and intended to have come and seen his Majesty in ­England. ­Great reward was offered to whoever should bring his head to the Dutch, but the blacks buried him at Old Cormantin.”22 En­glish priorities in Africa shifted as the insatiable hunger for bound ­labor in En­glish colonies created a demand for slave ­labor. Indeed, the Anglo-­Dutch strug­gle over control of West African fortresses was largely a strug­gle between the two nations to supplant the Portuguese as the primary slave trades in the Atlantic world. Before that time, however, the evidence suggests that the



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En­glish ­were inclined to approach the coast of Africa in much the same way they approached other regions of the world where ­there w ­ ere ­people, merchants, 23 and rulers with whom they wished to do business. Similarly, they clearly liked telling themselves a story that suggested that the subject p ­ eoples of the Atlantic world—or, rather, ­those ­people the Portuguese and Spanish had supposedly abused—­recognized in the En­glish the promise of a relationship built on sincerity and mutuality.24 Doubtless, t­ here was a g­ reat deal of wishful thinking ­here, but it was also the case that the En­glish demonstrated ­little interest in ­either developing the slave trade before the mid-­seventeenth c­ entury or worried much about the differences that seemingly characterized African socie­ties and ­people.

* * * Sir William Alexander, the first Earl of Stirling, was the recipient of a royal charter in 1621 from King James I of ­England granting him the authority to colonize the region that would eventually become Nova Scotia. In his effort to generate support for this endeavor and determine the proper course of action, Alexander composed a promotional tract in which he wondered aloud about t­ hose t­ hings that had helped other Eu­ro­pean nations succeed in their colonial endeavors. Not surprisingly, considering the state of affairs in the early seventeenth c­ entury, his meditation led him to contemplate the t­hings that Spain had done to establish control over large swaths of the Amer­i­c as. In that spirit, and ­after first acknowledging how the Spanish had dislodged the natives, Alexander offered his observations on African slaves, without whom Alexander could only conclude the Spanish would “have no meanes to prosecute t­ hese works.” Only “by drawing yeerly a g­ reat number of Negroes from Angola, and other parts,” could the Spanish work the land and extract mineral wealth. Slave l­abor, however, entailed risks. Africans w ­ ere “an unnaturall merchandise” that was “bought at a deare rate, and maintayned with danger.”25 The En­glish would need to be careful should they choose to go down a similar path. Alexander’s recognition of the impor­tant role played by Africans—as both historical agents and the main cogs in the emerging machinery of colonial plantations—­and the concomitant dangers of living in such close proximity to aggrieved parties (­whether Indians or Africans) was hardly new. Half a ­century earlier, in 1579, Richard Hakluyt already recognized that the exploitation of runaway African slaves could be the secret to En­glish successes in

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their Atlantic and global enterprises. In his outline for a plan for the En­glish to take over the Straits of Magellan, Hakluyt asserted that runaway African slaves could be transplanted “by hundreds or thousands” from the West Indies to Patagonia. Although the African had been “bredde as a slave” by the Spanish in Amer­i­ca, Hakluyt ­imagined that he would “think himself a happy man” to have the opportunity to serve the En­glish ­under the command of “a few good captens.” Africans could man the forts that would secure En­glish control over the key point of access for all Eu­ro­pean shipping to the Pacific Ocean. Runaway slaves (the famous cimarrones), Hakluyt subsequently claimed in his “Discourse of Western Planting,” would enable the En­glish to “bringe greate thinges to passe, and that w[ith] greate ease.”26 As the observations of Alexander and Hakluyt reveal, the En­glish ­were quick to recognize that Africans played disparate roles in early Spanish Amer­ i­ca. In their primary function, as slaves, in Spanish Amer­i­ca, Africans ­were engines of production. Even from his position in Africa, Richard Jobson certainly thought this was the case. Writing at the same time as Alexander, he described how “the blacke ­people” ­were “carried, or sold unto the Spaniard, for him to carry into the West Indies, to remaine as slaves, ­either in their Mines, or in any other servile uses, they in ­those countries put them to.”27 The anonymous author of the so-­called Drake Manuscript from the late sixteenth ­century also highlighted this stark real­ity in several watercolors depicting Africans diving for pearls, working in emerald and gold mines, and carting gold and silver overland.28 At the same time, even more sources paid considerable attention to the dangers posed by ­these very same Africans to the security of colonial Spanish Amer­i­ca. Restive Africans could easily undermine the Spanish in the Amer­i­cas, and the En­glish stood to benefit if they played their cards right. Thus, En­glish colonial promoters w ­ ere quick to appreciate that Africans ­were useful appurtenances—as in Africa—­for successful colonial enterprises in the Amer­i­cas b­ ecause of what they could do for the En­glish but also ­because of how they might undermine the Spanish. Should they so desire, the En­glish could employ Africans in much the same way as their pre­de­ces­sors, but colonial promoters tended to emphasize something ­else entirely: Africans w ­ ere a large chink in Spain’s colonial armor.29 Thomas Gage’s snapshot of colonial life in early seventeenth-­century Mexico and Guatemala (one of the very few En­glish “eyewitness” accounts of Spanish Amer­i­ca from the period) documents the range of roles played by Africans in a mature Spanish American settlement. To Gage, a former Dominican priest who lived in Mexico and Guatemala for more than a de­cade



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(1625–37), Africans ­were most certainly pres­ent and valuable as slaves. He described a sugar plantation near Tlaxcala as being “maintained in my time [by] above two hundred blackamoor slaves.” Gentlemen w ­ ere easily identifiable by “their train of blackamoor slaves, some a dozen, some half a dozen, waiting on them in brave and gallant liveries.” Rich merchants on the island of Margarita “have thirty, forty, or fifty blackamoor slaves only to fish pearls out of the sea.” En­glish eyes could easily perceive that the owner­ship of slaves was the mark of success in this setting. In that regard, Gage was particularly impressed by the rags-­to-­riches stories he could tell, like that of Sebastián de Zavalata, “Biscayan born,” who came poor but made his fortune in sugar and ­rose to possess “at least threescore slaves of his own for the work of his farm.”30 But slavery was only part of the story—­something that Gage was inclined to mention in passing rather than interrogate carefully. More impor­tant was the role Africans played in Spanish colonial society beyond, or in spite of, the prevalence of a fully articulated system of slavery. The story of Miguel Dalva illuminates Gage’s appreciation for what was a recurring theme in Anglo-­ Atlantic narratives: the value of an African ally and the irrelevancy of race within certain contexts in the early modern Amer­i­cas. As a priest, Gage was in the habit of chastising the Spanish for their treatment of Indians, who w ­ ere “kept ­u nder and oppressed by the Spaniards” and “live in ­great bitterness, are ­under hard bondage, and serve with ­great rigor.” A man named Francisco de Montenegro took offense at Gage’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the natives, so the En­glish priest “thought of securing of myself better, and called for a Blackamoor, Miguel Dalva, a very stout and lusty fellow . . . ​to be about me ­until I could discover more of Montenegro’s designs and malicious intents.” Subsequently, Gage became accustomed to his “trusty friend” Dalva’s com­ pany (or, rather, protection) and used him in a scheme that involved the surreptitious removal of an indigenous idol from a cave and guarding the church where the stolen object was hidden. When Gage planned to return to ­England, it was Dalva who, once again, abetted Gage in his efforts and even begged to go with him. But as Gage knew full well, “as a Blackamoor in foreign countries, he might be stopped and apprehended as a fugitive.”31 Dalva’s story was one of friendship and even de­pen­dency on the part of Gage. Dalva’s skin color, perceived heritage, and social status conspired to position him as both an insider and outsider in Spanish Amer­i­ca, qualities that enabled Gage (who was similarly a man between two worlds) to insulate himself from local dangers and, ultimately, see to his own escape. Dalva’s story also laid bare the real­ity that Africans w ­ ere sometimes able to exercise

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considerable power and influence in a colonial setting. In other parts of his narratives, Gage noted that some f­ree blacks owned property and slaves in their own right. And when Gage chose to depart the region, he remarked on the extraordinary story of another African—­a runaway, formerly enslaved mulatto from Havana supposed to be “Deigo el mulatto”—­who had managed to become the captain of a Dutch pirate ship. Slaves and runaway slaves ­were familiar characters in En­glish narratives, but t­here w ­ ere other Africans, too, whose lives seemed to indicate even greater mobility within Spanish American society than any ­simple enslaved/free dichotomy might allow. Gage described a world in which slavery functioned to enrich Eu­ro­pean settlers—­and t­ here is no indication that he had any prob­lem with that—­while si­mul­ta­neously providing an opening for other nations to capitalize on the fissures created by the bitterness of the enslaved. Gage, while criticizing the Spanish for their poor treatment of the natives and the enslaved, averred that “if their own oppressed ­people, Blackamoors and Indians, . . . ​ should side against them, soon they would be swallowed up both from within and from without.”32 The weakness of colonial Spanish American society ­because of slavery was central to the publication of Gage’s work in ­England (1648 and 1655) and viewed by many En­glishmen as an opportunity to extend the bounds of Protestant Amer­i­ca. But the En­glish would need to be careful. Gage’s version of ­things was not lost on the founding generation of En­glish colonists: possessing slaves promoted wealth and prosperity. Although the En­glish appreciated that other ­peoples could be compelled to ­labor (i.e., Indians and indentured servants) and knew that t­here w ­ ere a range of ways Africans might contribute to colonial ventures beyond being potential slaves, the En­glish bought into the idea that Africans ­were essential to their efforts in the Amer­i­cas and that it would be difficult to construct successful colonial settlements without, in some cases, the willing assistance of African ­peoples. Although numbers w ­ ere small, relative to the overall population, En­glish colonists eagerly took advantage of ­every opportunity that presented itself during the first half of the ­century to acquire Africans and hold them in bondage in Bermuda, the Chesapeake, Barbados, Providence Island, and elsewhere. By the 1660s, the En­glish would write openly about their conviction that “negroes” w ­ ere “the strength and sinews of this western world” and that slavery would allow the En­g lish to “advance their fortunes and his Majesty’s customs.” “Blacks bought by way of trade,” few could doubt in this ­later period, ­were “the most useful appurtenances of a plantation and perpetual servants.”33 During the earlier period, however, few ­people voiced ­things



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in such transparent language, and evidence suggests that the value of Africans to colonial enterprises was viewed in a more expansive fashion. Early En­glish settlers had e­ very intention of holding the Africans in their possession as slaves, but they also believed that Africans had real expertise and could facilitate the development of colonial enterprises. Writing in the aftermath of a lengthy debate about the fate of fourteen “accidental Negroes” who had arrived in Bermuda in 1619 (a group that was the product of the joint privateering venture that also resulted in “20. and odd Negroes” landing in the Chesapeake), Governor Nathaniel Butler observed that the Africans had been critical to the colony’s success in the two years since their arrival. This assessment was partly connected to a shared ac­cep­tance on the part of the En­glish that the colonies needed l­abor. Hence, Miles Kendall, who had been the acting governor in 1619, claimed that blacks “­were freely given unto mee,” and he fought to keep ahold of them while Butler asserted that they w ­ ere com­ pany property. What­ever the case, Butler believed that the Africans ­were far too valuable to hand over to Kendall without a fight. “The truth is,” he observed, “thes Slaves are the most proper and cheape instruments for this plantation that can be.”34 Although he was writing at precisely the same moment in time as Richard Jobson, the two men had completely dif­fer­ent ideas about the willingness to treat h ­ uman beings as both commodities and tools. Certainly, some Anglo-­A mericans already valued Africans as slaves—as units of l­abor—­but Butler was equally cognizant of the value they provided by virtue of their knowledge and expertise. As early as 1617, Bermudians attempted to follow in the footsteps of ­Virginia’s John Rolfe by transplanting a West Indian variety of tobacco in island soil. To this end, Robert Rich wrote to his b­ rother the Earl of Warwick to let him know that they had both the “plant and good store of neggars which Mr Powell brought from the West Indies, all which ­will prove very vendable.” As it turned out, Robert Rich was overly optimistic and was forced to apologize early the next year ­because his “neager in tryall speled [i.e., spoiled] it.” This failure, however, prompted Rich to try to procure a more knowledgeable authority on tobacco cultivation, “a negar whose name is Francisco.” Francisco had apparently mastered his craft in the Spanish West Indies, and Rich considered “his judgment in the cureing of tobackoe” to be beyond repute, declaring that he would “rather have hime than all the other negers that bee ­here.” Rich also noted, almost in passing, that he had placed two En­glish servants on a plot of land with another African, believing that some benefit would come of them being “well followed by the negres planting of west endy plants,” with which the African had “good

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scill.” By the end of 1618, Francisco was in Rich’s possession and working his ­brother’s land. And, as proof of Francisco’s wisdom, Thomas Durham could report in 1620 that “the negroes made 1350 pounds of tobacco.”35 As in Africa, entrepreneurial En­glishmen in the Amer­i­cas i­magined a variety of ways that Africans could be useful, including both as bound servants and as knowledgeable and potentially power­ful authorities. A similar appreciation for expertise could appear in other locales as well. The Providence Island Com­pany instructed one of its ship captains in 1636 to take any “captured negroes . . . ​who can dive for pearls to be so employed at Providence [Island].”36 To Richard Ligon’s eye, it was “an able Negro” who was primarily responsible in midcentury Barbados for the management of a plantain grove. Writing in another context, Ligon commented that “we had an excellent Negro in the Plantation, whose name was Macow, and he was our chief Musician; a very valiant man, and was keeper of our Plantine-­Grove.”37 Although events in Jamaica tran­spired at a ­later date, the acknowl­edgment of African expertise and value to the En­glish repeated itself. Writing in the early eigh­teenth c­ entury, Hans Sloane, who had accompanied the Duke of Albamarle to Jamaica in 1688 as his personal physician, noted that once the Spanish had been uprooted from the island, abandoning “their Habitations” to the En­glish, “the Skill of Using them remain’d with the Blacks and Indians, many of whom came, upon a Proclamation that they should be F ­ ree, submitted peaceably, and liv’d with the En­glish,” including “several which made small Plantations of their own.” Sloane also noted the reputed medical skills of some Africans that made them popu­lar among the locals. For the most part, however, he disregarded them as charlatans, even noting the death of Sir Henry Morgan, who turned to “a Black, who gave him Clysters of Urine, and plaister’d him all over with Clay and ­Water.”38 In spite of the tendency of a few En­glish writers to celebrate the abilities of Africans—­free and enslaved—in new En­glish colonies, as well as the examples that survive of En­glish colonists seeking out African experts, the more ­simple real­ity was that Africans w ­ ere highly prized for the same reason they ­were in Spanish Amer­i­ca: Africans labored as slaves and imparted an elevated status on t­ hose who w ­ ere able to possess them. Increasingly, scholars have emphasized that small numbers in no way indicate a lack of interest on the part of the En­glish to supply themselves with black slaves. Africans may not have arrived in V ­ irginia much before 1619 (by which time they w ­ ere already in Bermuda), but almost as soon as they began to appear, V ­ irginia elites strug­



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gled to get ahold of (and keep) as many as they could, especially ­after 1630.39 African slaves ­were on shore with the En­glish virtually at the moment of first settlement on St. Cristopher’s and Barbados in the 1620s.40 And the African population exploded on Providence Island within just a few years of settlement, so much so that the Providence Island Com­pany found itself repeatedly trying to come up with schemes to limit numbers in 1637 and 1638.41 African slaves ­were a boon for ­t hose who sought to ennoble themselves at someone ­else’s expense and for ­those who simply needed hands. But ­there was a catch. As the aforementioned Sir William Alexander observed, “it is alwaies feared that to revenge what of necessitie they must suffer, and to procure their libertie hating most what they feele for the pres­ent, and hoping for better by a change,” that African slaves “­will joyne with any strong e­ nemy that landing ­there dare attempt the conquest of that Countrey.”42 This nightmare scenario, especially in the precariously located En­glish West Indian settlements, was as potent among the En­glish as it had been among the Spanish. Less apparent to contemporaries, but equally impor­tant in hindsight, was the fact that African slaves need not rebel to create prob­lems for En­glish colonists. For quite some time, the En­glish maintained control of Africans as slaves by sheer force of the custom of the early modern Atlantic world rather than by force of En­glish law. This practice allowed would-be slave ­owners to get away with something in the Amer­i­cas that would never have been allowed at home and was considered by some to be inconsistent with one of the defining characteristics of the En­glish nation (i.e., the love of liberty) and Protestant Chris­tian­ity. Considering the opportunities that existed u ­ nder Iberian law and custom of Africans to liberate themselves and the uncertainty of the situation in the En­glish colonies, where l­ ittle in the way of tradition and even less in the way of positive law governed affairs, it should not be surprising that some Africans tried to improve their circumstances. Just as the En­g lish might try to take advantage of Africans in the Atlantic world, so too could Africans try to take advantage of the En­glish. One way that that Africans may have tapped into customary practices based on Iberian pre­ce­dents was to create and exploit patron–­client relationships to protect themselves and the members of their ­family amid the instability that threated the lives and security of slaves everywhere. One example can be found in the effort of Africans (who may have lived their formative years in the Iberian Atlantic world) to cultivate fictive ties through ritual godparentage.43 In Bermuda in 1639, James Sarnando, “Commonly Called olde

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James the Nigro,” and his wife brought their seven-­year-­old d ­ aughter Hanna to Hugh Went­worth’s home for a ceremony in which they took their ­daughter’s hand and “delivered it into the hande of Mr. Went­worth saying heere Master mee give you this Childe.”44 The question, of course, is what did the Sarnandos believe they ­were giving to Went­worth (they and their ­daughter ­were slaves)? And what did they expect in return from the En­glishman (who was not their owner)? A good argument is to be made that the Sarnandos w ­ ere enacting a ritual that closely paralleled the compadrio, or ritual godparentage. If James Sarnando and his wife had any familiarity with Catholic practice, they would have known that they ­were forging both a spiritual and temporal kinship with Went­worth.45 And Went­worth made a particularly good choice for a benefactor. Although the Africans w ­ ere owned by the Earl of Warwick, Went­worth served as Warwick’s agent and was, by one mea­sure, Bermuda’s most impor­tant dealer in African and Indian slaves. In Went­worth, Sarnando may have hoped to engage the protection of an influential f­ ree Bermudian to ensure the sanctity of his f­amily’s tenuous u ­ nion.46 Certainly, Africans tried to cultivate relationships with influential or power­ful En­glishmen in other colonies as well. Africans also seem to have tried to use their understanding of Protestant Chris­tian­ity against ­those who held them in bondage. In a number of places, putative slaves converted (or attempted to convert) to Protestant Chris­tian­ity in part, it seems, ­because they ­were aware that many En­glish in the Amer­i­cas believed that they could not hold co-­religionists in a state of perpetual bondage.47 Colonial elites, members of Parliament, the king, and ministers repeatedly asserted, as the V ­ irginia House of Burgess declared in 1667, that the “conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or Freedome” and that “Bondage,” as the Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn famously asserted, “is not inconsistent with Chris­tian­ity.”48 Conversion, however, was no s­imple t­hing in the minds of Anglo-­A merican slaveholders. When Richard Ligon tried to convince a Barbadian sugar planter to allow one of his slaves to become a Christian, the slave owner balked, telling Ligon that “the ­people of that Island ­were governed by the Lawes of ­England, and by t­ hose Lawes, we could not make a Christian a Slave.” Ligon responded that it was not his intention to enslave Christians; rather, he “desired . . . ​to make a Slave a Christian.” In this revealing passage, the sugar planter acknowledged Ligon’s perspective, but he continued to object—­guiltily, perhaps—­ that “being once a Christian, he could no more account him a Slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as Slaves.”49



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Ligon’s Barbadian sugar planter was right to worry ­because some Africans had ­every intention of exploiting this situation. Slaves in Bermuda petitioned for their freedom in 1669 on the grounds that “the Gospel allowes noe bondmen.”50 Earlier in the ­century, “John Phillip, A negro Christened in ­England 12 yeeres since,” was able to assert his freedom when he visited V ­ irginia in 1624 51 as a crew member on an En­glish privateer. Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom in ­Virginia during the 1650s and won, partly on the grounds that she had been baptized. Although not ­every African was successful, they all seem to have recognized that what­ever laws may have been passed and what­ever assurances may have been offered from London, Anglo-­A merican Protestants ­were hesitant to blur the lines between their understanding of themselves as Christians and their understanding of their slaves as something e­ lse entirely (and therefore lacking in the kinds of rights that might make it difficult to hold them in a state of perpetual slavery). The sensibility articulated by Richard Jobson in Africa that the En­glish ­were not the kind of ­people who bought and sold h ­ uman beings was widely shared. Few En­glish living in the Atlantic world preferred to lend the lie to the idea that they ­were members of a nation, ­legal culture, and religious group that had a special commitment to liberty. One suspects that most En­glish colonists would have liked to remain ­silent on this par­tic­u­lar subject, but they w ­ ere called to task by the Africans living in their midst who tried to exploit Protestantism to achieve their liberty.52 The En­glish experience in the Amer­i­cas—­whether on the mainland or in the islands—­reflected several countervailing tendencies. On the one hand, the En­glish knew about the widespread use of Africans as slaves in Spanish Amer­i­ca and often commented on just how dangerous slavery was to colonial security. On the other hand, Anglo-­A mericans never shied away from holding Africans as slaves and seemingly could not get enough of them to satisfy their desires. Even so, the impulse to possess Africans as slaves in the Amer­i­ cas did not necessarily mean that they w ­ ere completely ready to dispatch with older notions of Africans as friends and allies who could aid the En­glish in their efforts to replicate Spanish successes in En­glish colonies. Predictably, some Africans took advantage of En­glish inexperience and unease to try to improve their situation by capitalizing on the En­glish proclivity to govern their affairs in ways that looked (at least superficially) more just and humane than ­those of the Iberians. As a result, t­ here was considerable room for negotiation between the two parties during the first half of the seventeenth ­century as the En­glish and Africans worked together and apart to figure out mutually advantageous resolutions to the challenges of Anglo-­A merican settlement.

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Considerable flexibility and creativity was the order of the day. That, however, would change dramatically at midcentury.

* * * The sporadic and incomplete evidence from E ­ ngland’s Atlantic world enterprises between the mid-­sixteenth and mid-­seventeenth centuries tells a story of Anglo-­A frican cooperation (sometimes real, sometimes ­imagined) that is a bit at odds with historical narratives designed to chart the development of an emerging En­glish racial ideology and/or the development of ­England’s involvement in slavery and the slave trade. Many En­glishmen appreciated the fact that Africans ­were subject ­peoples in the Atlantic world and that the Iberian powers had propped themselves up in Africa and the Amer­i­cas on the backs of Africans. That way of imagining t­ hings encouraged the En­glish to create and proj­ect an alternate image of themselves as the friends and allies of Africans in certain contexts, even as they proved to be willing to conduct themselves no differently than ­either the Spanish or Portuguese in the long run. But it was precisely that opening that led En­glish writers to compose charitable assessments of the knowledge and expertise of Africans. It also led some early En­glish colonists to create openings in their colonial socie­ties through which a few Africans might even walk through.53 How this might all work out, and just how rapidly ­things could change, is particularly easy to perceive in Jamaica between 1655 and 1675. The first generation of Anglo-­Jamaicans, for example, willingly allied themselves with the runaway slaves who inhabited the interior parts of the island in order to topple the Spanish. By Governor D’Oyley’s likely exaggerated estimation, as many as two thousand Africans roamed freely about the island, and the En­glish found it impossible to ignore their presence, much less do anything about the ­free Africans. As a result, D’Oyley’s successor, Sir Charles Lyttelton, deci­ded to invite “Juan Lubola [Juan de Bolas] and the rest of the Negroes of his Palenque” to be “in the same state and freedom as the En­glish enjoy.” When the En­glish fi­nally uncovered “where the Negroes have lurked t­ hese four years undiscovered,” at least one prominent band agreed to the deal and allied themselves with the newcomers. Within a ­matter of weeks, Juan de Bolas was officially recognized by the En­glish as “Governour of the Negroes” and fighting side by side with the En­glish.54 What is most in­ter­est­ing about this development, of course, is that it suggests that the En­glish believed ­there might be a role for Jamaica’s maroons not just as allies but as members of a shared com-



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munity. Whereas eighteenth-­century treaties between the En­glish and maroons envisioned the two parties as separate and distinct, the 1663 draft treaty suggested that ­free blacks should receive thirty-­acre headrights and “bring up their ­Children to the En­glish Tongue” so “that by such Communitie of Language a better Societie, Correspondence and Commerce may be gotten between us and them.”55 Some Africans seem to have accepted the terms of this proposal, and as a result, t­ here would be a few f­ ree blacks living on the island. It is unclear w ­ hether the En­glish knew they w ­ ere replicating the Spanish practice of accommodating themselves with groups of Africans they could not control and, worse, could do them harm if they cooperated with ­England’s enemies. Spanish officials granted cimarrones in Panama a semiautonomous status in the late sixteenth c­ entury at the conclusion of the Vallano War with the understanding that local Africans would cease cooperating with En­glish ­ ere making choices that reflected and French pirates.56 Certainly, they w En­glish patterns of be­hav­ior in the early modern Atlantic world. Over and over again, En­glish merchants, mari­ners, interlopers, and settlers chose to work with Africans to try to establish a firm footing in an arena conditioned by Spanish, Portuguese, and even Dutch powers. But ­things ­were clearly changing. By the end of the 1660s, if not earlier in other parts of En­glish Amer­i­ca, ­England was becoming even more committed to dealing with Africans as a commodity—as t­hings rather than persons—as a result of a growing commitment to plantation agriculture and even the slave trade. During the late 1670s and 1680s, one additional incentive for importing large numbers of Africans into the island was to resell them in the Spanish market. Between 1680 and 1686, the intercolonial slave trade between Jamaica and the Spanish colonies was impor­tant enough to warrant a resident Spanish merchant in Jamaica to coordinate the trade.57 Writing in 1684 to Hender Molesworth, the com­ pany’s agent in Jamaica and acting governor of the colony, William Blathwayte assured him that “you w ­ ill certainly receive o­ rders to encourage it [the Spanish trade] as farr as pos­si­ble as well as ye par­tic­u­lar Trade of Negros.”58 Ironically, perhaps, by the late seventeenth c­ entury, it seems, E ­ ngland’s new friend and ally would be Spain.59 As the Jamaican case reveals, the relationship between En­glishmen and Africans changed dramatically in the Restoration era. Before that time—­ and even for a short period of time on Jamaica itself—­some En­g lish ­were inclined to think about Africans in a way that placed ­little emphasis on the primacy of slavery or the importance of perceived racial distinctions. To be sure, the Anglo-­A frican world between the mid-­sixteenth and mid-­seventeenth

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centuries was hardly equitable, and astute observers can easily find examples of the En­glish ­doing and saying t­ hings that seem to presage the full articulation of the mature plantation complex. Yet, from the time of John Lok and his five “blacke slaves” through the era of Richard Jobson and Thomas Gage and even into the early colonies, t­ here is another in­ter­est­ing story to tell. For quite some time, the En­glish thought about Africans as agents of empire—­ not ­because of their l­ abor value but, rather, ­because En­glishmen and Africans would work together to achieve material gain, often at the expense of the Iberian powers.

chapter 3

Empires on Drugs Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Go-­Betweens and the Anglo-­Portuguese Alliance b en ja mi n b reen

In 1597, the same year Shakespeare was writing The Merchant of Venice, a farther-­flung crew of merchants set out from the southwestern coast of India. The Portuguese carrack São Alberto brimmed with nutmeg and other medicines and spices purchased in Cochin that winter. It also carried the wife of the governor of Ceylon, several wealthy traders and sea captains, two Dominican friars, and a crew ­e ager to carve personal fortunes out of Portugal’s mono­poly on Indian drugs and spices. South of Mozambique, however, the overloaded ship began to take on ­water. The crew was forced into a desperate action: “The danger increasing, they threw overboard every­thing that had been in the holds of the gun-­deck and in their payloads of drugs (payoes de drogas), by which they covered the sea in infinite riches. Most [of the drugs and spices] ­were thrown overboard by ­those who owned them, to whom they ­were now as abhorred and despised as they had once been beloved and esteemed.”1 Although Portugal’s dominance of the Indies trade in spices, dyes, and medicines was still secure in 1597, the hallucinatory scene onboard the São Alberto seemed to augur a change in fortune. Pi­loting the Indies route around the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese called the Carreira da Índia, had been a dangerous business since the age of Vasco de Gama. But by the seventeenth ­century, Portugal’s commerce in Indies drogas was ­under threat. In the period between 1629 and 1634, less than half of the 5,228 soldiers who left

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Lisbon for Goa actually reached their destination: the rest succumbed to disease, died in shipwrecks, or vanished from the rec­ord as deserters or stowaways.2 Likewise, as documented by Paulo Guinote, out of the one hundred vessels that attempted the Carreira da Índia between 1626 and 1650, twenty-­five ­were lost to shipwreck or capture, and only forty out of the original one hundred ever returned to Lisbon.3 Readers of the naufragio (shipwreck) narratives inspired by this grim death toll could hardly avoid drawing parallels with the ship of state.4 The House of Braganza, regnant since the 1640 restoration of Portuguese in­de­ pen­dence ­under João IV, seemed to be sinking. In a series of naval actions during the m ­ iddle de­cades of the seventeenth c­ entury, the Dutch had seized the most valuable components of Portugal’s overseas empire: Pernambuco in Brazil (1630), São Jorge de Mina in Guinea (1637), Luanda and its hinterlands in Angola (1641), Malacca in the East Indies (1641), and Sri Lanka (1656). By 1660, even Portugal’s imperial nerve center in Goa was u ­ nder a Dutch naval blockade. Th ­ ese exceptionally aggressive campaigns led to a degree of overreach on the part of the Dutch. In Brazil, a mixed Luso-­Brazilian military force led by figures like the indigenous commander Filipe Camarão and the governador da gente preta (governor of the black folk) Henrique Dias recaptured Pernambuco in 1649, and a Luso-­Brazilian armada restored Luanda to Portuguese rule in 1648.5 Yet despite signs of a resurgence in the Atlantic sphere, the Estado da Índia continued to shrink. To some at court and elsewhere, ­these disasters suggested that the Portuguese state had restored itself in 1640 only to suffer another imperial decline—­what one chronicler called “Monstrosities of Time and Fortune”—­just twenty years ­later.6 Starting in the 1650s and culminating with the 1662 marriage alliance between Catherine of Bragança and King Charles II of ­England, power­ful members of the Portuguese court attempted to right the ship of state by forging an alliance with the British Empire.7 This chapter argues that the trade in materia medica from the Indies—­goods typically called drogas in early modern Portuguese and drugs in English—­stood at the core of the imperial entanglement between the British and Portuguese. Indeed, among the dowry gifts that the Portuguese Infanta Catherine carried with her to E ­ ngland was a new medicinal drink from the Indies that she called chá. At that time, it was largely unknown to En­glish consumers, but it soon found adherents at court. By the early eigh­teenth c­ entury, it had become one of the most impor­ tant components of British trade. En­glish speakers called it “tea.”8



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Beyond ­t hese material and diplomatic exchanges, the drug trade comprised a vital epistemological link between the Portuguese and British dominions. As they exchanged phar­ma­ceu­ti­c al knowledge and materials, the merchants, healers, and cultivators in the Portuguese Empire established impor­tant contacts with networks of natu­ral phi­los­o­phers, including the Royal Society of London.

From Especiarias to Drogas The spice trade had been the jewel in the crown of the Portuguese monarchs since King Manuel I proclaimed himself the “Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India” in 1499.9 But when we write t­oday about the Portuguese “spice trade” in the sixteenth ­century, we elide the complexity of what this trade actually entailed. The Portuguese ­were in fact laying claim to two overlapping realms of commerce: the trade in especiarias and the trade in drogas. Throughout the early modern period, substances we now classify as drugs operated within the same umbrella category as substances we regard as benign spices or foods, like cloves, sugar, and rosewater. As late as 1794, a Spanish encyclopedia seeking to categorize “the types of merchants” listed the especieros (spicers) as a group that traded in every­thing from vinegar to coffee and aguardiente and who controlled “el comércio ó tráfico de drogas ­simples sin manipularlas.”10 This trade in drogas helped shape and sustain the Anglo-­Portuguese alliance.11 To understand how it did so, we need to imagine a world that classifies rhubarb, wildebeest hooves, ground pearls, and powdered h ­ uman skull within the same category as opium and cannabis; a time when the merchants of the East India Com­pany regarded tea as an exotic curiosity but carried on a healthy trade in calcified goat hairballs mixed with gold; a world in which the British crown claimed no territories in India, and a Portuguese flag flew above a village that would become Bombay. In his book Renascent Empire?, Glenn Ames offered a revisionist interpretation of this period that portrayed the late seventeenth-­century Portuguese Empire as newly revivified, finding unexpected success as it reestablished footholds in India, expelled the Dutch from Angola and Brazil, and regained partial control of the spice trade.12 Yet for all its revisionist appeal, Ames’s thesis remained modest: his point was simply that the Portuguese Empire in the seventeenth ­century was not in a state of steady and permanent decline.13 Though Ames

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acknowledged that the empire suffered an almost fatal shock to its system in the 1640s, he mobilized evidence from colonial archives in Goa to show that the financial under­pinnings of the Indies trade remained sound and pointed out that the Portuguese retained many lesser-­known tropical outposts, such as Diu, even as they lost territories such as Sri Lanka and Malacca to Dutch naval power. What happens if we expand our view into regions where the Portuguese did not possess sovereignty but still wielded forms of soft power? Viewing the Portuguese Empire as a territorial po­liti­cal entity fails to account for spaces, like Amazonia or the Congo River basin, that w ­ ere contested by several polities but ­were strongly s­haped by Portuguese commerce and evangelization. We must distinguish between the Portuguese Empire and the Portuguese world, a porous space of intercultural encounters and conflicts.14 Even as Dutch, En­glish, French, and African or Asian states encroached on formal Portuguese hegemony, t­hese powers continued to be influenced, in subtle yet impor­tant ways, by Lusophone networks of materials and knowledge. It was in this larger Portuguese world that much of the commerce in Indies drugs played out—­and it was into this world that British merchants, colonists, and natu­ral phi­los­o­phers expanded in the seventeenth ­century.

The Braganza Dowry and Imperial Entanglement On May 13, 1662, the Infanta Catherine of Braganza made landfall on the south coast of ­England. Edward Montague, who had been tasked with welcoming the royal bride to ­England, wrote ner­vously to Charles II’s chief minister Edward Hyde that the Infanta had greeted Charles II with “due expressions of affection” but that she was “keepinge her bedd, by reason of a sore throate, and a ­little fev’rish distemper gotten by a cold ­here.”15 The stakes for Catherine’s recovery w ­ ere high, as Montague’s next comment made clear. “The m ­ atter of consumation of the marriage is adjusted to satisfaction,” Montague reassured. “Too morrow, if the Queene be well, it w ­ ill be performed.” But the queen’s illness persisted for five days, during which time she requested chá, a restorative decoction that had grown fash­ion­able in the court of her ­father, King João IV of Portugal.16 According to one (perhaps apocryphal) version of events, an En­glish servant provided her with the only substitute available: a glass of warm ale.17 Although she carried a chest of the new drug to E ­ ngland with her as a dowry gift, Catherine did not, as is frequently asserted, introduce tea to



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­ ngland. Four years earlier in 1658, a London tobacco and coffee merchant E named Thomas Garway had published a broadside proclaiming the “Vertues of the Leaf TEE, alias TAY.”18 Garway claimed to have been the first to publicly sell “this precious Leaf” in E ­ ngland, beginning in 1657 at his shop near Charing Cross “at the Signe of the China-­man.” Garway’s broadside cited Portuguese and Dutch travelers who had written “in Honour of this Noble Leaf and Drink,” including Padre Alvarez Semedo and the Dutch physician Jacob Bontius. As early as 1651, tea was being drunk at the Portuguese court and appearing in Dutch East India Com­pany auctions in Amsterdam.19 One Amsterdam physician, Cornelis Bontekoe, was even rumored to have been bribed by the Dutch East India Com­pany to promote the new import.20 Bontekoe’s remarkable enthusiasm (the doctor recommended that sick patients drink between fifty and two hundred cups a day) gave the beverage a boost in popularity among Amsterdam consumers, who regarded it as a kind of energizing health tonic to be drunk on doctor’s ­orders.21 Garway’s text, however, assumes that his London audience has no prior knowledge of tea, explaining that it is a leaf that “groweth [in China] upon ­little shrubs” and that the Japa­nese and Chinese have a long history with this “cha.” Garway highlighted the exotic origins of his import, quoting extensively from an unnamed “padre of Macao,” who believed that “the best tea o­ ught to be gathered but by virgins,” and boasting that the Chinese and Japa­nese “frequently sell it among themselves for twice its weight in silver.” He surveyed the drink’s humoral characteristics (“moderately hot”) and credited it with curing headaches, giddiness, “obstructions of the spleen,” and “difficulty of breathing,” as well as “cleaning the kidneys and ureters.” In a move typical of many seventeenth-­century drug sellers, ­these more prosaic benefits accompanied claims about tea’s psychoactive effects, such as “vanquish[ing] heavy dreams,” improving memory, and, of course, warding off sleep.22 Catherine and her Portuguese courtiers are impor­tant to this story not ­because they introduced tea but b­ ecause they helped legitimate it, elevating an obscure medicament to the heights of courtly fashion. Tea drinking in the 1650s was a fringe act, something that had to be strenuously justified. By the 1670s, it had become a status symbol. The influence of Catherine and her ladies-­in-­waiting may also have given the new drink a gendered dimension, making it one of the few exotic drugs that was associated with ­women.23 Coffee and tobacco, t­hose other fash­ion­able stimulants of the seventeenth ­century, remained strongly associated with masculinity and public life.24 By contrast, in his 1700 ode to tea Panacea, Nahum Tate called the plant a

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“Nepenthe” that, like Homer’s nepenthe—­the mysterious “anti-­sorrow” that Helen spikes her wine with in the Odyssey—­functioned as “an Entertainment for Ladies.”25 Catherine’s chest of tea assumed a special resonance in the context of the dowry gifts it accompanied: two million silver cruzados and the port cities of Tangier and Bombay.26 Tangier held symbolic importance for the Portuguese. It was their foothold in the lands of the “Moors,” a remnant of campaigns of the young King Sebastian, who perished in a disastrous b­ attle south of the city in 1578. The gift of the tiny fishing village of Bombay, though of l­ittle value, was a loaded symbolic act in the context of the considerable loss of life that the Portuguese had recently suffered in defending the Estado da Índia from the Dutch in the previous de­cade. Antonio de Mello de Castro, the final Portuguese governor of Bombay, even predicted that the handover would spell the end of Portuguese India (“we are finished in India on the very day that the En­glish Nation takes hold of Bombay,” he wrote in an angry letter to the crown).27 Thus, although in one re­spect the alliance was aggressively modern, with its gift of an exotic drug and its handover of commercial entrepôts thousands of miles away, it was also freighted with deep historical meaning.28 In a 1662 ode to the royal wedding, Samuel Hinde offered a Spanish-­language dedication to Caterina that celebrated the “­bitter herbs [amargas yervas] which your Majesty consumed in your Passover across the Atlantic.”29 The phrase evoked both the tribulations of the Israelites and the medicinal “­bitters” (amargas) that the Portuguese carried from what Hinde called “their infinite cities, fortresses and rivers, some of which issue forth from Paradise.”30 By following the dedication with a truculent “Alarum to the Spaniard,” Hinde also placed the marriage within the narrative of the Black Legend, with Hinde lamenting the Castilians’ “bloody Scenes . . . ​[of] woe” in the “Indies, and at Mexico” and mocking their indolence.31 Significantly, Hinde portrayed the news of Portugal’s successful bid for in­de­pen­dence in 1640 as a soporific drug that “benum’d the Sense / of Spain, with its Narcotick influence.”32 Con­temporary accounts of the marriage tended to fixate more on the imperial realpolitik under­lying the alliance than on the experiences of the king and queen themselves.33 Hinde, for instance, devoted a mere eigh­teen lines of verse to describing the a­ ctual wedding (“the Illustrious paire of Princes greet!”) but followed this meager offering with fifty lines praising the diplomatic finesse of Edward Montagu, who helped arrange the wedding. The match marked the realization of a centuries-­old ambition on the part of both Portuguese and En­glish courtiers. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, had estab-



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lished an early iteration of the Anglo-­Portuguese alliance as early as the 1370s.34 The Anglo-­Portuguese alliance established by the marriage of Gaunt’s ­daughter Phillipa to King John I of Portugal in 1386 would continue, in vari­ ous guises, up to the pres­ent day. It is, in fact, the longest-­lasting national alliance in history.35 But if the relationship between Charles and Catarina was a masque played out on the creaky stage of dynastic diplomacy, it also had a more intimate dimension. Lorenzo Magalotti, a Florentine traveler who befriended Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton and observed the En­glish court during the 1660s, noted rumors of “extraordinary and ill-­timed purges” and a “superabundance of blood” that limited Caterina’s sexual relations with the king and left her “despairing of having c­ hildren.” Although Magalotti did not mention Caterina’s consumption of tea, he complained that she avoided wine and was “not careful about eating food full of very hot condiments,” since her condition would supposedly be worsened by substances that (like tea) w ­ ere deemed to be humorally hot.36 Potentially, too, the severe disabilities of Caterina’s b­ rother King Alfonso IV (who suffered from hemiplegia, or half-­body paralysis, owing to a childhood illness) would have colored perceptions of Caterina as a patient in need of care rather than as a queen. In the Indies, the ­union produced considerable friction. This was especially true in the more far-­flung British and Portuguese colonies, where news of the alliance took over a year to arrive. As a symbol of the new ­union, the Portuguese crown dispatched António de Melo e Castro as the first post-­ alliance viceroy to India aboard the frigate Leopold, a ship belonging to an En­glish squadron led by James Ley, third Earl of Marlborough.37 Yet when Melo e Castro reached India and found the Portuguese feitorias at Cochin and Cannanore ­under a Dutch blockade, his En­glish colleagues refused to help. Ultimately, Melo e Castro sided with local Portuguese administrators in Goa and denied the British access to Bombay ­until 1665, some three years ­after they had nominally received possession. British merchants and imperial agents became increasingly contemptuous of what they regarded as a typically Portuguese lack of organ­ization. In April of 1656, the East India Com­pany council in Surat reported that, due to the Dutch blockade along the western Indian coast, “the Portuguez are in a very bad condicion; and the worse by reason of discord among themselves. A new Vice Rey came out this yeare, who dyed in January last; and now they have a Governour again. With this new Governours rule wee heare that they are already discontent’d, and ­will select another.”38

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The British had, in the early de­cades of the seventeenth c­ entury, sought to emulate Portuguese models. By the 1660s, the British ­were cannibalizing ­these models, seizing a moment of opportunity to enlist the Portuguese as ju­nior partners in an (ultimately successful) attempt to wrest dominance of global seaways and trade networks from French, Dutch, and Spanish competitors. As the de­cades progressed, the early significance of the Portuguese empire—­and specifically of Portuguese drogas—in the British state’s rise to commercial preeminence faded from view, in no large part due to the efforts of British authors who attempted to banish all traces of Iberian influence from their Whiggish narratives of Britannia’s rise to glory. This tale of entanglement and severing echoes ­those of other contributions to this volume, like Christopher Heaney’s “Marrying Utopia.” But it differs in impor­tant ways from the Spanish Black Legend. Rather than serving as exemplars of how not to run an empire, Portuguese models ­were in some ways folded into an increasingly cosmopolitan British imperial strategy. The drug trade exemplifies the complexity of this pro­cess: drogas associated with Catholic and indigenous epistemologies reemerged, in the de­cades bookending 1700, as drugs eagerly sought out by British consumers. Just as Infanta Catarina’s cha became good Queen Catherine’s tea, the suspicious and foreign drugs of the Portuguese trading worlds became some of the most valuable fruits in Britannia’s cornucopia.

The De Gaman Exchange In the early days of the British Empire, u ­ nder James I, the importance of Portuguese models had been obvious. Just as Tudor chroniclers like Richard Eden drew on Spanish accounts to encourage colonization in the New World (as Christopher Heaney demonstrates in Chapter 4), Jacobean writers about India and the East Indies followed Portugal’s lead when it came to trade and colonization in the East Indies. It was not uncommon for early British expeditions to the Indian Ocean and Africa to carry documents in Portuguese, on the assumption that this was the Eu­ro­pean tongue that native rulers would be most likely to understand. Alexander Sharpeigh, a leader of an East India Com­pany voyage to India in 1608, carried letters from King James to unspecified “princes” written in Portuguese.39 Twenty years ­later on the Gambia River, an En­glish slaver utilized Portuguese to communicate with “a Blacke man called Sandie” who described how to neutralize the toxins of a poisonous fish.40



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Portuguese became the language of exchange in the seventeenth ­century ­ ecause it was the language of extraction in the sixteenth. As A. J. R. Russell-­ b Wood has noted, early modern Portuguese mari­ners w ­ ere pioneers of ecological pillaging and cross-­pollination, carry­ing chili peppers to Asia, maize to Africa, and tobacco to China.41 A 1588 treatise on the “special medicines” that apothecaries could produce from “the three kindes of peppers in common use” featured extensive citations of the Portuguese Jewish apothecary Garcia da Orta. Da Orta’s name appears in the very first paragraph of the text, and excerpts of his influential 1563 treatise Colóquios dos s­imples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (Dialogues of the S­ imples, Drugs, and Materia Medica of India) reoccur seven more times throughout this short pamphlet.42 Significantly, however, although the author acknowledged that da Orta’s findings invalidate the claims of Greco-­Roman authors (“we learne by the histories penned by the latter writers, that all of this is untrue”), the section of the pamphlet devoted to ­actual preparations of the vari­ous types of peppers reverted to tradition, abandoning Portuguese in­for­mants in ­favor of remedies supplied by the second-­century c.e. Roman physician Galen.43 This was a common pattern in En­glish pharmacopeias of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In t­ hese texts, Portuguese empirical knowledge figured in the descriptions of drugs and spices, but this information coexisted uneasily with continued adherence to the authority of “the Ancients.”44 The practical knowledge that made the global drug trade pos­si­ble—­what a valuable drug looked and smelled like, where it might be found within a landscape, what it was called—­was readily adapted from Portuguese into En­glish vernacular writing about the drug trade. Yet English-­language authorities ­were much slower to abandon two millennia of Greek, Roman, and Arabic learning as to medical treatments in ­favor of the Portuguese—­a nation that one naval officer called “a p ­ eople of less Renown and Fame, and less Ability and Valour than any other Christian Monarchy.”45 Portuguese knowledge of drugs circulated among merchants and apothecaries working in commercial contexts, but it was slower to filter into the learned networks of physicians and natu­ral phi­los­o­phers. During the 1620s and 1630s, the Portuguese continued to dominate the global trade in goods like brazilwood, cinnamon, nutmeg, musk, mace, camphor, opium, tobacco, black pepper, and chili peppers. It was becoming evident to observers in Holland, ­England, France, and Spain, however, that their era of mono­poly was ending. In 1621, Robert Burton extolled “our laborious discoveries” and the “true Merchants” of Britain, who “carry the bell away

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from all other nation[s], even the Portingales.”46 Fifteen years l­ ater, in his Briefe Description of the Whole World (1636), the Anglican bishop George Abbott reflected on the changing nature of the drug trade. “In time past,” he wrote, the Venetians had dominated the trade in Indies drugs via the Red Sea and Alexandria, but by Abbott’s time, “Spice, and Apothecaries drugs are found to be far worse than before time they ­were, by reason of the ­great moysture which they take on the ­water, by reason of the long Navigation of the Portugales by the back part of Africa.”47 A failed Northwest Passage discoverer named Thomas James (1633) was disparaging, acknowledging the importance of Portuguese in­for­mants about “the golden Indies” and “the mysteries of their trades, and traffique,” but also attacking Portuguese navigators—­“the meere shaddowes of whose mistaken Relations have comme to us”—­for intentionally distorting information about Indies commerce and navigation. “The vicious, and abusive wits of ­later Portingals,” he concluded, ­were founded on “falsities” and empty boasts about maritime prowess.48 En­glish agents of empire of the 1630s and 1640s saw themselves as following a path blazed by the Portuguese—­but they ­were increasingly starting to think that they could pass them on the road. Yet if British sea power began to come out from the shadow of the Portuguese in this period, knowledge of Indies drugs was still an Iberian prerogative. Lusophone in­for­mants occupy the background of many early British accounts of Indies drugs, serving as guides, translators, and in­for­mants. When an En­glish merchant named Thomas Bowrey sought out new goods in the port of Machilipatnam, for instance, he established local contacts like “Petro Loveyro, an antient Portuguees,” who Bowrey came to “[know] very well.”49 Bowrey’s contacts introduced him to an unfamiliar intoxicating drug called bangha, which the townsfolk used “to besott themselves.”50 By 1689, the drug had made its way from Indian bazaars to London coffee­houses, where Robert Hooke purchased a sample for testing, concluding that the substance could “prove as considerable a Medicine in Drugs, as any that is brought from the Indies.”51 Both Bowrey’s and Hooke’s understanding of this besotting herb (which we know ­today as Cannabis indica) was founded on the textual tradition of Portuguese medical writing about Indies drugs.52 The Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta had offered up the earliest account of bangha’s psychoactive properties in any Eu­ro­pean language a c­ entury earlier, writing that a large dose of the drug made what he called a “Portuguese jester of my acquaintance” laugh merrily but then fall into a deep depression. “In his case,” wrote



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da Orta (who was not a fan of the drug), “the effect was sadness and nausea.”53 The Portuguese word for the drug, banga or bangue, would predominate in En­glish accounts throughout the eigh­teenth ­century and beyond, as would the basic outlines of da Orta’s descriptions of its effects.54

Testing Drogas One of the most significant shifts in late seventeenth-­century medicine involved the integration of chemical techniques with the tropically inflected Galenism promulgated by Iberians like da Orta and Monardes.55 Apothecaries began to create compound medicines using alchemical pro­cesses and proprietary mixtures of tropical drugs. One of the most popu­lar of t­hese was the Lapis de Goa (Goa stone), an “artificial” version of a bezoar stone in­ven­ted by the Portuguese Jesuit apothecary Gaspar Antonio in Goa in the m ­ iddle de­ cades of the seventeenth ­century. ­These stones, like bezoars, ­were regarded as antidotes for a wide range of poisons, venoms, and plagues. In March of 1691, the Jesuit b­ rothers who ran the Royal Hospital in Goa (which employed Gaspar Antonio) attempted to restrict sale of ­these bezoar-­ like “cordial stones” and license them using certificates of authenticity.56 Yet despite (or, perhaps, ­because of) ­these restrictions, the stones exploded in popularity during the 1680s and 1690s.57 In his Trea­sury of Drugs Unlock’ d (1690), John Jacob Berlu wrote of “Goa Stones (by some not rightly called Lapis Jasper Antonicus)” composed of “seed-­pearl, Bezoar, Gold, and other Ingredients.”58 Likewise, the merchant John Ovington’s report of his 1689 voyage to Surat included a description of two dif­fer­ent cordial stones produced by the Portuguese in India: the “Snake-­stone,” made of “Ashes of burnt Roots, mix’t with a kind of Earth, which is found at Diu, belonging to the Portuguese,” and the “deservedly fam’d Gasper Antoni, or Goa Stone.” Ovington added that Eu­ ro­pe­ans he met in India “carry always about them one of t­ hese Stones inclosed in a Heart of Gold . . . ​which hangs about their Necks.”59 Although they remain almost unstudied by con­temporary scholars, clearly ­these “artificial” bezoars ­were popu­lar drugs in the late seventeenth-­century world. “Three small bags or more of Jasper Antonio or stone of Goa” even make a surprise appearance as the most valuable buried trea­sure itemized in a deposition by the notorious pirate Captain Kidd in the aftermath of his 1698 raid on a Mughal merchant vessel.60 However, the relatively precise descriptions of the stones offered up by experienced drug merchants such as Berlu and Ovington can

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be misleading. Among medical consumers, it would seem that the origins of the Goa stones w ­ ere becoming increasingly obscured—­and exoticized—by the time of Kidd’s deposition. For instance, Nahum Tate’s 1700 poem in praise of tea portrayed the Chinese drink as joining “Nature and Art’s choice gift, the Goa-­stone” in the pantheon of the most beneficent drugs found among the “Refin’d and Civiliz’d Chinese,” apparently unaware that this was, in fact, a product of Portuguese Jesuits.61 Identifying and investigating the purity of drugs from the Portuguese world became a special interest of Robert Boyle and his circle in the Royal Society in the years following the 1662 marriage alliance. In his Observations made upon the Brasillian root, called ipepocoanha, imported from the Indies (1682), the London physician Richard Griffith noted that his research arose out of his “being frequently importuned by Esq Boyl to make Experiments upon Indian ­Simples [medicinal drugs], and to give an Account of my Observation and Success to some London Physitians.”62 Likewise, Robert Hooke wrote up his “Directions for Knowledge of Bezoar Stones,” describing tests of their purity and provenance: rubbing the bezoar on a piece of chalk, touching it with a red-­hot iron, dropping it in w ­ ater, and observing w ­ hether it 63 produced ­bubbles. Hans Sloane also took a strong interest in ipecacuanha, whose introduction into Eu­ro­pean medicine he credited to “an anonymous Portuguese, who lived in Brasil, (supposed to be one Manoel Tristaeon) whose book falling into the hands of the En­glish, is translated and published by Purchas, in the year 1625.”64 In his work on hydrostatics, Boyle described a series of experiments on bezoar stones and “calculi humani” (concretions found inside h ­ uman bodies) inspired by the “famous physician” Garcia da Orta. Boyle described being approached by a London drug merchant to test the legitimacy of an “adulterate” bezoar, which was likely a Goa stone: “I have seen a fair adulterate bezoar-­stone so resembling the genuine, that a g­ reat price was set upon it,” Boyle wrote. “But by being brought to me for my opinion, I made no doubt of it being counterfeit, from its appearing as heavy, as a mineral stone of the same bulk.”65 Boyle was even tasked with testing the legitimacy of an Indies “snakestone” by Queen Catherine herself. In his notebooks, Boyle recorded that “the Queen also was pleas’d to honor me with a command to try ye goodness of a snakestone,” which she had been given by the emissaries of the king of Siam during their 1684 visit to London. Boyle made a “trial” of the “virtues” of the stone by administering it to a dog that had been bitten by a viper but found



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it “void of virtues.” Boyle continued, however, that “[Queen Catarina] being not discourag’d at this disappointment was pleas’d to send me another of ­these Antidotes yt came from ye same parte of ye East Indys.” This time, the antidote worked, and Boyle recorded his “­great satisfaction” at being able to report to the queen that her drug was the genuine article.66 New knowledge about Indies drugs that flowed from the tropical world, from tea to bangue to bezoars, helped set in motion a culture of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal experimentalism in Restoration London. Boyle’s private list of “desiderata” that he hoped natu­ral phi­los­o­phers might discover in the f­ uture is telling in this regard. The list included both “Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions” and drugs that would allow “Freedom from Necessity of much Sleeping [as] exemplify’d by the Operations of Tea.”67

Anglo-­Portuguese Knowledge Networks Knowledge exchanges between the Portuguese and British ­were ­shaped by the unbalanced power relations between the Portuguese and British states. By the early eigh­teenth ­century, Portuguese authorities on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals had begun to adopt the methods and nomenclature of British and Dutch natu­ral phi­los­o­phers. In the revised second edition of his Pharmacopea ­Lusitana (1711), the Lisbon apothecary Caetano de San António implicitly acknowledged the work of Boyle and his colleagues, writing that “since the Northern nations have introduced chemistry it is evident that this impor­tant art [of pharmacy] is now very dif­fer­ent than it was in earlier times. . . . ​[Thus] I have resolved to revise my Pharmacopea Lusitana, increasing the number of receitas, and modern theories, that may not have reached your notice owing to an incomplete knowledge of the dif­fer­ent languages that the foreigners write in.”68 In 1733, the Portuguese physician José Rodrigues Abreu argued that coffee was a “stupefacient” drug, citing no less an authority than Francis Bacon, while in 1728 the Lisbon physician Luis Caetano de Lima demonstrated his bona fides as a proponent of the new “chemical” learning by compiling an exhaustive, three-­volume manuscript “epitome” of the works of the controversial En­ glish physician and Royal Society founding member Thomas Willis, complete with hand-­labeled index stubs for easy reference.69 One of the most in­ter­est­ing cases of British natu­ral knowledge being used to serve Portuguese imperial ends appears in a group of letters penned by the diplomat Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo in 1670s Paris. In one, Macedo wrote to

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the king’s council with a detailed plan to restore Portuguese power that, he boasted, had been inspired by a “proposition” of King Charles II of ­England himself.70 “I have had correspondence in Paris with Lord Montagu, ambassador of the King of G ­ reat Britain in this court,” he wrote to his superiors in Lisbon: “In our conversations in which we spoke generally about the En­glish colonies in V ­ irginia and the Portuguese in Brazil, he remarked to me that the first time that the King, his Lord, saw the powder that we call ‘Cravo,’ the King remarked in the presence of vari­ous subjects of his court that only his ­brother the King of Portugal had the means to destroy the Hollanders.”71 In the detailed “Discourse on Transplantation” (Discurso sobre a transplantação) that followed, Macedo drew on this royal authority but also a Royal Society treatise on transplanting drug and spice crops that Montagu had passed along to him and which Macedo translated into Portuguese. Even as En­glish chemistry was influencing medical writers in Lisbon, knowledge and materials from the Portuguese tropical colonies ­were themselves helping shape the development of iatrochemistry within E ­ ngland. In August 1671, Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society of London, dispatched a set of “Inquiries for Brazil” to an unnamed in­for­mant in Bahia, most likely the Jesuit astronomer Valentin Stansel.72 This long list of natu­ral philosophical questions—­which was prob­ably composed collectively at a meeting of the Society—­offer an in­ter­est­ing glimpse into the members’ eclectic curiosity about the tropical New World. Questions inquired about poisonous jellyfish, epidemic plagues, glowworms, “fiery flying dragons” (dracones ignis volantes), and native Brazilians who, “moved by affection,” ­were reputed to “seize the bodies of parents not killed by poison and, having dismembered them, bury them inside themselves.” But the document centered around the entwined themes of exotic natu­ral remedies and indigenous knowledge thereof: “Are the older Brazilians excellent botanists, able with ease to prepare e­ very kind of medicine from materials gathered in all places” and to “seek ­after knowledge of diseases . . . ​according to some common intellectual princi­ple?” One of the Royal Society’s most unexpected sources for ­these attempts at verification was the octogenarian Portuguese Jesuit missionary Jeronimo Lobo, who appears to have struck up a friendship with the En­glish diplomat Sir Robert Southwell during the former’s retirement in Lisbon. In 1668, Henry Oldenburg presented the Society with a set of natu­ral philosophical treatises written by Lobo and partially translated and annotated by another En­glish diplomat in Lisbon, Sir Peter Wych, including73



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1. A Relation of the River Nile, its source, current and inundation 2. An account of the real existence and the place of abode of the Unicorne 3. Of the Abyssin Emperor, vulgarly called Prester John 4. Of the Red Sea and the cause of its inundation 5. A discourse of Palme trees, their variety, fruit, usefulness, proper soil, ­etc.74 Sir Robert Southwell became an impor­tant conduit for both knowledge and materials relating to Portuguese drugs. In his Musaeum Regalis Societatis (1681), Nathaniel Grew added an appendix to the main body of his text solely to describe a group of materia medica that had been donated by Southwell and ­were used by what Grew called “the Portugal Negros.” ­These included “Sagu”; “the Mallaca gum”; Poco Sempie, “a Golden Moss . . . ​accounted a ­great Cordial”; Rizagon, a “root brought from Bengala, of good use”; and o­ thers.75 In the late 1680s, William Dampier found himself relying on the knowledge of Portuguese-­speaking locals whom he encountered on his circumnavigation of the earth. In one of the most telling moments in Dampier’s travels, a Portuguese man on the Ilha do Sal (an island in the Cape Verde archipelago that Dampier describes as inhabited by “Portuguese banditti”) approached one of Dampier’s crewmates with what he claimed was a lump of ambergris. This substance was (and is) extraordinarily valuable, and early modern doctors attributed a number of compelling properties to it, from an “alexipharmic” (anti-­poison) power to the ability to intoxicate and cure melancholy. Dampier’s crewmate was intrigued and purchased the lump for “more than it was worth.” “We had not a Man in the Ship that knew Ambergriese,” Dampier confessed, “but I have since seen it in other places, and therefore am certain it was not right.” True ambergris, as Dampier l­ater learned, is “very hard,” odorless, and “of a lighter color.” Dampier realized that his friend had been tricked. The Portuguese man had not been selling ambergris at all. “Possibly ’twas some of their Goats Dung,” the sea captain speculated.76

Decontextualizations of the Drug Trade The Anglo-­Portuguese exchanges explored h ­ ere w ­ ere obscured by both confessional antagonisms between Protestants and Catholics and emerging notions of racial difference. For instance, Geronimo Lobo was called “a learned

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Jesuit” in the Royal Society’s internal correspondence, but his treatise reached print as an anonymous work, stripped of its Portuguese and Catholic origins. A similar pattern played out with Fernão Mendes, Queen Catherine’s crypto-­ Jewish personal physician, who was involved in the creation of a famous anti-­fever medicine based on cinchona bark. In his Conclave of Physicians (1686), Gideon Harvey annotated Latin drug prescriptions with sarcastic commentary that compared the influx of Iberian-­traded cinchona bark to a shipwreck. “Despair, despair, all is like to be lost. The Vessel is overloaden with Bark,” Harvey wrote of one receipt, comparing the patient’s body to an East India vessel freighted with cinchona, or Jesuit’s bark. “The mischief is, ­there is no opening the hatches by a Purge, to let out the Jesuit.”77 Some Portuguese purveyors of natu­ral knowledge came to be regarded as potentially suspect owing to their mixed-­race origins. Though Dampier relied on in­for­mants from the Portuguese world, he also cast doubt on their “purity” as Eu­ro­pe­ans. Off the coast of Vietnam, for instance, he met a local in­for­mant, “entertained for the sake of his knowledge in the several Languages of t­ hese Countries,” whom Dampier called a “a kind of bastard Portuguese.”78 Captain Cowley, an associate of Dampier, wrote similarly in his Voyage Round the Globe that he encountered (at the same Ilha do Sal at which Dampier’s crewmate bought ambergris from “Portuguese banditti”) “five Men upon the Island, viz. 4 Officers and one Boy to wait on them: One being a Governor, who is a Mullatoe; two Captains and one Lietenant.” To Cowley’s eyes, “They ­were all black,” but he noted that they “scorn to be counted any other than Portuguese; for if any Man call them Negro’s, they w ­ ill be very angry, saying, 79 That they are white Portuguese.” Whereas in the 1630s British imperial theorists could see themselves as walking the same path to empire as the Portuguese, and in the 1660s British consumers a­ dopted Portuguese tastes for tea and other Indies drugs, by the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century British authors ­were elaborating racialized distinctions between northern and southern Eu­ro­pean constitutions and casting aspersions on the increasingly mixed demographics of the Portuguese tropical colonies. One treatise on “Northern P ­ eople” in “Southern Climates” equated the dangers of tropical nature and the dangers of southern Eu­ro­pean Jesuits. “The Fibres of Northern P ­ eople become very lax on g­ oing into Southern Climates,” wrote the author, John Tennent, “and ­will be in that State in a greater or lesser degree, as the Atmosphere they go thro’, or stay in, abounds more or less with moist or aqueous Particles.” This produced “a fizzy heavy Blood” that could lead to “Stagnation” and death. Moreover, besides the heat



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and moisture in the southern atmospheres, they also “abound with Effluvia of a poisonous coagulating Nature.” Tennent attacked Iberian-­traded drugs, like cinchona and dragonsblood, b­ ecause ­these “astringents . . . ​would produce death [in northern constitutions], as appears by the Experiment [of injecting them into dogs].”80 Tennent also took the opportunity to plant seeds of anti-­ Jesuit paranoia about the proprietary drug r­ ecipes supposedly obtained by a rival in Rome: “­There are many Conjectures about his getting them, amongst which the most probable one is, that a Jesuit t­ here communicated them to him.”81 For Tennent, this southern and Catholic origin made the drugs unhealthy for northern bodies. In early eighteenth-­century ­England, gathering medical knowledge from the Portuguese world meant associating oneself with Catholics, mestizos, and indigenous groups: associations that threatened both the credibility of the Protestant natu­ral phi­los­o­pher and the popu­lar reputation of the merchant and apothecary. The solution to this prob­lem was to tacitly maintain connections to members of the Iberian world (via merchant or missionary intermediaries) who could communicate firsthand knowledge and materials but to allow the genealogies of this knowledge to drop out of the picture when it was presented to scientific and medical publics and to consumers. The stones made by Gaspar Antonio, for instance, became stripped of their specific phar­ ma­ceu­ti­cal context in the Jesuit apothecary shop in Goa but retained a fash­ ion­able Indies origin.82 The Infanta Catarina’s cha became Queen Catherine’s tea. The Portuguese world was key to British natu­ral knowledge, but it also became critical to obscure the origins of that knowledge.

* * * The entanglement between the Portuguese and British played out among bioprospectors in Amazonia, governors in Goa, and courtiers at Whitehall, and each case was dif­fer­ent. But drogas ran through the warp and weft of alliance that bound the two empires together. The relationship at the heart of this alliance—­the ­actual personal bond between Catherine and Charles—­remains, in many ways, a cipher. And in this it stands as a proxy for the other relationships studied ­here: Bowrey’s friendship with the “ancient Portuguees” Petro Loveyo; Jeronimo Lobo’s odd retirement as a Jesuit missionary turned in­for­ mant to the Royal Society; Dampier’s mishap with the goat’s dung ambergris among the mestiço banditti of the Isle of Salt. Ruminating on the ambiguities of the relationship between a Florida plantation owner and an African slave

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in Chapter 7, Cameron Strang writes about how intimate and in many ways ultimately unknowable “racial and romantic relationships” could help decide the fate of empires. The colonial relationship studied by Strang differed in fundamental ways from an elite match like that of Catarina and Charles or the alliance between Phillip II and Mary studied by Christopher Heaney in Chapter 4. But in all three cases, a bond between two ­people became mingled with the larger imperatives of f­amily, social class, global commerce, and imperial subjecthood. In a William and Mary Quarterly roundtable, James Sweet has observed that recent scholarship on “entanglements” and “hybridity” can flatten out the unequal power relations that defined the early modern world.83 Abstract terms like “exchanges” and “interaction” subtly reinforce a rosy view of individual encounters that, as Sweet notes, ­were often predicated on the threat of sexual and physical vio­lence. Even for Catarina, who could scarcely have been born into a more elite station in life, the biological and commercial demands of an early modern coupling overwhelmed individual autonomy. As Belinda Peters has argued, seventeenth-­century En­glish thinkers began to reframe marriages as po­liti­cal contracts between male heads of ­house­hold, a framing that largely excluded female agency.84 During the same period, the age-­old practice of elite gift giving began to take on new importance in the context of En­glish relations with the Mughal court and other non-­European powers, with diplomatic gifts and dowries functioning as a kind of shadow trade that greased the wheels of commerce.85 It can be tempting to view the early modern spice and drug trade from the perspective of the relatively frictionless networks of con­ temporary globalization, yet in practice (as the crew of the São Alberto knew well) it was an ad hoc and dangerous affair. Gifts like Catarina’s chest of tea— to say nothing of Catarina’s body, or the dynastic promise of her f­uture progeny—­were part of a larger calculus of empire that blended the intimacy of reproduction and consumption with the cold-­eyed realpolitik of Baroque statecraft and the everyday vio­lence of early modern colonial regimes. The Anglo-­Portuguese alliance, long studied in an anecdotal and Eurocentric fashion, takes on impor­tant new dimensions when considered in this larger context of imperial entanglement. Catarina’s individual agency may have been limited, but the larger apparatus of a dynastic marriage—­the exchanges of enormous dowries, the flows of information and personnel, and even the biological and ecological exchanges of valuable plants or deadly diseases—­ profoundly influenced the larger interactions between socie­ties and empires in the early modern world. So, too, did the ­unions between Portuguese and



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non-­Europeans throughout the tropical ­belt that gave rise to the so-­called “bastard Portuguese” disdained by Dampier and Cowley. The connections studied h ­ ere also complicate certain commonly held assumptions regarding the Northern Eu­ro­pean origin of Enlightenment-­era Portuguese medical and scientific knowledge. Portuguese historiography has tended ­toward a unidirectional model in which “enlightened” learning flowed from estrangeirados (foreign-­educated intellectuals) in France, Britain, and the Netherlands to a Portuguese periphery.86 The Royal Society, as the preeminent scientific institution of the era, emerges in existing scholarship as one of the most impor­tant conduits of empiricism for such Portuguese intellectuals.87 It is true that by the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury the Portuguese state (by then ­under the control of the Anglophilic Marques de Pombal) made concerted attempts to reform Portuguese medicine along empiricist lines originally articulated by British, French, and Dutch scientists and physicians. Yet a close attention to the medical and botanical aspect of this very empiricism reveals a surprising twist: some of this “Northern” medical innovation was, in fact, a result of exposure to medical and botanical knowledge from a cosmopolitan and dynamic Portuguese tropical world. Anglo-­Portuguese phar­ma­ceu­ti­c al exchanges—­unstable, vernacular, based on shifting personal, matrimonial, and commercial connections rather than a traditional republic of letters model—­exerted a complex and oftentimes hidden influence on global trade and experimental science and medicine. But this legacy would prove to be a vitally impor­tant one in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when both the illegal and phar­ma­ceu­ti­c al drug trades emerged as among the largest industries in a world economy built in large part on the exploitation of colonial ­labor, knowledge, and nature. The path from Caterina’s dowry gift of tea and Bombay led directly to the Opium Wars—­ and, arguably, to the con­temporary war on drugs, in which fears of immigrants and foreign imports are again playing out in a postcolonial guise.

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PA RT I I

Brokers and Translators

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chapter 4

Marrying Utopia Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the En­glish Alchemy of Spanish Peru ch ris toph er h ea ney

Long before Jamestown colonists grappled with prior Castilian colonization in the New World, the sixteenth-­century entanglements of En­glish and Spanish royal bodies produced an irreal indigenous offspring worthy of Christian imperial ambitions. ­These ­were the “Peruvians,” but they ­were neither the Incas Francisco Pizarro encountered nor their Andean subjects. Rather, they ­were the Peruvians of ­England’s imagination, a branch added to the American f­amily tree by promoters of colonization during the intellectually fecund marriages of Ferdinand and Isabella’s d ­aughter, Catherine of Aragón, to Henry Tudor (1509–33) and that of Catherine and Henry’s d ­ aughter Mary to Catherine’s great-­nephew Philip (1554–58), the f­uture king of Spain. Th ­ ese Peruvians w ­ ere the perfect subject ­people: formerly idolatrous but now Christianized and tractable, they and their alchemical land made and relinquished gold and silver as prolifically as Henry had made and lost queens. This land, Peru, was even posited as a pos­si­ble “New ­England”—if it could be reached. This chapter explores the roots from which t­ hese Peruvians and that Peru grew. It traces the intellectual entanglements between two scholars who s­ haped En­glish understandings of South Amer­i­ca in the mid-­sixteenth c­ entury: the Re­nais­sance humanist Sir Thomas More, whose allegory Utopia was translated into En­glish in 1551, and, more extensively, the cosmographer and alchemist Richard Eden (c. 1520–76), “­England’s first literary imperialist,” whose 1555

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publication, The De­cades of the New Worlde or West India, translated the earliest “de­cades” of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s account of Spain’s efforts in the New World, De Orbe Novo.1 Specifically, this chapter shows that Eden’s De­cades borrowed from Utopia to praise Spanish efforts in the New World, and to use the example of Peru to encourage En­glish navigators and merchants to contribute to and profit from an expanding “Christian empire” of native ­peoples. This observation challenges a line of scholarship that insists on reading early En­glish cosmographical production mostly in light of subsequent and supposedly natu­ral antipathy between “Protestant” ­England and “Catholic” Spain.2 The importance to this question of Eden’s production during Mary’s reign (1553–58) is clear. As Ralph Bauer and David Armitage have observed, respectively, Eden’s De­cades was likely how most En­glish first read about the Amer­i­cas; it was where they first encountered the word “colony” in En­glish, requiring its definition.3 Yet on the assumption that Eden was likely a Protestant, he has been called e­ ither “weak” and “vacillating” for dedicating the De­cades to Mary and Philip or a “Protestant spy” whose encoded meta­phors satirized the royal c­ ouple’s attempt to conceive, “anticipat[ing] the ambivalent and hostile repre­sen­ta­tions of the Spanish imperium” that w ­ ere l­ ater com4 monplace. Edmund Valentine Campos has read Eden’s alchemical interest in the New World as pre­de­ces­sor to l­ater En­glish efforts to attain Indian wealth without the complicity of the Spanish conquest.5 It is dangerous to confuse outcomes for intentions. En­glish religious, royal, and—as Sheaves argues in Chapter 1—­economic sympathies ­under Mary ­were as complex as Eden’s own sense of nuance regarding Spanish achievements. Some En­glish subjects may have resented what Philip meant for Catholic rapprochement, but less so the wealthy Christian empire he brought. Londoners expected him, a descendent of Edward III, to rule as king; he himself “pursued a policy of pragmatic conciliation with Edward VI’s Protestant courtiers.”6 Philip attempted that conciliation with American silver: E ­ ngland had indeed become “a link in a chain of Habsburg territories, in Amer­i­ca as well as Eu­rope,” as John Edwards put it, but this was a chain that briefly pulled New World wealth London’s way.7 That wealth, and the Christian conquest that achieved it, helps explain how, as other scholars have noted, Eden’s De­cades was in places even more pro-­Spanish than its main object of translation, Martire.8 The De­cades suggest the mutual “Christian mission to convert the native ­peoples of an Edenic New World,” argues Barbara Fuchs: “Eden’s power­ful admonition to ­England to emulate Spain’s empire holds w ­ hether that admonition is born of true admiration and belief in Christian unity or of revulsion and Protestant dissimulation.”9



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That the final object of that emulation was specifically Peru further clarifies the De­cades’ alchemical ethnography. Examination of its less studied texts demonstrates that Eden edited the work to show how Spanish per­sis­tence in engaging the New World’s Indians yielded Peru, the geo­graph­i­cal quintessence from which wealth flowed: first to Spain, and then, via Philip, to the Tower of London, where Peruvian silver became pounds sterling.10 The Indians who produced that silver or gold ­were neither ­simple noble savages nor cannibals. Instead, the De­cades was a cata­logue of the many indigenous kings Spain had encountered, listing their names, wealth, and terms of conquest and alliance, which E ­ ngland might seek elsewhere. In asking readers to judge Spain’s New World empire on the basis of ­those indigenous kings’ conversion and supposedly peaceful conquest, Eden thereby modeled how wealthy ­peoples similar to the Peruvians might be earned through a mixture of doggedness and Christian devotion. Eden’s Peruvians w ­ ere ultimately Utopian: a fitting designation for the subjects whose importance to Spain’s fortunes—­indeed, the very creation of global capitalism—­after the discovery of silver at Potosí in 1545 cannot be overemphasized.11 Philip’s injection of Peruvian silver into the En­glish economy was a momentous event, and Eden repaid the f­ avor by censoring his Spanish sources on the vio­lence that produced that wealth.12 Eden’s De­cades even hardened the imaginary lines of More’s po­liti­cal allegory into something like cosmographical fact, projecting a Peru that was peacefully subjected, not conquered; whose alchemical “­free gift” of nature, to borrow Jason W. Moore’s Marxian meditation on Potosí’s importance, was the most valuable commodity in the world: the precious metals that “grew” so prolifically in American earth that they ­were supposedly as common as Eu­ro­pean iron and easily accessed by a peace­ nder which Eden made his argument able indigenous l­abor force.13 The terms u ­were highly unstable, as his personal fortunes a­ fter the De­cades’ publication suggest. But its implications became the root structure of the early En­glish lit­ er­a­ture of exploration. Peru already belonged to Spain, but Eden’s De­cades hinted of the similar wealth of other New World lands, like Newfoundland and Terra Florida, of which ­Virginia would be part. From ­these hints, the En­glish would try, fruitlessly, to grow an Edenic Peru of their own.14

“Pirro” Before Peru New World cosmography was slow to develop in E ­ ngland. A single-­sheet tract from 1507 mentioned Amer­i­ca, but E ­ ngland’s l­ater cosmographers had l­ittle

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awareness that Bristol sailors had fished in the New World from at least 1480. John Cabot’s explorations from 1496 on behalf of Henry VII w ­ ere similarly forgotten. His son Sebastian’s defection to become Spain’s pilot-­major well indicates the two realms’ diverging interest in lands whose early value remained unclear.15 More than Mexico—­which was marked by reports of “diabolic” h ­ uman sacrifice and anthrophagy—it was South Amer­i­ca’s metal-­rich socie­ties that slowly turned the En­glish ship of state.16 The key was an indigenous nobility that not only possessed gold and silver—­common in limited quantities in the Caribbean—­but also ­labored to mine them. Christopher Columbus’s early predictions that one such “­Great Khan” awaited the Spanish at first came up short, but he was also the first to report, a­ fter his final 1502 expedition, that Tierra Firme contained indigenous kings who ­were interred according to their ­ eople who dispatched gold and silver estate: embalmed and with gold.17 A p with their dead suggested an enticingly alternate conception of wealth—­a theme extended by Amerigo Vespucci’s accounts of the Indians he encountered during his explorations, between approximately 1498 and 1504. “The wealth to which we are accustomed in this Eu­rope and in other parts,” read one of Vespucci’s more influential passages, “such as gold, jewels, pearls, and other riches, are of no interest to them, [and] although they have them in their lands, they neither ­labor to procure them, nor prize them.”18 Vespucci’s account circulated widely, becoming a point of embarkation for the En­glishman Sir Thomas More’s extended po­liti­cal allegory Utopia, published in Latin in Flanders in 1516.19 Utopia’s fictive narrator went still further: a sailor who claimed to have been left ­behind by Vespucci and to have spent five years observing a New World island society with an even more diminished esteem for mineral wealth. More’s imaginary society of Utopia was communal and humane, lacking private property, and, though capable of metal working, wholly dismissive of the precious metals that inspired Eu­ro­ pean greed.20 Iron was valuable, but gold and silver bore the Utopians’ reproach: “of gold and siluer they make commonlye chamber pottes and other like vesselles, that serue for moste vile vses, not only in their common halles, but in euery mans priuate ­house.”21 Although More’s allegory of a kingdom so perfect that it disdained rare metals was quickly translated into German, French, and Italian—­and may have then affected Spanish American colonization—it was published in ­England only in 1551.22 This was not for lack of En­glish interest in New World society. Rather, En­glish merchants ­were attuned to the far more tangible prof-



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its made from the Spanish-­led explorations of South Amer­i­ca’s ­actual civilizations, including that of the Incas. The En­glish merchant Roger Barlow, for example, lived and traded in Seville. In 1526, he helped fund and participate in Sebastian Cabot’s expedition along South Amer­i­ca’s eastern coast on behalf of the Spanish king. In 1541, Barlow wrote about the experience within a manuscript translation of Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de Geographia (1519) that Barlow hoped would encourage Henry VIII’s support for trade and discovery in the New World.23 Cabot, who was supposed to sail for the Spice Islands, ran aground in Brazil, perhaps purposefully, to search for ­these wealthy Indians.24 According to Barlow, they then learned that west of the Paraná River ­there was a sierra, where “thei saie is a king where is a grete aboundance of gold and sylver and al his vesseles and stoles that he sitteth on is gold and sylver. . . . ​This lond and the lond of pirro [Peru], wch is in the southside that the spaniards have dyscouered of late, is all one lond, whereas thei had so grete riches of gold and sylver.”25 The brevity of this first known written reference in En­glish to “pirro” relied upon the reports of Spain’s Andean possession that had circulated in ­England following Francisco Pizarro’s ­brother Hernando’s return to Spain with the crown’s first share of Inca treasure—100,000 castellanos of gold and 5,000 marcos of silver. A series of pamphlets in Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, and German introduced Eu­rope in 1534 to the conquest of a society whose kings w ­ ere so wealthy that they—­like Columbus promised—­interred themselves with rooms full of gold and silver.26 By the end of that year, Henry’s man Thomas ­Cromwell had begun to receive letters noting the many ships on their way to “Pero,” which then returned with wealth whose accounting seemed almost implausible.27 To ­those eying Peru—­courtiers, scholars, and merchants struggling with ­England’s ragged finances and devalued currency—­ fictional Utopia and its pious deferment of wealth could wait.

The First “New E ­ ngland” Duly inspired, the En­glish u ­ nder Henry w ­ ere not unproductive abroad—in the latter 1530s light trading and privateering to the New World began—­but his on-­again, off-­again alliance with Charles V against the French likely discouraged larger infringements on Iberian claims in the New World.28 ­A fter Henry’s death in 1547, however, his son Edward’s second head of government, John Dudley, the Duke of North­umberland, entertained American solutions

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to the country’s massive economic prob­lems. To do so, North­umberland and his secretary of state, William Cecil, cultivated cosmographical experts like Richard Eden and John Dee, whose advice and translations seeded En­glish readers with interest in what New World opportunities remained.29 The possibility that the much-­delayed translation of More’s allegory Utopia from Latin to En­glish in 1551 was one such seed helps explain the more obvious appeals that followed. Utopia’s translator was Ralph Robynson, who claimed that he had embarked on the effort at the request of a merchant named George Tadlow. Robynson was also in the employ of Cecil, however, and it was to the secretary of state that he dedicated the translation, explaining that he did it “for the auauncement & commoditie of the publique wealth of my natiue countrey.” Despite More’s allegiance to Rome, Robynson praised More’s attention to what Robynson put in far less allegorical terms: the “new [isle] Vtopia.”30 The translation’s implication that Utopia was “new” ­because it was discovered has led scholars to speculate that it was intended to interest the En­glish public in distant foreign trade and to be “read alongside nonfictional ­ eople accounts of colonial voyages.”31 That the New World might contain p like Utopians—­who had settled colonies in lands that ­others had let fall uncultivated; who lifted o­ thers up to higher levels of culture but warred against them if they resisted; who disdained gold but permitted its recirculation through trade—­was a useful spur to En­glish ambition.32 Utopia’s “Spanish” pedigree via Vespucci’s explorations magnified the possibility that Utopians existed. It is highly significant, however, that Utopia was only Anglicized in 1551, ­after the 1545 foundation of Peru’s silver mine at Potosí, whose stunning output complicated Utopia’s allegorical ideal. North­umberland’s circle may have even reread Utopia as a report of Peru that ­England had ignored but then lost to Spain.33 Richard Eden, for example, was a Cambridge scholar whose f­ amily was interested in the generation of gold and who had once been employed to search for the “quintessence.”34 Eden found ­great significance in Peru’s discovery, framing A treatyse of the newe India—­his 1553 “sensational” translation of Münster’s Cosmographia—­with this lost English-­Peru connection.35 His preface, dedicated to North­umberland, claimed that in 1517 Sebastian Cabot and Sir Thomas Sperte had led a fleet to the Indies that had turned back b­ ecause of Sperte’s lack of “manly courage.” “Perularia”—­Eden’s name for the trea­sury in Spain’s Casa de Contratación that pro­cessed American



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wealth—­and its “infinite ryches brought thither from the newe found land of Peru” therefore went to Seville, not London.36 A treatyse of the newe India was likely publicity for E ­ ngland’s search for a northeast passage to China, but Eden’s inclusion of Peru within its narrative, and his hints at commodities to be found in “newe found landes,” suggests secondary motives. In his “Epistle to the Reader,” Eden continued the theme, pointing out Spanish explorers’ boldness in finding wealth and ­people in the gold-­producing South—­a taking up of Castilian biblical cosmography, that, via Amer­i­ca Meridional, had seemingly proven that Solomon’s Ophir was real and that the equatorial sun engendered trea­sure. Eden’s unwillingness to advocate explic­itly for ­England’s infringement on Spain’s New World was therefore notable precisely b­ ecause he called attention to it: “As for other landes and Ilandes in the west sea, where the [Habsburg] Ea­gle (yet not in euery place) hath so spled his winges, that other poore byrdes may not without offence seek theyr praye within the compasse of the same, I wyll speake nothing hereof, bycause I wold be loth to lay an egge, wherof other men might hatche a serpent.”37 The translator doth protest too much. In fact, a serpent in Spain’s New World nest, specifically in Peru, was exactly what North­umberland was then imagining. The head of Edward’s government had been meeting with the French ambassador and Sebastian Cabot—no longer the Spaniards’ pi­lot major and now back in E ­ ngland—­regarding an audacious plan of conquest. According to the French cosmographer André Thevet, North­umberland hoped that Cabot might lead a joint English-­French fleet to Brazil, sail up the Amazon River, and steal Peru, “to colonize the country with new inhabitants and set up a New ­England ­there.”38 As unlikely as an Andean New E ­ ngland now seems—­let alone one attained by ascending the Amazon—in the 1550s it was taken seriously. In the 1540s, Peru’s conquistadors had rebelled against the king’s New Laws, which sought to protect Indians from exploitation. Eden and his fellow En­glish ­were aware that some sort of uprising had occurred, and Spain remained sensitive to the spread of intelligence upon the region.39 Fearing Charles’s response if he learned that his former pi­lot was implicated, Cabot wrote to him on November 15, 1554, to share “the secret” of E ­ ngland’s designs and report that Peru remained in danger: “And as by the said river, in assailing easily the Spanish wholly unprepared, and scattered in the country, they may succeed in their nefarious proj­ect, which would be a ­great disgrace to Your Majesty, let Your

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Majesty provide against it at once; for what I am now writing is absolutely certain and true.”40

Books of the Bravos By the time of Cabot’s letter, North­umberland and his plot had been defanged, but Eden’s interest in Peru was not. Eden’s De­cades, published in 1555, was no less ambitious for ­England, and no less about Peru, than A treatyse of the newe India had been. A close reading of Eden’s prefaces, ordering, and marginal glosses suggests that Eden consciously placed it within the developing tradition of Spanish historiography of the Amer­i­cas and projected E ­ ngland’s role in advancing the same. But ­because that tradition was not just about conquest but also regarded the Amer­i­cas’ indigenous p ­ eople and their subtle abilities in kingship and metal manipulation, Eden’s De­cades demands reconsideration as a complex text of Christian ethnography, in which Spanish efforts chronologically mapped onto a providentially revealed hierarchy of indigenous society—­some savage, many kingly, whose conversion yielded Spanish wealth. In this way, Eden’s De­cades was designed to inspire En­glish conquistadors much as medieval “Books of the Brave” had once inspired conquistadors from Spain.41 It was also a work of extraordinary urgency. In July of 1553, a month ­after Eden’s A treatyse of the newe India was published, Edward VI died. Despite North­umberland’s attempts to steer the crown to Edward’s cousin Lady Jane Grey, Edward’s Catholic half-­sister Mary took the throne instead. For North­ umberland’s role in the succession plot—­Lady Jane was his daughter-­in-­ law—he was executed in August. On July 25, 1554, Queen Mary I married Philip, and Peru came to ­England. Eden’s De­cades, published just over a year ­later, is thus a crucial text for understanding the risk and opportunity that Mary’s ascension and Philip’s arrival entailed for the merchant and intellectual communities to which Eden belonged. Although Eden’s f­amily avoided punishment for their support of North­umberland’s attempted coup, the departure of Eden’s ­uncle for Strasbourg suggests a Protestant conscience that might not have fared well ­under Mary’s prosecution of heresy with the quiet help of Philip’s Spanish friars.42 ­Those who stayed ­behind sought to both prove their loyalty and encourage trade, as En­glish exports had been shrinking since 1551.43 David Gwyn suggests that the merchant community did so by underwriting Eden’s transla-



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tion, which initially focused upon Martire’s De Orbe Novo and the Historia General y natu­ral de las Indias (1547) of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés. Although coordinated by the publisher William Powell, the book was actually printed by four other publishers, a recently pioneered method that suggested a sizable run of “national importance.”44 The De­cades ­was not a front for Protestant protest, however. It is crucial that we forget that Mary and Philip would conceive no child; that we remember how Providence made the unlikely pos­si­ble; and that we identify rapprochement as a v­ iable Protestant tactic: not all could flee or be martyrs. Andrew Hadfield suggests that one of Eden’s goals was to forward En­glish unity by quelling Protestant re­sis­tance to the Catholic monarchy and seeking En­glish expansion into the Spanish New World. This was a tactic of nonconfrontation, hidden reconciliation, and interimperial dispersal of dissent, akin to the “Nicodemism” that Neil Kamil traces among Huguenots or the crypto-­ Jews that Snyder explores in Chapter 5.45 Closer examination of Eden’s publishers further suggests that this was the case. During Edward’s reign, Powell had published William Tyndale’s En­glish Bible and texts refuting the twin threats of Anabaptists on the one hand and Catholics on the other; in 1554, however, he had published a praising account of Mary and Philip’s marriage as useful to E ­ ngland.46 Three of the four other printers had previously produced or would produce En­glish Bibles or other religious texts similarly shoring up the national church: Richard Jugge, William Seres, and Edwarde Sutton, the last the publisher of Eden’s A treatyse of the newe India.47 The fourth printer, however, was Robert Toy, who had published Bishop Stephen Gardiner’s fiercest anti-­Protestant texts, as well as the sermons of William Peryn, a Blackfriars preacher who had gone into exile ­under Edward.48 Toy’s inclusion may have been a cover—­but, as Eden’s Latin dedication hints, the De­cades is best interpreted as a wedding pres­ent from London’s reconciled printers to Mary and Philip, their English-­Spanish sovereigns: a paper and ink vessel for many secret hopes.49 For Eden, it was also a show of personal and national gratitude. A few years a­ fter he lamented E ­ ngland’s lack of access to “Perularia,” Philip and Mary had brought it to London’s door. If Philip’s son from his first marriage left no line, their offspring could inherit the Indies; in the meantime ­England’s new king circulated the New World’s incredible “movable goods” among his new subjects, which Eden saw firsthand.50 Despite his f­amily’s relationship to North­umberland, Eden had found himself a position in Philip’s En­glish trea­ sury and was likely among the many Londoners pres­ent on October 2, 1554,

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when Westminster emitted a train of Spanish soldiers and twenty carts, each one creaking u ­ nder a load of up to six padded two-­foot-­long bundles of gold and silver bullion—­a sizable share of the 284,030,652 maravedis of gold and silver that Philip I had diverted from the last flota from South Amer­i­ca. In the Tower of London, the load was converted to £40,507, which Philip quickly recirculated in the local economy through pensions and ­house­hold expenses— so large a sum that it caused an abrupt 7 ­percent increase in E ­ ngland’s available sound money, likely induced inflation, and inspired the Tower’s En­glish mint officers to defraud their king’s Spanish-­speaking agents.51 “Never so much hath byn seen at once as suche as have byn owlde officers in the mynte doo affirme,” Eden gushed in the De­cades’s preface.52 Eden drafted the De­cades in that spirit, praising the “most potent and serene” Philip and Mary. His “Preface to the Reader” was a paean to Spanish mastery of the seas and new lands that skirted them: an inspiration to yet further assaults on the powers of the devil and the Turkish Antichrist. Spain’s work in uncovering commodities and converting unbelievers, Eden claimed, surpassed heroes pagan and biblical. King Ferdinand—­Mary’s grand­father, Eden noted—­“planted a newe Israell muche greater then that whiche Moises ledde throughe the red Sea”; he had surpassed Solomon by incorporating Ophir in his “Empire”—­a crucial word, that might be read as professing similarity between Spain and ­England, whose imperial nature Henry had asserted and Philip and Mary reinforced. Eden’s ­later transformations of Martire underlined that New World conversions ­were not for the pope but for Christian empire. Where Martire exhorted Pope Leo X to note what the “Spanish nation” had made “thousands of men . . . ​subject to your holy throne,” Eden edited it instead to read that “this valiante nation (the Spanyardes I meane)” had “subdued to the Christian empire, infinite hundredes and legions, but also myriades of men.”53 Eden defended the Spanish use of Amer­i­ca’s Indians as bondsmen and tributaries ­because it improved their lands, which—­supposedly—­could now sustain more p ­ eople. The Spanish had indeed killed t­ hose they could not bring to civility, but—as Barbara Fuchs has noted—­Eden’s sense of Christian duty trumped national difference, and the larger arc of conversion justified excesses and quests for riches. “Stoope E ­ ngland stoope,” Eden exhorted famously, “and learne to knowe thy lorde and master, as ­horses and other brute beastes are taught to doo.”54 Eden hardly recommended that ­England stoop in ways he as a cosmographer had not. Eden’s praise extended to the importance of Philip’s tenure



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for En­glish knowledge of the Amer­i­cas. Beyond silver and gold, Philip’s marriage brought the biological and literary New World to ­England. His court in ­England—­numbering in the hundreds, possibly thousands—­included the Mexican conquistador Hernán Cortés’s legitimate son Martín, the Marquis del Valle, who was likely attended by his older mestizo half-­brother, also named Martín, the son of Cortés and his indigenous interpreter Malintzin.55 Representing Peru and its outsized bibliographical wave was the contador and chronicler Agustín de Zárate. In the 1540s, during the conquistadors’ rebellion, Zárate enforced the king’s claimed royal fifth of the gold, silver, and other trea­sures taken from the Incas. On the voyage from La Coruña to Southampton, Philip had read Zárate’s manuscript about that rebellion, and the wealthy indigenous p ­ eople it was fought over, and liked it so much that he would authorize its publication in 1555.56 Eden met Zárate in their shared capacity in Philip’s trea­sury. Although it is unclear ­whether the En­glishman read his counterpart’s chronicle, Zárate’s larger argument as to Peru’s importance to Christian empire is manifest in the De­cades that Eden assembled. For Zárate, Peru was an im­mense reward. Unlike the “savage” regions that preceded it, Peru possessed not just mineral wealth and commodities, but a ­people who made ­those trea­sures accessible—­ whose society and origin stories hinted at knowledge of the Universal Flood and Christian potential. The “wicked, horrible, and blinde religion” of Peru’s priests had led its inhabitants astray, but the burials of caciques, or lords, filled with gold, silver, and attendants, showed that they believed in an immortal soul.57 The conquistadors’ rebellions had threatened Peru’s potential for Spain, but as Eden similarly assured his readers, t­hose rebellions w ­ ere settled, and the gold and silver ­were once again flowing—­“as I was credibly informed by the woorthy and lerned gentelman Augustinus de Ceratta [Zárate], Contador (that is) the auditour of the kynges mynes who had longe before byn surueyoure of the golde mynes of Peru, and browght from thense and from Rio de Plata xiii. thousand pounde weyght of syluer.”58 Eden’s De­cades was thus both tribute to and continuation of the half-­ century of Spanish cosmography on the New World that preceded it. His preface celebrated the Spanish documentary, archival, and bureaucratic tradition that undergirded the larger colonial pro­cess, counted commodities, and transformed events into histories. The primary texts for the De­cades ­were the first three “de­cades” of Martire’s De Orbe Novo. Eden compared Martire to Virgil, for combining old texts with new reports from “Gouernours, Lieuetenauntes, Capitanes, Admirals, and Pylottes.”59

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Eden did similarly, making it dangerous to read Eden’s De­cades as a mere translation. He worked from the 1533 Basle edition of Martire’s De Orbe Novo, which contained the first three de­c ades and an abridgment of the fourth, bringing the history only through 1521.60 To supplement that history, forward and backward, Eden included newer publications and his own interviews with pi­lots such as Cabot. Some ­were relevant but “old,” like the Bull of Donation that divided the Amer­i­cas between Portugal and Spain. O ­ thers ­were more current: Oviedo’s Historia General and Francisco López de Gómara’s La historia de las Indias y conquista de México (1552).61 Eden translated excerpts, added marginal glosses that pointed to still other texts, and edited them, leaving out par­tic­u­lar details and adding ­others.62 Specifically, Eden continued Spain’s story beyond 1525, untying Martire’s obvious concern that Spain’s actions in the Ca­rib­bean in search of gold trumped their deeds on behalf of God.63 Eden did so by emphasizing not Spanish vio­lence but the goodness of gold and empire and the benefits the Indians received via colonization, as ­others have noted.64 But he also prized the Indians themselves, whose own complexity ­after 1521 constituted imperial glory. Given that this was the first En­glish translation of the original Spanish accounts of discovery—­a point that cannot be made often enough—­most En­g lish readers’ first exposure to American Indians was therefore not to a binary between innocents defrauded and cannibals justly slaughtered but to a range of p ­ eoples across a wide geography whose noble hierarchy, wealth, complexity, and potential for both diabolism and conversion w ­ ere progressively revealed, retrospectively justifying the conquest.65 Eden encouraged that impression through marginal glosses that emphasized the New World ­peoples’ positive qualities, not least of which was their capacity for kings and the wealthy socie­ties they commanded. Eden did engage in negative commentary but was specific as to its location: “Canibales in the goulfes of Paria,” read one gloss. More common w ­ ere glosses celebrating “Relygious and humaine,” “quicke wytted,” and “conninge artificers” who believed in an immortal soul. Kings w ­ ere celebrated for the l­abor and land they commanded—­a crucial precondition for the mining that the Spanish so fruitfully sought. Beside their description, Eden enumerated how much gold each king had yielded and the kings’ names, as if the En­glish might one day meet them again: “xxx. pounde weyghte of wrought golde. Lx. Poundes weyght of golde”; Periquete, Totonoga, Taracuru, Pananome.66 Within Eden’s translation of Martire, t­ hose kings’ complexity and wealth grew greater and greater ­until the fourth de­cade, written in 1521, on early Spanish



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conquests in Mexico. Though Mexico’s inhabitants practiced ­human sacrifice, they ­were also recognizably accomplished, and Eden’s glosses presented their conversion as that contradiction’s solution. Next to his source’s first description of the Yucatan, Eden observed: “a g­ reat citie well buylded,” “­Temples,” “Humane ­people,” “Cunnyng artificers,” and, significantly, “Apparaled people”—­ the Indians naked no longer. The Mexicans w ­ ere “Circumcised idolaters,” whose “Chyldren [­were] sacrificed to Idoles,” Eden glossed from Martire—­ but they ­were also a “Gentell ­people,” possessing towns of three thousand ­houses, “Towres and ­temples,” “Palaices of maruelous bygnes and wel buylded,” “Plentie of beastes and fowles,” and plenty of “Gold and precious stones,” crafted in incredible forms. Moreover, “They receue owre religion.” As Eden promised in his preface, Cortés’s letters revealed that the Indians even had “Innumerable bookes.” Their “Bluddy gods” had demanded the consecration of h ­ uman lives, but this was “The force of an owlde errour.”67 An old error was far from evil, and it was succeeded by Eden’s most notable marginal gloss in the De­cades, alongside Martire’s lengthy and admiring description of Aztec craftsmanship. “I do not maruaile at golde and precious stones,” Eden rendered Martire. “But am in maner astonyshed to see the woorkemanshyppe excell the substance. For I haue with woonderynge eyes behelde a thousande forms and similitudes, of the which I am not able to write. And in my judgement, I neuer sawe any ­thing whose bewtie myght so allure the eyes of men.” Eden’s editorializing on this wondering passage was fierce. “How can we then caul them beastly or Barbarous,” he asked. “If they had changed their gold for owre Iron, they had not so soone byn subdued.”68

Utopia’s Peru In imagining how the conquest might have gone if Mexico’s Indians had been facile with iron, not gold, Eden was not only engaged in counterfactual history avant la lettre. He was also reaching backward in Martire’s text, combining it with prior evocations of Sir Thomas More’s allegory, and then forward again, to advance a very literal and pro­cessural argument regarding the latter Spanish conquest. This argument hinged on a Peru so perfect that its occult name was Utopia. The question of gold’s value in comparison to iron, crucial to both Martire’s and Eden’s texts, has inspired many of the more in­ter­est­ing meditations on how the En­glish both learned and distinguished themselves from the Spanish

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model. Andrew Hadfield in par­tic­u­lar has explored how Eden’s championing of Indian-­produced gold was at odds with Martire’s original. Much has been made of an episode in the Darien—­modern-­day Panama—in which the Spanish squabbled over gold jewelry given them by an indigenous ally, King Comogrus, whose son then shamed them for defacing beautiful artisanship by melting it down. Spanish “hunger of goulde [was] insatiable,” had “disquiete[d] soo many nations,” and hurt themselves as well.69 It seems likely, as Hadfield notes, that the son’s original speech was Martire’s interpolation—­a critique of Spanish greed placed in the mouth of one of Anthony Pagden’s “savage critics.”70 More complicated, however, is Comogrus’s son’s subsequent explanation—­ via Martire’s pen—of his own ­people’s relationship to mineral wealth, which smacks of Sir Thomas More’s famed Utopians, as o­ thers have noted. “For we do no more esteem rude gold unwrought,” says Comogrus’s son, “then we doo cloddes of earthe, before it bee formed by the hande of the workeman to the similitude eyther of sume vessell necessarie for owre use.”71 Hadfield suggests that the interjection is “a more subtle critique of Eu­ro­pean values than that of Thomas More’s ascetic Utopians”: whereas Utopians “re­spect materials only in accordance with their intrinsic worth,” the Comogruans value gold’s social worth.72 Eden’s reading of the Comogrus tale, however, has been interpreted as suggesting an ambivalence ­toward both the Spanish and the Indians. ­Comogrus’s son laments that though the “gredie hunger of golde hathe not yet vexed vs naked men yet too we destroy one an other by reason of ambition and desyre to rule.”73 (117). Hadfield suggests that Eden’s marginal gloss on that lament—­“Naked p ­ eople tormented with ambition”—­hinted that Indians, like Spaniards, ­were also impure.74 Barbara Fuchs follows the Utopian similarity to a less guilty end, turning back to its roots in Vespucci, who cast the New World as a paradise whose “gold ignored by the natives lies t­ here for the taking.” Yet she, too, suggests Eden’s ambivalence, in which his defense of Spanish evangelism is short-­circuited by Martire’s text, with its critique of Spanish greed. Comogrus’s ­people become mirrors, like the Utopians, for En­ glish be­hav­ior in the New World, displaying a disregard for gold that might encourage a more “moderate, ethical En­glish take on conquest.”75 Less desirous of violent conquest Eden may have been, but he was not disinterested in gold. What such interpretations miss is the cosmographical relevance of the exchange, which culminated in his son’s intelligence of an as-­ of-­yet unidentified “Region flowing with goulde” south of the Darien, “where yow may satisfie yowr ravenyng appetites.” The son’s itinerary described



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“cruell Canibales . . . ​lying withowte lawes, wanderinge, and withowte empire,” who had nonetheless subjugated the p ­ eople who had previously developed the mountains’ mines and now labored digging and working that gold “in plates and sundry Images lyke unto ­these whiche yowe see ­here.” It was ­here that that Martire observed that they “no more esteem rude gold unwrought then we doo cloddes of earthe”—­but then returned to the son’s specific directions: that beyond the mountains was “an other sea”—­the Pacific—­“where they sayle with shyppes as bygge as yowres (meanynge the caraueles) vsinge both sayles and ores as yowe doo, althowghe the men bee naked as wee are.” Gold was abundant ­there. “As he said ­these woordes, he poynted to the vessels in whiche they vse to serue theyr meate, affirmynge that kynge Tumanama, and all the other kynges beyonde the mountaynes, had suche and al their h ­ ouse­holde stuffe of golde: And that t­here was noo lesse plentie of golde among t­hose ­people of the Southe, then of Iren with us.”76 Eden’s glosses suggest that he took—­and he wanted his readers to take—­ this itinerary and its opportunities literally. As he had claimed in the preface, however over-­optimistically, the Spanish “have taken nothynge from [the Indians] but such as they them selues ­were wel wyllynge to departe with, and accoumpted as superfluities, as golde, perles, precious stones and such other.” The fact that t­ hese p ­ eople lay to the south mapped onto a specific cosmography, in which gold originated in very par­tic­u ­lar regions, among very par­tic­u­lar ­peoples. Eden’s marginal glosses furthered this reading. “A region flowing with golde . . . ​Kynge Tumanama. Canibales. The golde mynes of the mountaynes. Vnwrought golde not estemed. Exchaunge. Abundance of golde. House­holde stuffe of gold.”77 In glossing “House­holde stuffe of gold,” Eden was not simply likening Martire’s Indians to ­those of More; he was preparing them for their appearance ­later in the De­cades, to the south, in a place named Peru. The glue for the De­cades’ second half was Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia General de las Indias y Conquista de México (1552), which Eden used to give context to other accounts following Martire. López de Gómara’s account explained the Spanish and Portuguese arguments that preceded Pope Alexander’s bull dividing the New World. To a description of the Ca­rib­bean isles that Eden inserted from Oviedo, he then added ­those of López de Gómara. Following an interlude on lands to the northeast, Eden returned to López de Gómara at length, to explain Spain’s explorations south of the Ca­rib­be­an.78 López de Gómara was a curious choice. He became “one of the most despised apologists of Spanish imperialism,” as Cristían A. Roa de la Carrera

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has noted—­but his apol­o­getics w ­ ere mostly centered on Hernán Cortés, whom he celebrated for defeat of the “bloodthirsty” Aztecs. To burnish Cortés’s reputation, López de Gómara excoriated the injustice of Spain’s conquests elsewhere—in Peru, most notably, whose conquistadors ­were presented as motivated solely by greed, vio­lence, and lust, wholly without “any heroic ele­ ment.”79 His depiction of the Inca conquest was positively spectral, emphasizing a cupidity for trea­sure so fierce that Spaniards forced Indians to show them ancestral graves, to disinter them in search of gold and silver burial goods. The Indians pleaded with them to stop, “for well do they believe in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of souls.” And ­because the Spanish had disinterred the dead, López de Gómara explained, the Incas had rebelled.80 For that reason, among ­others, his history became the most frequently cited account of Spain’s conquests—to criticize them. The Spanish protested its portrayals, but among non-­Spaniards, it was an indictment of what the conquistadors had done. The Spanish crown banned its republication ­after 1556.81 Had all of its interpreters presented it the same way as Eden did, however, the crown ­wouldn’t have worried. Eden boiled López de Gómara’s motivating interest in Mexico—­the ­whole second volume of the Historía—­down to less than two pages that confirmed his prior use of Martire, bracketing the Aztecs’ “warlike” h ­ uman sacrifice with descriptions of their artistry in gold and feathers and their redemptive conversion by “owre religion.” For Peru, Eden proved an even better censor. He saved López de Gómara’s cele­bration of the Incas’ wealth and development but entirely stripped the account of any details of their conquest, violent or not. Eden may have done so to avoid offending Philip, but what he added suggests still larger intentions. In his hands, Peru was burnished into the most perfect province of the entire De­cades. ­A fter noting the Peruvians’ defense of their cities with laws and arms, Eden celebrated the fruitful nature of their land—­“so floryshynge with many fayre wooddes, mountaynes, ryuers, and other both pleasaunt and necessary commodities, that it seemeth in maner an earthly Paradyse.” Peru lacked ravening beasts and possessed sheep (in real­ity, llamas) so tall that they could be used as beasts of burden and whose wool was “very softe and fine”—no small praise, given ­England’s estimation of its own wool. And of all the New World’s ­peoples, the Peruvians ­were the most perfect. “The ­people are wytty, and of gentyl behauoure. Cunnynge also in artes, faythful of promes, and of maners not greatly to bee discommended, saue only that they are ignorant of Chryst: who neuerthelesse is nowe knowen vnto them in many places, as our hope is he shalbe dayly more and more, if all princes wyll herein putte theyr helpynge



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handes to the plowe of our lorde, and sende labourers into his vyneyarde.”82 Their conversion was their reward and Spain’s. But as Eden’s prefaces to both A Treatyse and the De­cades emphasized, souls ­were not all that Spain had earned in its bloodless taking of Peru. Th ­ ere was the trea­sure, too, whose depiction Eden magnified u ­ ntil it became not just Spain’s prize but ­England’s as well. One of López de Gómara’s more notable chapters described the wealth of Cusco and of the emperor Huayna Capac, who possessed ­giant statues, life-­size repre­sen­ta­tions of plants and animals, and ­house­hold utensils—­ropes, bags, and baskets—­all made of gold and silver. “­There was not a t­hing in his land that he had not had counter­parts of gold made.”83 Eden’s simplified transformation of this passage made his understanding of it plain. In one city, Eden wrote, the Spanish “founde a ­house all couered with massie plates of golde,” and the very harnesses the Peruvians used at war ­were made of gold. Peru was “the richest lande in golde, syluer, pearles, precious stones, and spices, that ever was found yet to this day. For golde is ­there in such plentie that they make pyspots therof, and other vessels applied to fylthy uses.”84 This was the most impor­tant transformation in Eden’s entire book. ­There ­were no references to golden piss pots in all of López de Gómara’s work, let alone his Peru. Instead, this was a line from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia that Eden had transferred to Peru, thus closing the loop of Spanish discovery and its En­glish interpretation: “of gold and siluer they make commonlye chamber pottes and other like vesselles, that serue for moste vile vses.”85 In other words, Peru was not only the southern kingdom hinted at by Comogrus in Martire and revealed by López de Gómara; it was also nothing less than the closest ­thing to Utopia on earth—­possibly even Utopia’s inspiration. Given Eden’s lament for ­England’s lack of “Perularia” in 1553, this was not likely satire. Utopia was real, it was Peru, E ­ ngland had known it, and, via its frictionless conquest by Spain, its excess of wealth and civilization now flowed through the Christian empire, through Spanish ships and En­glish carts into the Tower of London, and thence into Eden’s hands: Peru transmuted, via the alchemy of colonization, into the Utopia of ­England’s dreams.

American Edens Utopia was no longer imaginary, but Eden hoped it was also no longer unique. The De­cades suggests that Eden ­imagined that Philip and Mary’s E ­ ngland might engage in Christian explorations in the New World alongside Spain,

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reproducing Peru’s prizes elsewhere. His preface noted that Spanish explorations had revealed “an other portion of that mayne lande reachynge towarde the northeast, thought to be as large as the other, and not yet knowen but only by the sea coastes, neyther inhabyted by any Christian men.” Th ­ ese lands ­were Florida (which included what became V ­ irginia), Newfoundland, and Labrador, which Eden claimed contained an “abundaunce of gold and dyuers kyndes of beastes” and “cities and towres so wel buylded and ­people of such civilitie, that this parte of the worlde seemeth lyttle inferiour to owre Eu­rope, if th inhabitauntes had receaved owre religion. They are wyttie ­people and rufuse not barterynge with straungers”—­a description akin to that of his Peru. Cabot’s personal intelligence and summaries of Oviedo and López de Gómara deepened the connection: Florida was “estemed a ryche lande” by no less than Hernando de Soto, veteran of Peru, who “spente fyue yeare in seekynge of golde mynes, supposynge that this lande hadde byn vnto Peru.”86 Peru was not the De­cades’ last uncolonized, wealthy realm in the Amer­i­cas, and if other princes heeded Eden’s call to follow Spain’s questing, Christianizing example, then a ­people such as the Peruvians, and their riches, would be their reward.87 Eden did not go so far as to intimate En­glish colonization—­but the benefit of Utopias was that they had gold and silver to spare via trade. The initial reception of Eden’s pro-­Peruvian, pro-­Spanish, pro-­English cri de coeur when published in September of 1555 was strikingly cold, however. Despite its tributes to Philip and Mary, and despite the massive print run its publishers had managed and their conciliatory efforts, Eden was charged with “heresy” before the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, in the month following. Gardiner died on October 24 of that year and Eden escaped becoming one of the 280 or so heretics burned during Mary’s reign—­which makes it hard to know what offense, if any, Eden had committed.88 Given the church’s prosecution of Protestants even if they had repented, it may have been Eden’s presumption that an appeal to Philip and Mary was conformity enough.89 Or perhaps Spain’s reputation was indeed too complex to be praised. The En­glish Protestants in Strasbourg, where Eden’s u ­ ncle was in exile, used Martire’s text to warn the En­glish of Spanish atrocities—­perhaps even using Eden’s own translation—­soon thereafter.90 Eden lost his position with Philip’s En­glish trea­sury and faded from the rec­ord for several years. The influence of Eden’s work grew over time, however, and its long-­term relevance for En­glish imperialism grew abundantly clear. When Mary died and Elizabeth took the crown in 1558, she at first had ­little desire to step on King Philip’s New World robes. Over time, however, opportunities emerged.



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In 1561, Eden translated the Arte de navigar of Martín Cortés de Albacar, the first “modern” manual of navigation in En­glish. The De­cades resurfaced in forms more concrete than its apparent influence on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen.91 As noted earlier, Eden’s De­ cades was the first time the word “colony” was ever published in En­glish, and as Nicholas Canny argued long ago, the De­cades’ repre­sen­ta­tion of how to treat barbarous p ­ eoples was familiar to many involved in the colonization of Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s—if not textually, then personally, given that the leading personality ­behind the latter scheme was Sir Henry Sidney, who had been in Queen Mary’s ser­vice in Spain, having even escorted Philip to London, while Philip was reading Zárate’s chronicle. Canny suggests that it was thus more than likely that the En­glish colonists “saw themselves as conquistadores subduing the barbaric and pagan Irish, just as their Spanish counter­parts w ­ ere bringing the Indians to subjection.”92 Yet Ireland had no gold, and as En­glish intentions projected still further into the Atlantic, the De­cades became still more impor­tant. Eden died in 1576, but his literary executor Richard Willes, possibly a former Jesuit, saw the De­cades back into publication as The History of Trauayle in the West and East Indies in 1577.93 For this revision and enlargement of the text, Willes cut Eden’s now-­impolitic paean to Philip and Mary but added a preface that reinforced Eden’s “Peruvian” argument for a new generation. In this preface, Willes labeled all of northern South Amer­i­ca “Peru ­matters,” folding all kingly gold-­rich Indians u ­ nder the same aegis. Columbus’s third voyage became the “discovery of Peru, in the maigne west Indish lande.”94 In the years before Richard Hakluyt began publishing his own compilations of travel, to promote En­glish expansion, Eden’s vision therefore reigned. Although the De­cades was no longer read as a carefully couched promotion of En­glish commerce ­under the aegis of Spain’s shared Christian empire, it remained an incitement to reproduce its material and evangelical outcomes while challenging its geopo­liti­cal and Catholic gains—­a vision that lasted as long as ­England sought New World footholds. Although Hakluyt would cut away the De­cades’ “Peruvian” coda, he nonetheless pulled from his intellectual pre­ de­ces­sor’s translation of Martire in 1587; Eden’s rendition of Martire was republished again by Michael Lok in 1612, 1625, and 1628.95 The Spanish excesses formerly justified by Peru w ­ ere left open for condemnation, even as the En­g lish considered their hands clean when they came upon that Peruvian wealth via piracy. As Valentine Campos suggests, “The desire for a golden empire . . . ​never ­really faded in the time before ­England established permanent

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slave-­based agrarian colonies, but was obscured over time by Elizabethan anti-­Spanish propaganda that softened the harsh real­ity that ­England would never find a New World El Dorado.”96 This earlier vision was not without consequence. Peru was the sort of desirable, hierarchical, and gold-­rich indigenous kingdom that the En­glish hoped for in their explorations and colonizations through the early seventeenth ­century; its light cast the Native Americans the En­glish actually met in a blindingly harsh glare. At Baffin Island, in Guiana, and at Jamestown, the En­glish sought and celebrated a Peru “valiant above all other nations,” whose metals promised “to surpass the country of Peru.” But short of Utopia, nowhere could compare to the Peru of E ­ ngland’s imagination. Instead, the En­glish met ­actual indigenous ­peoples, whose relationship to wealth, property, and religion ­were far more complex, whose re­sis­tance would be fierce, and whose experience of colonization would be less than Edenic.97

chapter 5

The Pegs of a Wider Frame Jewish Merchants in Anglo-­Iberian Trade h olly s n yder

In 1712, Joseph Addison took the extraordinary step of devoting an issue of the Spectator to the topic of the Jews, stating, in the voice of his fictional narrator, “I have often amused my self with Speculations on the Race” in part ­because he had “met with [many Jews] in most of the considerable Towns which I have passed through.” Considering their history as a ­people of the Bible, their exile from the Holy Land, and their dispersion even into “the remotest Parts of China, . . . ​Eu­rope and Africk, . . . ​the West Indies . . . ​and . . . ​ the inner Parts of Amer­i­ca,” he observed, “the w ­ hole P ­ eople is now a Race of such Merchants as are Wanderers by Profession, and, at the same time, are in most if not all Places incapable of ­either Lands or Offices, that might engage them to make any Part of the World their Home.”1 It is not as though this essay was the first time that Addison had introduced the topic of con­temporary Jewry to his readers. Indeed, in the very first issue of the Spectator, which introduced his fictional narrator to the readership, he had made reference to the narrator being able to “pass for a Jew in the Assembly of Stock Jobbers,” as he wound his way through the world to observe its inner workings.2 And in issue 213, Mr. Spectator’s discussion of Christian morality included some comparison of Protestant ideas with t­hose of Jews and Catholics.3 Yet Addison’s discussion in Spectator issue 495 presented con­temporary Jews in a wholly dif­fer­ent light, showing Jews as modern

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merchants who ­were avowedly rootless. This scenario served several rhetorical purposes. First, it allowed Addison to emphasize his interest in the presence of Jews at the many centers of Eu­ro­pean trade. He did this while evading the provocative topic of their status as subjects, with the subtle implication that Jews themselves, who wandered both by nature and by cultural inclination, would likely be uninterested in giving their allegiance to any state. But at another level, Addison’s notion of the Jews as “Wanderers by Profession” lent weight to the narrator’s speculation that Jews “are become the Instruments by which the most distant Nations converse with one another, and by which Mankind are knit together in a general Correspondence.” By emphasizing Jewish dispersion and rootlessness, along with the evident desire of Jews to maintain their distinctive status as a p ­ eople apart through their adherence to the ritual practices of Judaism (for which he cited dietary laws as but one significant princi­ple), Addison made the Jews into the exemplar of a group “­little valued in themselves, [but] wholly necessary” to the framework of empire.4 In effect, Addison was building a case for interimperial entanglements as a necessity for the proper functioning of empire. Jews, ­because of their geographic dispersion and their rootlessness, had the know-­how to create the essential connections between empires and, by their very presence, served as the instrument creating the connective tissue that allowed empires to achieve success in global commerce. It was common knowledge that Spain and Portugal, much as they disparaged Jewishness as a social quality, had made good use of the commercial prowess of their Jewish and converso population both to promote and to enhance their overseas trade. Still, the oppression and social displacement created throughout its empire by Spain’s Limpieza de Sangre statutes meant that Jews might well be susceptible to the temptation to move their allegiance to a more tolerant British state.5 So the question for Addison’s reading audience was thus implicit: how could ­these inherent and well-­developed skills be put to work for Britain? It can scarcely be denied that Jews have permeated the bound­a ries of nearly ­every Eu­ro­pean state from the medieval period to the pres­ent day, their mobility forced upon them by repeated episodes of persecution, economic restriction, expulsion, and readmission by hostile Christian rulers and suspicious Christian populations of Eu­rope dating back at least as far as the ­ eoples) first Crusade.6 While other stateless minorities (notably the Romany p have experienced similar patterns of mobility in Eu­ro­pean history, Jews w ­ ere apparently unique in consciously positioning themselves to participate in



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local commerce and to rise along the hegemonic sociocultural ladder. Yet, existing historiography pres­ents at best a fragmented view of the Jewish experience during the early modern era. Historians of the respective Eu­ro­ pean empires (Spanish and En­glish, as well as Dutch and French), w ­ hether individually or in conversation with one another, generally ignore the existence of Jewish economic activity as inconsequential to the study of imperial politics, diplomacy, and warfare.7 Many nationalist historiographies of Britain, in par­tic­u­lar, have cleansed their narratives of any reference to Jewish participation in a national past.8 For their part, historians of early modern Jewry have by and large privileged par­tic­u ­lar geographies (for example, the Dutch Republic and its overseas possessions, the Italian city-­states) and individual cases studies of Jewish firms over studies of the long transnational range of Jewish commerce.9 In their attempts to quantify and compress their respective targets for analy­sis, historians of both the Eu­ro­pean and Jewish experiences have eliminated the aspects of early modern Jewish life that adhered individual Jews to multiple geographies and necessarily engendered in them multivalent and contingent identities.10 In this way, Addison’s notion of his Jewish contemporaries as “the Pegs and Nails in a ­great Building,” pegs and nails whose value to the nation state lay in the myriad of ways their activities joined far-­flung places to one another and greased the wheels of international trade, has thus far been overlooked as a means of analyzing how Eu­ro­pean empires interacted with each other in unofficial, as well as in official, capacities.

Jews and Conversos in the Context of Anglo-­Spanish Conflict, 1525–1625 The trajectory of Anglo-­Spanish relations u ­ nder the Tudors is well known, if not frequently discussed from the perspective of its Jewish connections. The alliance with Spain forged by Henry VII, and cemented by the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, began to falter once it became clear that Catherine would produce no male heir. In his determination to rid himself of Catherine, Henry now proceeded along several parallel tracks of action, one of which involved sending his prelates to Venice in 1529 for the purpose of consulting with rabbis and scholars of Jewish law about the practice of divorce in Judaism. ­A fter several other lines of theological argument in support of his

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effort to obtain a divorce from the Vatican proved fruitless, Henry continued to pursue the arguments made pos­si­ble by this recourse to Jewish law—­until they w ­ ere rendered obsolete in 1532 by his decision to remove the En­glish church from the pope’s authority.11 Nevertheless, the very fact of Henry’s turn away from papal authority, along with the open embrace of Protestantism once Anne Boleyn became his queen, created tentative openings for the return of Jews to E ­ ngland—­a prospect that had been flatly impossible since the expulsion of the Jews from ­England in 1290 by Edward I. More significant inroads ­toward the historical moment we t­ oday call the readmission w ­ ere made during the long reign of Anne and Henry’s Protestant d ­ aughter, Elizabeth I. U ­ nder her administration, immigrants flocked from the continent to E ­ ngland and ­were seemingly encouraged for the economic benefits their industry brought to the realm. A number of Iberians of Jewish heritage (many of them openly suspected of having Jewish proclivities) are known to have settled in London during her reign, and Elizabeth appears to have made ready use of them.12 The early Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I, seemed to have followed Elizabeth’s lead in tolerating the growing presence of immigrant aliens of all va­ri­e­ties in the area between the Royal Exchange and the Tower; the growth of Protestant dissenters in ­these years and the nation’s subsequent transformation into an avowedly Protestant nation harboring multiple modes for religious expression paved the way, ­a fter de­c ades of armed conflict, to a Commonwealth government led by a devout Parliament with Oliver ­Cromwell at its head. It was in this context that the question of the Jewish return to ­England would be openly considered.13 In the wake of ­Cromwell’s indecisive conference on the readmission of the Jews in December 1655, much debate has appeared in print concerning ­Cromwell’s motives in bringing this question to the fore. David Katz argues that the motivation was deeply religious and highlights the significant role played by Menasseh ben Israel in facilitating a rapprochement with Messianic Protestants in E ­ ngland; in Katz’s view, “It is quite clear that motives of economics or trade had l­ittle to do with the readmission.”14 Still, in my own view, it takes nothing away from the role of religion in mediating and fostering public discussion of the Jewish readmission—­a discussion that, as Katz notes, does make E ­ ngland extraordinary in the Eu­ro­ pean experience—to acknowledge that facts on the ground w ­ ere other­wise. For the conferees w ­ ere almost evenly divided between approval and disapproval of the proposition, and the conference thus resulted in no official pronouncements on the question at hand. Meanwhile, as the public was shortly to dis-



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cover, Jews w ­ ere already residing in ­England, while pursuing economic interests, and religious liberty, on their own behalf.

The Iberian Identities of Anglo-­Jewry, 1558–1688 Given the long trajectory of the Jews as a displaced minority p ­ eople in Eu­ rope, the notion that Jewish lives ­were inherently entangled with a wide variety of geographic peripheries is hardly new or surprising. Still, the depth and range of t­ hese entanglements has been poorly understood and only sparingly documented.15 Perhaps no group of early modern Jews lived lives more entangled than the Western Sephardim—­those Jews who turned west on leaving Spain and then found themselves trapped in Portugal in 1490s when the official edict of toleration t­ here was overthrown u ­ nder Kings Joao II and Manuel I, and harsh mea­sures resulting in forcible conversions ­were instigated instead. ­There is abundant evidence in the historiography on the Jews and conversos of Portuguese extraction concerning the socially and religiously complex and physically extensive economic networks, crossing not only the borders of nation-­states but also t­hose of religious persuasion, that Sephardim constructed once they moved beyond the geographic bound­aries of the Iberian peninsula a­ fter 1540. Yet l­ittle of this extant historiography acknowledges the complexity of Iberian converso culture outside the peninsula, particularly in the context of Jewish marginality within imperial frameworks. The very notion of converso culture was broadly entangled with the multilayered question of identity—­the internal religious identity unique to the individual (­whether Jewish, Christian, or the syncretic crypto-­Jewish), the communal identity as an expatriate Iberian community of Jewish heritage outside of the Iberian peninsula, and the parallel external identities as merchants operating in both Iberian and En­glish contexts.16 A closer look at the experience of several converso residents of London w ­ ill suffice to set the scene. In 1549, early in Elizabeth’s reign, the Portuguese physician Hector Nuñez settled in the parish of St. Olave, within the walls of the City of London. Five years a­ fter his arrival, he was admitted as a fellow to both the College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons. But in addition to sustaining a prestigious medical practice, Nuñez developed an extensive overseas trade. This activity may have begun with his marriage, in 1566, to the s­ ister of Bernardo Luis Freire, a converso merchant in Antwerp. Two years ­later, he joined

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the Com­pany of Italian Merchants whose head was the Florentine spy Ridolfi. His in-­laws soon removed from Antwerp to London, and as three remaining Freire ­sisters married converso merchants in London, Nuñez quickly became part of an extended London-­based mercantile clan, working with his four brothers-­in-­law to form mercantile partnerships trading between London on the one hand and Spain, Portugal, and the converso community in Antwerp on the other.17 His connections as a physician brought him into contact with members of Elizabeth’s court, while his mercantile contacts provided impor­ tant information about international affairs. It is clear from official state papers that by August of 1582, Nuñez had determined to use the knowledge gleaned from his trading connections to make himself useful to the court, as he was thereafter in close communication with both Elizabeth’s Lord trea­ surer, William Cecil (Lord Burghley), and her spy chief, Francis Walsingham.18 Gonsalvo Añes, born in Spain to converso parents, was sent to London with his widowed m ­ other ­a fter he came u ­ nder scrutiny of the Inquisition. Tried and sentenced in absentia, he soon Anglicized his first name, changing it from Gonsalvo to Dunstan, and became one of the city’s successful merchant grocers. A member of the Grocer’s Com­pany as well as a licensed provisioner to the Court, despite his status as an alien, Añes lived openly as a member of the Church of ­England, attending St. Olave’s Church, where he was buried in 1594. Yet, he also sometimes used a distinctively Hebraic alias (Benjamin George, the surname consisting of his late ­father’s first name, as was traditional in Judaic naming practice) and gave at least six of his fourteen ­children names drawn from the Old Testament, suggesting some degree of interest in his Jewish heritage. Indeed, the En­glish traveler Thomas Coryat witnessed one of Añes’s sons and two of his ­daughters celebrating a brit milah during a sojourn in Constantinople, where they presented themselves as Jews.19 Roderigo Lopez, who resided at London from 1559 ­until his death in 1594, also lived an avowedly Protestant life in London, where he arrived as a young physician and shortly thereafter married the eldest d ­ aughter of Dunstan Añes, fathered nine ­children, and served as a society physician. By 1586, his skills had won him appointment as the first among Elizabeth’s personal physicians—­ not, according to court observers who had met him, b­ ecause he was “the learnedest or expertest” of the court physicians, but b­ ecause he “showed himself to be both careful and very skillfull . . . ​for his counsel” in prescribing remedies. In short, Lopez was “one, that maketh as ­great account of himself, as the best.”20 Still, Lopez was widely rumored to be a secret Jew, and ­those suspicions came to the fore for many witnesses at his execution. Despite his



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public protestations that he was a good Christian, Lopez was damned in the minds of many En­glishmen by the evidence of an unsigned private letter he had received from Antwerp that was replete with carefully encoded expressions of religious sentiment, leaving his allegiances wide open to noxious interpretations by an audience with fixed ideas about religious identity and unfamiliar with the peculiarities of converso life.21 ­These three stories reflect distinctive ele­ments of converso life in Elizabethan London: densely packed familial relations, concerted efforts to ply what­ever connections might be made to ­those with power and authority, and the use of public fictions to hide an intimate and under­lying Jewish identity. By the time the Stuart rulers ascended to the throne, it was safer for conversos to display themselves as Spanish Catholics, who, by virtue of the fact that they ­were aliens, had official license to worship at the residence of the Spanish ambassador to ­England. While ­England was at peace with Spain, this masquerade sufficed to buy their ac­cep­tance among the city’s residents, as the trade they prosecuted with Spain and Portugal and the Spanish goods and bullion that they imported w ­ ere useful to the En­glish economy. It was only in 1655, when ­Cromwell’s planned incursion into the Spanish West Indies (denominated the “Western Design”) resulted in war between ­England and Spain that the position of ­these ostensible Catholics became precarious. At that point, suspicion of London’s Iberian crypto-­Jews emerged into a formal denunciation of the merchant Antonio Rodrigues Robles, ­after his bookkeeper was suborned to testify that Robles had just received a shipment of goods and specie from Spain. Testimony in the case presented a confusing array of evidence about the nationality of Robles as e­ ither a purported Spaniard or a native of Portugal (with which E ­ ngland continued to maintain friendly ties), none of which was particularly persuasive; the case soon began to seem interminable. It was the difficulty in defending Robles against the charge that he was an e­ nemy alien—­a charge grounded in his trading activities in Spain—­ that led London’s crypto-­Jewish community to submit a petition to C ­ romwell revealing their identity as Jews as a proof that they had no ill intent ­toward Britain and seeking his official protection as such.22 The complexities of the Robles case highlight the difficult choices forced on Iberian crypto-­Jews when it came to self-­presentation. In addition to using vari­ous deceptive techniques (such as false names), when necessary, to mask their national origin, their adherence to Judaism was marked by adaptations designed to pres­ent a public facade of Catholicism without revealing their adherence to Jewish practices.23 In this regard, it must be noted that Robles,

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who signed the petition to C ­ romwell along with other members of the tiny Jewish community, had trou­ble persuading the Admiralty that he was indeed a Jew ­after confessing that he had not been circumcised. The lack of circumcision was one of the many ways in which Robles sought to make his true religious identity as a Jew indecipherable to the Inquisition and its familiars, but when it came to his denunciation as a Spaniard in Protestant E ­ ngland, ­these practices created the unfortunate aura that he was just a liar. Antonio Fernandes Carvajal, a larger-­than-­life personality who financed the small community’s secret synagogue in Cree Church Lane, near Aldgate, provides a dif­fer­ent example of how multiple identities could be managed. The master of his identity from the moment of his arrival in London, Carvajal was at points denounced as a recusant of the Church of ­England and, in an anonymously published pamphlet, derided for the public admission that he was a Jew a­ fter years of presenting himself in public as a Catholic. Carvajal somehow always managed to come out on top, with his dignity and his authority intact.24 He had even higher aspirations than his own private success and worked actively on behalf of the converso community he was fostering and supporting. Building on his prowess as a trader, Carvajal not only sought endenization for himself and his sons but also worked assiduously ­behind the scenes to secure the status of the entire community in the Protestant Commonwealth. He presented himself as an “indispensible man” to En­glish authorities, offering his ser­vices to Parliament as a spy through ­Cromwell’s intelligence chief John Thurloe and rendering fiduciary duty to the Commonwealth by making large transfers of bullion from his trading posts in Spanish possessions, notably the Canaries, into ­England.25 Lucien Wolf argued that Carvajal’s information-­gathering networks on the Continent w ­ ere sophisticated enough to have helped head off a planned alliance between Spain and the exiled Catholic prince Charles Stuart (then just a putative successor to his late ­father, Charles I), who had hoped to launch an invasion of ­England to reclaim his crown, with Spanish support, in 1656.26 Carvajal’s voluntary assistance, it would seem, offered a reversal to the situation of the ill-­fated Roderigo Lopez—an ostensible Catholic offering loyal ser­vice to a Protestant realm, in lieu of an ostensible Protestant turning traitor against the Protestant queen, to whom he had pledged his personal ser­vices, by secretly serving the Spanish crown. Carvajal’s willingness to utilize his mercantile networks for the benefit of the state ­were not unique—at least two of the other found­ers of the small congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews offered similar ser­vices to ­Cromwell,



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one providing intelligence on the munitions of the Spanish navy via contacts in Amsterdam; the other on conditions in Jamaica immediately following on the En­glish conquest of the island, with suggestions for successful administration of the new colony.27 Yet Carvajal remained unrivaled among London’s crypto-­Jews for his unwillingness to compromise his integrity as a Jew. In Spanish territory, at the other end of his trade, Carvajal soon enough became a subject for Inquisitorial investigation ­because, having made a clear break with his Iberian identity, he did not work as assiduously at keeping his religious proclivities secret in that context. A 1660 deposition provided by Friar Mathias Pinto, a Franciscan difinidor in the Canaries, reported that on Pinto’s recent visit to London, Carvajal boldly told the middle-­aged monk “that he had been a Jew from the time that the Protector ­Cromwell had broken the peace with Spain [in 1655/6]” and that, along with engaging in Jewish ritual practices in a back room in his home, which the monk himself witnessed, Carvajal had several times confided in him a belief that “ ‘although I am a Jew we ­shall all meet in Heaven.’ ”28 His bold be­hav­ior nonetheless obscures the risks that most Iberian Jewish merchants faced in plying Iberian ­waters from beyond the bound­aries of the peninsula: though Carvajal was never officially denounced or tried at an auto-­da-­fé, other Jewish merchants operating in the Canaries trade from London did not escape that fate. In 1653, some two years before the Whitehall Conference where ­Cromwell and Parliament would debate admitting Jews to reside in ­England, Diego Rodriguez Arias was denounced by a former servant, then living in the Canaries, who said he had witnessed Arias flagellating a crucifix on Friday and Saturday eve­nings (that is to say, at the beginning and end of the Jewish Sabbath) in his London home. The denunciation, made at La Palma, was stimulated by the servant’s having heard that Arias was at that time in Teneriffe on trade, having both f­amily and mercantile contacts t­ here. The accusations against Arias picked up steam when familiars of the Inquisition heard other reports that Arias had lived openly as a Jew in Amsterdam, prior to his removal to London. Although some of the in­for­mants reported this as hearsay from third parties and could testify that they themselves had known Arias only as ardently “devoted to Christ,” the evidence was considered strong enough to warrant an arrest, and despite his then being ill, Arias found himself imprisoned in the city of Canary from the end of February through the ­middle of August that same year.29 ­A fter the Robles case exposed other members of the heretofore secret community of professing Jews in London, charges ­were brought in the Canaries against Duarte Henriquez Alvarez, who had been chief collector of customs at Teneriffe prior

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to his resettlement at London and was previously sentenced to penitence at an auto-­da-­fé, as well as against Antonio Rodriguez Robles himself. Thus, like conversos throughout the Atlantic world, E ­ ngland’s incipient Jews played their public identities with ­great care and always with a fin­ger to the po­liti­cal winds of the time. New scholarship in recent years on other communities of conversos suggests that the religious identity of expatriated Iberian Jews was pliable rather than fixed, with individuals making varied determinations about when to pres­ent themselves as Christians and when as Jews.30 As Eu­ro­pean empires grew and expanded into and across the Atlantic during the seventeenth ­century, they developed their own perceptions and ste­ reo­t ypes of Iberian conversos. Th ­ ose Iberian conversos who embraced Judaism a­ fter abandoning Iberia for London in the seventeenth ­century found themselves locked between a rock and a hard place. In Iberia, where they w ­ ere encouraged to pursue commerce, Inquisitorial scrutiny restricted and often embittered their personal lives. While escape to London gained them the liberty to live according to their true beliefs, it also confronted them with barriers and roadblocks when it came to making a living.31 With their position as British subjects considered marginal by many En­glishmen, Jewish merchants long resident in London easily fell afoul of the Navigation Acts, finding their goods confiscated on the flimsiest of charges. They ­were, in short, frequently regarded as objects of suspicion; and in light of increasing conflicts with Spain ­after 1585, often the trigger point was their Iberian origin and not their suspected secret adherence to Judaism. E. V. Campos and David Katz have both stated that it was not Roderigo Lopez’s alleged Judaism that led him to the hangman on Tyburn hill in 1594 but rather his Iberian origins, ­after his true loyalties ­were revealed through his treacherous correspondence with agents of the Spanish crown. As Campos puts it, “his Jewishness was only impor­tant insofar as [Lopez] was an Iberian Jew,” which is to say that his Jewishness only put an additional nail into the coffin constructed out of his Iberian identity.32 Ranging from India to the New World, Jewish merchants—­the majority of them of Iberian background—­came to play, by Addison’s time, an instrumental role in connecting interimperial trade between the possessions of ­England and Spain in both the Old World and the New. Yet their prowess and the strength of their global connections was such that by the early seventeenth ­century, it sparked the perception of an imminent threat to En­glish merchants hoping to establish themselves and their own kin in ­England’s bur-



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geoning international trade. Jews w ­ ere not the only such threat to the accumulation of mercantile prowess by London merchants: as Mark Sheaves demonstrated in Chapter 1, even En­glishmen could represent a threat in circumstances where they had “gone native” abroad, accumulating the kind of linguistic flexibility and cross-­cultural ease that En­glishmen at home typically lacked. Indeed, the very techniques for which Jews ­were decried ­were available to anyone who sought to learn the trade.33 What made Jews distinctive in this regard was only that they w ­ ere forced by circumstance into d ­ oing it so intensively that they had long since become masters of the art of overseas trading in disparate geographies, with all of the requisite skills that ­doing so entailed.34 En­glish merchants in Jamaica complained bitterly about their Jewish competitors, whom they viewed as mere interlopers. Th ­ ere, Jewish merchants w ­ ere commonly described as “villanous men” who provided loans to planters at usurious rates, traded currency at discounted rather than fair rates, and took advantage of the needs of unfortunate soldiers, indentured tradesmen, and impoverished blacks in order to enrich themselves.35 In part, such complaints ­were a reaction to the trading practices that Jewish merchants employed in Jamaica, as they strug­gled against unfavorable taxation, administrative roadblocks, and Anglo-­Jamaican hostility to make ends meet and minimize their risks. In 1672, thirty-­one En­glish merchants in Port Royal submitted a petition to Governor Lynch to complain about the mercantile be­hav­ior of twenty-­nine Jewish merchants trading t­ here, of whom only thirteen had obtained letters patent from the crown: The g­ reat mischeife w[hi]ch wee suffer by y[e]m is, That their Tradeing is a perfect Mono­poly, For they are a kind of a Com­pany, & Trade w[i]th a joynt Stocke, Whereby they allwaies Comand ready money, & by y[a]t meanes doe not onely allwaies buy ye choicest & best goods, but frequently ­whole Cargoes, & if yo[u]r Hono[u]rs Pet[itione]rs haue at any time a share w[i]th y[e]m They ­will certainely vnd[e]r sell y[e]m though to their owne Loss, w[hi]ch They can better beare b­ ecause of their penurious way of Liueing; But by ­these Arts at last they gaine Excessivuely, & giues ye w ­ hole mea­sure to ye Trade themselues. Anglo-­Jamaican merchants further pointed to the fact that “­These persons remoued y[e]mselves hither from none of his Ma[jes]ties Dominions” but rather

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­ ere enticed to Jamaica from elsewhere “by their Lucre and design.” What w assurances, asked t­hese merchants, invoking Addison’s notion of Jewish rootlessness, “can ­there bee of their fidelities, who liue vnder noe obligacon of Duty & Alleigance, & can never bee supposed to regard or pr[e]serue . . . ​any long[e]r then their owne private int’rest & Advantage”?36 ­These tensions persisted over the course of the next two de­cades. By 1692, Jewish merchants in Jamaica had cause to complain to the board that “some En­glish Merchants and o­ thers . . . ​are desirous to have the Jews deprived of ­those Priviledges they enjoy” by virtue of their Letters of Denization. Anglo-­ Jamaican merchants and their supporters had submitted a petition to the Governor’s Council ­toward that end, in the wake of the unexpected death of Lord Inchiquin, a proponent of Jewish mercantile enterprise who had served as governor of the island for three years prior to his death.37 The Council supported this effort b­ ecause, as their letter to the Board of Trade put it, they feared an influx of Jewish merchants to Jamaica from other places. “The Jews,” they wrote, “eat us and our c­ hildren of all trade. . . . ​We did not want them at Port Royal, a place populous and strong without them; and though told that the w ­ hole country lay open to them they have made Port Royal their Goshen and w ­ ill do nothing but trade. . . . ​This means taking our c­ hildren’s bread and giving it to Jews.”38 Nor did the attempts of Anglo-­Jamaicans to disable Jewish trade end with this feeble effort. During the spring of 1700, when requested by the Board of Trade to respond to Jewish complaints of excessive taxation on the Island, the governor and Council did not deny the allegations but rather offered the following justification: To Trate all from the Originall their first Introduction into this Island was on Condition that they should s­ ettle and plant, which they doe not, ­there being but one Considerable and two or three Small settlements of the Jews in all the Island; But their Imployment is generally keeping of Shopps and Merchandizing, by the first of which they have Ingrosst that Imployment, and by their parcimonious living (which I doe not charge as a fault in them) they have thereby meanes of under-­selling the En­glish that they cannot many of them follow that Imployment, Nor can they in reason putt their ­Children to the Jews to be Trained up in that profession by which the En­glish Nation thus be they Suffer much both in their owne Advantages and what may be made to their ­Children Hereafter. . . . ​For ­these reasons the Assemblys have



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always when public money was to be raised thought it but reasonable that they the Jews who in the opinion of the Assemblys Ease out the En­glish in Trade and gott it very much in to their owne hands and thereby the proffitts and advantages that might be made by the Retayling Trade to the En­glish nation have thought it but Just that they should pay something in proportion more then the En­glish.39 Such justifications remained an ongoing theme in Anglo-­Jamaican politics well into the eigh­teenth c­ entury. In 1703, for example, Ishack Pereyra pressed a petition on the Board of Trade seeking protection for the Jews in Jamaica against excessive taxation, which, he stated, had been instituted only with the administration of Sir William Beeston as lieutenant governor in 1692, “when some Merchants of the Island conceiving a Jealousy that They sold their Merchandize cheaper than [the En­glish merchants] would afford them, prevailed on the Governm[en]t to tax them in an Extraordinary Maner, hoping thereby to oblige them to quit the Island & their Settlem[en]ts and then to oblige the Planters & other Inhabitants to purchase their Merchandize at such rates as they should think fit to impose.”40 In the face of blatant attempts to thwart their routine commerce, Jewish merchants in the British West Indies asserted their own utility t­ oward imperial goals, particularly when it came to obtaining ­labor, livestock, and desirable material objects from Spanish territories. In responding to the attempt by the Jamaica Assembly to impose an additional tax on the island’s Jewish population in 1703, Ishack Pereyra declared that the Jews had been responsible for bringing the Assiento of Negro Slaves to Jamaica “before the pres­ent Warr with Spain, by their Industry and Interest.” Yet, ever mindful of their precarious po­liti­cal status on the island, Pereyra also made sure to point out that Jews “by virtue of their Lett[e]rs Patents of Denization have been t­ here Established [in Jamaica] since before the Yeare 1670 and always behav’d themselves as good & Loyall Subjects,” that Jewish endeavors “have been very Instrumentall in the promoting of Trade, to the ­great Benefit of the Island, the advancem[en]t of the Customs of E ­ ngland, and the Encouragment of Navigation” and, indeed, had “ very much promoted the Trade between the s[ai]d Island & the Spanish West Indies to the g­ reat profit of ­England.” In sum, Pereyra avowed, “the Chiefe & only Reason assigned for the Extraordinary taxing the Jews [in Jamaica], is their driving a ­great Trade, & underselling the other Inhabitants.”41 Meanwhile, Jamaican Jewish merchants continued

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to look to the crown to protect their interests from the nefarious be­hav­ior of Anglo-­Jamaicans ill disposed to fair treatment for economic competitors whom they deemed not properly British. Indeed, in January  1714, a body of Anglo-­Jamaican merchants presented a petition to the island’s Assembly “against the importation of indigo, wine, and other Eu­ro­pean goods”—­trades in which Jews w ­ ere particularly involved in the early part of the eigh­teenth ­century—­“and also of Jews keeping shops.”42 One need not accept Ishack Pereyra’s defense that the trade driven by Jewish endeavor was “a very ­great con­ve­nience to the Planters & poorer sort of ­People” to see that Anglo-­Jamaicans ­were singling out Jews for reasons other than pure fiscal necessity. Anglo-­Jamaicans, as April Lee Hatfield notes in Chapter 10, had frustrations of their own—­international treaties negotiated in Madrid and London often had l­ittle consonance with conditions on the ground in Kingston and Cartagena. And it was h ­ ere that Jewish merchants had the concerted advantage, as they could deploy their language skills and cultural knowledge of Iberia to advantage with Spanish contacts in ways that Anglo-­Jamaican merchants simply could not replicate. Anglo-­Jamaican merchants w ­ ere not wrong in claiming that Jewish merchants had the advantage when it came to interimperial trade in the Ca­rib­be­an; but they read as unfair the advantages available to Ibero-­Jamaican Jews in their fa­cil­i­ty as Anglo-­ Iberian cultural chameleons and so consciously misconstrued them to challenge the po­liti­cal loyalties of Jewish Jamaicans. In that way, they sought to redress what they perceived as an imbalance, and their attempts to subvert Jewish competencies in trade thus continued unabated throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, gaining sway among prominent En­glish planters as the ­century progressed. The envy of En­glish traders operating in British overseas possessions was hardly unique to the West Indies. A ­ fter the British conquest of Gibraltar during the War of the Spanish Succession, military administrators found themselves dependent on Jewish trade with Morocco for essential supplies and recruited Sephardi merchants from Livorno and Portugal, as well as from the Maghreb, who ­were conversant in the unique methods of trading ­there. As in Jamaica, En­glishmen resident in Gibraltar complained that the liberties (or “Indulgence”) given to the Jews to trade prevented the colony from proper growth; but British administrators, however they might have wished to rid the colony of Jewish merchants, found them so essential to the colony’s credit structure that a mass expulsion would have constituted economic suicide for the entire colony. Thus, when Spain demanded the expulsion of Jews from



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Gibraltar as one of the terms of ceding the territory to Britain in 1714, the requisite order was never fully implemented ­because the governor found that Jewish merchants simply could not be expelled if the colony w ­ ere to survive.43 A contrast with this continuous sequence of apparent hyperbole is found in analy­sis of data from the London Port registers and official admiralty rec­ ords, which document the flow of commerce by Jewish merchants resident in ­England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During his long residence in London, Hector Nuñez, though trained as a medical doctor, made much of his living through trading ventures. Over the course of three de­cades (1560–91), in addition to his official roles as physician and diplomat at Elizabeth’s court, Nuñez traded frequently with correspondents in Morocco, South Amer­i­ca, and India, as well as on the Continent, importing Brazilian sugar. His trading ties to Lisbon ­were particularly strong, at a time when Portugal’s relationship to E ­ ngland was seen to be a buffer against Spanish power.44 Between 1600 and 1655, ­England’s crypto-­Jewish merchants imported im­mense volumes of brazilwood, sugar (likely of Brazilian production), and wines from Lisbon and the Canaries, along with gold and silver bullion, tobacco, and spices from the Amer­i­cas. More significantly, they exported En­glish textiles (particularly baize, worsted and silk hosiery, and perpetuana), En­glish metalwares of tin, pewter, and steel, and other goods of En­glish manufacture to vari­ous places on the Continent, including Spain and Portugal.45 Though ­these data appear to suggest a lack of impediment to their trade, two cases prosecuted in the late 1650s, ­after the eruption of the latest iteration of Anglo-­Spanish war, illustrate the precarious nature of ventures where the merchant’s right to receive the privileges of a subject was questionable. In 1657, Manuel Martinez Dormido, who had moved to London from Amsterdam three years earlier, filed a claim for the cargo of the Three Cranes, which had been confiscated by the Commonwealth as property of an ­enemy alien. In order to win his case, Dormido had to rely on testimony by three London merchants testifying to both his identity as a Jew and the volume of his trade with Brazil. The following year, Antonio Rodrigues Robles faced an even more complex case involving cargo that he had had loaded on board the Mary and Joyce using a Spanish alias—­a standard ruse relied on by crypto-­Jewish merchants residing outside of the Iberian peninsula to protect their goods from confiscation by authorities when trading in ­either of the Iberian nations or their overseas possessions. The ruse had succeeded when the Mary and Joyce was intercepted by Spanish officials but worked against Robles when the ship was l­ater condemned by En­glish customs officials as e­nemy property. Robles then had to pres­ent

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testimony from four witnesses in order to legitimate his claim that he was an En­glish subject, resident in London since 1648, and the ­actual owner of the cargo in question.46 The po­liti­cal status of Jewish merchants operating in the British Atlantic theater eased as they became more numerous, both in London and in the British overseas possessions, and as their prowess and carry­ing capacity grew. In 1663, London banker Edward Backwell had active accounts with some thirty Jewish mercantile firms; by 1672, that number had more than doubled, numbering nearly eighty firms.47 Nuala Zahedieh’s analy­sis of the port register for 1686 revealed that of fifty-­eight principal merchants involved in the colonial trade that year, seven (12 ­percent of her sample) ­were Jews.48 ­These seven men, she found, also comprised one third of the twenty-­t wo wealthiest London merchants engaged in the export trade to the West Indies. Jews w ­ ere clearly overrepresented in this group, given that the entire Jewish population of London was noted as consisting of only four hundred in the early 1680s and was estimated by modern writers to have nearly doubled by the time of the London census of 1695.49 At the same time, the connections sustained by Jewish merchants abroad ­were the object of envy and resentment by many En­glish merchants who considered Jews to have an unfair advantage, particularly in dealing with Iberian interests. The complaint that Jews in Britain and its overseas possessions who lacked the proper authority as ­free traders acted u ­ nder the aegis of ­those who had obtained that authority seems particularly suspect when examined from the metropole; Nuala Zahedieh notes that ordinary London merchants who ­were unfree (that is, lacking the grant of “freedom of the city”) often obtained the lower duties that ­were a benefit of having that authority by partnering with a ­free London merchant.50 Many such complaints thus rested on the perception that even if born in E ­ ngland, a Jewish merchant was still an alien u ­ nder En­glish law and therefore not entitled to the full benefits that accrued to a natu­ral born subject of the crown.

* * * In 1712, Joseph Addison could have known only parts of this story. Spectator 495, though identified by some as a Whiggish text, also displayed some conservative ele­ments insofar as Addison saw fit not to invoke the specter of Jewish naturalization, allowing that Jews w ­ ere unlikely to make proper subjects or citizens of an empire defined as British. In a sense, the outline of con­



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temporary Jewry provided in his Spectator 495 attempts to parse the difference between progressive Whigs, such as John Toland, who went so far as to advocate for naturalization for the Jews, and concerted Tories, who viewed Jewish mercantilism as a continual threat to the proper development of a British economy that should remain in British hands. Still, Addison’s interpretation of Jewish history was embedded in a Whig narrative of empire in which Jews could be viewed as contributors to British aims by virtue of their ­labor and enterprise. From this perspective, the endeavors of Jewish merchants to push the bound­aries of British trade into the territories possessed by Spain and Portugal could help the En­glish to expand the range of influence, prosperity, and power for the British Empire. This was a vision that the Iberian Jews of the British Empire could not help but embrace. In the contrasting Tory worldview, national wealth was held to be finite, and conservatives ­imagined it necessary to import raw materials on the cheap and sell them at high prices in order to maintain the nation. For such thinkers, keeping control over resources was paramount, and Jews could only be seen as outsiders set to enrich themselves and become a drain on national resources.51 Yet even u ­ nder the Whig model, and despite all of their perceived advantages, Jewish merchants experienced the tensions of their bifurcated British and Spanish identities. ­Here is a case in point: in June of 1763, Abraham Sarzedas “of the City of New York Merchant but now of the Island of Jamaica” sailed his sloop Katy, on which he traveled as supercargo, to the south side of Cuba on a trading voyage. Anchoring near the town of Calizeto, Sarzedas entertained an officer of the Machioneal Guard, who invited him to come on shore to trade his cargo of textiles and other En­glish goods in return for oxen, ­horses, and Spanish coin. ­A fter several days of friendly contact, during which the soldiers repeatedly proffered their ser­vices in furtherance of trade “as their interest wholly depended on the[ir] good treatment to the en­glish Traders with whom they got their Livelyhood,” Sarzedas agreed to join them on shore with the prospect of meeting a few prominent planters they said w ­ ere anxious to trade with him. Shortly ­after landing, however, the t­ ables w ­ ere turned; Sarzedas and his crew w ­ ere taken prisoner by a squad of the Guarda Costa, and a ransom was demanded for the return of the ship and her crew. A ­ fter prolonged negotiations over the ransom, Sarzedas was ultimately rescued from his predicament on shore by means of an assault fomented by his En­glish captain and the crew. A local planter named Don Edwardo, with whom Sarzedas had had some friendly and profitable relations and whose f­ amily was entertaining Sarzedas on shore at the time of his capture by the Guarda Costa, expressed

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deep chagrin at the be­hav­ior of his fellow Spaniards, valiantly offered to assist Sarzedas with the ransom, and vowed never to leave his side ­until Sarzedas had been restored to his ship. Don Edwardo joined Sarzedas on board to collect the goods he had previously contracted for, and Sarzedas dutifully gave him what had been agreed and paid for. His En­glish crew, however, convinced that all of the Spaniards had been in on the plot, recaptured the canoe and its cargo just as the planter reached shore. Sarzedas, persuaded that Don Edwardo was in fact “wholly unacquainted” with the soldiers’ plot to deprive him of his ship and goods, was now denuded of ­every advantage that his knowledge of Spanish culture had provided in making this trade; it was he who was in turn chagrined, with his own honor as an honest dealer put to the test and his abilities as a cultural chameleon of no help to him in resolving this very par­tic­u­lar pickle. The situation for the ship and crew remained too dangerous, and the captain insisted on an immediate return to Jamaica. Sarzedas was thus unable to forge an attempt at undoing the harm his men had just created in depriving Don Edwardo of goods that the planter had duly paid for. So on his return to Jamaica, in an effort to do right by the planter and defend his honor as a merchant, he took the extraordinary step of filing a deposition with the local court and delivered the amount of Don Edwardo’s payment to a merchant of his acquaintance in Lucea, on the north side of Jamaica, so as to provide a secure method for the return of the funds to the Spaniard.52 Despite the heightened Anglo-­Spanish tensions caused by the armed conflict surrounding this incident, Sarzedas sought above all to ensure that his mercantile transactions w ­ ere honorable. Now it can be argued that he did this simply ­because it made good business sense to do so in case he intended to trade at Calizeto in the ­future. But we should not forget that, quite apart from his po­liti­cal allegiance to Britain, Sarzedas was also an Iberian engaged in a transaction with another Iberian, where his honor as a merchant would have readily been questioned had he not been known to or could not legally prove that he had made assiduous efforts to provide satisfaction in the way that the code of honor demanded in such cases. What layers his status as a practicing Jew may have added to the perceived stain on his reputation we can only guess, but given the prevailing ste­reo­t ypes of Jewish greed in both Britain and Spain, the result could hardly have been positive. The contrasting views of the workings of interimperial trade from the British and Ibero-­Jewish perspectives are striking for the dif­fer­ent ways they suggest how early modern Britain found itself entangled in early modern Spain, but of course the few cases discussed ­here cannot tell the ­whole story.



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When it comes to discussion of interimperial trade between the British and Spanish empires, t­here is so ­little historiography extant that it is difficult to know where to begin.53 ­Here, it may be useful to contrast the somewhat simpler entanglements of Anglo-­Spanish merchants, British colonists with interracial f­ amily networks, and Irish Catholic soldiers discussed elsewhere in this volume with the more complicated and layered entanglements of the Western Sephardim.54 Jews, ­a fter all was said and done, occupied highly ambiguous spaces within both empires. While En­glish, Irish, and Scots renegados could still rely on making legitimate claims to British birth or connections, Jews in the British Empire had no such fallback. Try as they might to mold their public be­hav­ior to the very model of a patriotic Briton, they found themselves attacked and ridiculed for acting a part they had not been granted. Without access to the full rights and privileges of the subject and the citizen, many Western Sephardim doubtless saw British imperial identity as just one of many facades it was necessary to adopt in the course of eking out an existence on unstable ground. It was that very ambiguity that made them, as Addison was quick to perceive, such useful tools of empire. Depending on British officials for ac­cep­tance and acknowl­edgment of their capacity to exercise the rights and privileges of natural-­born and naturalized subjects forced Jews to be subservient to imperial goals in ways that other groups with more persuasive claims to British identity could contest and decline. Yet sustaining Jews in the rank of perpetual outsiders unfit to claim British identity also left Jewish merchants, and particularly ­those of Iberian extraction, f­ ree to pursue their own self-­interest wherever it led, even if that resulted in embracing commonalities with their fellow Iberians in ways that did not directly serve the British Empire. In the ­battle between ­these two empires, Spain and Britain, to create global hegemonies, Jewish merchants operated largely in the gray zones between one empire and the other, plying any argument that might prove persuasive in the circumstances. Operating largely in obscurity at the margins of empire, they nonetheless pushed at the bound­aries that surrounded them and brought Britain into contact with Spain in ways that ­were both provocative and beneficial. How they did this is something that we historians ­little understand at pres­ent; the interstices of empire, where they conducted their interimperial trade, remain terra incognita. Addison’s Spectator 495 provides the opening gambit in a discourse historians have yet to fully engage.

chapter 6

Entangled Irishman George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-­Spanish Imperial Rivalry ch ri s toph er s ch mi dt -­nowa r a

“I am Flinter . . . ​a name which is in the mouth of e­ very man, w ­ oman, and child in Spain. I am Flinter the Irishman, just escaped from the Basque Provinces and the claws of Don Carlos.”1 So boasted a red-­faced man who spoke impeccable Castilian with a foreign accent, encountered by the missionary George Borrow in Santander. George Dawson Flinter (c. 1796–1838)2 was a prominent general in the liberal armies defending the claims of the infant Isabel II against her u ­ ncle Don Carlos and his counterrevolutionary supporters in the First Carlist War (1833–40). Flinter had fallen captive at the siege of Almadén in 1836 in Andalusia, where he and his men distinguished themselves against a much larger force before fi­nally surrendering. He was marched back to the Carlist strongholds in the north of the peninsula and held in miserable conditions. He met Borrow soon a­ fter his escape. He returned to action and achieved new glories but also infamy, unjustly scapegoated by the Madrid government. In 1838, he committed suicide by slashing his throat. Borrow found a lesson in Flinter’s feats of arms and his death: “Ardent spirits of foreign climes, who hope to distinguish yourselves in the ser­vice of Spain, and to earn honours and rewards, remember the fate of Columbus, and of another as brave and as ardent—­Flinter!”3 How Flinter entered the ser­vice of Spain some twenty years earlier and what that ser­vice shows us about the entangled histories of the Spanish and



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British empires is the subject of this chapter. On the most biographical level, Flinter’s early ­career holds clues to his l­ ater iteration as an impor­tant pro-­slavery advocate and publicist in Puerto Rico in the 1820s and the 1830s, which is how I became familiar with his writings and then deci­ded to track the origins of his views and how he came to serve the Spanish monarchy.4 What he learned about revolution, race, slavery, and po­liti­cal vio­lence in the Ca­rib­bean in the 1810s, when he was based in Curaçao and then sojourned to Venezuela at the end of the Napoleonic wars, would influence his defense of slavery and Spanish sovereignty in Puerto Rico and Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish American revolutions.5 In addressing the theme of entanglements between the British and Iberian empires, Flinter’s ­career reveals telling features that extend beyond the early modern era through the age of revolutions and well into the nineteenth ­century. Th ­ ese include the deep history of Irish immigration to peninsular Spain and the Spanish colonies and naturalization as Spanish subjects; Irish military ser­vice to the Spanish crown; and Irish involvement with the strug­ gles over slavery and abolition in the Spanish colonial empire.6 In the conjuncture of the revolutionary era, Flinter’s shifting allegiances and efforts to influence opinion in both Britain and Spain shed light on the inflections to ­these deeper histories. For example, during this period, Flinter was something of an outlier, as many more of his countrymen, instead of serving the Spanish crown, actively fought against it as soldiers of fortune in Simón Bolívar’s liberating armies in New Granada. Flinter himself exercised in­ter­est­ing inversions in this period, using typically anti-­Spanish British discourses—­notably the Black Legend and the gothic novel—to attack Bolívar and to defend Spain. Fi­nally, stepping back from Flinter’s life and focusing on the Ca­rib­bean colonial situations he sought to navigate in the early nineteenth c­ entury allows us to glimpse aspects of the uneasy alliance between Britain and Spain during the Peninsular War and the Spanish American revolutions. From their perch in Curaçao, British officers voiced their support for f­ ree trade with the Spanish colonies and intimated that trade with in­de­pen­dent nations would be even better. They urged London to hold onto Curaçao ­after the defeat of Napoleon ­because its deep-­water port of Willemstad was a perfect jumping-­ off point for the economic penetration of South Amer­i­ca, as the Dutch had demonstrated in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. But they w ­ ere by no means full-­throated advocates of Venezuelan and Spanish American in­de­ pen­dence; they displayed contempt for Simón Bolívar and the revolutionaries of Tierra Firme b­ ecause of their challenge to established authority and social

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hierarchies, a response that implied sympathy for loyalism, monarchy, social deference, and the defense of empire, values to which Flinter would dedicate himself for the rest of his life in the Spanish cause. This chapter begins with an examination of the Ca­rib­bean milieu in which Flinter first actively engaged with the strug­gle over sovereignty in colonial Spanish Amer­i­ca and what this particularly intense site of imperial entanglements shows us about the paradoxical Anglo-­Spanish alliance. It ­will then turn to an analy­sis of the lessons Flinter learned in Curaçao and Venezuela and how he used them to influence British public opinion in defense of Spanish dominion in the Amer­i­cas. Fi­nally, it ­will compare Flinter’s ­career and writings to ­those of two other well-­k nown Spaniards of Irish lineage, Alejandro O’Reilly and Joseph Blanco White, who, like him, wrote at length on the topic of Spanish colonial slavery and its relationship to Spanish rule in the Amer­i­ cas. Throughout I w ­ ill call attention to the way in which the vicissitudes of Flinter’s life fit into broader patterns of how the Irish helped to entangle, and to make meaning of, the British and Spanish empires.

The British in Curaçao George Dawson Flinter was stationed in Curaçao between 1812 and 1815, serving as a ju­nior officer in the Seventh West India Regiment during the British occupation of the Dutch colony, which had commenced in 1807. That assignment coincided with the most brutal phase of the insurgency and counterinsurgency in neighboring Venezuela, historically Curaçao’s hinterland for its vast smuggling economy. The war in Venezuela disrupted trade, to the point that the island confronted famine, but Curaçao remained valuable to the British ­because it was the ideal listening post for news of the revolution as the deeply established flow of ­people between the island and mainland continued. The occupation also enabled the British to gauge French activities in the Spanish colonies, though this issue faded in relationship to the intensity of the conflict within Venezuelan colonial society.7 For example, Curaçao was the destination for loyalists and patriots (including Simón Bolívar) alike as they fled the vio­lence in the Spanish colony. Reports of Bolívar’s declaration of war to the death, news of José Tomás Boves’s ferocious counterinsurgency, and rumors of the arrival of Pablo Morillo’s expeditionary force in 1814 flowed through the reports of the British governor, the local newspaper, and, we can imagine, in the daily conversations and interactions among Cura-



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çao’s residents, the British garrison, and the many refugees that arrived over the years. Historically a site for Dutch clandestine trade to Spanish Amer­i­ca, ­Curaçao became deeply enmeshed in the geopolitics of the age of revolution. In the 1790s, ­there was division between supporters of the French Revolution and Orange royalists, accentuated with the declaration of the Batavian Republic in 1795. A slave rebellion—­the largest in Curaçao’s history, involving perhaps 2,000 out of the 12,000 slaves—­erupted on the island in the same year, possibly linked to the slave revolt in Coro on the mainland, a port closely connected to Curaçao and home to the luangos, Curaçaon slaves who had achieved freedom by fleeing to Tierra Firme. Over the next several years, Venezuelan conspiracies, such as the 1797 republican conspiracy at the port city of La Guaira, would have impor­tant Curaçaoan dimensions. The 1797 plotters, Manuel Gual and José María España, would flee to Curaçao and find temporary refuge in the home of Felipe Piar.8 At the same time, the British and French ­were contending for control of the island. In 1800, a French invasion led the Dutch governor to surrender the island to the British, who then sacked it. The British surrendered the island ­after the Treaty of Amiens (1802) but looted it again in 1805 before fi­nally taking it by force on January 1, 1807. They would remain in control u ­ ntil January 16, 1816, when they returned Curaçao to Dutch sovereignty.9 The British occupiers introduced impor­tant changes in the island’s economy by temporarily including it in the British sphere. At the same time, the occupation was marked by economic dislocation brought on by the strug­gles in Venezuela that broke out in 1811. ­Because of Tierra Firme’s turmoil, Curaçao and its dependencies—­Bonaire and Aruba—­were on the brink of starvation several times. For example, in 1814, the governor reported to London that corn was being horded in Maracaibo, and as a result the island’s slaves ­were starving, the ­cattle ­dying, and the planters had scaled back ­labor on their estates so that the slaves could give more time to their provision grounds. The cluster of small islands was saved in the end by Haitian ships arriving in 1814 and 1815 with shipments of corn, even though the governor expressed reservations about trading with the revolutionary regime.10 In addition to the economic crisis, the be­hav­ior of the occupying troops was a cause for concern. The British governor reported widespread illness so that a large part of the Seventh West India Regiment was incapacitated: “I beg to represent to your Lordship that t­ here are Ninety five Men of the Seventh West India Regiment totally unfit for Ser­vice in consequence of vari­ous

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diseases and accidents, and no prospect of them even being restored to the Ser­vice of the Regiment. I have also to observe that ­these useless men are a heavy burthen to the Regiment, as well as an enormous expense to the Pub­ ere also a burden in lic.”11 ­Those officers and soldiers who remained healthy w their own way, causing trou­ble by gambling and ­horse­whipping the locals.12 Flinter’s decision in 1815 to go to Caracas instead of returning home with his regiment perhaps seems less quixotic when seen in relation to the dearth in Curaçao and his unit’s undistinguished rec­ord. The potential riches to be had in Venezuela certainly compared favorably to the penury of his posting and the prospect of half-­pay in Britain or Jamaica.

News from Venezuela Curaçao was arid and unproductive and in dire economic straits during the revolution in Venezuela, but the island remained an invaluable source of intelligence on the course of the insurgency and counterinsurgency and the leaders of the contending forces. For example, in 1812, the first year of Flinter’s ser­vice in Curaçao, patriot refugees flocked to the island ­after the earthquake in Caracas and the retaking of the capital city by the Spanish commander Monteverde. Among them was a figure who would constantly surface in the reports from the island: Simón Bolívar. From the start, the British governors viewed him with suspicion, which would ­later turn to disgust during his reconquest of the territory in 1813. The governor Hodgson reported to London that Monteverde in Caracas was demanding information about the correspondence of Francisco de Miranda and the church plate that the patriots had smuggled out of the city during their retreat. Hodgson found both to be a source of annoyance: the circulation of Miranda’s correspondence gave the impression that Britain was supporting him, while the missing plate, “claimed by a Don S. Bolívar” who had arrived on the brig Zeloso, involved him in wrangling with Monteverde.13 In 1813, the roles of patriots and royalists w ­ ere reversed as Bolívar’s invasion from New Granada sent the royalists into flight, many landing in Curaçao: Fugitives are daily arriving from Venezuela, t­ hese unfortunate persons have met with that humane treatment, which is so exclusively a distinguishing feature in the character of Britons.



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I am sorry to say the pro­gress of Don Simon Bolivar has been marked by the most sanguinary mea­sures, all the Eu­ro­pean Spaniards who have fallen into his Power, w ­ hether in Arms or not have been put to death, and his second in command, Don Felix Rivas, is one of the most cruel and ferocious characters in existence. ­Every mark of allegiance to the M ­ other Country is thrown off, and War is declared against her; t­ hese proceedings appear to me to render my Instructions [to maintain neutrality] null.14 The reporting of Bolívar’s victories—­complete with translations of Bolívar’s proclamations—­indicated a shifting attitude among the officials in Curaçao. Miranda had been a nuisance, but Bolívar was a monster. In 1814, Hodgson communicated to London news of the massacre of royalist prisoners at La Guaira, in spite of appeals to Bolívar for mercy: “the numbers destroyed amount to about Twelve Hundred, and this horrid act was carried into execution in the most cruel and horrid manner. I transmit an Extenuating Manifesto published by the In­de­pen­dent Government but it ­will be very difficult to wipe away the foul stain, this barbarous action has so indelibly stamped on that Government.”15 The extreme vio­lence meted out to royalists, not only by Bolívar but also by lieutenants like Antonio Nicólas Briceño, shocked the British in Curaçao; so did the possibility of social revolution.16 Hodgson reported to London news of a conspiracy uncovered and suppressed by Monteverde in Caracas, in which ­people of color ­were said to play a leading role: “The Demagogues have not and perhaps never w ­ ill give up their destructive and pernicious plans, the dangerous seeds of which seem to be lodged in the minds of the Mulattos, a race whose chief propensity is ambition and aggrandizement, and who made the most of the Revolution of this unhappy p ­ eople, and it is they who are the greatest accomplices in the said Conspiracy.”17 The royalist counterinsurgency led by Boves plunged the colony into even greater disorder and vio­lence, as a Briton in Venezuela communicated to the governor in Curaçao: “The interior of the Province pres­ents only Murder, Insurrection, and Desolation. Boves, Rosette and other Spanish Partizans, spare neither age nor sex. They have raised the Slaves in Mass, giving them Liberty and Plunder for their reward. . . . ​I do not think it proper to say all I think on this subject, but my opinion is conceived in this fact, that if ­Great Britain does not immediately interfere, Venezuela is lost to the civilized World.”18 ­These repre­sen­ta­ tions of the war in Venezuela, featuring the inhuman cruelty of Bolívar and

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the specter of a social revolution driven by racial conflict, unwisely stirred up by the in­de­pen­dence leaders and then fully unleashed by the outsider Boves, would recur in Flinter’s history of the conflict, written in ser­vice of the Spanish counterrevolution, several years l­ater. Much of the news from Venezuela concerned the horrific vio­lence of the conflict. They focused particularly on Bolívar’s tactics, less so on t­ hose of the royalists, indicating British sympathy with the Spanish monarchy and the colo­ ere reflective of British colonial mentalities nial social order.19 Such attitudes w that expected barbaric be­hav­ior in the Amer­i­cas, far beyond the line of Eu­ro­ pean civility, especially in the aftermath of their own colonial debacle in North Amer­i­ca a generation earlier. The British rulers of Curaçao, and l­ater Flinter in his accounts of the war in Venezuela, instinctively sided with their Eu­ro­ pean brethren—­even the Spaniards, their longtime foes—­against the claims of Venezuela’s revolutionaries, who w ­ ere subverting legitimate authority and undermining the colony’s proper social hierarchies.20 Besides the vio­lence of the conflict and the dislike of colonial revolution, other themes emerged that call attention to the entanglements of the period, especially concerning the uneasiness of the alliance between Britain and Spain ­after 1808, no ­matter how much the British hated the spectacle of insurgency. For example, one of Monteverde’s chief concerns once he had reasserted royalist control in 1812 was to exclude British merchants from Tierra Firme. He seized British vessels and expelled British merchants. Access to the Spanish American markets would remain a point of friction between the allies throughout the period, especially as the Cádiz merchants seized on the po­liti­cal crisis as an opportunity to enhance monopolistic privileges eroded in the ­later eigh­ teenth ­century.21 The governors of Curaçao ­were sanguine about British prospects in the region when and if warfare came to an end. Military victories in Eu­rope, including the French evacuation of the Iberian Peninsula, raised the possibility that Britain would soon return the island to the Dutch, but Hodgson urged London to reconsider the island’s surrender b­ ecause of its ideal physical circumstances as a commercial hub. The port of Willemsted was “not equaled by any in ­these Seas in extent, con­ve­nience, and security, and affording protection to the Shipping in the most violent Hurricanes.” He reminded London that before the war in Venezuela, more Produce was exported from [this island] to Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca than direct from the Ports on the Spanish Main: this arose from the policy, ­adopted by the Dutch Government, in



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admitting Launches and other small Spanish Vessels into the Harbour with Cargoes, without molestation or payment of duties or fees. This shows at once the extent of the Clandestine Trade carried on, and the natu­ral result of excessive duties, laid on by the Spanish Government. It required but a few hours for vessels of the above description to reach this Harbour, laden with Coffee, Cotton, Indigo, and Cocoa, which w ­ ere bartered immediately at higher prices than could pos­si­ble have been claimed in their own Ports, for manufactured Dry Goods.22 Hodgson speculated that if Britain w ­ ere to retain the island and at the same time pressure its reluctant ally, the newly restored monarchy of Ferdinand VII, into liberalizing its commercial policies, then British trade would reap this natu­ral bounty. Of course, what Hodgson was not considering was that such policy suggestions w ­ ere the stuff that Spain’s geopo­liti­c al nightmares w ­ ere made of.23

Lessons Learned Though commerce between Curaçao and Venezuela was disrupted, the historical flow of ­peoples between the island and the continent persisted through the in­de­pen­dence strug­gles. Flinter would join that traffic as a young officer at loose ends ­after victory over France. He was twenty years old. When the British returned Curaçao to the Dutch and the Seventh West India Regiment withdrew, Flinter was listed as absent with permission.24 Like many other British and Irish officers who faced reduced circumstances on half-­pay at the end of the Napoleonic wars, Flinter opted for adventure and the chance at enrichment in the Spanish American wars.25 Unlike his fellow officers, he chose to fight not for Bolívar and in­de­pen­dence but for Ferdinand VII and empire. He married into a well-­to-do loyalist ­family—­his father-­in-­law was Don Francisco Aramburco—­and by 1819 he was actively serving Spain as an agent in Britain and Ireland by trying to thwart the recruitment of officers and soldiers for ser­vice in Bolívar’s armies and by recruiting his own royalist Irish Legion, a mea­sure that failed. According to the Duke of San Carlos, Spain’s ambassador in London with whom Flinter worked closely, the Irishman had effectively furthered Spanish interests (even though a large expedition or­ga­nized by the adventurer John Devereux was able to depart) and was fully

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worthy of rewards from the Spanish crown: naturalization and a commission in the Spanish army with the rank of col­o­nel. However, t­hese rewards w ­ ere late in coming. The Liberal revolt that forced Ferdinand VII to accept constitutional rule in 1820 was led by officers and politicians who w ­ ere tired of counterrevolutionary machinations in the Amer­i­cas and sought instead to ­settle accounts in the peninsula. Flinter suddenly found himself in the po­liti­ cal wilderness and would not be resuscitated for almost a de­cade, when ultrareactionary governing officials in Puerto Rico plucked him from obscurity.26 That Flinter had sought the rank of col­o­nel (which he would receive during his Puerto Rican sojourn) was telling: beginning in the sixteenth c­ entury, Catholic Irishmen forced from home by En­glish colonization and repression found ser­vice in the Spanish monarchy. In 1604, Philip III appointed a Protector of the Irish to manage the large influx ­after the ­Battle of Kinsale in 1602. Nobles such as the O’Neills and the O’Donnells commanded tercios that bore their names, and they received the rank of col­o­nel in the Spanish army. In the eigh­teenth ­century, the Bourbons renewed this link, forming nine Irish regiments. In the early nineteenth ­century, a significant number of Irish volunteers joined the Spanish army during the Peninsular War. Flinter was thus following a well-­worn path that entangled the Spanish and British empires over the centuries, the revolutionary era marking a par­tic­u­lar bend in the trail, as Irish veterans fought largely against the Spanish monarchy.27 His sojourn in the revolutionary Ca­rib­bean also inflected his experience and the lessons that he learned from it. Seeking to convince other Britons and Irishmen that they would be foolish to join Devereux on his expedition to Venezuela, Flinter cast the war as a gothic tale in which Bolívar and Boves between them had called into being monstrous social forces that would annihilate all vestiges of civilization, an exaggerated version of the judgments made by Curaçao’s British governors between 1812 and 1815.28 Flinter wrote at length about the revolution and counterrevolution in Venezuela during his work in Britain in 1819 to cut off the flow of mercenaries to South Amer­i­ca, publishing a broadsheet and a lengthy study as counter­parts to his lobbying and l­egal challenges.29 That year marked considerable turmoil in Britain itself, the Peterloo Massacre, so Flinter was writing for a divided society in which the dominant groups responded to popu­lar unrest with ­great vio­lence and repression. Perhaps Flinter believed that he could tap into that counterrevolutionary mood, though he did acknowledge that the allure of the in­de­pen­dence movements was ­great for the Irish and Britons. But he hoped that his reports on condi-



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tions in Venezuela would dispel the illusions that had accrued to the cause of the patriots: All eyes are directed ­towards South Amer­i­ca. From the prospect of in­de­pen­dence which that country pres­ents, thousands indulge the hope of seeing laid out, a wide extended field for commercial speculation, and o­ thers view, in the pres­ent strug­gle, an opportunity of obtaining military renown. Far be it from my intention to attempt to damp the sober calculations of the one, or the enthusiasm and romantic chivalry of the other; . . . ​I am well aware of the many obstacles I have to encounter; I have to combat the very general feeling which exists in this country in favour of South American patriots; the deci­ded predilection to e­ very t­ hing which bears the smallest semblance of freedom; and the rooted prejudice to e­ very circumstance connected with the Spanish cause. But g­ reat as ­these difficulties may appear, they ­will dwindle, like the mist before the noon-­day sun, from the touch of impartial investigation.30 To ­counter the support for the in­de­pen­dence movements, Flinter revived the debate over the Black Legend of Spanish vio­lence and cruelty, which was enjoying a re­nais­sance during the wars of in­de­pen­dence, by trying to demonstrate Spanish benevolence and the sadistic brutality of the would-be liberators.31 He also made a special appeal to the Irish who, like himself, had benefited from Spain’s generosity: “She received them into her bosom, and ­adopted them as her c­ hildren.”32 But the main thrust of the broadsheet was the clash between blacks and whites unwittingly unleashed by the revolutionaries, who proved unable to tame the furies they had freed: “No man, g­ reat and disinterested, r­ ose to reconcile ­these clashing interests, and to unite, in one irresistible mass, the whole population.”33 Instead, the Creole insurgents like Bolívar had sown the seeds of their own destruction: “When long protracted warfare s­ hall have exhausted the power of Spain, internal discord w ­ ill destroy the few surviving Creoles, and the blacks ­will be the undisputed masters of all the country. . . . ​Scarcely is a white person to be seen.”34 The fear and influence of the Haitian Revolution echoed through his violent denunciation of the in­de­pen­dence movement: “the day is not far distant, when the Caracas ­will be swayed by a sable chieftan; for since the introduction of the St. Domingo blacks in Caracas, in 1816, by the sanguinary BOLIVAR, a general spirit of destroying the whites

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pervades the slaves and ­people of colour.”35 What this meant for the British and Irish would-be liberators was that they w ­ ere furthering this social revolution, which would also consume them: “when they have proceeded too far to retrace their steps, when t­ hose very persons who have employed them (as has already happened in more than one instance) holding out to them such flattering prospects, w ­ ill abandon them, leaving them a prey to the horrors of want, privation, and sickness, in an unfriendly clime, to the inexorable fury of a horde of savage blacks.”36 Flinter filled in this sketch of Venezuela as a site of violent racial conflict and social disorder in his book-­length history of the revolution also published in En­glish in 1819 as a means of averting Irish enlistment in Bolívar’s armies. He laid the blame not only on Bolívar and the revolutionaries, as he had done in the broadsheet, but also on the preeminent royalist warlord of the counterrevolution between 1812 and 1815, the Spaniard Boves. In his narrative, Flinter appropriated the characteristic ele­ments of the Black Legend, describing in painful detail acts of extreme, and apparently gratuitous, vio­lence and cruelty, with ­great emphasis on dismemberment and torture. He especially sought to tarnish the image of Bolívar, to show his British readers that the Liberator “­will find it difficult to liberate his own name from the well earned title of a vile assassin,” an echo of Governor Hodgson’s condemnations from Curaçao.37 While he appropriated rhe­toric from the Black Legend, he also wrote in a more con­temporary key, using ele­ments of the gothic novel, yet another anti-­Spanish genre obsessed with “Latin fiends,” to defend Spain.38 In treating Boves (“a monster”39) and his irregular army of llaneros, Flinter presented the destructive counterrevolution in gothic tones, the gothic being a form that “deals centrally with paranoia, the taboo, and the barbaric, every­thing that a given culture most fears and tries hardest to repress.”40 The gothic’s “reiterated evocation of terror, disgust, and alienation” suffused Flinter’s treatment of the race war unleashed by the unscrupulous, monstrous Boves and his revolutionary homologue, Bolívar.41 A familiar setting of the gothic novel, the blood-­soaked prison or dungeon replete with chains and instruments of torture, recurred.42 Flinter filled his history with accounts of atrocities committed at Bolívar’s ­orders (for example, the commander Briceño sending to Cartagena a bag full of severed heads as a sign of victory, or Bolívar executing prisoners by taking them to sea and having them walk the plank), reversing the Black Legend discourse of Creole patriots.43 Inscribed in this telling of acts of incredible vio­lence was the racial conflict and social inversion set in motion by the



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revolution, especially ­after Bolívar had declared war to the death against the Spanish: the most despicable character, even freemen of color and slaves, might satiate their revenge on persons of the most unblemished integrity. What a heart-­rending spectacle, to behold decrepit old men, whose grey locks and venerable appearance would have excited compassion in the hearts of the most obdurate villainy, brought in from the country, and marched through the streets, tied on the backs of asses, amidst the sights and tears of their ­children, their grandchildren, and domestics, exposed to the insulting sneers of an unprincipled mob, and destined to languish their few remaining days, in misery and chains.44 Such carnivalesque scenes in which the colonial world was turned upside down became more common with the triumph of the counterrevolution headed by the humbly born Spanish immigrant Boves. By portraying Boves as an unprincipled opportunist, a resentful outsider (“when the dire spirit of rebellion inverted order, . . . ​Bobes [sic] formed the bold design of occupying that exalted station which was denied him by birth, fortune, and education”45), Flinter could deflect away from Spain the responsibility for the unequivocal cruelties committed during the counterrevolution and place them squarely on the shoulders of the plainsman and his irregular forces of cowboys recruited from the southern llanos of Venezuela: “­these ­were the soldiers, for whose atrocities, the press of ­every country in Eu­rope has groaned beneath the weight of publications, fulminating the thunder of horror and destruction against the Spanish name.”46 Boves could rally the zambos of the llano by promising plunder and vengeance upon the colonial white population that they hated and resented: “By ­these means he soon collected a formidable force of ­these lawless savages, who, regardless of ­every law of justice, and devoid of ­every humane feeling, bore down every­thing before them, with fire and sword. Men, ­women, and ­children, all who had the slightest tinge of Eu­ro­pean blood, fell indiscriminately, victims to their fury.”47 The consequence of Boves’s victories was to plunge Venezuela even further into social conflict. Faced with rout, Bolívar responded with similar vio­ lence, in one instance unleashing his colored supporters on his Spanish prisoners held in the dungeons of port city La Guaira, the episode that had so shocked Governor Hodgson in his report to London in 1814: “For this

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purpose a number of ­people of color and soldiers entered the dungeons, armed with sabres, knives, and lances; and shocking to relate, in place of putting them to immediate death, they ­were mangled in a most horrid manner, whilst the unfortunate captives begged and prayed to be put out of torture,” ­after which they ­were burned alive.48 In full-­throated gothic tones, Flinter recalled witnessing the traces of this event: “A few months ­after this shocking massacre took place, I visited the dungeons where the Spaniards suffered martyrdom; the walls and floors w ­ ere still clotted with blood, and the chains and rings which secured them to the ground still remained t­ here.”49 The arrival of Pablo Morillo at the head of thousands of metropolitan troops in 1815 “restored confidence and order, and checked the power, which the p ­ eople of color had assumed,” but Bolívar’s gains in the eastern part of the country ­after he returned from exile in Jamaica and Haiti promised to return Venezuela to that chaotic state when he and Boves and their followers had run amok.50

Entangled Irishmen In writing and acting so energetically on behalf of Spain during the Spanish American revolutions, and l­ater in life apologizing with eloquence for Puerto Rican and Cuban slavery, Flinter bore some resemblance to other Irishmen who ­were active at the intersection of British and Spanish imperial rivalries, such as the army officer and colonial official Alejandro O’Reilly (1725–94), an impor­tant advocate of reforms in the Ca­rib­bean colonies that would rejuvenate Spanish fortunes in the aftermath of crushing defeat at the hands of the British during the Seven Years’ War, and the former Catholic priest-­turned-­ Anglican Joseph Blanco White (1775–1841), a near con­temporary of Flinter, who also wrote at length about Spanish colonial rule and Antillean slavery but to quite dif­fer­ent ends. O’Reilly was born in Ireland and educated in Spain as a youth, part of the flow of Catholics to the Spanish monarchy. He joined Spain’s Hibernian Regiment as a subaltern, the beginning of a glorious military and po­liti­c al ­career that took him to Italy, Portugal, the Ca­rib­bean, and, infamously, Algiers. The disastrous Spanish invasion that he led in 1774 would always tarnish his fame. A biographer’s remark about O’Reilly’s reputation reminds one of the Spanish government scapegoating Flinter for setbacks in the Carlist War: “In his Irish origin is where some historians see the cause of the ill ­will that Spaniards almost always showed him. If in some moments he was a g­ reat



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military hero then in many ­others he was considered the cause of Spain’s military ruin.”51 Though O’Reilly succeeded where Flinter failed by entering into the most elite circles of the Spanish military and court, the two Irishmen shared an outsider status that heightened criticism against them and made them, in some instances, dispensable in spite of their accomplished ser­vice. Where their c­ areers most overlapped was in their advocacy of slavery in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean colonies. A ­ fter distinguishing himself as a commander in Spain’s invasion of Portugal during the Seven Years’ War, O’Reilly was selected to tour both Cuba and Puerto Rico and to recommend military and economic reforms to bolster the islands’ defenses, which had been shown wanting when the British seized Havana in 1762. His recommendations for reforms in Puerto Rico included jump-­starting a plantation economy, imitating small eastern Ca­rib­bean neighbors, such as Danish St. Croix, where the slave trade and sugar plantations had reaped considerable wealth: “To encourage the rapid growth of the island of San Juan de Puerto Rico, I believe it is indispensable that men of wealth establish themselves h ­ ere and set up sugar 52 mills.” Such wealth in Puerto Rico, which enjoyed all of the advantages of a plantation society except for enough enslaved workers, would benefit the Spanish crown as it sought new monies to pay for more troops, ships, and fortifications. It was therefore urgent for Madrid to countervail the policies that had limited the influx of slaves to the Ca­rib­bean settlements over the centuries.53 Bourbon officials would continue to make similar recommendations over the course of the eigh­teenth ­century, and though the island experienced significant economic and demographic growth, it was not u ­ ntil the period when Flinter landed in Puerto Rico in the 1820s that the stage had been set for a large influx of slaves and the rapid spread of sugar plantations, innovations that he would defend against British abolitionists.54 O’Reilly and Flinter ­were advocates of Spanish colonial slavery; O’Reilly saw it as an impor­tant building block in rejuvenating Spanish defenses against British imperial aggression, while Flinter would earn his keep in Puerto Rico as a pro-­slavery apologist who could ­counter new British aggressions in the form of antislavery. In contrast, Joseph Blanco White was one of the first Spanish abolitionists, strongly influenced by British patrons during the internationalization of the antislavery movement. Blanco White (José María Blanco y Crespo) was born in Seville, grand­son on his f­ather’s side of an Irish immigrant who fled the British penal laws and, in partnership with Irish cousins, set up a successful merchant ­house in the Andalusian city in the early eigh­teenth ­century. Though the ­family became increasingly Hispanicized

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through marriage, it retained its links to Ireland and Britain over the generations. Joseph became a priest instead of working in the ­family business and ­rose to some prominence as a cleric and as an enlightened figure on the fringes of the Madrid court. He deci­ded to flee his homeland in 1810 during the Peninsular War when the French occupying forces descended on Seville. He left for ­England, settled in London, and reinvented himself as Joseph Blanco White and as an Anglican.55 With the help of power­ful patrons such as Lord Holland, Blanco White supported himself as editor of El Español (1810–14), a widely read newspaper that commented on Spanish and Spanish American politics during the revolutionary crises. He also penned reports on po­liti­c al conditions for the British Foreign Office, which subsidized and disseminated El Español. Blanco White not only sought to explain Spanish conditions, ideas, and ambitions to the British; he also sought to translate British ideas for the Spanish. For example, in El Español, he firmly advocated the views of Lord Holland and o­ thers, who believed that the revolutionary government in Cádiz was most likely to retain the loyalty of the American colonies by granting them ­free trade and home rule, for which he earned ­bitter enmity among his erstwhile Spanish friends and colleagues, who ­were struggling to retain peninsular po­liti­cal supremacy over the colonies and to uphold monopolistic privileges.56 His views on slavery, likewise influenced by the British milieu, w ­ ere also untimely. Approached by the outstanding figure of the British antislavery movement, William Wilberforce, Blanco White agreed to translate into Spanish Wilberforce’s Letter on the Slave Trade (1807) for dissemination in Spain ­after the defeat of the French. The goal was to influence Spanish opinion into support for a joint treaty with Britain that would ban the slave trade to Cuba. However, his conviction that the Spanish colonial situation differed radically from the British and that Wilberforce’s evangelicalism would be unpalatable to Spanish readers led him to rewrite the work extensively. His Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos (1814) thus not only demonstrated the entanglements of the Spanish and British empires, and the role of Irish expatriates in thickening them, but also their impor­tant divergences.57 Blanco White diverged from Wilberforce’s original work in several ways to make the Bosquexo more accessible to Spaniards.58 First, he equated the condition of Spaniards ­under the yoke of Napoleon with that of African captives enslaved by Spanish and Cuban slavers. In par­tic­u­lar, by drawing parallels be-



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tween Spanish and African captives, he was channeling the plight of his own ­brother, Fernando Blanco White, a prisoner of war in France for the duration of the Peninsular War. Second, at the heart of the work was a stirring polemic with the most eloquent Cuban pro-­slavery advocate, the planter and official Francisco de Arango y Parreño. Fi­nally, he argued that the surging traffic to Cuba was an anomaly within the deep history of the Spanish colonial empire, which had always distanced itself from direct involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and relied far less on slave l­abor and the plantation system than did rival empires like the British and French. The examples of constant slave unrest in neighboring Saint Domingue/Haiti and Jamaica should serve as warnings to the Cuban slave trade’s defenders.59

Irish Intermediaries in Anglo-­Spanish Imperial Rivalries Blanco White’s efforts to make British antislavery appealing and comprehensible to a Spanish public is emblematic of how Irish expatriates mediated between the Spanish and British empires, not only entangling them but also attempting to make meaningful and sympathetic that which might appear alien and repulsive. Flinter worked in the same vein but for dif­fer­ent purposes: to convince Britons of the justice of Spanish rule in the Amer­i­cas and the humaneness of Spanish colonial slavery. Both men w ­ ere apt agents of imperial mediation ­because they w ­ ere well versed in the languages, histories, and politics of the rival empires. That both men ­were of Irish origin was no coincidence. Flinter’s ­career in par­tic­u­lar reflected long-­standing patterns of Irish agency in entangling Britain, Spain, and their overseas colonies; it also showed the inflections to t­ hese patterns during the age of revolutions. Flinter would become one in a long line of Irish col­o­nels in the ser­vice of the Spanish military, though as a likely Protestant, the conditions of his recruitment w ­ ere quite distinct from ­those of the Catholic nobles, soldiers, and merchants driven from their homeland in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, like the families of Alejandro O’Reilly and Joseph Blanco White. In British-­occupied Curaçao, strangely at first glance, he could see his opportunity for advancement and enrichment, despite the horrific news from Venezuela that flowed into the island. However, Flinter was like many other Irishmen and Britons who flocked to South Amer­i­c a to fight in the wars of in­de­pen­dence, especially in Caracas and Cartagena, at the end of the

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Napoleonic wars in Eu­rope. Confronted by half-­pay ­after 1815, t­hese men sought wealth and glory in the Amer­i­cas, though Flinter stood out for his ser­vice to the crown, rather than to Bolívar’s armies. His affiliation with the Spanish monarchy appears less strange when seen in the context of the long history of Irish ser­vice to Spain and naturalization as Spanish subjects. Moreover, in the revolutionary Ca­rib­bean, his opposition to the Venezuelan liberation movement partook of the views of the British rulers of Curaçao and of the generally counterrevolutionary outlook of the British elite in the early nineteenth c­ entury. The British occupation of Curaçao illustrates the tensions and adhesions in the Spanish and British alliance that began in 1808. British governors informed London that the island was an excellent base for British trade with the Spanish colonies, which Spanish governors in turn sought to ban. But even though they w ­ ere open to smuggling, British governors w ­ ere sympathetic to Spanish loyalism and hostile to the revolutionary in­de­pen­dence movements and the disorder they reaped. In other words, although their economic interests ­were diametrically opposed, the British and Spanish monarchies and their colonial agents shared counterrevolutionary views about social and po­liti­cal order in the revolutionary era, clearly articulated in British responses to events in Venezuela as news of them reached Curaçao. Flinter as publicist would neatly emphasize this convergence and defend the Spanish monarchy by deploying British literary genres that w ­ ere usually anti-­Spanish, the Black Legend and the gothic novel, against the leaders of the colonial insurgency. If popu­lar sentiment supported Latin American in­de­pen­dence, as he suggested in his 1819 broadsheet, he could be confident that the ruling classes w ­ ere unsympathetic to revolution. Fi­nally, Flinter’s subsequent c­ areer in the Spanish Ca­rib­bean as an advocate for colonial slavery, like Alejandro O’Reilly several de­cades before him, highlights a point of inflection in the entanglements and engagements between the Iberian and British empires in the nineteenth ­century. In the first half of the ­century, Britain was diverging from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian monarchies by abolishing the slave trade to its colonies and seeking to suppress the transatlantic trade altogether, indicated by Blanco White’s translation and rewriting of Wilberforce.60 In contrast, Spain, Portugal, and Brazil become more committed to slave trafficking than ever before, the number of captives arriving in Brazil and Cuba reaching unpre­ce­dented heights. Nonetheless, this divergence brought more intimate entanglements b­ ecause anti–­slave trade treaties, even if ineffectual in actually stopping the traffic, gave



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Britain new diplomatic, naval, and l­egal leverage in the Iberian world, such as the mixed commissions that adjudicated the treaties in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, the very condition of mid-­nineteenth-­century Iberian pro-­ slavery lit­er­a­ture, of which Flinter’s writings ­were especially ­adept examples, was the Atlantic-­wide conflict with the Royal Navy and British antislavery movement over the fate of the transatlantic slave trade.61

chapter 7

Planters and Powerbrokers George J. F. Clarke, Interracial Love, and Allegiance in the Revolutionary Circum-­Caribbean ca meron   b. s t ra ng

Between the 1780s and 1820s, East Florida was ground zero for a set of intimate, bloody, and international relationships that entangled the declining Spanish Empire with United States imperialism. ­These connections centered around Florida’s landed elites, ethnically diverse white men who mediated between contending powers, maintained some semblance of order, and enabled Spain, outlaw republics, and, to at least some extent, the United States to control and know the province. ­These planter-­powerbrokers w ­ ere primarily loyal not to any of ­these empires or republics but to Florida. George J. F. Clarke (1774–1836) was a Florida patriot and man of science, and he had remarkable success securing Floridians’ support for, or rallying them against, a dizzying array of transnational po­liti­cal movements through which imperial officials and other would-be rulers sought to integrate East Florida into broader Atlantic or hemispheric geopo­liti­c al visions. Anglo-­ American and Spanish American in­de­pen­dence movements, the Atlantic-­ wide rush to capitalize on the unraveling Spanish Empire, and U.S. imperialism all challenged Clarke and other Floridians to realign their allegiances and define their priorities during the 1810s.1 And t­hese elite Floridians’ choices mattered. Officials’ and revolutionaries’ efforts to defend and establish governments in Florida depended on incorporating or overturning the local authority



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and knowledge of elite powerbrokers. This was also, I would suggest, true throughout the greater Caribbean—­a region that stretched from Brazil to ­Virginia—­during the age of revolutions: overthrowing empires, establishing republics, and the state-­building efforts of both Atlantic and regional powers centered around winning the support of influential planters or, when that proved impossible, destroying them.2 Clarke and other elite Floridians viewed Spain, the United States, and in­de­pen­dence movements throughout the Amer­i­c as within a single unit of analy­sis.3 For Floridians, interimperial entanglements ­were a ­matter of course. Florida was central and the empires and fledgling republics of the Atlantic world ­were outside powers with which they had to negotiate or fight in an effort to keep northeastern Florida the way they loved it: a place where slave-­ owning whites’ mastery was not limited by prohibitions against publicly enjoying interracial intimacies. Clarke supported Spanish rule b­ ecause it made Florida a place where slavery was secure but where ­free blacks, particularly ­those in his ­family, nevertheless had rights and social standing.4 Clarke knew that U.S. rule would destroy this Florida. He thus strove to forestall U.S. domination and, when that failed, to convince Anglo-­A mericans that blacks and Indians ­were not inherently inferior. Economic interests did m ­ atter to Florida’s landed elites as they constructed their allegiances during Florida’s age of revolutions. But Clarke and other wealthy Anglo-­Spaniards considered protecting Spanish Florida’s relatively tolerant way of life and, thus, their own beloved black ­family members, to be a higher priority.5

* * * George J. F. Clarke’s history was in many ways the history of late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth-­century Florida. He was born to British parents in British Florida and baptized into the Church of E ­ ngland. The Clarke ­family transcended imperial bound­aries a­ fter Britain transferred Florida back to Spain as part of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Clarke, three of his siblings, and his m ­ other— an Irish Spanish Catholic—­opted to remain in once-­again-­Spanish Florida. In 1785, Jorge Clarke was baptized as a Catholic, and he and his Floridian siblings would all grow up to be or marry Spanish civil and military officials in Cuba, Eu­rope, or Florida: maintaining familial bonds throughout disparate parts of the Spanish Atlantic prob­ably reinforced the Clarkes’ shared allegiance to Spain.6 Although only a handful of Anglos remained in Florida

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a­ fter the 1784 change of flags, more soon came in response to government initiatives to develop the province, and they quickly emerged as the largest contingent of its landed elite.7 Clarke’s early ­career, economic pursuits, and official positions molded him into a respected leader and able go-­between. He first learned the po­liti­cal and commercial arts between 1786 and 1793 as an apprentice to Panton, Leslie, & Co., one of the region’s most influential powerbrokers. From its base in Spanish Florida, this British firm controlled the Indian trade, and a significant amount of po­liti­cal power, in southeastern North Amer­i­ca by navigating multiple cultural and po­liti­cal bound­aries. During the early 1800s, Clarke began to build a fortune through the same diverse array of agricultural, extractive, and commercial pursuits that made Florida’s other white elites rich and power­ ful. Florida’s landowners exploited slave l­abor to build large ranching and lumbering operations as well as to grow indigo, oranges, or cotton. As merchants, they benefited from Floridian officials’ willingness to turn a blind eye to illicit trade, and as in other parts of Spanish Amer­i­ca, families that could si­mul­ta­neously engage in Atlantic commerce and tap into inland resources through slave ­labor exercised significant economic and po­liti­c al influence.8 Clarke owned twenty-­three slaves in 1815 and had a thousand-­acre ­cattle ranch, a tannery, an orange grove, thousands of acres of timberland, and a horse-­ drawn sawmill of his own invention. All told, he owned some 33,000 acres in Spanish East Florida and several urban lots in Fernandina (a new city on Amelia Island) and Saint Augustine. Much of the reason that he was able to accumulate so much property was that Spanish governors granted him land as a reward for civil and military ser­vice. A ­ fter moving to Fernandina in 1808, Clarke served as an official timber measurer, surveyor general, census taker, customs agent, public interpreter, militia commander, and, a­ fter 1816, captain, judge, and deputy governor of northern Florida. Many of ­these positions enabled Clarke to mediate power between Spanish officials in Saint Augustine and the diverse inhabitants of Amelia Island and the Georgia border region.9 Clarke’s familial connections cemented his attachment to Spanish Florida. Throughout the Spanish Atlantic—­and particularly in the borderland regions of North Amer­i­ca where Spanish officials sought to secure the allegiance of Anglo-­A mericans—­patriotism began at the local and intimate levels and was often defined in terms of love. Emotional and po­liti­c al attachment to Spain emerged from an individual’s love of a par­tic­u­lar part of the empire and the ­people in it b­ ecause ­those relationships embodied one’s interests. Th ­ ese



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local bonds then formed the social and ­legal foundations for enjoying the rights and fulfilling the responsibilities of a Spanish subject.10 For Clarke, t­hese patriotism-­engendering intimacies all involved Afro-­Floridians, and luckily for him, the laws and customs of Spanish Florida made manumission relatively easy and offered f­ ree blacks at least some l­egal protections. Th ­ ese laws had their roots in medieval Spain but became particularly impor­tant in Florida, where Spanish officials offered runaways from South Carolina and Georgia freedom in hopes of gaining loyal settlers and fighters at their Anglo rivals’ expense.11 Clarke purchased a w ­ oman named Flora from John Leslie (of Panton, Leslie, & Co.) in 1797 and manumitted her that same year. Although they w ­ ere never officially married, an 1814 census identified Flora as George’s “esposa,” not his ­ ill, “mujer.”12 Clarke and Flora had eight ­children, and as Clarke noted in his w he “acknowledged, freed, raised, and educated [them] as my c­ hildren; and bestowed on them my surname.” A ­ fter Flora died, Clarke developed a relationship with the enslaved Hannah, with whom he had four more ­children. Clarke provided all of his c­ hildren with bequests. He also ordered the executors of his w ­ ill to buy the freedom of Hannah and her c­ hildren and to invest “in healthy grown negroes, and convey them to the said Hannah. . . . ​ I consider the investment in negroes in t­hese Southern countries the most lucrative, sure ­simple investment in property that can be found.”13 Claiming that somebody loved somebody is tricky, and this issue becomes even trickier when the relationship crosses racial bound­aries in a slave society. We cannot know the extent to which Clarke forced Flora or Hannah into sex; we cannot know how ­these individuals understood what it meant to be in a loving relationship; nor can we assume that the unequal power dynamic precluded deep attachment on ­either side. Clarke left no letters that spelled out how he felt about Flora or Hannah, and by suggesting that he was motivated by love, I risk casting Clarke—­a hard-­bitten merchant and slave master—in an overwarm light. But as Annette Gordon-­Reed put it, “in the absence of words, actions can be quite telling,” and Clarke’s be­hav­ior suggests that he did care deeply enough for his black lovers and kin that t­hese bonds could constitute his attachment to Spanish Florida. Clarke had lasting sexual relationships with Flora and Hannah, freed Flora immediately ­after acquiring her, and gave their c­ hildren his name and fought to secure their inheritance.14 Clarke also left writings that hint at his attraction. In 1823, he published a meditation on “beauty in a female face” and concluded that t­ here was “no rule to go by in our estimates of beauty, on which nations differ in the general as individuals in the minutiae.”15 Spanish Florida was a place

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where Clarke could flaunt his admiration for what­ever kind of face he wanted. This degree of mastery was unmatched in the United States, where even a power­ful slave owner such as Thomas Jefferson—­who, like Clarke, was a planter, a man of science, an official, and engaged in an interracial relationship—­had to hide his love away. And Clarke was by no means the only slave owner in Spanish Florida who loved black w ­ omen and their mixed-­race c­ hildren. The most out­spoken of ­these was Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., a planter and slave trader who married a Wolof w ­ oman in an African ceremony, enjoyed sexual relationships with other black ­women, and emancipated their ­children. ­A fter the United States’ acquisition of Florida in 1821, Kingsley penned pro-­slavery yet antiracism essays in an effort to convince U.S. officials to maintain the three-­caste system of whites, ­free blacks, and slaves that had structured Florida—­and, he argued, prevented slave rebellion—­during the Spanish era. Kingsley also authored a petition to the U.S. Congress against the strictly racialized ­legal codes that the United States was imposing on Florida. George Clarke and his b­ rother Charles, who had six mixed-­race c­ hildren of his own, w ­ ere among the Floridians to sign their support.16 Both George and Charles, who commanded the “Com­pany of Pardos and Morenos,” held prominent positions and used their influence to support their extended families and patronize the province’s black community.17 Their relationships with black ­women augmented the Clarkes’ influence by generating kinship networks through which they could perform po­liti­cal, economic, and military power.18 ­These relationships made them loyal to Florida, where their ­family bonds w ­ ere grounded, and to Spain, which enabled this par­tic­u­lar kind of ­family to be a source of power and wealth. The Clarke ­brothers’ civil and military efforts during the 1810s w ­ ere aimed at ensuring the safety of their interracial families and, therefore, perpetuating Spanish governance. The United States—­like Spain, France, and Britain—­was vying for power in the Gulf South during the early 1800s. In 1812, federally backed filibusters worked to take advantage of Spain’s instability in the years a­ fter Napoleon’s 1808 removal of King Ferdinand VII to foment a revolution in Spanish Florida that would pave the way for U.S. annexation.19 General George Mathews, the leader of this campaign, had President James Madison’s tacit support. But Mathews believed the cooperation of Florida’s landed elite key to success. He convinced some prominent Floridians to rally to the Patriot cause, including the rancher Lodowick Ashley and the planter John Houston McIntosh. Clarke



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would grumble ­later that “­after applying to e­ very one ­else within his reach, [Mathews] addressed himself to John H. McIntosh, a wealthy man, and of good education, but not influential with the government or the p ­ eople.”20 Despite Clarke’s dismissal of McIntosh’s credentials as a powerbroker, McIntosh—­who owned plantations in both Georgia and Florida—­pulled enough clout with the poor white settlers along the Saint Mary’s River that ­these “rag-­a-­muffins from the fag-­end of Georgia” followed him to victory in a bloodless conquest of Fernandina, Clarke’s primary residence.21 The facts that “the Patriots (as they style themselves)” named McIntosh director of East Florida during their constitutional convention and that the Spanish governor offered Seminole warriors $1,000 for his scalp further attest to McIntosh’s recognized influence.22 Mathews, McIntosh, and other Patriot leaders made ­every effort to win the allegiance of East Florida’s other wealthy inhabitants. They offered land to supporters, threatened to confiscate the property of any who resisted their revolution, and promised to protect both the lumbering rights and “freedom from all the American restrictions on commerce” that had made rich Floridians rich.23 The Patriots also played to Black Legend notions of Spanish ignorance and tyranny: their constitution of July  17, 1812, boasted that “it might have been expected that a ­people who neither idolized their priest nor could think it an honor to lick the dust from the feet of their oppressors . . . ​ would have been the first in the Spanish territory to declare themselves in­de­ pen­dent.”24 But Clarke was not swayed, and from 1811 to 1813, he used his considerable influence to challenge the Patriots’ si­mul­ta­neously revolutionary and imperial designs. Since 1808, he had been a prominent figure in Fernandina, a city that had boomed as a center of smuggling and slave trading following the United States’ prohibition of the foreign slave trade. And when McIntosh’s forces loomed outside the city, Spain’s overwhelmed military officers looked to Clarke and a few other landholders as their “Embassy.”25 He tried to buy time through meetings with Patriot leaders, the mayor of Saint Mary’s, Georgia, and the U.S. Navy, which had “five Gun Boats staring us in the face.” A naval officer balked when Clarke asked if the United States backed the Patriots, and Clarke got ­little more than “argumentary talk” out of McIntosh. But Clarke was able to negotiate a bloodless surrender a­ fter it became clear that “we must submit or die,” and he personally carried the white flag into the Patriot camp.26 Clarke’s public support for Spain chafed the Patriots, and they sought to make an example of him: they sent him death threats that forced

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him to flee Fernandina and ransacked his lumber mill, ­houses, cotton ware­ house, and Matanzas River plantation.27 Clarke took pride in his brains, and he argued that being smart qualified him as a powerbroker who could secure Floridians’ allegiance to Spain and rally them against the Patriots. He explained to Governor Juan José de Estrada that he needed to remain in the Saint Mary’s River region b­ ecause the inhabitants would feel “left out in the cold” if they w ­ ere to “see themselves abandoned by t­ hose persons that . . . ​can form their head,” that is, men like Clarke who, “with a ­little bit of cunning,” could direct the ­people to Spain’s advantage. Clarke was clear that his own “greater enlightenment” enabled him to rally the inhabitants for Spain “­because, speaking cleverly [ingeniosamente], the ­people ­here are principally ignorant.” The Patriots feared him, Clarke boasted, b­ ecause “our enemies do not overlook the significance of the saying that ‘among the blind the one-­eyed man is king.’ ”28 Clarke sent regional and international intelligence to the Spanish governors in Saint Augustine to bolster their re­sis­tance to the Patriots. He supplied Estrada and Sebastián Kindelán y O’Regan, who took charge in June  1812, with details about the movements and numbers of the ­enemy forces, the success of the governor’s ploy to pit the Seminoles against the intruders, potential spies in Saint Augustine, and the pillaging campaign of the “celebrado Rey de los Crackers.”29 Clarke also sent news from the United States and the wider world to Saint Augustine, much of which he gleaned from Georgian newspapers. He reported that “the situation of the United States,” which was in the ­middle of its own war with Britain, “is critical:—­Without ships, without money, and without ­union among its ­people; its coasts covered with En­glish ships . . . ​its sides infested by the Indians that are attacking from Canada to Florida; and its center about to be a second San Domingo [­after the British deploy] regiments of morenos they have in t­ hese Indies!”30 Clarke even kept the governor abreast of the latest happenings in Spain, sharing the good news that Rus­sian and En­glish victories had obliged Napoleon to withdraw from Iberia.31 As Clarke well understood, the Patriot War was part of the histories of the United States and of the Spanish Empire si­mul­ta­neously: the disorder brought about in the Spanish Atlantic by Napoleon’s conquest made U.S. expansion into Latin Amer­i­ca pos­si­ble. Clarke filled his reports with information on Floridians’ allegiances and, not accidently, his own influence over their loyalty and his value as a source of po­liti­cal knowledge. In 1811, for example, Clarke got one Dr. James Hall drunk—­Hall’s “notorious weakness” made him a “shure [sic] channel” for



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information—­and heard that “at least three fourths of this province is desirous of and ready for an American government.” Clarke held that this “is very far from being the case.” On the basis of his own observations, Clarke argued that “however [the inhabitants’] principals might tend ­under other circumstances, the rapid progression they are making t­ oward wealth through the medium of lumber inshures [sic] them ­under the pres­ent: self-­interest being the most dominant impulse in man, Generally.”32 But Clarke’s own interests—­and t­ hose of McIntosh and other Patriots—­ were more than financial. They w ­ ere racial. McIntosh sought to establish a government that would curtail the rights of ­free blacks and, when pos­si­ble, enslave them. When describing the “tribunal” that McIntosh established to judge “the c­ auses of the Republic of Florida,” Clarke lamented how McIntosh had “sentenced and executed the sale of two ­free blacks [morenos libres] of this province that committed no other crime than being moreno libre (­father and son) . . . ​which indignity was supported by the military authority of the United States. . . . ​They say that no moreno nor gente de color ­will be left with liberty that come into their hand; but I hope to God that ­those villains ­will not catch many to judge.”33 Clarke saw the freedom of Florida’s ­free blacks as a reason to wage war and, albeit for dif­fer­ent reasons, so did McIntosh. As McIntosh explained to Monroe in a failed bid for the president’s continued support, “if we are abandoned, what ­will be the situation of our southern states, with [black soldiers] in the neighborhood? St. Augustine, the ­whole province, ­will be the refuge for fugitive slaves, and from thence emissaries can and no doubt ­will be detached, to bring about a revolt of the black population in the States. A nation [Spain] that can stir up savages around your western frontiers ­will hesitate but ­little to introduce the horrors of St. Domingo into your southern country.”34 Anglos in Spanish Amer­i­ca and the United States tied their loyalties to their love or fear of blacks. As the Patriots lost ground—­largely through the efforts of Seminole and black fighters—in late 1812 and eventually returned Fernandina to Spain in May 1813, Spanish officials faced a new prob­lem: how to govern the restless population of a war-­devastated province that was itself a small part of the restless population of Spain’s war-­devastated empire.35 The hoped-­for answer lay in the constitution of 1812. The constitution was the work of pan-­imperial delegates and it limited the king’s authority, entrusted the unicameral Cortes with decisive power, enfranchised a larger percentage of the male population than any con­temporary representative government, and “transferred po­liti­cal power to the local level” by allowing towns with more than a thousand residents

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to form municipal governments.36 Clarke spread word of the constitution and his own En­glish translation of it to both loyalists and insurgents and reported in December  1812 “that the news of the new constitution of happy Spain . . . ​makes [the Patriots] sigh; and they confess that the Spanish citizens are more f­ree than the citizens of the United States.”37 Clarke prob­ably endorsed the constitution ­because its rules concerning black inhabitants corresponded with his own priorities. The constitution, like Clarke, upheld the institution of slavery. And while it excluded most African-­descended individuals from citizenship, it did extend this privilege u ­ nder certain circumstances, including civil or military ser­vice to Spain, legitimate birth, and the possession of useful offices or talents.38 The members of Clarke’s extended ­family would have easily met t­ hese requirements, especially considering Clarke’s personal influence. Other Floridians seemed to share Clarke’s zeal for the constitution. According to Governor Kindelán, the diverse vecinos of Fernandina broke into a flurry of patriotic cele­brations ­after they swore to the constitution in May 1813. Yet Kindelán denied the Fernandina district full status as a municipality and, therefore, extended only the constitution’s most basic aspects to its inhabitants. Instead, the governor looked to the Spanish tradition of negotiated authority to administer Amelia Island. He appointed two of the province’s landed elites, Philip Yonge and Francis Philip Fatio Jr., to act as Capitanes de Partido, an office that the governors in Havana had long used to mediate between isolated populations and the imperial bureaucracy. According to Kindelán, Yonge was an ideal Floridian powerbroker: he was “attached to the Holy Cause that we defend, born in the Province u ­ nder the En­glish domination, Speaks both languages, . . . ​and deserves the confidence of the Inhabitants, who are composed almost entirely of En­glishmen, Scots, and Irishmen.”39 Perhaps ironically, Ferdinand VII’s abrogation of the constitution in 1814 did not foment the same revolutionary reaction in Florida as it did in other parts of Spanish Amer­i­ca ­because the governor’s co-­option of local powerbrokers was, once again, in keeping with the mode of negotiated governance that had ordered the Spanish monarchy for centuries.40 Kindelán’s plan had brought Spanish rule back to Fernandina, but it would be up to Clarke to develop and oversee a system of negotiated authority in the Saint Mary’s River region, which had remained a chaotic holdout for partisans of the Republic of Florida and a hub for “bad men” from Georgia. In 1816, Spaniards feared that the Patriots would once more try to seize Amelia Island, and Clarke took it upon himself to broker power between



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Governor José Coppinger and the “­people of the main,” whom Clarke had “influence among.” So he “proposed a plan of reconciliation and re-­establishment of order” and, along with Zephaniah Kingsley and Henry Yonge, or­ga­nized a meeting. They “knew that nothing short of an election of officers would subdue ­those p ­ eople . . . ​and that was a course opposite to the princi­ple of the Spanish government. However, extraordinary cases require extraordinary remedies; and . . . ​I provided several copies of a set of laws adapted to their circumstances.” Clarke’s plan was to welcome the region back into the province as a semi-­independent polity in which he would be the de facto regional governor and the ­people would maintain at least nominal allegiance to Spain. Clarke, Kingsley, and Yonge met with the “mob,” and “in a few hours a territory containing about one-­half the population of East Florida [some 1500 souls] was brought to order.” As captain and judge of “the Northern District of East Florida,” Clarke instituted a system of “fines, flogging, and banishment . . . ​not as a law of Spain, but as a special compact of the p ­ eople.” He argued that this l­egal system brought more order to the Upper and Lower Saint Mary’s Districts than “a board of l­awyers, and a w ­ hole wheelbarrow of law books.”41 The strength of this arrangement would be tested in 1817 amidst Gregor MacGregor’s conquest of Fernandina (in the names of the Republics of Venezuela, Mexico, Nueva Granada, and Buenos Aires), the French revolutionary Luis Aury’s subsequent command in the name of Mexico, and, fi­ nally, the United States’ occupation of Amelia Island. MacGregor had been an officer with both Francisco de Miranda’s and Simón Bolívar’s forces before arriving in the United States, where merchants backed his scheme to revolutionize Florida. ­ A fter establishing East Florida’s in­ de­ pen­ dence from Spain, MacGregor planned to offer the province to the United States or Britain as part of their broader competition over the fraying edges of Spain’s empire.42 MacGregor intimidated Fernandina’s commandant into submission and, on June 29, 1817, took control over the city, proclaiming that this day “­will be forever memorable in the annals of the in­de­pen­dence of Spanish Amer­i­ca.”43 Amelia Island became, at root, a pirate redoubt that took advantage of Amelia’s proximity to Ca­rib­bean and Atlantic shipping routes to profit from seizing Spanish ships and selling their cargo, particularly slaves, into Georgia. French naval veteran and circum-­Caribbean pirate Luis Aury—­who had also served with Bolívar—­rose to power in Fernandina shortly ­after his motley crew of black and white French West Indians arrived in September.44 Clarke and other Spanish officers made some efforts to oust this new Republic of

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Florida. But Spain had become too weak to keep t­ hese smugglers from operating inside their territory, a circumstance that U.S. officials used to justify seizing Amelia on Christmas Eve, 1817, and holding it u ­ ntil Spain sold West and East Florida.45 For the Floridians caught in the eye of this storm, the bound­aries between Spanish American revolutions, circum-­Caribbean adventuring, and U.S. imperialism would have been difficult to distinguish. MacGregor and Aury took time away from privateering to attempt to win the allegiance of Floridians to their Spanish American republic. MacGregor thought that he could secure Amelia Islanders’ attachment by protecting their property, and despite coming to Florida with antislavery ideals, he tried to bring more Georgians to his cause by promising that Florida would not grant asylum to runaway slaves from the United States.46 Aury preferred revolutionary rhe­toric. He told the inhabitants of Amelia—as a preamble to declaring martial law, naturally—­that “we are republicans from princi­ple . . . ​ we have come h ­ ere to plant the tree of liberty, to foster ­free institutions, and to wage war against the tyrant of Spain, the oppressor of Amer­i­ca, and ­enemy to the rights of man.”47 But according to Clarke and other observers, most north Floridians remained loyal to Spain: they w ­ ere satisfied with the semiautonomous regional government that Clarke had or­g a­n ized and administered.48 Clarke fled to the town of Saint Mary’s, Georgia, shortly ­a fter MacGregor’s arrival, but he nevertheless remained the most influential figure in securing north Floridians’ allegiance, coordinating their opposition, and funneling local and international knowledge to the governor in Saint Augustine. MacGregor was, in fact, well aware of Clarke’s importance and made multiple attempts to bribe him into supporting the Republic of Florida. Clarke rejected ­these offers “with scorn,” so MacGregor put a $1,000 bounty on his head.49 Clarke returned to Florida to rally volunteers from the border districts to retake Amelia Island and, he l­ater claimed, “­every man turned out, well equipped, not excepting the superannuated.”50 But t­ hese militiamen ­were “farmers used to ­rifles and fighting in dense woods, not cannon and forts,” and they refused to storm Fernandina’s fortifications.51 Despite ­these martial setbacks, Clarke remained a tireless knowledge broker: he collected intelligence from spies and sent Governor Coppinger news about MacGregor’s and Aury’s movements, infighting among the filibusters, and the pro-­Spanish sentiment of Floridians. Clarke was also a propagandist. He sent “a long piece” to Savannah newspapers refuting MacGregor’s allegations about “the character of the inhabitants of this province, ­because it is essential



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to his plans that the United States . . . ​believe that we desire their coming, and that we have united with them for bringing a revolution, not an invasion.”52 Clarke’s information networks blurred national bound­aries further ­after the United States took control of Fernandina in December.53 He could fi­nally return to Amelia Island, and he kept Coppinger informed about the conduct of the occupying force at Fernandina and General Andrew Jackson’s campaigns against Pensacola and the Seminoles. Coppinger valued Clarke’s knowledge. As his province collapsed around him, Coppinger sought to ensure that Clarke could keep up his intelligence work ­because it could help Spain endure “the storms” that threatened “our po­liti­cal existence in Florida.”54 U.S. officers must have agreed for, in October 1818, they accused Clarke of being a “spy” and kicked him out of Fernandina, forcing him to paddle back to Saint Mary’s in a canoe during swells so high that he had to undress “in readiness for a swim.”55 But amidst all of this international intrigue, Clarke also proved ­eager to promote natu­ral knowledge. From Saint Mary’s, Georgia, Clarke extended Spain’s welcome to an expedition of naturalists from Philadelphia’s Acad­emy of Natu­ral Sciences—­a team including William McClure, Thomas Say, George Ord, and Titian Ramsey Peale—­that chose this chaotic moment to study Florida’s insects, plants, and birds.56 Predictably, the threat of native vio­lence during the First Seminole War soon forced them to abandon their expedition: Say wrote that “in consequence of this most cruel & inhuman war that our government is unrigh­teously and unconstitutionally waging against t­ hese poor wretches whom we call savages, our voyage of discovery was rendered abortive.”57 Clarke could not protect Spanish Florida and its occupants from the overlapping forces of the Spanish Empire’s disintegration and the racial vio­ lence that spread hand in hand with the United States. Clarke was not a huge fan of the United States’ incorporation of East Florida in 1821, but he continued to serve as a po­liti­cal and intellectual go-­ between in an effort to maintain his own influence and promote the prosperity of Florida. He complained that the United States brought “an iron and non-­descript administration, that . . . ​drove off . . . ​several hundred of [Florida’s] old inhabitants in sheer disgust.”58 Although this population reduction was bad eco­nom­ically, it made Clarke even more unique as a potential powerbroker. He stressed to U.S. officers that he had the Saint Mary’s inhabitants’ “confidence, their devotion, and their support,” adding that t­hese settlers produced “three-­fourths of the agricultural interest of the w ­ hole province” despite a de­cade of “revolutionary broils with government, forced upon

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us by foreigners in their over-­strained assiduity for our welfare, gagging us with freedom, the most f­ ree, civilized ­people perhaps in the world.”59 He also reassured border Floridians that, despite having no official position in the territorial government, he would continue to represent their interest with the province’s latest overlords.60 Clarke justified his willingness to facilitate U.S. rule by claiming that he acted first and foremost as a Florida patriot. In an 1823 letter to secretary of state John Quincy Adams, Clarke announced that “East Florida is the land of my nativity, it has been the theatre of my life, and I expect it to be the depository of my bones.” Clarke concluded this boast with a plea for patronage. “I presume,” he told Adams, “that he who without stipend faithfully served his country for 20 odd years, thrice bore a part in saving it from the evils of revolution . . . ​­under one government, would not feel less its friend when fairly transferred to another.”61 Adams was unmoved, and Clarke never became an agent of the U.S. government. Clarke’s days as an official powerbroker w ­ ere done, yet he nevertheless promoted the interests of U.S. officials and intellectuals by acting as a source of agricultural, medical, and ethnographic knowledge. As one author put it in 1821, Clarke had “resided from his infancy in Florida, and possesses more local information respecting it than perhaps any other person.”62 Yet Clarke’s knowledge was not simply local; it emerged from the overlapping contexts of being an Anglo-­Spanish Floridian, a denizen of the circum-­Caribbean, and a Spanish American. ­A fter he moved back to Saint Augustine in 1823, Clarke devoted himself to experimental agriculture and, ­under the name “A Native Floridian,” circulated his observations in Floridian and Southern newspapers. He promoted a Minorcan method of ripening figs, Seminole modes of cultivating and pro­ cessing arrowroot that he had learned from enslaved blacks, and Florida itself as “the only tropical climate within the pale of the United States.”63 But Clarke also introduced agronomic knowledge from the wider circum-­Caribbean. He stressed that Mexican Indians’ “floating garden[s]” ­were “examples of what can be done by ingenuity and industry in the management of w ­ ater,” encouraged the cultivation of “Havana Cigar tobacco,” and advertised the advantages of introducing Mexican maguey and fermenting pulque, a liquor “peculiar to New Spain [and] consequently unknown to the world; and this very novelty would add to [its] value, and greatly to the éclat of Florida.”64 Clarke even looked to Africa and native Amer­i­ca to chastise white agriculturalists for their inefficiency and asserted that white natu­ral phi­los­o­phers w ­ ere no more quali-



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fied than black or native farmers to explain fundamental botanical pro­cesses: “what do we know . . . ​that analy­sis has discovered to us? Nothing. ­Will we then pretend to understand spiritual and ethereal agency in the pro­cesses of vitality, nutrition, gestation, and reproduction? ­Here the sage and the savage stop together, and with an involuntary exclamation acknowledge an incomprehensible God.”65 Clarke’s transnational contexts allowed him to bring new agronomic knowledge to the United States while also calling scientific agriculturalists out for the arrogance of claiming to be more capable of understanding nature than blacks or Indians. Clarke also introduced medical knowledge from the Spanish Ca­rib­bean into the United States and used medicine as a basis for ethnographic analyses of white Floridians. He suggested that several medicinal plants—­including Balsam Peru and ginseng—­would thrive in Florida, and he shared a technique for preventing yellow fever that he had developed in Havana.66 Clarke also sought to defend Florida against charges of insalubriousness and, in the pro­ cess, crafted an ethnography of the poor “St. John’s men” settled in the territory. Th ­ ese ­people ­were “always sickly while many o­ thers of dif­fer­ent habits and ideas, living within the same extent of country w ­ ere quite healthy; we of the city distinguished them by the appellation of Crackers and Christians. The latter lived like civilized beings, and kept medicine about them. . . . ​But the former . . . ​planted but l­ittle corn and made up the deficiency with whortle berries, black berries, plumbs, and starvation . . . ​and they had a ‘mighty hatred of doctor’s stuff made out of dead p ­ eoples’ bones.’ ” It was culture, not climate, that made some Floridians unhealthy. Clarke concluded with a call for philanthropists to stop donating their money and energy “across the Atlantic for charitable purposes” and, instead, work to civilize Florida’s Crackers.67 Clarke’s most detailed ethnographic writings focused on natives, and he circulated his observations to U.S. officials and men of science bent on controlling and civilizing the Seminoles. Clarke’s attitude t­ oward Indians resembled that of other Anglo philanthropists who believed that, through the educational and administrative efforts of whites, Indians could be assimilated. As he told a U.S. Army officer in 1821, “I know that t­ here are some who w ­ ill smile contemptuously at the idea of taming Indians; but I trust that their number and influence are small. . . . ​A re we not all ­children of habit, the mere reflectors of education and manners?” Clarke informed the officer that ­there ­were some five thousand Seminoles in Florida and described their vari­ous towns and leaders. He added, optimistically or sardonically, that the Seminoles “­will, no doubt, find a protecting arm in the United States—­they w ­ ill

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participate in the endeavors of civilization, already so beneficial to the more western sons of the forest.”68 A year l­ater, Clarke penned a long letter to Jedediah Morse, one of the United States’ most esteemed men of science and corresponding secretary of the American Civilization Society, to share every­thing he knew about Florida’s past and pres­ent Indians. On Florida’s pre-­Seminole native history, he both consulted a hundred-­year-­old w ­ oman—­who was from a nation that he knew only as “Salt W ­ ater Indians” and had, with the remnants of her kin, emigrated to Cuba in 1763—­and excavated some of the peninsula’s Indian mounds. He found Catholic relics and skeletons tied into a seated position, both of which led him to suggest that, prior to the 1700s, Florida’s Indians had achieved some degree of spiritual and social sophistication.69 Clarke was more ambivalent about the Seminoles. He portrayed the Seminoles’ treatment of their black slaves as humane but belittled their religious beliefs and the expertise of their medicine men, who ­were “doctor, divine, and conjurer, all ­under one cap.”70 Clarke wavered over w ­ hether the Seminoles’ “power in finding their way through the thickest woods” was rooted in “instinct” or “a species of reason,” but he held that “the effects, from what­ever cause they derive, go to demonstrate [their] capability for civilization.”71 Clarke’s core argument was that the Seminoles’ current degree of civilization and potential for improvement ­ought to motivate U.S. citizens to press themselves further into the Seminoles’ territories and lives. Clarke—­and, more famously, Zephaniah Kingsley—­sought to perpetuate Spanish Florida’s racial mores and, if pos­si­ble, spread them throughout the United States by bringing their experiences in the Spanish American borderlands and greater Ca­rib­bean to bear on the Anglo-­A merican world. In an essay reproduced in Charles Vignoles’s Observations upon the Floridas (1823), Clarke pushed his readers to accept that blacks, whites, and Indians ­were all equally capable of m ­ ental improvement, an idea that had enjoyed wide popularity in the eigh­teenth ­century but that nineteenth-­century Anglo-­A mericans increasingly rejected in f­avor of a biology-­based notion of nonwhites’ inherent ­mental inferiority. He wrote that “the only difference in man, laying aside his color, is the difference of opinion; and that difference of opinion arises from difference of education.” He invited “the skeptical in this part of the philosophy of h ­ uman nature [to] turn his eyes to the city of Mexico, and see t­here the examples of talents natu­ral and acquired, in the fine arts and belle lettres, manifest among the Indians; let him look into the Havana and see the many finished workmen in the useful and elegant crafts, to be found t­ here among



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the Africans . . . ​and then let him declare if he is not always the master-­piece of Nature’s works and the only master of arts.”72 Clarke’s writings did influence some Floridians, but not surprisingly, they failed to appeal to most of the white Southerners who ­were increasingly bringing Anglo-­A merican racial attitudes into Florida.73 Clarke had spent most of his life fighting, negotiating, and writing in the hope of preserving the way of life that he had trea­ sured in Spanish Florida and, he believed, existed throughout the Spanish Ca­rib­bean. By the time of his death in 1836, he would have known that this world was gone from Florida forever.

* * * East Florida might seem like an unlikely place to trace larger trends and entanglements in the revolutionary Atlantic world.74 It was a scarcely populated military buffer that endured two uprisings against imperial authority, both of which w ­ ere begun by nonresident revolutionaries, before being bought by a rival government. It neither became in­de­pen­dent through military action (like most of the Amer­i­cas’ mainland colonies) nor remained part of a Eu­ro­pean empire (like Spain’s and Britain’s Ca­rib­bean colonies). And while the fate of all American colonies depended largely on decisions in London, Paris, and Madrid, Floridians ultimately had no real say in the broader forces that first crippled Spain’s power to defend Florida against foreign revolutionaries and then drove Spanish leaders to sell it. Florida’s place in the Atlantic world and its path out of the Spanish monarchy w ­ ere, in a sense, unique. So, too, was George J. F. Clarke. His province-­centered patriotism was typical of white Creoles, and like the other whites, natives, and blacks who chose to fight against revolutionaries to perpetuate Florida’s status quo, Clarke cared deeply about his country. Yet when compared with his counter­parts throughout the Amer­i­c as—­t hat is, white Creole elites whose primary allegiances ­were also to their own locales—­Clarke’s history directly contradicts several influential theories about what motivated the Creoles of Spanish Amer­ i­ca during the crises of the early 1800s. He was an intellectual who embraced Enlightenment science but remained fiercely loyal to the Spanish monarchy.75 He was an elite Creole who sought to protect blacks’ rights and potential for social mobility instead of fearing that ­either Spain’s promotion of a more racially fluid society would threaten his own privileged status or that Spain’s instability would threaten his interests as a slave own­er.76 He was a white Creole whose identity and patriotism w ­ ere defined not in opposition to peninsular

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Spain nor through or against an Amerindian past but, rather, emerged amid ties with blacks.77 He was a slave owner in the greater Ca­rib­bean who opposed in­de­pen­dence from Spain not b­ ecause imperial rule helped secure slavery but rather to prevent the imposition of the United States’ far more potent protections of slavery.78 And far from feeling resentful that peninsulares ­were monopolizing prestigious official positions, Clarke was a Creole who ­rose to the highest ranks of the provincial bureaucracy and, indeed, became the primary governor of much of East Florida.79 Clarke’s example demonstrates how the histories of locally influential individuals, their families, and larger international developments ­were interconnected during an era of im­mense change. This case study should encourage historians to question received wisdom about what actually inspired Creole revolutionaries and, more broadly, to work harder to understand how t­ hings like love drove individuals’ decisions to defend or topple empires. The big stories that make entanglement—of empires, ethnicities, cultures, knowledge, hemispheres—an enticing mode of historical analy­sis depended, at root, on love and f­ amily. Instead of seeking to embed intimate relationships in an international context, historians would do better to reconsider international entanglements as emerging from an array of place-­specific intimacies.80 Last, the Clarkes of Florida illuminate how the cultural and po­liti­c al ­futures of the vast borderland regions of the Amer­i­cas w ­ ere deci­ded. Racial and romantic relationships ­were often quite dif­fer­ent in ­these territories than they ­were in places where Eu­ro­pean rule was more secure and, as in Clarke’s case, personal bonds motivated the choices of elites in t­ hese regions.81 The Spanish American borderlands ­were, moreover, zones where empires, wouldbe republics, slaves, and natives strove to re­create or preserve American geopolitics on the grandest scale. Indeed, in­de­pen­dence movements and international competitions in borderlands may have had a starker impact on the ­later history of much of the hemi­sphere than did the successful revolutions in Spain’s and Britain’s colonies. South Amer­i­ca, Mexico, and the thirteen rebellious British colonies did achieve in­de­pen­dence, yet they maintained institutions and cultural norms that ­were, in many ways, continuations from the colonial era. Florida and its society, in contrast, largely ceased being Spanish. Focusing on the most intimate bonds of powerbrokers in contested spaces where international entanglements emerged from the ground up offers historians a means of integrating the global and the personal at a time when individuals’ reactions to, and efforts to shape, a new world in the making could have consequences that lasted for centuries.

PA RT I I I

Possession, Sovereignty, and Legitimacy

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chapter 8

The “Iberian” Justifications of Territorial Possession by Pilgrims and Puritans in the Colonization of Amer­i­ca jorg e ca ñ i z a res -­es gu e r r a

The scholarship on discourses of dominium and sovereignty in the Amer­i­cas has posited clear differences between Catholic Spain and Calvinist England. A careful reading of the foundational texts by Pilgrims and Puritans justifying their migration to V ­ irginia and New E ­ ngland in the 1620s and 1630s does not bear this out. Iberians made a distinction between spiritual and temporal sovereignties and claimed that only the pope had the authority of delegating monarchs with the task of conversion. Monarchs had no temporal rights whatsoever to the new lands. To justify territorial possession and po­liti­cal dominium became therefore an exercise in justifying “just war” as bridge: legalese to circumvent the wall of separation between the right of spreading the Gospel and the lack of authority to take land and po­liti­cal authority away from the rightful native o­ wners. Pilgrim and Puritan discourses of conquest and dispossession had no need of separating spiritual and temporal sovereignties: the monarch enjoyed both. Paradoxically and despite their alienation from the Stuart monarchs as the heads of the Anglican Church, the En­glish Calvinists (­either separatists, Pilgrims, or nonseparatists, Puritans) simply sought to gain crown ­legal sanction by securing “commercial charters.” Unlike the Iberians, Calvinist legalese focused on where to locate the headquarters of the chartered com­pany so as to wrestle effective po­liti­cal dominium from the crown. Remarkably, Calvinists began with the premise that Native Americans

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­ ere willingly transferring dominium and sovereignty to the En­glish crown. w Calvinists also assumed that dominium rested on the conversion of natives. This l­egal edifice came crumbling down once Roger Williams posited the same radical separation between spiritual and temporal sovereignties that had long characterized the thinking of such Iberian intellectuals as Barto­ lomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria. It was only in the wake of Williams’s trenchant “Iberian” critique of Puritan rights in Amer­i­ca that that Calvinist discourses of dominium began to claim all sovereignty to be based on the “rightful” purchase of natives’ “empty” lands.

* * * When seven hundred Puritans set sail from the port of Yarmouth (Isle of Wight, southern E ­ ngland) on April  8, 1630, the leader of the expedition, John Winthrop, had meditated about his decision for months. Much was at stake, for he would be leaving b­ ehind his f­amily, a ­legal practice in London, a lordship, and vast estates in Groton. The likelihood of success in Amer­i­ca’s northeast was vague and rampant with dangers; few En­glishmen had managed to establish colonies in North Amer­i­ca. An indigenous uprising in 1622 had almost exterminated colonists in Jamestown, ­Virginia’s oldest colony. And, as a commercial venture, Jamestown continued to be a failed promise. The colony of Pilgrims in New Plymouth—­founded in 1620—­had survived fierce winters and attacks from indigenous communities but still remained small and divided and lacked a clear plan for commercial expansion. Fishing communities established by cod fishing companies throughout the 1620s in Nova Scotia, Maine, and Mas­sa­chu­setts also failed to prosper; only a few families remained, scattered across the coasts and forests.1 A more serious concern for Winthrop was the necessity to subdue fears that the Puritan migration stemmed from a premeditated plan to split from the Church of E ­ ngland and fi­nally abolish Anglican rituals in order to “purify” the religion. Winthrop and his fellow Puritans did not wish to be confused with the migration of the “Pilgrims” who previously settled in New Plymouth. The Pilgrims—­most of whom came from En­glish communities in exile from Holland—­were radicals. Their migration resulted from a complete rejection of the Anglican Church, which they considered to be corrupt, a creature of the Antichrist, not unlike the Catholic Church. Yet in the eyes of many, a decision to leave for Amer­i­ca implied radicalism. Unlike the Pilgrims, who w ­ ere artisans or p ­ eople who belonged to lower



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social classes, Winthrop and his ilk w ­ ere landowners and even magistrates. How could he justify the migration of outstanding po­liti­cal and social leaders from reformed communities in a climate of confrontation that became increasingly marked by the Stuart court in the Anglican Church, in par­tic­u­ lar, by the new king Charles I (1625–49), who married a Catholic princess and was promoter of Arminianism (quasi-­Catholic in terms of salvation, not in terms of grace but with regard to good conduct)? For many Calvinists, Winthrop’s decision to set sail to Amer­i­c a further weakened the reformed church and revealed a separatist spirit—­one that was nonecumenical and represented the rejection of the search for salvation and conversion of all Anglicans.2 As Winthrop planned the migration, he was acutely aware of the necessity to identify the ­legal under­pinnings that justified the establishment of colonies in regions that belonged to ­others—in this case, the lands of indigenous populations. Could he take for granted the right to s­ ettle on American soil? Criticisms of cruel and impious Spanish practices, such as taking power of American lands that belonged neither to the crown nor to the pope, had characterized Calvinist communities in both Holland and ­England. ­Were the Puritans not ascribing to themselves the same rights to sovereignty and dominium that they denounced as invalid when it came to the Spanish monarchy? Paradoxically, when leaders such as Winthrop deci­ded to migrate and establish colonies, their reason for ­doing so was ultimately tied to the resurgence of power of the Catholic Antichrist. In the Puritans’ imagination, Charles I and his new bishops, such as William Laud, w ­ ere members of a g­ reat Catholic Eu­ro­pean alliance that was set to destroy Calvinists in vari­ous regions, including E ­ ngland, France, and Central Eu­rope. Puritans regarded Charles I’s vari­ous maneuvers to rule without Parliament and his success in this venture in 1629 as part of a strategy to reestablish the power of Catholic-­ Arminian rituals in the Anglican Church. In Winthrop’s mind, forming a colony in Mas­sa­chu­setts would ensure the survival of the Calvinist proj­ect at a critical time; the Huguenots had surrendered in La Rochelle (1628), and Calvinists and Lutherans had been defeated on battlefields in Bohemia (1621), the Low Countries (1625), and Denmark (1629). Winthrop’s determination to establish colonies stemmed from a desire to escape Catholic brutality spearheaded by Spain. He and his Calvinist peers saw themselves in the same light as Amer­i­ca’s indigenous populations: both w ­ ere victims of the same Catholic barbarism and illegality, lead by the Hispanic monarchy.3

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This chapter explores the arguments employed by En­glish Calvinists to justify their migration to New E ­ ngland—­both to New Plymouth (the Pilgrims of 1620) and Mas­sa­chu­setts (the Puritans of 1630). Analyzing four key texts, I elucidate the tensions in their discourse of colonization. Despite adopting a rhe­toric that rejected the Spanish conquest, Calvinists’ arguments about the legitimacy of conquest corresponded in an almost identical manner to ­those employed by Spanish writers, and they realized that. From the outset of the migration to New ­England, both the Pilgrims of New Plymouth and the Puritans of Mas­sa­chu­setts assumed that Stuart monarchs, be it James I or Charles I, ­were the rightful heirs of sovereignty and dominium in Amer­i­ca, like Pope Alexander VI. In turn, t­ hese monarchs could delegate such powers through royal patents. From the early stages of American settlements, both the Pilgrims and the Puritans ensured their control of royal patents by forming commercial companies. The directors of the commercial companies, who tended to reside in En­glish cities, such as London or Plymouth, received royal authority over the assigned territories. Responsible for passing edicts, establishing laws, and distributing justice, land, and properties, ­these directors assumed de facto sovereignty and dominium of the colonies. The Pilgrims, however, did not control the management of their com­pany and therefore depended on adventurer-­merchants based in E ­ ngland with whom they did not always share religious priorities. In contrast, the Puritans established complete control of the royal patent by ensuring that the directors and executive board of their commercial com­pany ­were based in Mas­sa­ chu­setts, thereby gaining complete in­de­pen­dence in the administration of sovereignty and dominium over the territories that they w ­ ere assigned. Upon successfully transferring the dominium and sovereignty to the respective companies, Calvinist colonists sought to identify rituals that would result in the transfer of dominium and sovereignty from indigenous authorities to the king—­using a strategy that is indistinguishable from t­ hose followed by Cortés with Montezuma and Pizarro with Atahualpa. But the similarities with the l­egal practice and discourse of the Spanish conquest ­were not limited to determining the origins of transfer of sovereignty and dominium. Both the Pilgrims and the Puritans employed religious arguments to justify their expansion: primarily, the conversion of indigenous populations and the salvation of gentiles’ souls. For En­glish Calvinists, the ­great ­battle against the devil and the Antichrist, which signaled the imminence of the Apocalypse, made the conversion of indigenous populations in Amer­i­ca all the more urgent. Their discourse did not differentiate itself much, for ex-



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ample, from the motives of Franciscans in Mexico and Yucatan in the sixteenth ­century. More surprising, Calvinists also understood conversion of indigenous populations as a pedagogical act. In their minds, the indigenous would understand religious princi­ples only if they stopped living like “wild beasts” and learned how to live a civilized life. Salvation and conversion was for the Calvinists (much like it was for the Spanish) the act of instigating new patterns of conduct and civilization from inherently inferior beings. Last, En­g lish Calvinists also witnessed a rise in furious critics who contested Calvinists’ doctrines of sovereignty, dominium, and conversion. Roger Williams was the Bartolomé de Las Casas of New ­England. Like Las Casas, Williams put the juridical basis of the colonization proj­ect on tenterhooks when he negated the authority of the Stuart kings to transfer dominium and sovereignty from territories that already had o­ wners—­the indigenous populations. Williams employed the same arguments that Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco Victoria used to delegitimize papal and royal patents that justified the Spanish conquest. For Las Casas and the neo-­scholastics of Salamanca, as for Williams, the absolute separation between spiritual and temporal power negated the l­egal basis of any claim of Eu­ro­pean sovereignty in Amer­i­ca. Las Casas and Victoria believed that sovereignty was restricted to saving souls; the pope’s only permitted action was to delegate kings with the task of promoting and financing missions of conversion and not to transfer any temporal authority to claim sovereignty and dominium. In the same way, Williams admonished the spiritual and temporal authority of the Stuarts to transfer temporal dominium and sovereignty that did not belong to them. The radical separations of spiritual and temporal power that permitted Las Casas to delegitimize the Spanish conquest also permitted Williams to delegitimize the rights of Puritan colonization based on royal patents.4

* * * Robert Cushman, a wool comber by trade who lived for many years in exile in Leiden with separatist communities, was tasked in 1617 with organ­izing the Pilgrims’ migration to Amer­i­ca.5 Cushman’s fundamental role consisted in ensuring that he accrued royal patents for the Pilgrims. Instead of acquiring new royal patents, Cushman sought to transfer a patent from an already established commercial com­pany, that of V ­ irginia, created in 1606, since its commercial ventures had failed to prosper. The original com­pany of ­Virginia

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had two seeds. One consisted of a governing council and a patent residing in London, which controlled the colonization of what we now consider the coast of the state of ­Virginia, also called the Com­pany of ­Virginia of London. The other seed had a government and patent that resided in the city of Plymouth, and it controlled commercial trading on the coast of what is now considered New ­England, known as the ­Virginia Com­pany of Plymouth. Both companies possessed dominium and sovereignty delegated by the king, and they could therefore also transfer such powers to individuals or subcompanies, over the thirty-­fourth to forty-­first parallel in the case of London and over the thirty-­ eighth to forty-­fifth parallel in the case of Plymouth. Cushman and his separatists formed an alliance with a group of merchants and negotiated the transfer in 1619 of the Plymouth patent (its 1607 colony of Popham in Maine had failed). Upon confirmation of the legality of the transfer, the separatists and their commercial partners (who ­were not as pious as the Pilgrims) commenced the pro­cess of organ­izing the migration and settling a colony, which consisted of Pilgrims and vari­ous ­others recruited by merchants. They established the settlement in New Plymouth in 1620. ­A fter a brief visit to New Plymouth in 1621, and a­ fter witnessing the Pilgrims’ survival of a ­bitter winter and the serious divisions between Pilgrims and the settlers sent by the associated merchants, Cushman returned to London to publish hopeful and positive accounts of New Plymouth colony in an attempt to reject the many negative stories of disconsolate survivors who had begun to circulate in ­England. In 1622 Cushman published a memorial of the Atlantic crossing and the first months of settlement and negotiations with indigenous groups, titled A Relation or Journal of the beginning and proceedings of the En­glish plantation settled at Plimoth of New E ­ ngland, by certain En­glish adventurers both Merchants and ­Others, which also contained his reflections on the l­egal basis and theologies that justified the new colony: An answer to all such objections as are any way made against the lawfulness of En­glish plantations in ­those parts, also known as Reasons and considerations about the legality of establishing outside of E ­ ngland in parts of Amer­i­ca. For Cushman, the migration to and colonization of New Plymouth needed a detailed justification that went further than biblical arguments. The Israelites received their land from God and w ­ ere guided by prophecies and miracles. God directly guided Lot to the Jordan River and Abraham to take possession of the lands of Canaan. God, through an angel, guided Mary and Joseph to escape Egypt. Moreover, God gave Abraham specific sacred land. However, the Pilgrims w ­ ere not the Israelites of the Old Testament. Since



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Christ’s arrival, God had stopped communicating with his church through dreams and miracles. For the Pilgrims, ­there ­were no prophetic or biblical justifications for the migration of God’s church. The only sacred territory that the Pilgrims could aspire to was to be found in heaven, not earth. For Cushman, the Pilgrims needed to justify their migration in somewhat more mundane terms, employing arguments of natu­ral and common laws. Cushman advocated a pedagogical justification for the migration to Amer­ i­ca; t­ hose who possessed knowledge of the Gospel had an obligation to share the teachings with ­those who had not yet received it. Drawing on the parable of Luke 19, Cushman explained the permissibility of colonization inspired by religious motives. Luke 19 relates the story of a power­ful man who left his three servants with money for investments. Upon returning, the man discovered that two of his servants had augmented their capital, and he praised them for d ­ oing so. The third, however, had saved the money in an attempt to protect its value. Condemning the hoarding servant, the man cautioned: “I was afraid of you, ­because you are a hard man. You take out what you did not put in and reap what you did not sow” (New International Version, Luke 19:21). Cushman depicted the Pilgrims as Christ’s servants, whose role was to grow the capital that God had given them, sharing it with the gentiles of the New World. Therefore, the principal motivation of the Calvinists’ migration was the conversion of indigenous p ­ eoples. It is not clear ­whether Cushman or any of the Pilgrims knew it, but such readings of Luke (particularly Luke 14) as central to any campaign of colonization w ­ ere at the core of the debate pitting Bartolomé de Las Casas against Juan Gines de Sepulveda in Valladolid in 1550– 51. In this case, the parable in Luke that mattered was one in which a master sends his servant several times with invitations for supper, implying that some groups should be compelled to attend.6 Cushman understood the inherent weaknesses in such a justification; certainly the indigenous populations of New ­England ­were not the only gentiles who could be converted. Why migrate to New Plymouth and not to other regions in the Amer­i­cas? Cushman found answers to this prob­lem through history and law, always implying that the ultimate reason to s­ ettle New Plymouth is that it had an elaborate polity with an emperor who could become an En­glish vassal. According to Cushman, the territories from Florida to Canada ­were recognized by consensus, even by historians and chroniclers of other Eu­ro­pean empires, as regions ­under the dominium and sovereignty of the king of E ­ ngland. A historic tradition of voyages, discoveries, and claims afforded the king of E ­ ngland such privileges. Yet, the majority of land in New E ­ ngland

Figure 8.1. The peace treaty of 1614 between Chesapeake settlers and the sachem of the Chickahominy by which the latter become “King James, his subjects and tributaries.” Episode described in Ralph Hamor, A true discourse of the pres­ent estate of ­Virginia, and the successe of the affaires ­there till the 18 of Iune 1614 (London: John Beale, 1615), 11–15, and illustrated in Johann Theodor de Bry, Americae pars decima: quae continentur Solida narratio de moderno provinciae Virginiae statu, quaratione tandem pax cum Indianis coaluerit, ac castella aliquot ad regionis praesidium ab Anglis extructa fuerint (Oppenheim: Hieronymi Galleri, 1619), plate 9. The Chickahominy agreed to become King James’s vassals (subjects), change their names to “En­glishmen” (Tassantasses), not to disturb En­glish ­cattle and fortifications, to contribute five hundred men ­every time the En­glish fought Spaniards nearby, and to pay an annual tribute of a thousand bushels of corn (two bushels for each of their five hundred fighting men). The En­glish, in turn, pledged to give the Tassantasses access to ports and towns when requested; five hundred iron tomahawks annually for their armies; a red coat or livery to which copper engravings of King James would be appended as necklaces for each of their eight sachem ­every year; protection from all foreign enemies, including their rivals the Powhatan; access to copper, beads, and hatches through trade; and recognition of the Tassantasses’ liberties, freedoms, and laws (that is, they could not be captured, enslaved, or traded). The governor of ­Virginia, however, was the head ruler of the said Tassantasses polity as he was of that of Jamestown: two republics, one of the En­glish Indians and another of the En­glish, both ­under the sovereignty of the same universal monarch.



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was yet to be cultivated or allocated to colonists and therefore lay barren (Genesis 1:28). God had ordered men, such as Abraham and Lot, to occupy and establish control over virgin territories since the times of the Patriarchs in the book of Genesis. Therefore, the En­glish, armed with royal patents, had the right to establish colonies. Cushman’s argument to transfer royal sovereignty and dominium to the colonists is strikingly similar to justifications of colonization proposed by some Spanish jurists of the sixteenth ­century. In real­ity, it is no dif­fer­ent from ­those made by Cortés and Pizarro, who sought to demonstrate that local monarchs such as Montezuma or Atahualpa had recognized the Spanish king’s sovereignty and dominium. The trope of a negotiated transmission of native kingly sovereignty to an En­glish “emperor,” resembling that of Moctzuma to Charles V, became widespread among En­glish colonists (see Figure  8.1 that documents an alleged 1614 transmission of sovereignty between the Chesapeake settlers and the Chickahominy in ­Virginia).7 As Cortés and Pizarro did in their time, Cushman insisted that the emperor Massasoit, monarch of the territories of New ­England—­which w ­ ere more extensive that ­those of ­England and Scotland together—­who gave vassalage to a variety of regional sachem, had explic­itly recognized that the king of E ­ ngland was “his sir and commander.” Most surprising, Cushman insisted that the act of recognition and transmission of sovereignty and dominium from Massasoit to the Stuarts occurred orally (an episode that Cushman had witnessed) and in writing (in front of the Pilgrims’ militia leader, the captain Myles Standish).8 Cushman recognized that such an argument resonated with ­those of conquistadors such as Cortés and Pizarro and as a result sought to establish differences with the Spanish experience. Massasoit’s oral and written recognition of the king of ­England’s sovereignty and dominium had not been extracted by force in a military conquest, “neither hath this beene accomplished by threats and blowes, or shaking of sword, and sound of trumpet, for as our facultie that way is small, and our strength lesse: so our warring with them is ­after another manner, namely by friendly vsage, loue, peace, honest and iust cariages, good counsel.”9 As a w ­ hole, Cushman’s argument is strikingly similar to t­ hose proposed by Spanish sources in the sixteenth ­century: the principal objective and justification of colonizing Amer­i­ca lay in the religious conversion of its inhabitants. As a result, the king was lawfully entitled to the sovereignty and dominium of indigenous territories.

* * *

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The year before departing ­England, John Winthrop circulated among supporters of the pos­si­ble Puritan migration a manuscript that we now know as Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation.10 This manuscript, which exists in vari­ous copies and versions, recapitulates much of Cushman’s argument but differs significantly from the document published by the En­glish wool comber. The differences stem from the Calvinists’ geopo­liti­cal position in the second half of the 1620s, which differed significantly from the Pilgrims’ social and po­liti­c al standing t­oward the end of the 1610s. Puritan mi­grants such as Winthrop hailed from elite social positions (magistrates, nobles, religious leaders, politicians, and members of the Anglican Church), and Puritans had managed to wrest control over the commercial com­pany and, as a result, also of the royal patent for the administration and control of American territories. In contrast to the Pilgrims, the Puritans obtained a transfer of the royal patent from the V ­ irginia Com­pany to a com­pany that they controlled, the Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Com­pany. In contrast, the Pilgrims remained dependent on “merchant adventurers” based in London who sought to gain advantage over their Pilgrim partners, by exhausting their resources and sending colonists who did not share the separatists’ priorities. It is therefore not surprising that the New Plymouth settlement suffered serious divisions soon ­a fter the Mayflower arrived at the coast of Cape Cod. Conversely, from the early days of settlement, Puritans had wrested control of the royal patent and the transfer of sovereignty and dominium conceded by the king. Further, since the executive committee of the com­pany also moved en masse to New ­England, ­those governing Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Com­pany ­were located far away from the control of the Stuarts in London. The Puritans effectively exerted dominium and sovereignty over the territories assigned to their com­ pany. And the executive board of the commercial com­pany became the legislative and governing power in the polity. This difference between Pilgrims and Puritans explains Winthrop’s emphasis on identifying the mercantile potential of New ­England—in terms of goods and resources and commercial opportunities. The manuscript also differs significantly from Cushman’s as a result of Winthrop’s anxious search to provide responses to some Puritans’ skepticism ­toward the migration. Preoccupied by the f­ uture of a church that was besieged in Eu­rope, they questioned the wisdom of religious and po­liti­cal leaders migrating at the precise moment when they ­were most needed for the ­battle against a resurgent Catholic Antichrist. Was ­there any sense in abandoning ­England while King Charles I repeatedly attempted to close Parliament and



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bishops, such as Laud, ­were seeking to change the equilibrium between Calvinists and Arminians in the religion of the state? Was t­ here any sense in migrating and debilitating the Puritan church when t­ here existed the possibility that reformed communities in ­England might suffer from the same fate as the Huguenots in La Rochelle or the Calvinists in Bohemia and face extermination? Winthrop’s answer was s­ imple: the Puritans’ best defense was to ensure alternative places of defense and survival, such as t­ hose that God gave a w ­ oman and her child in Apocalypse 12, whom he separated for being besieged by the dev­il; he brought the boy to his side and sent the ­woman to the desert. A flourishing church in the desert was the best alternative in the geopo­liti­cal framework of that moment. The Puritans’ migration to Amer­i­ca was not only a geopo­liti­cally astute move, but it was also a response to the permanent En­glish disillusion, with the prospect of establishing v­ iable colonies. In Winthrop’s mind, the failure of Jamestown—­perishing since its establishment in 1606 and especially ­after an indigenous attack in 1622 that exterminated large groups of colonists—­ resulted from the mi­grants themselves and their priorities, rather than the nature and potential of the land. Winthrop discounted what he regarded as absurd colonists’ criticisms of the climate, food, and topography of New ­England, as a place that was degenerate, dangerous, and ill prepared for defense. According to Winthrop, the failures of colonization promoted by the ­Virginia Com­pany from Florida to Maine stemmed from (1) the “carnal” priorities of colonization; (2) the type of colonists who had been sent, that is to say, “a multitude of rude & misgov’ned psons, the very scumme of the ­people”: and (3) the nature of their governments.11 En­glish Puritan colonies would therefore prosper only if they ­were to receive quality colonists: power­ful landowners, educated parish priests, magistrates, and, especially, pious colonists. Both Winthrop, the owner of vast estates, and Cushman, the wool comber, shared a central justification for establishing colonies: a religious argument centering on the conversion of gentiles and the destruction of the Antichrist in the global ­battle announced by the Apocalypse. The motivation for colonization could not be “carnal.” Instead, it had to be religious, “to carry the Gospell into t­ hose parts of the world, to help on the cominge in of fulnesse of the Gentiles and to rayse a Bulworke against the kingdome of Antichrist, which the Jesuites ­labour to rear up in ­those parts.”12 For Winthrop, it was therefore a priority to have excellent, well-­ educated s­ettlers—an elite. The Catholics, unlike the En­glish, Winthrop argued, sent their elites to convert indigenous and establish colonies: “It is

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a reproach to our Religion that when we professe an Intention of Convertinge ­those Indians we send nott p[er]sons meett for such a worke but such only as wee cann well spare & most Comonly t­ hose that are a burden to our selves, while the Papists out of a false zeale to draw them to their supsticon sticke not to imploy their most able and useful instruments.”13 Although impor­tant differences did exist between Cushman the wool comber, who represented the separatist Pilgrims, and the nobleman Winthrop, who oversaw Puritan Congregationalists’ migration, in essence their discourses of l­egal and religious justification of colonization w ­ ere strikingly similar. Winthrop and Cushman shared with the Spanish not only the idea that colonization was justified only when the conversion of indigenous populations was made a priority but also the idea that sovereignty and dominium could be transferred. Like Cushman, Winthrop depicted a barren New ­England, where the indigenous had neither cultivated nor divided the land, thereby lacking any civil or po­liti­cal rights over ­those territories. The Puritans, therefore, found themselves in similar conditions to the descendants of Adam and l­ ater of Noah ­after the flood—­facing uninhabited lands. As Cushman did, Winthrop found in the divine, natu­ral, and common laws foundation to the right to possess uncultivated lands through Genesis.14 Winthrop did not, however, regard the king of ­England as the historic trustee of sovereignty and dominium of the Atlantic coast of North Amer­i­ca. He made no mention of cases where Stuart monarchs recognized indigenous emperors as vassals. The reason should not surprise us: in the Puritan imagination, Charles I’s piety was in serious doubt and also, therefore, so was his authority. In practice, however, the Puritans recognized the king’s sovereignty and dominium of American territories by forming a com­pany and securing a royal patent. The other two texts published by Winthrop’s colleagues in 1630, John Cotton’s Gods Promise to His Plantation and John White of Dorchester’s Planters Plea or The Grounds of Plantations Examined and Usual Objections Answered, demonstrate similar arguments to t­hose by Winthrop, and they share the same preoccupations: the l­egal bases and biblical sources that justified the appropriation of barren territories (both Cotton and White considered New ­England as a region lacking in settlements and cultivation and in consequence open to colonization); the ­causes for the failure of previous En­glish colonies; the reasons why leaving E ­ ngland would not, in fact, weaken the reformist camp (Puritan) inside the Anglican Church (neither Cotton nor White was separatist); the origin of the authority to establish colonies in the



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transfer of the sovereignty and dominium from the Stuarts through a royal patent; and the conversion of indigenous populations as a primary motivation of colonization. White, however, incorporates new ele­ments to the debate that make the similarities to the Hispanic texts of the sixteenth c­ entury even more compelling. I pres­ent h ­ ere briefly the arguments of Cotton and ­those of White.

* * * Cotton, one of the most learned of the three thousand Puritans who migrated to the New World in the first g­ reat wave of 1630, adds very l­ ittle to Winthrop’s arguments, apart from drawing on a richer array of biblical examples about the migrations of Patriarchs, Israelites, and Apostles to new lands.15 Cotton’s principal preoccupation was to detect how and when God communicated his desires for individuals and communities to move to dif­fer­ent lands. Cotton argued that the communication in the case of Israelites was clear and indisputable: God promised them a piece of land; he invited them to embark on the journey, and he guided them in their migration; he indicated where they should ­settle; he eliminated their potential enemies through wars; and he created enough barren land for them to occupy. The purpose of such a migration was to establish territories where the laws and rules would be obeyed and respected in all their purity. The divine w ­ ill was clear in the case of the Israelites but indirect in the case of Puritans, which necessitated ­people like Cotton to interpret it. Like Cushman, Cotton found that the land was promised in Christ himself, not in a geographic space. Any territory in which a church was built and where the laws of Christ ­were obeyed was a “promised” land. ­There ­were some signs, however, that God encouraged individuals and communities to move— by helping them to overcome obstacles and difficulties and to take lands without vio­lence, removing original habitants from their lands through “­legal” means and the transformation of flourishing territories into barren lands. Indirect signs clearly indicated that God promoted the migration to New ­England; the plagues of 1617 and 1619 that eliminated 90 ­percent of the indigenous population of New E ­ ngland ­were a sign of Providence. As for the general reasons why individuals migrated—­including the search for knowledge and commerce and to escape persecution and evil—­Cotton identified specific reasons that ­were suggestive of the fact that Providence favored Puritan migration: the existence of a state authority (the crown) with

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dominium and sovereignty that could be transferred to companies.16 Along with the plagues that had destroyed the indigenous communities, this was yet another sign of divine Providence. Cotton thought of individuals as gardens where seeds of God’s grace flourished. All individuals, all ­houses, and communities, regardless of where they ­were, should aspire to seed and cultivate the laws of God. For Cotton, the security of individuals and communities would be assured if they followed God’s o­ rders to look a­ fter their own cultivations. Tragedies, diasporas, and banishments happened to Israel as a result of failing to follow God’s o­ rders. The security of individuals and communities, however, should not be judged in terms of persecutions and dangers. It was enough for each person or community to follow the laws of God for e­ very plot of land to survive and flourish, without fear of the e­ nemy’s ploys.17 The new American plantations offered individuals and communities the opportunity to establish their own security despite the many dangers. The key to that security lay largely in the transmission of the Gospel to indigenous populations. Colonization was converted therefore into an exchange between the temporal and spiritual in which the Puritans benefited from indigenous ­people’s lands and resources, while the natives supposedly benefited from the Puritans’ Gospel. This last explanation seems to be the real reason why God desired a new plantation in Amer­i­ca.18 For Cotton, Amer­i­ca should be created from the commercial traffic between the temporal commodities of the Indians and the spiritual ones of the Puritans.

* * * In the Planters Plea or The Grounds of Plantations Examined and Usual Objections Answered, Reverend John White of Dorchester argued that colonization was a natu­ral pro­c ess that had been associated with the responsibility to occupy barren lands since the times of Adam and Noah.19 For White, the colonization of large empty lands was an escape valve from the “egoism, fraud, and vio­lence” to which p ­ eople ­were driven by overpopulation. Colonization of unpopulated lands to make the land productive generated “frugality, simplicity, and justice.” As such, primitive periods that ­were characterized by the ­great quantity of unpopulated lands w ­ ere known as the “golden times.”20 White refuted the arguments that the colonization of Amer­i­ca was incomparable to when God guided the heirs of Adam and Noah to form settlements, by signaling that the hand of Providence guided the Puritan migration indirectly. According to White, God had emptied the lands of New E ­ ngland from



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their original o­ wners through “Warres, Pestilences and Famines” and even cannibalism as a punishment of indigenous idolatry.21 For White, colonization had to be a religious act. The principal objective of establishing a colony was not to feed and accommodate bodies but to expand the kingdom of Christ. The work “of planting Colonies above all civill and humane ends, and deserves honour, and approbation, above the most glorious Conquest and, or successful emterprizes that ever ­were undertaken by the most renowned men that the Sunn hath seene, and that by how much the subduing of Satan is a more glorious act, then a victory over men: and the enlargement of Christs Kingdome, then the adding new mens dominiums: and the saving of mens soules, then the provisioon for their lives and bodies.”22 For White, like the Franciscans in Mexico in the sixteenth ­century, the colonization of Amer­i­ca was part of a greater divine plan associated with the end of the world. The conversion of indigenous p ­ eople formed part of the general conversion of gentiles and Jewish ­peoples on the eve of the second arrival of the Messiah. If for Franciscans, the Aztecs—­creatures of the devil—­ prepared through their vio­lence for the arrival of civilization and the Gospel, for White, the Spanish—­creatures of the devil—­had prepared for the arrival of the Puritans. The Antichrist had, unknowingly, facilitated God’s final plan for Salvation: the Puritans would complete what the Hispanic vio­ lence first generated: and as ­great folly to imagine, that hee who made all t­ hings, and consequently o­ rders and directs them to his owne glory, had no other scope but the satisfying of mens greedy appetites, that thirsted a­ fter the riches of that new found world, and to tender unto them the objects of such barbarous cruelties as the world never heard of. Wee cannot then prob­ably conceive that GOD, in that strange discovery, aymed at any other t­ hing but this, that, ­after hee had punished the Atheisme, and Idolatry of t­ hose heathen and bruitish Nations, by the Conquerors cruelty, and acquainted them, by mixture of some other p ­ eople, with civility, to cause at length the glorious Gospell of Iesus Christ to shine out unto them.23 White, like many Spanish ideologues of the sixteenth ­century, presented a civilizing aim as the first, indispensable, step for conversion. The indigenous of New E ­ ngland had to be transformed from beast into man in order to

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understand the Gospel: “Besides, it hath beene intimated that wee hardly have found a brutish ­people wonne before they had beene taught civility. So wee must endeavour and expect to worke that in them first, and Religion afterwards.”24 White recognized that conversion would take time, as would the linguistic act of translation, and New ­England was the ideal place for this. Its depopulation guaranteed very minor re­sis­tance from indigenous groups and therefore would ensure a peaceful form of cohabitation between settlers and natives, along with opportunities for the transformation of indigenous individuals into civilized creatures and time for them to learn the language, first for commercial purposes and ­later for theological ones.25

* * * The Hispanic discourse of sovereignty and dominium was predicated on the idea of the transfer of spiritual sovereignty from the pope to the king of Spain, whose task was to convert the indigenous populations. This conversion implied the creation of a church and the sourcing of resources to build it. The transfer of spiritual sovereignty soon converted itself into the transfer of temporal sovereignty, that is to say, control of lands (sovereignty), which at the same time became the transfer of po­liti­cal authority from local kings to the Hispanic monarch (dominium). Such a justification did not escape the wrath of critics such as Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas, who insisted that a claim to spiritual sovereignty did not equate to claims on temporal sovereignty and its corollary, dominium. For ­t hese figures, the Spanish monarchy’s authority to send missionaries did not encompass the right to conquer territories and exert po­liti­cal power. For Las Casas and Vitoria, ­there existed a radical separation between temporal and spiritual power. Spanish monarchs, therefore, could not claim any dominium or sovereignty in Amer­i­ca. Roger Williams a­ dopted the closest position to Las Casas and Vitoria among the settlers in New ­England. This radical figure took the discourse of the separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignties to its logical conclusion, which Edmund Morgan explored with elegance and eloquence more than five de­cades ago.26 Historians such as Morgan and, more recently, John Berry (who essentially repeats Morgan’s analy­sis) found the key to Williams’s intricate and complex thinking about the state and church in his doctrine of the separation of sovereignties. For Williams, the state did not exist to privilege a religion, nor did religion exist to use temporal powers that discipline members of



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society to accept one sole dogma. Arguments in f­avor of religious tolerance and a lay state ­were at the heart of Williams’s logic. Historians’ interest in Williams’s ideas about state and church have obscured the impact of Williams on debates about the transfer of sovereignty and dominium in the New ­England colonies. Williams, like Las Casas, denied the fundamental basics of the Puritan doctrines of colonization: the transfer of sovereignty from the Stuarts to the executive board of the commercial com­ pany and dominium through a royal patent. For Williams, the premises of the discourses ­were absurd: the colonizers of Mas­sa­chu­setts had no right to ­settle in Amer­i­ca. Williams’s argument took the Puritans by surprise and caused a profound moral crisis. Since 1635, however, the Puritans had resolved the prob­lem thanks in ­great part to the solutions proposed by Williams himself. The colonizers’ could hope to rightfully possess land only if they purchased it from indigenous leaders, ­under strict controls of property title transfer. For the Puritan titles of the land to be valid—­and at the same time enable Puritans to establish dominium and sovereignty over the purchased land—­Indian commoners could not sell their own land; only recognized authorities could do so. Puritans recognized only titles signed by indigenous leaders, which ­were subsequently approved by Puritan courts and judges, the equivalent of what Spain’s General Indian Court and Protector of Indios did. Puritans thus avoided transactions and transfers by Indian commoners between the two groups, like the Spaniards did. Williams introduced a new discourse of dominium and sovereignty: colonization was pos­si­ble only if ­there had been a commercial transfer of territories.27 The similarities between the Hispanic discourse of sovereignty and dominium in sixteenth-­century Amer­i­ca and the Puritans’ discourses of the seventeenth c­ entury are extraordinary. An overhaul of the continued compartmentalization of American history is well overdue.

chapter 9

“As the Spaniards Always Have Done” The Legacy of Florida’s Missions for Carolina Indian Relations and the Origins of the Yamasee War b ra dley dixon

In June 1716, Major James Cochran traveled from Charles Towne to the presidio of Spanish Florida. Cochran came to recover property that Carolina’s enemies had plundered and sold to the Spaniards. Walking the streets of San Agustín, Cochran recognized a few ­faces. In the marketplace, he met “Several of his own Slaves . . . ​a s also Several other Slaves who told him they belong’d” to the En­glish.1 They informed Cochran that they “­were Carried & Sold to the Spaniards by the . . . ​Indians—­Begging him to Redeem them.” Cochran also saw several small boats, “which he was informed belonged to his Majesties Subjects.” When Cochran reached San Agustín, Carolina was fighting for survival. On April 15, 1715, a co­a li­tion of indigenous ­peoples including the Yamasee Indians launched a war against the colony of South Carolina. In the eyes of many Carolina officials, the war was a revolt—­t he treacherous act of lawful subjects against their rightful rulers. Impatient to fulfill his mission, Cochran went to the ­house of the Spanish governor and “made a Demand according to the Powers Given him” for the restitution of stolen En­glish property. But rather than assist Cochran, the authorities in San Agustín instead “told him . . . ​that they had writt to the King of Spain for Directions how to Dispose of them [the slaves and other property] and that they could not part with them till they had an Answer.”2 The Spaniards’ “Evasive answers” convinced Cochran of the truth of what many Carolinians



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suspected—­“that the Spanish Government at St. Augustine Did Intise, Stir up and Incourage the Yamasee and other Nations of Indians” to attack the En­glish. An exploration of the deep, po­liti­cal roots of the conflict suggests that Cochran and other Carolinians w ­ ere right—­the Spanish did, indeed, contribute to the outbreak of the Yamasee War—­but not in the way that the En­glish believed.3 The Spanish foundation of San Agustín predated the En­glish establishment of Charles Towne by more than a ­century. Before En­glishmen arrived to contest for control over the lands and p ­ eoples in the region at the end of the seventeenth ­century, the Spanish had constructed an elaborate mission system that stretched outward from San Agustín north along the coast—­ including the very site of Charles Towne, a place the Spanish called San Jorge—­and several hundred miles westward across the northern part of Florida ­toward the Gulf coast.4 At its peak, the system contained about forty doctrinas—or primary missions with a resident Franciscan friar—­with an estimated fifteen thousand Indians living u ­ nder their order.5 At the start of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, even as they destroyed the Spanish missions and enslaved their inhabitants, the En­glish also envied the Spanish method for governing Indians. The En­glish took more than Indian slaves and communion plates during their campaign against the missions. They also stole ideas. But En­glish dreams of order would clash directly with native po­liti­cal aspirations for freedom and fair treatment. Native ­peoples like the Yamasee and the Apalachee, who had endured both Spanish and En­glish colonialism and their often hollow promises of justice, w ­ ere exasperated with both by 1715 and ready to push them aside. While the En­glish ­were laying waste to the Spanish mission system in Florida, leaders in London ­were successfully conceiving a proj­ect in which the En­glish, like the Spanish, would attempt to make religion a sturdy pillar of overseas empire. In 1701, the church hierarchy and its parliamentary supporters persuaded King William to charter the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) with a mission to convert Native Americans within the empire.6 ­Under the auspices of the SPG, the first missionary arrived in Carolina in 1702. In the Southeast, SPG missionaries realized that they w ­ ere working not with raw material but with p ­ eople whom Spanish friars had already molded. Although the French Jesuits ­were often the models that the British pondered when fashioning their own missionary ventures, the “Spanish Friars,” the Franciscans of Florida, offered a potent alternative.7 Rather than convert “heathens” to Chris­tian­ity, the primary objective of the

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early SPG missions in the Southeast was “to convert the Roman Catholick Indians” to Protestantism.8 To aid in this proj­ect, SPG supporters in London produced a Spanish-­language version of the Bible for use along the “Borders of Florida and other Spanish Plantations to convert the Yamousee Indians Natives of t­ hose Parts.”9 Although the “Spanish Testament” was, in the end, ­little used—­Commissary Gideon Johnston shared his copies with “Spanish Prisoners” in Charles Town—­SPG missionaries nevertheless had a few notable successes among the Indians.10 Much as the Spanish had educated the ­children of some Native elites in Florida, the society sent the son of a Yamasee leader to Britain, where the bishop of London baptized him with the name of George and officials celebrated him as the “Yamasee Prince.”11 The SPG missionaries saw a particularly ripe field for God’s work among the “­free” Apalachee, whom a South Carolina army had recently brought to Carolina to “live ­under and subject themselves to Our Government.”12 In 1704, a combined force of Carolinians and Creek Indians attacked and destroyed the Spanish Catholic missions among the Apalachee, who lived near present-­ day Tallahassee. The expedition’s leader, former governor James Moore, boasted that he enslaved about four thousand Apalachee men, ­women, and ­children who had resisted his army or who at least lived in missions that had offered some re­sis­tance. Another 1,300 Apalachee who resided in missions that had surrendered followed the train of Moore’s army back to Carolina as “­free émigrés” and settled in a handful of villages near “Savano Town” along the Savannah River.13 For the “­free” Apalachee, the choice to “defect” from the Spanish was almost certainly made to avoid death or enslavement. But their arrival in the colony allowed the En­glish in Carolina to recast the Florida expedition—­ which had killed or enslaved so many—as a campaign of “liberation” that had rescued the Apalachee from the “Spanish Yoke.”14 For SPG missionaries, the “­free” Apalachee ­were even more useful and self-­a ffirming. Talking with one of their leaders in April 1708, the missionary Francis Le Jau learned that ­under the Spanish the Indians “had a Priest in e­ very Town” and that “they maintain’d their Clergy very well.”15 The same leader had applied to the governor of Carolina for “a Minister to live among them,” Le Jau noted approvingly and added that “they are baptized and w ­ ere formerly subject to the 16 Spaniards.” Perceiving how the “­free” Apalachee may have understood their own situation and what their expectations w ­ ere for life u ­ nder En­glish rule requires an examination of their historical experience living ­under the Spanish from



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the first establishment of the Apalachee missions in 1633 to their destruction seventy years ­later. In Florida, as elsewhere in the Spanish American Empire, most of the resident population comprised two “republics”—­one of Spaniards and one of Indians. The dos repúblicas ­were for most purposes separate polities that shared a mutual allegiance to the king of Spain and the Catholic Church. The rulers of the “Republic of Indians,” called caciques, ­were ­those señores naturales or “natu­ral lords” who accepted baptism and who acknowledged the king of Spain as their rightful sovereign. In a relationship of mutual obligation, the Spanish provided native rulers with gifts paid for from the situado, a subsidy from vari­ous sources that supported the colony’s expenses.17 The produce of communal fields or sabanas, meanwhile, provided for the yearly maintenance of a town’s indigenous elites, its ­widows and orphans, and its church.18 As the vassals of the king, any Indian could demand justice from Spanish officials all the way up to having an audience with the monarch himself. The periodic tours that the governor or his deputy made throughout the province provided a far more practical forum for the caciques of Indian towns to register their complaints and make requests.19 During ­these visitas, the caciques asserted their loyalty to the Spanish king but also their own right to govern the Republic of Indians. Th ­ ere was no encomienda in Florida, meaning t­ here w ­ ere no resident or absentee Spaniards who claimed a right to native villa­gers’ fealty and ­labor. Indeed, the native caciques themselves, with their continued power over the commoners, became “encomenderos in all but name.”20 In the absence of a Spanish encomendero class, Florida’s many native caciques held the appellation “don” by the seventeenth ­century’s end.21 Similarly, Florida’s caciques accepted commissions from the Spanish as officers in the colonial militia—­the rank and file ­were the male inhabitants of the village.22 In many ways, rather than undermine Florida’s indigenous rulers, the Spanish worked to reinforce and enhance their authority. Small won­der, then, that in 1708, Francis Le Jau reported that the “King” of the “­free” Apalachee was a “man of ­great power over his p ­ eople.”23 However, while the Spanish Republic of Indians gave Florida’s Indian elites a large degree of autonomy, authority, and status, it was also a system of colonial subordination. To maintain their position, native rulers had to support the larger imperial program of the Spanish state and the Catholic Church. In Florida, as elsewhere in the empire, Indian leaders enjoyed some latitude, but outright defiance—­k illing the resident priest and burning the mission, or refusing to send required food or l­abor—­could bring a swift and

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violent response. When the Apalachee expelled the Spaniards from their territory in 1647, Spanish soldiers and Indian auxiliaries quickly arrived to restore Spanish rule. Following the suppression of the revolt, Spanish authorities executed a dozen caciques and condemned twenty-­six to hard l­abor.24 ­A fter the revolt, Spanish officials and Franciscan friars inquired seriously into its ­causes in the hopes of preventing a recurrence of vio­lence in what had become Florida’s most impor­tant province. Violations of the bound­aries of the Republic of Indians in the form of an influx of Spanish soldiers into the territory along with “the beginning of Spanish settlement and farming activity” on neighboring lands w ­ ere to blame.25 Within a generation, memories of the uprising seem to have faded, and the province of Apalachee appeared to be “thoroughly Christianized.”26 Many Apalachee dressed like Eu­ro­pe­ans, pushed their claims through the Spanish ­legal system, and “interspersed a considerable amount of Spanish with their native tongue.”27 They gained a reputation among the En­glish and French for civility and industry that endured well a­ fter their removal from the missions. In 1708, one Carolinian leader boasted that “If an Inclination to Setle any Place to the East ward of the Mississippi, Should prevaile, the old Country of the Apalachias is the only best, Being for 40 miles Long and 20 wide Clear field fit for the plough, formerly mannured by the Indians who ­were four year ago Subdued and the remaning part of them removed to Carolina.”28 Destroyed and with their former inhabitants “Subdued” and “removed to Carolina,” the Spanish missions still offered tangible rewards. The En­glish encountered the power­ful influence of the Spanish from their first forays into the Southeast. During Robert Sanford’s voyage along the coast in 1666, an Indian came aboard his ship, near what is now Port Royal, and asked to have his hair cut in a tonsure, “a fashion which I guesse they have taken from the Spanish Fryers, thereby to ingratiate themselves with that Nacon,” Sandford wrote.29 Five years l­ater, William Owen, one of the first En­ glish settlers in Charles Towne, wrote that the Spanish friars had taught the natives “onely to admire ye Spanish na[t]ion and pay them Adora[t]ion equall to a dietie.”30 If the En­glish hoped to win over the Indians to their side, they would have to adopt—­and perhaps improve upon—­Spanish methods of Indian governance. In the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina of 1669, Anthony Ashley Cooper, l­ater earl of Shaftesbury, and his secretary John Locke famously hoped to shape the colony’s f­uture by creating an Anglo-­A merican feudal aristocracy. But they w ­ ere also seeking to incorporate into the colony an existing in-



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digenous aristocracy.31 The proprietors’ instructions to the colony’s first governor, William Sayle, urged him to use all friendly means to “draw the Indians to our government.”32 The proprietors’ aspirations to win the allegiance of natives followed the Spanish pattern in the Southeast. In Florida, Spanish claims depended not on “conquest” but on the consent of Indian caciques to the terms of what Amy Turner Bushnell has called the “colonial compact.”33 Formally, the terms of the “colonial compact” that caciques made between the “Republic of Indians” and the “Republic of Spaniards” ­were a Spanish mono­poly of trade, Indian allegiance to royal authority, and the voluntary ac­ cep­tance of friars to evangelize their vassals.34 Adopting the princi­ples of the Salamanca School, the Fundamental Constitutions left non-­Christian Indians in possession of their property and secure in their persons. A ­ fter promising that the Indians “­will be concerned in our Plantation,” the tenth article pledged that their “Idolatry, Ignorance, or ­Mistake, gives us no right to expel, or use them ill.” The document’s ninety-­ seventh article provided more than freedom of conscience to the pagan inhabitants of Carolina.35 In a passage that presaged Locke’s 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration,” the plan seemed open to the much more radical possibility that Native Americans in Carolina could form their own churches, which would be equally entitled to ­legal recognition and protection, when it declared that “any seven or more Persons agreeing in any Religion, s­ hall Constitute a Church or Profession, to which they ­shall give some Name, to distinguish it from ­others.”36 Protecting the Indians in their persons and goods, irrespective of their religions, and securing “baronies” of land around the towns of caciques ­were serious policies. Although such considerations may have constrained the En­glish to develop other ways to justify the dispossession of the natives, in the beginning they ­were the foundation for an altogether dif­fer­ent style of colonialism.37 The choice of “Cassique” as the name for the second order of Carolina nobility outlined in the Fundamental Constitutions was an appropriation and a strategy for co-­option. In theory, the new En­glish “Cassiques” w ­ ere expected to blend into the ranks of the existing Indian caciques of Carolina and eventually succeed to their places. Shaftesbury, in par­tic­u­lar, foresaw the development of an integrated, Anglo-­Indian elite in Carolina. He encouraged En­glish colonists to insinuate themselves into Indian polities in order to assume places of leadership. Two such aspiring En­glish caciques—­Maurice Mathews and Stephen Bull—­received Shaftesbury’s special ­favor. Shaftesbury’s letters to both men reveal how he pictured Carolina’s ­future ruling class. Quite unlike

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Captain John Smith, who spurned Wahunsonacock’s offer to become a weroance in the Powhatan chiefdom, En­ glish adventurers in early Carolina sought, and accepted, offers of indigenous titles.38 Mathews arrived in Carolina on the very first ship from Barbados. In a 1671 letter to Shaftesbury, Mathews reported on the po­liti­cal organ­ization of the Indians around Charles Towne. The local Indians, he wrote, boasted “haue 4 or 5 Cassekaes more or Less; Truly to define the power of ­those Cassikaes; I must say thus; it is noe more, (scarce as much,) as wee owne to ye Topakin in ­England.”39 In 1672, Shaftesbury congratulated Mathews on his election as the “Cassica” of a group of local Indians. He promised to make Mathews “a more considerable Cassique than any of the Indians.”40 Captain Stephen Bull was another of the early En­glish colonists in Carolina whose activities Shaftesbury believed heralded a pattern for ­future Indian relations. In August of 1673, when other colonists complained about Bull’s “acquaintance among and interest with the Indians,” Shaftesbury privately encouraged his work as “verry wisely done.”41 Bull’s apparent election as a local cacique, he wrote, was perfectly in keeping with “our designe w[hich]: is to get & continue ye friendship and assistance of ye Indians and make them usefull to vs w[ith]out force or Injury.” But Shaftesbury also expressed his desire that the En­glish would in time subsume the native aristocracy. He closed his letter to Bull, declaring that he “could bee verry glad [that] all the Tribes of [the] Indians round about vs had each of [them] an Eng[lish]man for theire Cassique.”42 Shaftesbury’s dream did not come to fruition. The En­glish caciques of Carolina never peacefully supplanted the native nobles in their seats of power. But t­ hese early traders’ activities presaged a f­uture when trade with Indians made them—in colonial eyes at least—­into obedient subjects.43 But the aim of incorporating and subjugating rather than expelling the Indians remained a priority. The Carolina proprietors repeatedly claimed the Indians in their territory to be ­under the En­glish crown’s protection. They commissioned their governors with instructions to serve justice to the Indians. In their 1682 instructions to Governor Joseph Morton, the proprietors characteristically reminded him that since they had “thought good to take all the Indians within 400 miles of Charles Towne into our Protection as Subjects to the Monarchy of E ­ ngland, you are not to suffer any of them to be made slaves off nor any ways Injur’d by any of the Inhabitants of the Territory u ­ nder yor Government.”44 The four-­hundred-­mile radius would have encompassed the Spanish missions of Florida.



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To most Carolinians, this was a declaration of their intent to gradually supplant and replace the Spanish as the Indians’ rightful lords. For the late seventeenth-­century Carolina governor, John Archdale, another possibility appeared. John Archdale’s c­ areer somewhat resembled that of another famous Quaker of the age, William Penn. Archdale joined the Society of Friends as an adult in the 1670s. He took an interest in Amer­i­ca and bought a place among the eight Carolina proprietors in 1678. From that time forward, the proprietors entrusted him with a succession of offices, culminating in appointing him to the governorship in 1694. The high points of Archdale’s governorship ­were the ­legal reforms he ushered in—­including the passage of a harsh Barbados-­style slave code.45 Lesser known is his correspondence with the governor of Spanish Florida, Laureano de Torres y Ayala, over the Indians u ­ nder their mutual jurisdiction. Verner Crane described the exchange as an instance of hard-­headed diplomacy to keep the prevailing peace between ­England and Spain.46 But the entangled framework may open another interpretation. The peace encouraged cooperation between officials in Charles Towne and officials in San Agustín, making them for a time something almost like joint custodians of the República de Indios. In 1695, a party of Yamasee men captured four “Spanish Indians that lived about Sancta Maria, not far from Augustine, the Seat of the Spanish Government” and that the king of Spain claimed as his vassals.47 John Archdale noted the incident and its sequel in his autobiographical A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina. According to Archdale, the Yamasee planned to “sell them for Slaves to Barbadoes or Jamaica as was usual.”48 Archdale instead sent for their cacique “and ordered him to bring t­hese Indians with him to Charles-­Town, which accordingly he did.” Upon their arrival, the governor learned that the captives—­three men and a ­woman—­“could speak Spanish.” With the help of his Jewish interpreter, perhaps local resident Abraham Avila, Archdale also learned that the Indians “profess’d the Christian Religion as the Papists do.”49 The governor promptly ordered the captives freed and sent them “to the Spanish Governour with a Letter” explaining how he had handled the situation. The full correspondence reveals two colonial officials commiserating about their shared difficulties in governing the Indians they claimed as vassals. The pair squabbled, too, but for the most part they forged a working relationship. For his part, Laureano de Torres y Ayala’s dispute with Archdale was about the government to which some of the Indians in question rightly belonged. Spanish Florida’s governor bemoaned attacks made upon the mission provinces

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by the Apalachicolas. From the vantage point of the presidio in San Agustín, the Apalachicolas ­were “Rebelles of this Crowne” and “neither vassals nor subjects of your Gouernemt & are of myne and as they Doe ill they must be Chastised.”50 In his reply, Archdale made clear the actions he had taken for the f­ uture maintenance of tranquility in the Indian lands between old San Jorge and San Agustín. “I have now sent an express to them to command them yt they doe nott Committ any acts of hostility on any of yor: Indians,” Archdale declared, “& doe expect yt: you give ye like also to yor: Vassalls.”51 Archdale shared what he assumed was a mutual frustration over governing the natives. “Undoubtedly you must need knowe ye Temper of ye Indians as well as my selfe how hard a m ­ atter it is to keep ym: from takeing revenge for Injuries or ye death of any of their nation,” Archdale confessed, “yett I doubt nott b­ ecause of their ready obedience to our Commands to prevent itt for ye f­ uture.”52 The Quaker governor closed his letter to his Spanish counterpart with an invocation of the Golden Rule—­what he took to be the guiding princi­ple of his policies. “I write now to a Christian Governor & nott to a Heathen or Indian King & therefore must remind you of ye Generall Command of our Lord Jesus Christ: doe to ­others as wee would they should doe to us.”53 For Archdale, the events that followed the Yamasee raid on Santa Maria was the work of Providence—­proof of how “the Almighty and Omniscient God, takes cognizance of ­Human Affairs, and directs them by a wise and prudent Chain of ­Causes.”54 God justified Archdale’s Indian policy and his cooperative relations with the Spaniards by using other Indians to save En­glish shipwreck victims who washed ashore “Southward of Augustine.”55 But the governor’s liberation of native “papists” and his cheerful correspondence with his Spanish partner ­were misleading. Archdale shared in the anti-­Catholic and anti-­Spanish prejudices of his countrymen. When he wrote his retrospective history of Carolina in 1707, Archdale, by then safely back in ­England, recounted Amer­i­c a’s Spanish past with loathing. “But again,” he wrote, “it at other times pleased Almighty God to send unusual Sicknesses amongst them, as the Small-­pox, &c. to lessen their Numbers; so that the En­glish, in Comparison to the Spaniard, have but l­ ittle Indian Blood to answer for.”56 Like most other En­glishmen, Archdale saw the “Cruel” and Catholic Spanish as having prepared the Indians for the ­later arrival of the more peaceful and Protestant En­glish. The Spanish had blazed the path through the wilderness. The En­glish must now make it straight.



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By 1700, Indians loyal to the En­glish government in Charles Towne w ­ ere fulfilling some of the same functions as the vassals of Spanish Florida’s Republic of Indians. As Alonso de Leturiondo put it, during the nominal peace between E ­ ngland and Spain since 1670, the Carolinians, “by acquiring vassals,” now “have ­people for the time of war” to come.57 In Carolina, indigenous auxiliaries formed the “Bulwark” of the colony’s military forces.58 The natives fought u ­ nder the command of their own headmen but also alongside En­glish militia. Some Indians received military pensions and other perquisites as rewards for their faithful ser­vice. Captain John Barnwell, for example, demanded money from “the Publick Trea­sury unto Francisco a Yamasee Indian the sum of twenty Shillings pr. annum for five years . . . ​­towards his support & maintainance, being disabled by a shot in his right hand on the late expedition against the Tusqueroras.”59 Tales of the valor of Carolina’s Indian subjects crossed the Atlantic. John Oldmixon, an En­glish historian, contrasted the alleged pusillanimity of the colony’s En­glish soldiers with the cool boldness of the Indians fighting alongside them. When the En­glish chastised the king of the “Yanioseaves” for the “slow Pace” of his retreat ­after they had failed to take the Castillo de San Marcos in 1702, Oldmixon quoted the Yamasee king as replying, “Tho your Governour leaves you, I ­will not stir till I have seen all my Men before me.”60 At the start of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the Yamasee w ­ ere seen as the most stalwart and loyal of Carolina’s Native American allies. At the same time, a missionary consortium took shape in London, in which the Yamasee—or at least an i­ magined version of that p ­ eople—­became the focus of the SPG’s principal campaign for religious conversion in the region. The Yamasee w ­ ere likely a composite of refugee Indian groups from Guale and vari­ous other parts of the region.61 While modern-­day scholars have puzzled over the origins and history of the Yamasee, eighteenth-­century Carolinians seemed confident in their knowledge of the Yamasee. Reports coming back from the society’s correspondents in Carolina confirmed the hopes at Lambeth Palace that the Yamasee ­were the best candidates for the missionaries’ endeavors. Francis Le Jau, one of South Carolina’s SPG missionaries, reported that the Yamasee, for one, “desired to have a Minister to come at Least and baptize their ­Children.”62 The SPG’s commissary in Carolina, Gideon Johnston, also promoted the image of the Yamasee as model recipients of the Gospel. “I hear the Yamousee Indians are very much inclin’d to embrace the Christian Religion,” Johnston reported to the SPG’s secretary in 1711.63

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The Spanish in Florida saw the ­matter in different terms. According to Spanish observers, the En­glish had won the “obedience” of natives like the Yamasees b­ ecause the En­glish did not subject them to the same rigorous law as the Spaniards had. En­glish trade goods only helped m ­ atters. Around 1700, in a memorial to the king of Spain, Alonso de Leturiondo believed “that ­these Indians get along so well with the En­glish . . . ​­because the latter do not oblige them to live u ­ nder the bell in law and in righ­teousness, but rather, only as they wish to, while the En­glish bring them guns, powder, balls, glass beads, knives, hatchets, iron tools, woolen blankets and other goods with which they make their trades.”64 The challenge for Spain was daunting. “It ­will not be easy to reduce ­these to obedience to the faith,” Leturiondo wrote of the Yamasees, Apalachicolas, and other “pagan” natives, “if they are brought up without law and without reason in accord with their own liberty and brutish style of life, [along] with the evil habits and the heresies of the En­glish.”65 Governor Zuñiga wrote that Spanish efforts against the Apalachicolas came to l­ittle thanks to “the aid that the En­glish give them, to whose friendship they incline as barbarians ­because they do not impose upon them the law that we do.”66 Meanwhile, some En­glish officials w ­ ere steadily planning to address exactly ­these issues. The secular champion of the mission to “civilize” the Yamasee was the Scottish-­born Indian trader Thomas Nairne. In 1705, Nairne wrote to the SPG about his plan for protecting and converting the Indians subject to the government of Carolina, particularly the Yamasee and Apalachee.67 Nairne had an eclectic c­ areer—he was a trader, government official, imperial reformer, and both an enslaver and would-be protector of Indians.68 But as the missions of Florida gave way before the combined onslaught of Carolinians and Creek Indians, Nairne turned his energies to replicating the old Spanish system ­under new, En­glish management. Nairne had vigorously supported military expansion into Florida. But even as he merrily joined in “kniving all ye Indians Towns in Florida w[hi]ch ­were Subject to the Spaniards,” Nairne pondered the po­liti­cal and religious complications that victory would bring.69 His proposed solution was an overt adaptation of the Spanish model. The brief days of any En­glish and Spanish joint custody of the República de Indios ­were long over—­the En­glish would now have to govern the southeastern Indians by themselves. Echoing William Owen’s remark of forty years earlier, Nairne first acknowledged the power of the Spanish missionaries. Nairne related to the SPG “what mighty influence the Spanish Fryars had upon ye Indians of St. James & Apalachia who though they saw their Countries all fired & themselves dayly



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killed & carried away Slaves by other Indians, yet they maintained their fidelity & friendship to ye Spaniards to ye very last, & nothing but downright force brought them over to our side.”70 But in the end, by sheer force of arms, Carolina had “brought about 1600. souls to ­settle among our Indians and be Subject to our Government”—­not counting the “­great numbers killed and sold for slaves.”71 Having forcibly resettled so many Indians within their territory, the Carolinians needed institutions to govern them properly. The Indians needed En­glish officials to hear their complaints and resolve them. To the SPG, Nairne proposed that its ministers could act as a “Protector” in each Indian town “to represent their Grievances to.”72 The ministers would serve both to advance the Gospel and to promote the safety of the colony. The government of Carolina needed resident officials among the Indians, he wrote, so that it “might then likewise rely upon having good intelligence of what passed among the Indians.”73 The Indians’ souls hung in the balance—­a ­matter, Nairne averred, that the Spaniards had never forgotten. “Now if we take not leave equal of their Salvation as the Spaniards always have done,” Nairne declared, “what a good fight have we been fighting to bring so many ­people from something of Chris­ tian­ity to downright Barbarity and Heathenism.”74 Nairne griped that the SPG sent too many missionaries who preferred to assume comfortable pulpits in settled Carolina parishes rather than minister to the Indians. Thus, “men & money designed for the poor Indians” often went instead to instructing wealthy planters’ slaves.75 Nairne encouraged the SPG to send over missionaries who w ­ ere “willing to bear some hardship & Trou­bles in bringing about so good a Design.”76 Perhaps Nairne was thinking of missionaries of the sort the Carolinians and Creeks had found in Florida during the Apalachee campaigns, like the friar at Ayubale who had rallied the Christian Indians to resist the Carolinian attack.77 Perhaps most remarkable was Nairne’s candid admission of how well the Spaniards had discharged the duty that the Catholic Church had imposed upon them in 1493. “Pope Alexander the 6th obliged the Kings of Spain when he gave them the W. Indies to maintain Missionaries in all Places of their territoryes ­there,” Nairne explained, “which they have always and still do with very good Success.”78 Although Nairne added that the friars’ support “came out of the Indians pocket,” the import of his words was undeniable. An Anglo-­ Scottish Indian trader was telling a group of Anglican ministers in ­England that the Catholic Spaniards provided a model worthy of emulation.

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Carolina, Nairne suggested, would now have to reconstruct a kind of República de Indios of its own—­complete with missions, “Protectors,” and ­legal channels for hearing the grievances of the native p ­ eople the colony had subjugated. Scholars have rightly viewed Nairne’s letter as outlining policy for the ­future but have not connected it with the subsequent reforms that the colony implemented.79 The letter’s emphasis on relieving Indian grievances suggests that Nairne put some of t­ hese ideas to use as a leading framer of the Indian Trade Act of 1707, which he hoped would “Preserve ye Country and Ease the Oppressions ye Indian Lie undr. and have hitherto unsuccessfully Complaind of.”80 ­A fter five years and much po­liti­cal wrangling, Carolina fulfilled part of Thomas Nairne’s vision for the relief of the Indians. However, instead of courageous men of God defending the Indians, the Carolinians impaneled a board of planters and traders to hear Indians’ complaints. Still, the colony’s “Indian subjects” would have a formal outlet for redress. Pursuant to the “Act of Assembly for regulating the Indian Trade and making itt safe to the Publick,” Ralph Izard gaveled to order the first meeting of the Board of Commissioners of the Indian Trade on September 20, 1710. The board commissioned roving agents to inquire into relations between En­glishmen and Indians much as the visitadores did in Spanish Florida. Meanwhile, Carolinian counter­parts to Spanish Florida’s “friars,” the SPG missionaries, enjoyed remarkable successes among the Yamasee—­despite the depredations of Indian traders and the glaring institutional limitations they faced. Carolinians had largely replaced Florida’s República de Indios with a fledgling experiment in Indian governance of their own—­a lbeit with substantial modifications. From the time of their arrival, the exiled Apalachee caciques demanded that the En­glish agree to the terms of the “colonial compact” and sought to protect themselves from avid colonists hoping instead to enslave them.81 That they “behave themselves very Submissive to the Government,” for instance, fulfilled their obligations to the crown.82 And if they ­were “hostages,” as recent scholars have suggested, the Apalachee did not always behave as such.83 The Board provided another forum for their efforts. On the second day of the Board’s existence, representatives of the “­free” Apalachee Indians poured into the room in Charles Towne where the commissioners ­were meeting. Many of their complaints concerned the sexual trespasses that En­glish traders committed against native w ­ omen. According to one Indian’s testimony, Jess Crosley, one of the En­glish traders who lived among the Apalachee had “beat and abused an Apalachia Indian Man in a barbarous manner” when the man



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had tangled with Crosley over what the commissioners’ rec­ord called “a Whore of his.”84 ­These grievances, along with other Apalachee complaints concerning demands on their ­labor, could reflect their continued adherence to norms that the Franciscan friars and Spanish officials had generally respected during the mission era. For instance, the Apalachee “complain[ed] against Capt. [John] Musgrove that he went this Spring to their Town and demanded Indians to goe and hoe his Corn.”85 Musgrove threatened the Apalachee that “if they did not answer his Demands he would beat them.” Musgrove’s threat was perhaps particularly galling to a ­people, who just a few years before, ­were liable only for the l­ abor drafts of Spanish authorities and not Spanish individuals. In the mission period, Indians like the Apalachee went to San Agustín to take their turn building or repairing the fortifications ­t here. An individual Spaniard would have made such a private, uncompensated demand for Indian l­abor at his peril. Musgrove’s demands w ­ ere all the more b­ itter as the last de­cade before the destruction of the Apalachee missions had witnessed a growth in Spanish ranching activity that led to the abuse of Indian ­labor. Local Spaniards forced Indians to work without pay, and some “even carried off native w ­ omen 86 to work on their ranches against their w ­ ill.” Spanish authorities found it difficult to resolve the Apalachees’ grievances—­a failure to police the bounds of the Republic of Indians that increased the Indians’ disaffection with the Spanish. Other common employments for their l­abor in Carolina might also have stoked Apalachee resentment. Twenty-­five Apalachee Indians ­were “burtheners” for Thomas Welch, carry­ing trade goods on their backs during a journey of hundreds of miles in 1708.87 Resorting to burdening may have presented economic opportunities, but it was humiliating work that Indians regularly complained about during provincial visitations. Indeed, the Spanish had tried to curb the use of Apalachee Indians as pack ­bearers back in the 1650s ­after accusations that some friars had worked them “without concern for the natives’ welfare.”88 The 1694 visitation in Apalachee Province laid down rules forbidding the use of Indians as pack ­bearers without just compensation.89 But to the “­free” Apalachee leaders, Musgrove’s greatest offense may have been his utter disregard for the native authorities that the Spanish had generally respected. The caciques and principales among the mission Indians ­were ­free from manual l­abor, complaining quickly if the Spaniards infringed on their privileges. Apalachee leaders tolerated few affronts to their status or dignity. They especially resented corporal punishments from the friars, and they could receive correction for other offenses only a­ fter a complaint to Florida’s

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governor, who would proceed with trying them.90 That the “­free” Apalachee repeatedly pursued their demands through ­legal and po­liti­cal channels may also have been a legacy of their mission past. They expected the visiting agent, the assembly, and the Board of Indian Commissioners to respond much as Spanish officials in Florida had once done. Leading historians of the Indian slave trade and the Yamasee War have parsed the complaints that native ­peoples made before Carolina officials to understand how ­these offenses added up to a Native American casus belli. Alan Gallay examined Indian grievances and concluded that, for the Yamasee, at least, En­glish encroachments on their land was the most impor­tant issue. As the value of the Yamasees’ trade declined and the demand for good rice land ­rose, the En­glish at Port Royal eyed the Indians’ lands with increasing desire.91 But land was not the only new issue that Gallay brought to the fore. For the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and other native ­peoples who interacted with Carolina traders and officials on a standing of relatively equality, the changing terms of trade w ­ ere the key grievance. Th ­ ese Indians complained that they grew poorer while the En­glish grew rich.92 For the smaller nations living within Carolina’s bound­aries, closer proximity with the colonists meant that the growing economic disparity was especially galling. And, not least, Indian slavery remained a thorny issue. Indians groups that had once joined in enslaving Spanish mission Indians now feared that the same fate would befall them if the balance of power tipped any further. All this was coming to a head as South Carolinians had become more confident in their management of Indian affairs, adopting what Stephen Oatis called a more “ ‘hands-on’ approach.”93 William Ramsey, in his careful study of the Yamasee War, explored in depth the conduct of Indian traders and the cultural expectations surrounding the Indian trade.94 Ramsey identified three categories of native grievances—­ crimes against w ­ omen that v­ iolated native gender norms, abuses of Indian and En­glish notions of credit and debt, and violations of what he called the “rudimentary protocol” that governed the pro­cess of Indian enslavement.95 However, Ramsey also argued that Indian reports of trader misconduct “masked” deeper concerns that grew out of clashes between En­glish norms and the cultures of the native South.96 Building on t­ hese historians’ insights, it is clear that the deeper, historic context for native complaints included many Indians’ prior experience with Spanish colonial rule, complicating still further the motives of native participants in the Yamasee War. Perhaps the memories of former Spanish mission



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Indians who had relocated to Carolina—­namely, the “­free” Apalachee—­ influenced the po­liti­cal expectations or aspirations of other Indian groups, like the Yamasee. ­A fter all, some Yamasee also had experience with mission life and Spanish rule, although they mostly rejected both. Some may have even lived in Florida mission towns nearby the Apalachee during the 1670s. Spanish documents indicate that some Yamasee may have taken part in a 1675–76 visita.97 If they did, t­here is no way to know what effect it had—­ whether to set a standard of justice in the minds of the Yamasee who attended or to underscore the futility of waiting on colonial powers for redress. While exasperation at Carolina’s failures to live up to their expectations of justice may have contributed to the decision of some Yamasee to go to war, for ­others their experience with the Spanish perhaps had encouraged their choice to stake their fortunes with the colonial power structure. One Yamasee band, at least, sent its leader’s son to live among the En­glish as a student, much as the sons of Indian nobles had once done in San Agustín.98 In September 1715, the SPG’s prized Indian pupil, George, the “Yamasee Prince,” returned to Charles Towne from ­England.99 He found the city and the colony completely transformed from the place he had left two years before. The previous spring, the Yamasee and the “­free” Apalachee, once model Indians in the minds of missionaries and colonial officials alike, had risen in revolt against their putative Carolina lords. One of the first casualties of the conflict was Thomas Nairne, a man who had once i­magined himself as the Indians’ “protector.”100 Now, as George disembarked from his ship, he found the small walled city crowded with frightened refugees from the surrounding countryside. Hostile Indians pressed so close to the city that the inhabitants crowded inside could not “be supplied with Provisions but by Sea.”101 George hoped to re­unite with his ­family. In a 1716 letter, Francis Le Jau described George’s ­father as “head man of the Newaas,” one Yamasee group that clearly favored a closer relationship with the En­glish.102 But reports had circulated that George’s ­father was dead, as ­were the entire clan, victims of rival Yamasees who had opposed submission to the En­glish. Soon a­ fter the war’s outset, Francis Le Jau had heard that “the Yamousee’s [sic] had kill’d 25. of their own Men who would not declare ag[ain]st us, among whom is the honest ­Father to the young Prince the Com[missa]ry carry’d to E ­ ngland.”103 The Yamasee War marked the end of Carolina’s and the SPG’s hope to erect a system of Indian governance as ambitious as Florida’s Republic of Indians. Carolina’s Indian commissioners, roving agents, and a few missionaries w ­ ere an attempt to come to grips with the havoc that the colony’s prevailing

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Indian policy—­rooted in the slave trade—­had wrought across the region. Compared with the Spanish colonial system—­with its situado and sabana, pillars of the crown and the Indian elite alike—­Carolina reformers had few resources with which to build and bind their own ties to the native polities that surrounded them. Their efforts proved to be si­mul­ta­neously too intrusive and too in­effec­tive for Indian leaders, who chose to rely on their own devices to reassert their autonomy and authority. A final misfortune concerns the fate of George, the “Yamasee Prince,” the living embodiment of South Carolina’s experiment in supplanting Spanish Florida’s Republic of Indians. George’s last surviving letter was written on December 8, 1715. In it, he thanked his En­glish benefactors “for all their Favours.”104 “I read e­very Day and night at Mr.  Commissary Johnston[’s] ­house,” George reported. “I learn by Commissary Johnston as [well as by his] Lady. I read e­ very Day and night and Mr. Commissary Johnston he as well kind to me alwa[y]s.”105 As to his ­father, George wrote that he “hope[s] he w ­ ill come to Charles Town.” Word arrived l­ater that George’s f­ather was alive but that he and the rest of the f­amily ­were now slaves.106 With this, the “Yamasee Prince” faded from the historical rec­ord. Perhaps, like so many other Indians in the war, George, too, was killed or enslaved. Or perhaps he joined with other Yamasee refugees who left Carolina and resettled in Florida and remade himself yet again—­this time into a loyal vassal of the king of Spain.

PA RT I V

Trade and War

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chapter 10

Reluctant Petitioners En­glish Officials and the Spanish Ca­rib­be­an a p ri l Lee h at fi el d

In 1689, diplomat Robert Southwell wrote that “the Spaniard both in his Islands and his Continent lyes t­here as the ­great Carcass, upon which all the rest doe prey.” Historians have followed his lead in characterizing the po­ liti­c al economy of the Ca­rib­bean at the end of the seventeenth c­ entury.1 But Southwell’s letter reflected the perspective of a Londoner who lacked Ca­rib­bean experience. In contrast, En­glish merchants and officials in the Ca­rib­bean approached their counter­parts in Spanish American port towns warily, knowing that they competed with Spanish, Dutch, and French merchants and risked seizure by trading in Spanish American ports. While Spanish American officials and merchants needed foreign trade, they possessed the bullion that other Eu­ro­pe­ans sought and could therefore often choose when to allow En­glish trade. Moreover, Spanish and En­glish officials operated within dif­fer­ent bureaucratic paradigms, frustrating communications. En­glish officials chafed against what they saw as Spaniards’ unwarranted attitude of superiority. En­glish merchants and officials who hoped for peaceful trade in Spanish American ports ­were put on edge by their inability to predict what kind of reception they would receive. They acknowledged Spanish officials’ upper hand but at the same time resented Spanish officials’ condescension, believing that the 1670 Treaty of Madrid ­ought to have created diplomatic parity.

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The inequalities that characterized the relations between Spanish and En­glish actors in the late seventeenth-­century Ca­rib­bean reflect the asymmetries Eliga Gould has identified as central to Anglo-­Spanish entanglements throughout the Amer­i­cas.2 I argue ­here that Spanish Ca­rib­bean officials willingly and En­glish Ca­rib­bean officials unwillingly sustained that asymmetrical relationship in their negotiations. Both found performing the asymmetry useful ­because it rested on real inequalities: Spaniards possessed the bullion the En­glish wanted, Spain claimed a more developed colonial society and bureaucracy, and Spain’s former dominion over the entire region left remnants of ­legal pre­ce­dence. Fi­nally, the Ca­rib­be­an’s international context meant that En­glish actors competed with the Dutch and the French to entangle themselves with Spanish Amer­i­ca. At first glance, two forms of entanglement seem in play—­one formal, involving officials attentive to diplomatic protocol, the other informal, involving officials, merchants, and consumers who readily engaged in illicit trade. Gould uses entanglement in part to convey that “far from being distinct entities . . . ​t he two empires ­were part of the same hemispheric system or community,” in other words, an “interconnected system.” I find the more impor­tant distinction not that between formal and informal entanglement but between ac­cep­tance of entanglement as a desirable model and re­sis­tance to it. Much of the (formal) warfare and (informal) piracy in the region during the late seventeenth c­ entury represented efforts to resist entanglement in ­favor of separation, to insist upon a fiction of “distinct entities.” Scholars and some contemporaries linked the vio­lence of piracy with the entanglement of illicit trade, but for the En­glish the two illegalities represented alternative means of accessing Spanish wealth, and from 1670 to 1713 En­glish parties in London and the Ca­rib­bean debated the better strategy. Despite instances of forced illicit trade, the two activities emerged from dif­fer­ent beliefs about how the economy worked: piracy, like warfare and conquest, reflected a certainty that accessing American wealth required weakening Spain. In contrast, smuggling and much of the era’s diplomacy, the subject of this chapter, reflected a hope that international trade would benefit the subjects of both nations. This vision demanded peace, not a universal commitment to “no peace beyond the line.”3 Thus, the distinction between the formal entanglements of diplomatic protocol and the informal entanglements of illicit trade expressed a developing po­liti­cal economy of interconnection rather than two distinct types of interaction. En­glish and especially Spanish officials’ commitment to formalities



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and rituals served to tame the potential disorder of smuggling, not by eradicating it but by creating a framework capable of anticipating the hoped-­for legalization of international trade. As suggested by Ernesto Bassi in Chapter 11, public protocol enabled entanglements below the surface. Rather than seeing smuggling as inherently disordered or a threat to Spanish sovereignty in the region, many local Spanish officials instead strove to introduce international trade while retaining dominion and insisting that En­glish and other foreign traders participate in ceremonial recognitions of Spanish sovereignty. As long as trade proceeded unforced, it revealed the disobedience of Spanish subjects and local officials but not a loss of sovereignty vis-­à-­vis foreigners. Local Spanish officials continued to exercise authority in their sovereign’s name over space and activities, as En­glish officials’ and merchants’ petitioning reveals. The 1655 En­glish conquest of Jamaica had rested on the militant hostility of polities necessarily distinct due to religious incompatibility. Such an attitude manifested itself in violent predation on Spanish American wealth: En­glishmen of all ranks in the western Ca­rib­bean pursued Spanish riches via conquest, giving rise to the privateering and piracy that came to characterize Jamaica. But many En­glish officials and merchants ­adopted a dif­fer­ent strategy for establishing Jamaica’s place within the region: one in which the En­glish would woo Spanish Americans into a willing trade, first for enslaved Africans and then for En­glish manufactured goods, primarily cloth.4 In exchange, the En­glish would receive bullion and coin, scarce in E ­ ngland and especially in its colonies. Unable to meet the l­abor demands of its colonists, Spain for de­cades had permitted foreign merchants to sell enslaved Africans in its American colonies. Slave traders required a special license—­the asiento—­ from the crown. Portuguese, Genoese, and Dutch merchants had held the asiento in the seventeenth ­century and had then subcontracted portions of the slave trade to other nations’ merchants, thus providing an even wider range of foreign merchants with l­egal entrée into Spanish American port towns and the means to acquire bullion legally. By permitting asiento merchants into Spanish American ports, this slave trade also provided cover for smuggling northern Eu­ro­pean manufactured goods—­primarily cloth—­for more bullion. Economic historians have argued that by the ­middle of the seventeenth ­century, foreigners carried more than half of Spain’s American trade. Smuggling thus operated with the collusion of Spanish American officials but depended on the asiento, b­ ecause only foreign merchants with license to trade slaves could enter the ports legally. In the late seventeenth ­century, En­glish, Dutch, Genoese, and French merchants competed for the asiento,

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both ­because slave trading in itself paid and ­because it facilitated illicit (but widely condoned) cloth trade. Asiento licenses protected the foreign merchants, the Spaniards who traded with them, and the officials who colluded to permit smuggling.5 Aspiring En­glish traders used Jamaica to build a smuggling network to Cartagena and other Spanish American port towns while seeking l­egal access to some portion of the asiento license. But ongoing En­glish privateering and piracy undermined En­glish officials’ credibility. Spanish officials granted retaliatory privateering commissions. Spanish colonists could choose from French, Dutch, Genoese, and Spanish merchants jockeying for their bullion, but Jamaicans needed Spanish trade to acquire hard currency without warfare. Thus, despite their frustration with Spanish prize taking and Spanish officials’ proprietary posture ­toward the region, En­g lish merchants and Jamaican officials responded by adopting a deferential tone ­toward Spanish American officials. The 1670 Treaty of Madrid set the stage for Anglo-­Spanish entanglement in the Ca­rib­bean. En­glish traders could, for the first time, imagine building an open trade with Spanish Americans. While we may be inclined to read treaties as fixed, they generated conflicting interpretations and ongoing negotiation, not only in Eu­ro­pean metropoles but also in the locales affected by them. The 1670 Treaty of Madrid left a number of uncertainties. While it affirmed En­glish dominion over American territories with En­glish settlements, it did not list them, producing, for example, conflict over ­whether En­glish logwood cutters could rightfully remain in their Yucatan camps. The treaty affirmed “Liberty of Navigation,” seeming to protect En­glish mari­ners throughout the region, but at the same time insisted that nothing detract from “any Pre-­eminence, Right or Dominion of ­either Confederate in the American Seas, Channels or ­Waters,” encouraging many Spanish officials to assert their long-­standing claims to police the Ca­rib­bean sea. The treaty prohibited the subjects of one king from entering the ports of another to trade but then opened the possibility that “­either King” might “grant unto the Subjects of the other any general or par­tic­u­lar Licence or Priviledges of Navigating unto, and Trading in, any places,” which En­g lish merchants could take as invitation to seek the asiento.6 This chapter argues that regardless of laws, instructions, and po­liti­cal theory emanating from Eu­rope, local Spanish and En­glish viewpoints in the Ca­rib­bean, riddled with perceptions and (sometimes willful) misperceptions, defined the terms of Anglo-­Spanish entanglement.



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The En­glish worried ­whether they could compete with the Dutch, who already ran an active trade from Curaçao to Spanish American ports. In 1670, the En­glish governor of Antigua wrote that the Dutch w ­ ere thriving at Curaçao, ­because ­t here they “vend a vast quantity of Negroes to the Spaniard.” Some En­glish merchants took advantage of Curacao’s open trade policy to contact Spanish merchants: four ships had recently taken a “­great store” of slaves from Jamaica to Curacao “for ready pieces of eight.” But En­glish traders preferred to secure a direct Spanish trade, fearing the Dutch would shut their ports to competitors. The Antigua governor worried that the Dutch might “­settle a Mart for Negroes” at Tortola and “ingrosse” the slave trade to Puerto Rico. Dutch permission to foreign slave traders at Curaçao had not overcome his sense of commerce as a zero-­sum competition. Thus, even En­glish officials and merchants who favored opening trade moved t­oward such a model fitfully, uncertain w ­ hether it might encompass Dutch or French competitors.7 Emboldened by the recent peace and hoping to emulate Dutch successes, Jamaicans in­de­pen­dently made commercial overtures to Spanish Americans. In July  1671, Jamaica governor Sir Thomas Lynch sent merchant Col­o­nel William Beeston to Cartagena “to Adjust the Peace [of] Madrid for the West-­ Indies.”8 Apparently, neither London nor Madrid officials had authorized the Cartagena meeting. Rather, it reflected local initiative.9 Lynch had just arrived in Jamaica, replacing Thomas Modyford. The new governor aimed to encourage trade and to appease Spaniards angry over Modyford’s breach of the peace in issuing the privateering commission that Henry Morgan had used to attack Panama the previous fall.10 Jamaicans wanted local Spanish officials to acknowledge the Madrid treaty’s recognition of En­g lish po­liti­c al and economic legitimacy in the region. The Ca­rib­be­an’s violent history, including their own countrymen’s continuing piracy against Spanish ports and shipping, worked against them. But ­because Spanish Americans’ markets for goods and laborers went unfulfilled, En­glish Jamaicans could hope for an expansive interpretation of the treaty’s terms to permit open commerce between Port Royal and Spain’s American ports. Beeston, as a slave trader, seemed well positioned to negotiate the one sort of international trade Spanish officials could legally allow. Both the Jamaicans and the Cartageneros labored to impress one another. Beeston, who penned a narrative of the voyage, sailed with “a handsome Train of Servants, and half a dozen Gentlemen.”11 He described the events of the weeklong visit in language redolent of ceremony and symbol. The En­glish took care to both offer and receive signs of re­spect that could foster a diplomatic

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relationship. On the one hand, they acknowledged their position as suitors. On the other hand, they asserted the diplomatic legitimacy they had acquired in the treaty, which had specified that Spanish governors could no longer deny En­glish claims to Jamaica. Beeston promised Governor Don Pedro de Ulloa Ribadeneira that he would honor the city with a salute if the governor pledged “due return.”12 When notice arrived that “the City was ready to receive us with all re­spect,” the En­glish fired salutes from both of their frigates and received answer from Cartagena’s walled fortress.13 The following morning, they exchanged salutes again “for the more solemnity.” When the En­glish landed their pinnaces, “ten Coaches, a Com­pany of Foot, the Serjeant Major of the Town, and the Commander of the ­Castle, with several other Gentlemen of Quality,” took them to Governor Ulloa’s ­house. On the way, ­people “thronged” the streets, fascinated by the visitors’ clothing. Ulloa received them at the head of his stairs with “fifty of the Best Gentlemen of the City,” “richly habited, and adorned with Gold and Jewels,” many wearing the insignia of their Spanish chivalric o­ rders. The Spaniards thus visually signaled both their material wealth and their ability to replicate Eu­ro­pean traditions of social hierarchy, even in a second-­tier colonial city such as Cartagena. The En­glish ­were duly awed by the display.14 They admired Cartagena, “well built with Stone, and covered with Tile,” with the h ­ ouses four or five stories high, decorated “with Balconies . . . ​and g­ reat Wooden Lattices,” as in Spain. In stark contrast to Port Royal, the “Publick Structures,” especially the churches, ­were “Beautiful.”15 ­A fter only one day to prepare, the Spaniards served “an extraordinary Dinner,” entirely on silver, accompanied by m ­ usic. The En­glish merchants and gentlemen knew that neither Port Royal nor any other En­glish town in the region could match such opulence. But they hoped that at least their shipping compared favorably. They entertained “such Gentlemen of Quality, as the Governour permitted to come on board,” impressing them, the En­glish hoped, with the two frigates’ “Strength and Beauty.” When formal talks began, the governor acknowledged the En­glishmen’s status by placing Beeston on his right and Mr. Read, a f­actor of the Royal African Com­pany, on his left. In discussing “the business of the Peace,” the Spanish officials raised the issue of Morgan’s attack on Panama, observing that it had occurred “­after certain notice of the conclusion of the Peace.”16 Despite Beeston’s dubious insistence that Jamaicans only learned of the peace months ­after the attack, he nonetheless recognized that it put him at a diplomatic disadvantage, requiring that he placate Spanish officials with concessions.17



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Although they enjoyed more feting, feasting, and salutes, the En­glishmen detected suspicion among the Spaniards, which seemed confirmed when news arrived that two privateers had anchored five leagues from Cartagena. The Spaniards, certain the privateers w ­ ere En­glish, told Beeston that the En­glish could hardly expect a lasting peace if privateers arrived even while local diplomats convened. Beeston assured them that “we had not one Privateer abroad.” Rather, they must be French or hold commissions from French Tortuga.18 The incident, and Beeston’s reference to both French privateers and Tortuga commissions, highlighted a difficulty the En­g lish and Spanish faced in trying to foster peaceful trade: the privateers of other sovereigns ­were not bound by the Treaty of Madrid. Moreover, Tortuga governor Bertrand d’Ogeron, defying the authority of his French superiors, issued privateering commissions to maritime predators of all nationalities, including En­glish.19 ­These privateers disrupted Anglo-­Spanish trade by preying on ships, and their indeterminate identities perpetuated Spanish fears of En­glish predation. While in Cartagena, some of the En­glish merchants tried to discuss trade with the “Eminent F ­ actor” Herman, who represented Domingo Grillo’s merchant firm. Grillo, a Genoese merchant resident in Spain, held the asiento contract from 1662 to 1669 and continued his trade thereafter. Grillo’s firm subcontracted this slave trade, placing ­factors in Spanish American ports who then purchased from other Eu­ro­pean slave traders, most notably the Dutch at Curaçao.20 Beeston and his companions hoped to establish a slave trade with Herman via a Jamaica reexport trade. But the Cartagena elite prevented any conversation between them b­ ecause they disliked Herman and distrusted the En­glishmen.21 Thus, the En­glish left Cartagena a week ­after their arrival, having forged diplomatic but not commercial ties. On their return voyage, they met with one of Grillo’s asiento ships ­going from Cartagena to Curaçao with 120,000 pieces of eight with which to buy slaves, an encounter that reminded the En­glish merchants of all the bullion Jamaicans could acquire if they could gain entrée to the asiento.22 Governor Lynch wrote to London that his envoys to Cartagena “­were treated infinitely well, & Magnificently by both the Governor & by the city.” He forwarded Beeston’s narrative and the governor’s “autos [decrees] and formalities.” He reported that he had given Beeston and Read o­ rders to encourage the asiento f­actor Herman to come to Jamaica to buy enslaved Africans but that Herman “was so hated,” and the En­glish visitors “so watched,” that they could accomplish nothing.23

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In 1675, Thomas Lynch (the former governor or his son) articulated Jamaican commercial goals.24 Hoping to convince both crowns to approve Anglo-­Spanish slave trade, he claimed that the asentistas (the asiento’s ­factors resident in Spanish port cities) could purchase slaves from the Royal African Com­pany at Jamaica and Barbados for almost 20 ­percent less than they paid at Curaçao. With such savings, Spain could raise the royalties that asentistas paid to Carlos II on each enslaved African and thereby advance Spain’s crown revenue. Spanish officials should not fear aiding Jamaica’s growth by such trade: not only was Jamaica already too well peopled and planted to uproot, but encouraging trade would also promote a Jamaican economy that would complement Spanish American colonies rather than competing with them. Lynch argued that the En­glish would make better commercial allies, incorrectly promising that the En­glish would not undercut Spanish cloth merchants (as the Dutch had done) since textiles already cost less in Spanish ports than in Jamaica. The slave trade could also serve a military goal, he argued, ­because the En­glish ships it employed “would awe and reduce and punish all Pyrates, & . . . ​make them . . . ​leave t­ hese Indies” or quit piracy, “which the Spaniards cannot do.” In addition, the trade would help preserve the peace by facilitating good correspondence between subjects of both crowns, and “make all the World see that . . . ​it is not for the advantage of the En­glish to have any other Colony but Jamaica.” Anglo-­Spanish trade in the Ca­rib­bean would thus benefit Spain, ­England, and their respective colonies.25 While Lynch’s po­liti­cal economy contrasted with a mercantilist vision of closed empires, he stopped short of promoting ­free trade, believing it impor­tant that the En­glish and Spanish cooperate to preserve the Spanish in their current territories and prevent a strengthened French presence. Lynch argued against supporting pirates’ further pillaging of Spanish ships and ports. Any En­glish attempt to gain Spanish wealth by weakening Spanish Amer­i­ca was, he believed, misguided: the En­glish should instead capitalize on Jamaica’s potential to increase E ­ ngland’s wealth through peaceful trade with Spanish Amer­i­c a and abandon any further dreams of conquest. Lynch presumed continuing Anglo-­Spanish rivalry in the region but believed vio­lence served no one. He contended that “En­glish interest” demanded “the Spaniards be preserved in the possession of what they have in the W. Indies” to ensure that the Spanish remained spread too thin to retake En­glish territories. If the En­glish acquired no more islands, they could avoid the Spanish example of overextension and rather keep existing colonies, especially Jamaica, “peopled & fortifyed.” The resulting stability would permit a secure commer-



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cial relationship with Spanish Amer­i­ca, with Port Royal as a slave trading entrepôt. “Warre and Pryvateering” obstructed ­those goals and must be suppressed for ­England to benefit fully from its presence in the region.26 Lynch, then, saw ongoing privateering and piracy as a danger primarily ­because it threatened the potential growth of an Anglo-­Spanish slave trade. He and other En­glish officials knew that their efforts to promote trade depended not just on their ability to suppress privateering but also on their ability to convince Spanish officials that ­those efforts ­were in earnest. En­glish privateers thus lost formal approval in 1671.27 Thereafter, En­glish privateers and pirates in the western Ca­rib­bean instead relied on colonial populations willing to harbor them, on their ability to bribe officials, and on taking foreign commissions. Jamaica governors hastened to assure both their Spanish American counter­parts and their London superiors that they fought privateers and made reparations to victims of En­glish privateering. Jamaica governors repeatedly issued proclamations prohibiting British subjects from accepting foreign commissions, “calling in” privateers who had done so, and offering them amnesty in exchange for security payments promising reform. Soon a­ fter his arrival in 1671, Jamaica governor Lynch called in the privateers and wrote to “all the Spanish ports” to declare publicly the En­glish decision to treat any remaining privateers as pirates.28 Fighting the island’s reputation as a haven for pirates and privateers with foreign commissions, Lynch claimed that “all the reasonable and Planting ­People” in Jamaica “are ag[ain]st privateering.” “Only,” according to the governor, “the Alehouse keepers and some few ­others” aided the privateers. He issued a “Proclamation against injuring the Spaniards” in October 1672, promising prosecution as pirates to any British subjects who robbed or committed any vio­lence against Spaniards.29 He sent an En­glish frigate to cruise for pirates in the Cayman islands.30 While some Spanish port officials condoned or actively engaged in trade with the En­glish, o­ thers issued privateering licenses to guardacosta captains to seize En­glish ships, frequently on the grounds (often correct) that they illegally carried Spanish American goods. En­glish officials and ship captains complained that the guardacosta regularly seized En­glish ships with En­glish Ca­rib­bean produce, evidence of a Spanish failure to acknowledge their right to sail and trade in the region.31 Spanish officials wrote that their need to obey their o­ rders required that they seize En­glish smugglers and logwood cutters.

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In Spanish port towns, then, unpredictable treatment of Anglo-­Spanish traders came from governors and port officials as well as from privateers with expansive interpretations of their commissions. In 1672, Jamaica governor Lynch sent a ketch to Cartagena to trade, but port officials seized the ship and the enslaved Africans (together worth £1,500) and publicly burned the rest of its goods (prob­ably cloth) in the marketplace.32 Lynch complained that Spanish colonial officials refused to grant reparations for their illegal “seizing in Peace” of “poor Marchants,” and he hoped London officials would request that Carlos II order his American governors to stop the seizures.33 Another En­glish vessel, similarly “employed by” Lynch and ­others, sold slaves and other goods “at a good Price” at Campeche. ­There the Spanish gave no trou­ble, but the ship’s cargo officer reported that as he went ashore to sell some goods, former En­glish privateers who had declined to accept Lynch’s amnesty offer and “revolted to the Spaniards” had robbed him of money and silver. Such piracy made it “difficult to find a firm Trade with the Spaniards.”34 Jamaica trade with Campeche sometimes did meet Spanish obstruction. When Lynch demanded of Campeche governor Don Fernando Francisco de Escobedo 14,000 pieces of eight as damages for a pink taken the previous August, Escobedo promised satisfaction but did not give it. Moreover, he commissioned a frigate from Jamaica, manned with En­glish subjects who “vollantary offred themselves to serve the Crowne of Spaine,” to seize En­glish logwood cutters.35 Escobedo gave Lynch a litany of excuses that typified Spanish officials’ recourse to administrative bureaucracy to defend their actions and inaction. First, he explained that ­because his replacement had arrived, he himself was powerless. Second, Lynch would have to deal with the bishop of the province and the archbishop of Santo Domingo b­ ecause “the major part of the plate and negroes belong to the Church.” Third, Lynch should prob­ ably appeal to the king of Spain and the audiencia of Mexico. Fourth, the Council of the Indies would likely render the final decision, so E ­ ngland’s ambassadors prob­ably would have to acquire justice in Spain. Fi­nally, Escobedo informed Lynch that news that the En­glish retained seven hundred slaves from Morgan’s plundering of Panama “makes it lawful to detain ­these goods” in reparation. The Campeche governor added (echoing Beeston’s claim in Cartagena) that no one in Campeche or Havana knew about the peace of Madrid when the pink was seized. And anyway he doubted the pink was truly a merchantman, b­ ecause it had been “armed for war” and therefore likely, in his opinion, carried a commission. A ­ fter ­these myriad reasons for refusing satisfaction, Escobedo (now behaving as a governor who commanded consider-



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able in­de­pen­dent authority) demanded remedy from Lynch for damage that an En­glish royal frigate had caused in chasing a Spanish ship ashore and remuneration for a Spanish barque that the En­glish had taken. He closed with the news that he was sending the injured Spanish captain to Lynch in Jamaica to obtain the satisfaction Escobedo trusted Lynch would give.36 Lynch fired the royal frigate captain but did not charge him with a crime despite his having chased the Spanish ship ashore, stolen logwood, and burned Spanish h ­ ouses.37 That Campeche governor Escobedo, over a thousand miles from Portobelo and in a dif­fer­ent viceroyalty, brought the seven hundred Panamanian slaves into the negotiations and made clear that Henry Morgan’s peacetime attack on Panama continued to reverberate in the Spanish Atlantic. Morgan’s acquittal in London further concerned officials in Madrid and in the Ca­rib­ bean in 1675, when news arrived in Jamaica from Santiago de Cuba that the Spanish queen regent wanted notification as soon as Thomas Modyford (the governor who had commissioned Morgan) and Morgan himself returned to Jamaica.38 Lynch made clear to his superiors that he thought it a ­mistake that Morgan had been acquitted and allowed to return to Jamaica, reporting that news of Morgan’s return “much allarme[d]” the Spaniards. It had “caused ye K[ing] of Spayne” considerable “charge in fortifyeing in ye south sea” and prompted Spanish officials to send Basque (Biscayan) and Dutch (Vlissingen) privateers to the Ca­rib­bean to clear it of the pirates who “Infest it.” Lynch lamented his inability to stop En­glish mari­ners from taking French commissions, certain that the “Clamor at Madrid is as high” against them “as ours in London can bee ag[ains]t ye Spaniard.”39 During the mid-1670s, En­glish mari­ners and officials complained repeatedly that Spanish officials not only obstructed En­glish efforts to obtain justice but slighted them in the pro­cess. In 1675, several En­glish ship captains and o­ wners failed to gain satisfaction for ship seizures a­ fter a yearlong transatlantic effort.40 The Havana governor sent the petitioners to Madrid. Madrid officials sent them back to Havana.41 En­glish ambassador William Godolphin blamed the difficulty on Spaniards’ belief that ­England so depended on its trade with Spain “that without it we should be all in disorder,” which “maketh them bold with us.”42 Godolphin, then, identified the same confidence among Spanish officials in Madrid that Jamaicans perceived in the Ca­rib­be­an. One En­glish witness in a seizure case reported that in 1674 the Havana governor had called him a “heretick dog” and declared it a crime for the En­glish to come into the Indies and that Spaniards in Havana bragged of having taken seventy-­five En­glish ships since the 1670 peace.43 Even if the

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witness exaggerated, his report reflected an En­glish belief that in the Ca­rib­ bean the Spanish treated the En­glish not only as invaders in the region but as cultural and religious inferiors. The following year, the new Jamaica governor John Lord Vaughan wrote several letters to Havana requesting reparations for a seized ship.44 He sent his petitions in Jamaica’s royal frigate with a personal messenger who arrived in Havana and styled himself an “Ambassador,” whereupon “the Spanish Governor fell a laughing.” He nonetheless admitted the man into the city but prohibited the frigate from entering Havana’s harbor and denied Vaughan’s requests, claiming that he acted “by Command from his superiors to whom he was accountable” and that if anything was “amisse they must have recourse for Remedie to Madrid.”45 En­glish officials in the Ca­rib­bean worried that differences in colonial administrative structure made Spanish officials their superiors rather than their peers. The Spanish American viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru ­were kingdoms within Spain’s composite monarchy and had no En­glish equivalent in the Amer­i­cas, where the highest officials ­were governors whose superiors all resided in ­England. In response to concerns that Jamaica’s governors suffered disrespect from their Spanish counter­parts, Lynch suggested that Charles II create the office of viceroy for the En­glish Ca­rib­bean in order to “check ye Spanyards” and signal his opposition to Spanish “affronts.” Lynch suggested that Charles give the new governor of Jamaica the title “ViceRoy of Jamaica[,] New E ­ ngland or Amer­i­ca” and that if the king appointed a governor over all of New ­England, that Jamaica’s top official should be his superior.46 During the late 1670s and early 1680s, London sent conflicting messages to Spain regarding its intentions in the Ca­rib­bean. Despite Jamaica governor John Vaughan’s complaints that Henry Morgan, as deputy governor, had encouraged seamen to take foreign privateering commissions from the governor of Tortuga, when Charles II replaced Vaughan with the Earl of Carlisle, he retained Morgan as deputy governor. Although Charles issued a proclamation in 1675 prohibiting his subjects from accepting foreign privateering commissions, Carlisle proved unable to restrain pirates.47 He himself added evidence to Spaniards’ belief that the En­glish wanted the benefit of piracy without accepting the responsibility for their pirates, reporting that in late 1679, a group of “En­glish[,] French and o­ thers,” the usual composition of “all the Privateers,” led by Jamaicans, plundered Spaniards in the Bay of Honduras, returning to Jamaica with sugar and indigo. Despite their having given security not to pillage Spaniards, on the men’s return they landed their cargo,



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paying customs on the indigo in Port Royal, and escaped unscathed. Carlisle, although claiming to his superiors that he had tried to catch them, admitted that the customs on the plunder had helped to replenish the island’s empty trea­sury.48 Despite his role in facilitating such violations, Carlisle shortly thereafter complained about the treatment official ventures received in Spanish port towns, emphasizing yet again the importance of protocol. A royal ship he sent to Cartagena to retrieve prisoners returned without success, finding the governor so protective that he refused to admit the captain or any other En­glishmen within the gates of the city. Instead, he “received them in a tent pitched for the purpose on the beach.”49 Even when En­glish Ca­rib­bean officials took a firm stance against pirates, London officials might undo the message, as they did in 1682, when a group of En­g lish pirates (holding a Tortuga-­ issued commission) returned to the Ca­rib­bean following two years of plundering Spanish ships and ports in Panama and the South Sea.50 At least one who sought refuge in Jamaica was instead hanged at Morgan’s ­orders, while ­those who returned to London ­were acquitted.51 But beginning in 1682 (partly in response to pro-­asiento lobbying from the Royal African Com­pany), London policy consistently favored promoting conditions for peaceful Anglo-­Spanish trade. He replaced Morgan (then serving as acting governor) with Thomas Lynch  Jr., who even more than his ­father sought to foster Anglo-­Spanish commerce in slaves and in cloth. Lynch immediately set out to establish correspondence with Spanish governors in the region and to rein in Bahama captain general Robert Clarke, who threatened to ruin the Anglo-­Spanish peace by issuing illegal privateering commissions.52 In 1682, Clarke issued a commission to John Coxon, a (former) privateer who had accepted a ­pardon from Morgan the previous year. Clarke authorized Coxon to attack Havana, but Coxon instead brought the commission straight to Lynch, who wrote immediately to both Clarke and London, noting that the commission obviously v­ iolated the Treaty of Madrid and that Clarke threatened to turn the Bahamas into another Tortuga. Lynch apologized to his London superiors if he overstepped his place in writing directly to Clarke, but he feared the consequences for the Ca­rib­bean if he awaited o­ rders from London.53 The following year, the Jamaica Assembly passed (and Parliament confirmed) Jamaica’s 1683 Act for the Restraining and Punishing Privateers and Pirates. It reaffirmed Charles II’s proclamation prohibiting his subjects from taking foreign commissions, permitted the trial and execution of pirates in Jamaica without London’s approval, and established punishment for ­those who

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harbored or traded with pirates.54 Shortly thereafter, Charles II reissued to all colonial governors his proclamation against foreign commissions.55 So by the early 1680s, London officials had come to support Jamaican merchants’ plans for fostering Anglo-­Spanish Ca­rib­bean trade. However, neither Charles’s 1682 prohibition nor Parliament’s Jamaica Act of 1683 convinced En­glish mari­ners to give up predation as long as privateering commissions remained available. Spanish and En­glish governors clashed several times during the 1680s over privateering. On August 18, 1683, Jamaica governor Lynch wrote to Cuban captain general José Fernandez Córdoba Ponce de León in Havana. He framed the region’s continuing conflicts as stemming from a combination of colonial administrative differences and officials’ personal failings. En­glish governors in the Ca­rib­bean, in Lynch’s view, possessed both the good w ­ ill and the latitude to act but insufficient power to follow through. Spanish governors, in contrast, possessed the power and resources to prevent maritime plunder but chose not to, claiming that their need to obey superiors prevented any autonomy of action. Lynch made a number of complaints to Fernandez Córdoba: he wanted the Cuban governor to stop issuing commissions to Spanish captains “to rob and murder” Charles II’s subjects, and he wanted the governor to recognize such predation as piracy. He suggested that Spanish Ca­rib­bean officials, in refusing to re­spect their En­glish counter­parts as fellow enforcers of the law, ultimately harmed themselves. Lynch had several times tried to warn Spanish officials in Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Mexico of Dutch pirate Nicolas van Hoorn’s intended attack on Veracruz, but officials in all three places had rebuffed his efforts at communication. Lynch claimed that he had freed several Spanish merchants from pirates and transported them home at his own expense, had “dryven out of ­these Indies, all the Pyrates that prey on us” or “y[ou]r nation,” and had done every­ thing “in my Power to serve ye Spanish Na[ti]on.” In return, the Spanish not only failed to give him “Thanks” but continued to “murther & rob all they can Ma[ste]r.” He highlighted En­glish efforts to protect Spanish cities from French conquest, ignoring the complex international realities of the Ca­rib­ bean, and instead asserted shared Anglo-­Spanish interest in defining the Indies as belonging to “us & you.” Lynch complained that Spanish officials in the Ca­rib­bean clung to a formal hierarchy of administration that prevented them from addressing international prob­lems quickly, with “not one Gov[erno]r ever giving Satisfaction for ye most notorious Injury,” instead referring En­glish complaints to Spain.



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In violation of the Treaty of Madrid, Spanish captains took En­g lish ships on the high seas and at fishing cays where no Spaniards lived and seized ships carry­ing frutas de las Indias, which the En­glish grew themselves or bought from Curaçao. He acknowledged that he lacked control over some “loose ­People” in Jamaica but insisted that any aggrieved Spanish subjects could have redress in Jamaica, although the En­glish in Cuba could not. He wished Carlos II would send a “Resident” specifically “to see ye Peace kept & Right done,” instead of “Governors neither Civil, just, nor communicat[ive].”56 Between 1689 and 1697, when Spain and ­England allied (along with the Netherlands, Portugal, and several other nations) against France in the War of the G ­ rand Alliance, the diplomatic context in the Ca­rib­bean again shifted. Jamaican governors and En­glish military officials expressed more frustration than previously at what they perceived as Spanish high-­handedness, be­hav­ior inappropriate among allies, especially as the En­glish believed that the Spanish depended on En­glish naval defense against the French. Even in the midst of the war, when Spanish Ca­rib­bean ship captains and port residents stood to benefit from En­glish naval presence, Spanish governors invoked bureaucratic red tape to deny En­glish officers full recognition as allies. In part, Spanish officials’ aloofness stemmed from Madrid officials’ worry that the alliance would provide cover for increased smuggling. In 1694, the Council of the Indies predicted that En­glish military squadrons would carry clothing to sell to Spanish colonists and instructed governors to use extra care in protecting their ports from illegal trade.57 In 1694, Sir William Beeston, now governor of Jamaica, complained to London officials that Spaniards at Santo Domingo made no preparations to join En­glish forces in an assault against the French in western Hispaniola. Santo Domingo officials told Beeston that they could take no action ­until they received o­ rders from the viceroy of Mexico and asked the En­glish governor to deliver a packet for the Mexican viceroy in the care of “a gentleman . . . ​who can concert ­matters.” Perhaps they suggested this circuitous path to communication with their viceroy ­because they opposed joining En­glish forces, or perhaps they had already pled the case themselves. Maybe they anticipated the viceroy’s opposition and wanted to avoid spending their own po­liti­c al capital. What­ever the reason, Beeston hesitated, believing the proposal “too foreign and too tedious to undertake.”58 While Beeston maintained communications with several Spanish governors whose title and authority ­were similar to his own, he balked at the suggested intervention with the viceroy, ­either unwilling to insert himself into internal Spanish affairs or uncomfortable

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corresponding with a viceroy who held much greater authority and had no En­glish analogue. Spanish officials repeatedly told En­glish officials that they could not act without explicit ­orders and therefore could not cooperate more fully with the En­glish. For example, in the summer of 1697, En­glish vice-­admiral John Nevill wrote several letters from his ship to the general of the Spanish galleons “to tell you that I was come to t­hese seas to escort you to Cadiz” and sent the same news to Havana governor and captain general Diego Córdoba Lasso de la Vega. Also, “in g­ reat want of w ­ ater and refreshment,” he begged the governor’s permission to bring his ships into Havana to provision them for the transatlantic voyage. Governor Córdoba wrote back instructing Nevill to go to the Matanzas River for ­water, as it was illegal for foreign ships to enter Havana. Nevill claimed himself “honoured” to receive the governor’s letter but “mightily surprised” by the content. Nevill’s anger was clear, but so, too, was his insecurity that he occupied a place of subordination, which he framed in cultural and religious terms. He expressed outrage at the denial, given that the En­glish had “come for so many hundred leagues to serve His Catholic Majesty.” The Matanzas River was “ill-­suited” to ­water such a large fleet as his, and the governor knew it. Calling Córdoba’s instruction tantamount to a denial of ­water, Nevill accused the governor of “use[ing] us more like Turks and Moors than Christians and En­glishmen.” Claiming injury in religious, ­legal, humanitarian, and diplomatic terms, he noted that even “if we ­were Turks or Jews we could not . . . ​be refused admission into any port for forty-­ eight hours in case of such necessity as we are now in for ­water.” Shaming Córdoba by questioning his civility, Nevill wrote that he would leave Cuba to “seek w ­ ater among the Indians, from whom I doubt not that we s­hall find more friendship than from you.”59 Nevill sent the letter by a personal messenger to whom he gave scattershot instructions indicating desperation. The messenger was to emphasize that the En­glish fleet had secret ­orders from Spain to protect the galleons, that he had letters from Cartagena for Carlos II, and that “by the law of nations you cannot refuse us admission to the port to ­water, in case of distress, for forty-­ eight hours.” As proof that he came with Spain’s approval, he sent a copy of an account of the flota and galleons, which he had been given in Cádiz. It included the information that the French lay “off the Azores in wait for them.” He also enclosed a copy of his own ­orders from William III to go to Havana to protect the galleons from the French. Hoping to convince the governor to appreciate his En­glish allies, Nevill stressed that he had lost all his long boats



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while chasing the French commander Baron de Pointis ­a fter his sack of Cartagena (a ser­vice to the Spanish) and that the En­glish had burned the French settlement of Petit Guavos on Hispaniola, destroying nine French privateer ships and carry­ing away five hundred French prisoners. He understood the Spanish king’s refusal to allow foreign ships to enter his ports “on account of trade” but protested that his ships ­were men-­of-­war and therefore carried no merchandise, implying that therefore the governor could allow them in while still obeying Spanish law. Fi­nally, “If none of ­these arguments ­will prevail,” Nevill’s emissary was to offer the governor “a pres­ent” of 2,000 pieces of eight.60 The general of the galleons thanked Nevill for his offer of convoy. If the decision lay in his power, he would gladly accept Nevill’s com­pany to Cádiz, but, “as I have told you,” in the absence of any new instructions, he was “bound by my former ­orders,” though he “regret[ed]” it “greatly.” The exchange ended with two letters from the Havana governor, protesting Nevill’s depiction of him but standing by his decision to admit none but Spanish ships and offering a pi­lot to assist the En­glish at Matanzas.61 Nevill had claimed the alliance and the shared goal of fending off French attacks as grounds for greater Anglo-­ Spanish coordination. But, aware of his charge to protect his port from any foreign penetration, Governor Fernandez Córdoba invoked the imperial structure of authority, perhaps anxious to position himself well as the war ended in 1697.62 Beginning in 1701, as the En­glish fought the War of the Spanish Succession to prevent French Bourbon succession to the Spanish throne, their efforts to court Spanish American officials became even more explicit. At the start of the war, the Bourbon administration now in power in Spain had granted the asiento to the French Senegal Com­pany, which exercised the contract as a mono­poly. This changed the structure the slave trade to Spanish Amer­i­ca had had for the previous half ­century, when Dutch and Genoese holders of the contract had subcontracted supply to multiple foreign slave traders rather than holding it as an exclusive mono­poly. While smuggling continued during the War of the Spanish Succession, the En­glish feared losing the trade and sought to lure Spanish Americans to break with a French-­controlled Spain. At the outbreak of the war, the En­glish crown prohibited its subjects from trading with the e­ nemy, French or Spanish. But in response to Jamaican objections, in 1704 it reversed its position to allow trade with Spanish colonies. Some En­glish merchants and officials in the western Ca­rib­bean believed that Spanish Americans supported the Habsburgs and that sufficient En­g lish

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encouragement and a show of En­glish force in the region could bring them to declare such preference publicly. London officials ordered their privateers not to attack En­glish merchants trading with the Spanish and then not to attack the Spanish e­ ither, defining them as potential allies rather than as war­ time enemies, and their trade as the ultimate reward of the strug­gle.63 In January 1706, En­glish secretary of state Charles Hedges wrote to Jamaica governor Thomas Handasyde, believing that recent En­glish victories in Spain presented an opportunity for “inviting and encouraging the Spaniards in the West Indies to shake off the French servitude.” Handasyde should look for “any disposition” among Spanish Americans “to declare for King Carlos III” by sending letters to Hispaniola, Cuba, and other Spanish dominions, with copies of letters from “the King of Spain,” choosing the locations and times that he judged most likely to yield results. If he found any hint of Habsburg allegiance, he was to promise En­glish ships, land forces, arms, and ammunition—­whatever the Spanish deemed best for “rescuing them from the yoake of France.”64 Handasyde was to tell the Spaniards that “their natu­ral Sovereign” Carlos III was sending them “naturall Spaniards” to replace the French officials Philip V had imposed upon them, thus returning them to “good government” in Carlos’s “own Royal name.” “Likewise,” he would restore “Ecclesiastical Government in the manner accustomed.” Hedges thus framed En­g lish alliance as far less demanding for Spaniards than the French alliance had proved, and as a return to the natu­ral order of Spanish self-­rule, downplaying the commercial competition between En­glish and French interests that it also represented. Hedges expected, “since they ­c an’t escape yr. observation,” that Handasyde would be familiar with “the methods taken by ye French for working themselves into ye Span. W. India trade” but repeated them anyway. Spaniards should comprehend “ye practices and designs of ye French for monopolising their trade.” The enclosed “account of the French monopolizing the Spanish West India Trade” argued that slave trader, privateer, naval commander, and Saint-­Domingue governor Jean-­Baptiste du Casse had persuaded Louis XIV to divide the asiento into three shares, with one g­ oing to Louis XIV, one to Philip V, and one to du Casse and his French and Spanish associates. Hedges believed that Spanish Americans would object to French traders bringing slaves and manufactured goods to their ports. He explained to Handasyde that Louis XIV’s asiento contract allowed the French to carry African slaves to Spanish Amer­i­ca “in their own ships, and with all sorts of



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provisions and other necessaries,” and to return directly to France all the Spanish gold and silver they could acquire by trade or credit, terms more lenient than any “before allowed of to any forreign Nation” or even to “Spaniards themselves” who traded outside the flota system.65 London officials assumed that Spanish Americans would more likely side with the Habsburgs if they understood that the French had persuaded the Spanish court to halt the voyages of the galleons and flotas during the war. Hedges insisted the change harmed Spaniards in the West Indies and in Spain, for the benefit of the French. Therefore, Handasyde should “make this design and contrivance of the French well known and understood in the Indies, to provoke them to a revolt.” Hedges ­imagined Spanish Americans already “inclined” to revolt in response to the “embargo” on Spanish shipping imposed by the French mono­poly, which robbed Spanish colonists of their very “subsistence” as well as of a market for their produce. Surely, Hedges believed, they would prefer “their former correspondencies and dealings with their own ­factors and countrymen of Old Spain.”66 But Spanish Americans w ­ ere not so cut off from Spain as London officials hoped. In 1707, Governor Handasyde wrote from Jamaica to the Board of Trade that while gladdened by the news of ­England’s “glorious success” in ­battle, the Spaniards “­here” had received news “much to our disadvantage,” that, in fact, the Duke of Anjou (as the En­glish insisted on calling Philip V) controlled all of Spain and had executed Charles III’s supporters, “which has mightily discouraged King Charles’ party h ­ ere and encouraged ­those of the Duke of Anjou’s.” Handasyde reported his own efforts “to undeceive them” by relaying En­glish successes and informing them of “a powerfull force gone to Spain to oblige the Spaniards to a true obedience to their lawfull King.”67 As soon as the En­glish squadron had arrived in Jamaica in early 1707, its commander sent three men-­of-­war to the Spanish coast with Handasyde’s letters inviting alliance. Handasyde forwarded to the Board of Trade the Spanish officials’ answers, which indicated “how ­matters are altered in t­ hese parts on the news lately received by French emissaries.”68 The Cartagena governor wrote a conclusive rebuff, that “the news your Excellency writes . . . ​is wholly made void by letters I have received from the Catholick Majesty, Philip V, that he is restored to the Court of Madrid. . . . ​In his defence we w ­ ill spill the last 69 drop of our blood.” En­glish officials’ efforts to curry Spanish ­favor before and during the War of the Spanish Succession show that the imbalance of Anglo-­Spanish entanglement did not rest solely on Spanish preeminence in the region. Spanish

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officials’ attitude of superiority depended on multiple sources. Their silver mines and their ­legal pre­ce­dence in the region allowed them to employ their bureaucracy effectively to thwart En­glish claims to diplomatic parity. But the context of international entanglements proved crucial to Spanish officials’ ability to maintain such asymmetry. Dutch, Genoese, En­glish, and French merchants and officials sought Spanish ­favor. As long as any two of ­these rivals for Spanish trade remained ­viable, Spanish officials could exercise diplomatic and l­egal dominion over the region. The outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession, which confirmed the Bourbon Philip V’s ascension to the throne but included Spain’s granting of a thirty-­year asiento contract to Britain’s mono­poly South Sea Com­pany, seemed to fulfill the wishes of ­those En­glish officials and merchants who had over the previous four de­cades courted Spanish trade in the Ca­rib­bean. The mono­poly was set up to benefit London-­based investors and merchants more than the local En­glish Ca­rib­bean merchants and officials who had worked to secure the trade. In the pro­cess, it reinforced an image of Ca­rib­bean economics as consistent with Robert Southwell’s depiction of a Spanish Amer­i­ca ripe for northern Eu­ro­pean merchants’ exploitation. That, combined with British naval dominance in the region from the mid-­eighteenth to the mid-­nineteenth ­century and a historiography emphasizing Eu­ro­pean (and l­ater U.S.) extraction of Spanish American mineral wealth, has served to erase the local Ca­rib­ bean realities of the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, in which Spanish officials retained much of their functional jurisdiction and many En­glish officials molded their own be­hav­ior and sometimes governed En­glish subjects with an eye to currying Spanish American f­ avor.70

chapter 11

Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement Empires, Sailors, and Coastal P ­ eoples in the British-­Spanish Ca­rib­be­an ern es to b a s s i

On October 27, 1795, three colonial officers, following o­ rders from Cartagena’s governor, Joaquín Cañaveral, conducted a surprise inspection of all tailor shops in Cartagena. The aim of the inspection, Cañaveral reported to the minister of finance, Diego Gardoqui, was to confiscate “all the clothes they could find [to have been introduced] through illicit trade.” The inspection yielded a small but significant harvest: “one cutting of a corduroy or cotton velvet dress for men, another cutting of a gold-­embroidered muslin doublet for w ­ omen, a cutting and clippings for a nankeen jacket, a piece of yellow cloth for trousers, and a cutting of a stripped, muslin vest.”1 The confiscated fabrics belonged to prominent members of Cartagena’s society, including the head of its merchant guild, Tomás Andrés de Torres, with whom governor Cañaveral had a history of confrontations over the crucial issue of how to contain contraband trade. Over the next four months, Cañaveral and Torres became embroiled in a ­legal dispute that featured mutual accusations of complicity in the introduction of contraband into the city. A ­ fter confiscating the fabrics, Cañaveral ordered a thorough inspection of Torres’s h ­ ouse and jailed the merchant for three days. Torres countered Cañaveral’s accusations by claiming that the governor

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was largely responsible for the widespread nature of contraband trade in the city. “The larger part of the contraband,” Torres claimed, “was introduced through the city’s gates” with the authorization of the governor and other colonial officers in charge of curtailing this illicit trade. By the end of February 1796, when Cañaveral informed Spanish prime minister Manuel Godoy that he had handed power to his successor, Anastacio Zejudo, it became clear that Torres, who remained at the head of the merchant guild, had emerged victorious in their dispute. While Torres continued to be a prominent member of Cartagena’s economic and po­liti­cal elite, Cañaveral, a report drafted in 1797 concluded, was deemed “not to be trusted with any po­liti­cal position, particularly in [Spanish] Amer­i­ca.”2 The dispute between the two high-­ranking provincial officers not only made vis­i­ble a personal feud. It also made explicit a truth known to all Cartageneros: that in the city, “­there was no one who did not wear all ­these forbidden clothes,” every­one, “including the governor, presenting themselves in public” wearing illicitly imported garments.3 The contraband in clothes was not confined to Cartagena. Colonial authorities throughout the northern provinces of the viceroyalty of New Granada frequently denounced the conspicuousness of contraband, often linking the abundance of British clothes to the permits granted to merchants to sail to foreign colonies for the purpose of buying slaves. This correlation between the “­free trade in blacks” and the availability of British clothes was aptly described by a Portobelo resident who claimed that since the royal order of November 24, 1791, made it ­legal to go to foreign colonies to purchase slaves, he had noted that ­people in Portobelo had started using “muslins, tassels, and other foreign clothes.”4 Through transimperial commercial networks connecting New Granada’s Ca­ rib­bean coast with British Jamaica, the royal trea­surer at Portobelo observed in 1803, sailors taking advantage of the permits to trade with foreign colonies exchanged “our colonial produce” for “all the clothes and [other] effects needed for the consumption of the Viceroyalty [of New Granada] and . . . ​ that of Peru through Panama.”5 The transimperial commercial networks that during the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries supplied New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean provinces with slaves, clothes, and other goods represented both a continuation of old trading patterns and a dramatic change in the way in which ­these trading patterns functioned. On the one hand, t­hese transimperial networks w ­ ere built on the foundations of over a ­century of illicit trade between British and Dutch Ca­rib­bean colonies and the Spanish circum-­Caribbean territories (as



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Chapters 1, 5, and 10 demonstrate, commercial entanglements—­mostly illegal— had been a constant feature since the sixteenth c­ entury). On the other hand, the late eighteenth-­century networks reflected fundamental changes in imperial approaches to interimperial trade. Instead of mercantilist empires theoretically functioning in autarkic fashion and stubbornly insisting on prohibiting trade with imperial rivals, the Atlantic empires of the late eigh­teenth ­century passed commercial legislation that legalized commercial relations between Spanish and British Ca­rib­bean possessions. Instead of curtailing transimperial entanglements, late eighteenth-­century Atlantic empires w ­ ere, to a certain extent, enabling entanglements. While empires made entanglements pos­si­ble, sailors turned them into a real­ity. Through their frequent crossing of po­liti­cal borders, they implemented entanglements. And, other, less mobile, but not necessarily sedentary, actors inhabited the transimperial milieu that empires made pos­si­ble and sailors instrumentalized. Th ­ ese other coastal residents, including wealthy urban residents, colonial officers, and autonomous indigenous groups, experienced entanglements (Chapter 7 demonstrates that experiencing entanglement was not the exclusive privilege of New Granada’s coastal denizens; it was a circum-­Caribbean experience).

Enabling Entanglement Accounts of trade relations in the Atlantic world generally stress that by the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, Eu­ro­pean empires, as dictated by mercantilist princi­ples, continued to operate “within autarkic commercial systems” that deemed illegal any commercial interaction with foreigners.6 Interimperial trade, in t­hese accounts, exists but happens largely against the desires of imperial policy makers. My interpretation stresses the increased willingness of Atlantic empires to legalize (and regulate) interimperial commercial exchanges. This willingness, in turn, made pos­si­ble the emergence of a transformed commercial landscape in which contraband was no longer defined by mere commercial contact with foreigners but acquired a more complex definition in which a combination of traded goods, ports of origins and destination, and geopo­liti­cal circumstances determined the legality of commercial transactions. Transformations in imperial commercial policies ­were closely associated with war.7 War made it difficult to continue commerce as usual. The scarcities associated with warfare often forced imperial authorities to introduce

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commercial exceptions that legalized trade with foreigners. In the eighteenth-­ century Ca­rib­bean, the combination of war­time exceptions and concessions made at dif­fer­ent peace treaties ultimately resulted in a progressive destruction of the barriers to interimperial trade. Interimperial commercial relations before the eigh­teenth ­century w ­ ere aptly summarized by a nineteenth-­century analyst, who described the prohibitive commercial restrictions as follows: “The colonizing powers of Eu­rope, it is well known, have always monopolized the trade of their respective colonies; allowing no supplies to be carried to them u ­ nder any foreign flag, or on account of any foreign importers; and prohibiting the exportation of their produce in foreign ships, or to any foreign country, till it has been previously ­ ntil the brought into the ports of the parent state.”8 Completely forbidden u first years of the eigh­teenth ­century, interimperial commercial exchanges in the Ca­rib­bean w ­ ere first legalized, ­under exceptional circumstances, in 1701, when France secured the exclusive right to introduce slaves to Spanish Amer­ i­c a.9 At the end of the War of Spanish Succession, however, France lost this privilege to the British crown, which also obtained from Spain an unpre­ ce­dented “right to send a trading vessel (the ‘Annual Ship’) to the Spanish American trade fairs held at Portobelo and Veracruz.”10 This concession notwithstanding, official support by any Eu­ro­pean crown to trade with foreigners remained tenuous ­until the 1760s. Ships in distress, regardless of their nationality, could enter foreign ports to request “refreshments” or claiming “auxilios de humanidad” (humanitarian aid), but regular interactions w ­ ere never officially encouraged.11 The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a war fought on a global scale and with equally global consequences, inaugurated a new epoch in terms of imperial attitudes ­toward trade with foreigners in the Ca­rib­bean. The war forced Eu­ ro­pean powers to relax their “colonial mono­poly” and to “admit . . . ​neutral vessels” into their ports.12 The British occupation of Havana during the last phase of the Seven Years’ War (1762–63) signaled an im­mense weakness on the part of Spain to maintain effective control, not only of peripheral areas of its vast empire but, most disturbing to Spanish authorities, of key ports in Spain’s transatlantic commercial system.13 The impact of this traumatic event on Spain went far beyond the cost the Spanish crown had to pay in order to recover its most valuable Ca­rib­bean city: “transfer of west Florida to the En­glish, En­glish control of the Honduras coast and its dyewoods, and abandonment of Spaniards’ rights to fish off Newfoundland.”14 In addition, the war greatly influenced the ways



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 221

in which imperial bureaucrats and ideologues both in Spain and Britain rethought the administration and defense of their overseas territories. From a Spanish perspective, the prob­lem went beyond the obvious inability to guarantee the defense of Havana and other Ca­rib­bean cities from ­future British attacks. The prob­lem, some Spanish policy makers thought, resided in the outdated commercial system—­the Cádiz-­controlled monopolistic sistema de flotas (convoy system)—­that still regulated transatlantic trade between Spain and its Spanish American territories.15 Part of the solution proposed by a junta (committee) created to review Spain’s commercial system called for opening more ports in Spain to direct trade with the colonies, eliminating the convoy system, and offering incentives for Spanish traders willing to travel to Africa in search of slaves for the Spanish Ca­rib­be­an.16 The junta’s recommendations ­were quickly turned into the Reglamento del comercio libre a las Islas de Barlovento (a new commercial code regulating trade between Spain and the Spanish Ca­rib­bean), which not only allowed Cuba to trade directly with multiple Spanish ports but also authorized its planters to buy slaves directly from foreign depots in the Ca­rib­be­an.17 The geo­graph­i­cal scope of this legislation (also known as the First Reglamento) was quickly expanded to Louisiana (in 1768), Yucatán (in 1770), Santa Marta (1776), Riohacha (1777), and, with the passing of the Reglamento y aranceles reales para el comercio libre de España a Indias (the Second Reglamento) in 1778, to all Spanish Amer­i­ca with the exception of New Spain. By increasing to twenty-­five the number of Spanish American ports allowed to trade directly with thirteen peninsular ports, the new Reglamento raised expectations about the prospects for colonial development. The expectations of immediate change, however, w ­ ere quickly curtailed by Spain’s entrance into the American Revolution.18 For Britain, victory in the Seven Years’ War meant not only the acquisition of Spanish (and French) territories but also its coronation as the dominant maritime power in the Ca­rib­bean. Victory in the war, however, came at a high financial cost. To recover financially, the British Parliament passed a number of legislative acts designed to extract more revenue from its colonies. The passing of the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765) triggered a crisis in the commercial exchanges between Britain and the North American colonies. The combination of its newly acquired status as main Ca­rib­bean power and the North Atlantic commercial crisis provided an opportunity for Kingston’s merchants to successfully advance their proposal to legalize (and thus to expand) trade between the British Ca­rib­bean and Spanish Amer­i­ca. British encouragement of this line of commerce sought to weather the crisis

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in North Atlantic trade and, most impor­tant, to avoid French and Dutch exploitation of the coveted Spanish American markets. Convinced by this argument, the British Parliament passed the First ­Free Port Act, which received royal consent in June 1766. The act opened four ports in Jamaica (Kingston, Savannah la Mar, Montego Bay, and Santa Lucea) and two in Dominica (Prince Rupert’s Bay and Roseau) to foreign vessels loaded with bullion and other foreign produce not available in the islands. In exchange, foreigners could buy “all British produce and manufactures . . . ​excepting only a range of strategic naval supplies and iron from British North Amer­i­ca.”19 From this moment, it became l­egal, in British eyes, for Spanish vessels to enter Kingston and other selected British ports in the Ca­rib­bean, even if ­these trips continued to be outlawed in Spanish legislation. In 1779, when Spain entered the American revolutionary war, both the British ­free port system and Spain’s yet untested expanded commercial code practically collapsed. With only Dutch and Danish ships eligible to enter the British f­ree ports, the commercial benefits Britain could obtain ­were minimal.20 By the same token, Spain, instead of witnessing the commercial revival promised by comercio libre (­free trade), suffered the interruption of its transatlantic trade, which forced it to yield to colonial pressures pushing for a mea­sure that, despite its always contentious nature, became a permanent feature of colonial Spanish Amer­i­ca’s commercial landscape: ­legal trade with foreign neutrals.21 The end of the war, however, brought the necessary conditions for both Spanish comercio libre and the British f­ree port trade to flourish. The British Empire, a­ fter losing what had been its most impor­tant colonial possession, embarked on a pro­cess of imperial reor­ga­ni­za­tion that included looking for new commercial partners. Spain, optimistic policy makers argued, was fi­nally on the verge of experiencing the “fortunate revolution” in the trade with its colonies that comercio libre promised.22 The results, while posititve—­ only in one year between 1784 and 1796 did Spain’s exports to Spanish Amer­ i­ca fail to at least ­triple their 1778 value—­were not overwhelmingly celebrated throughout Spain’s American territories. In New Granada, discontented merchants and provincial authorities pushed for an expansion of trade with foreigners as the only way to alleviate “the ­great scarcity” that, they claimed, continued to affect the viceroyalty.23 The petitions and complaints of merchants and provincial authorities in New Granada captured the attention of viceroys and metropolitan policy makers and led to the passing of a number of royal o­ rders allowing trade with



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 223

foreigners.24 Always regarded as a temporary mea­sure and subject to a number of restrictions, trade with foreigners was, from the 1780s to the late 1810s, a permanent, though highly controversial, feature of New Granada’s trade. Merchants heavi­ly invested in trade with Spain w ­ ere strong opponents of the mea­sure; t­ hose who saw trade with Jamaica and other Ca­rib­bean colonies as an opportunity to make a profit supported the extension of the temporary mea­sures. Viceroys and provincial authorities a­ dopted dif­fer­ent approaches to foreign trade depending on the interest groups that managed to capture their attention. Praised by some as “the best recourse to confront contraband” on the grounds that it has been proven that “when licit ways are open, the illicit ones are closed,” trade with foreign neutrals also faced criticism from t­hose who argued that it was actually the source of all the contraband undertaken in the viceroyalty of New Granada.25 As Cartagena merchant José Ignacio de Pombo put it, trade with foreigners constituted “an addiction, difficult to cure ­after acquired.”26 Critiques notwithstanding, the prevalence of trade with foreigners a­ fter the 1780s demonstrates an increasing recognition by imperial authorities that transimperial entanglements w ­ ere g­ oing to happen with or without imperial connivance. Between 1785 and 1818, trade with foreigners moved through several stages. Initially promoted based on the necessity to supply the newly established towns in the Darién, by the beginning of the 1790s the need to trade with foreigners, especially to acquire slaves, was invoked as part of a larger strategy to promote agricultural development and exports.27 As the 1796–1808 Anglo-­ Spanish War began and its negative effects on the Spanish transatlantic trade ­were first felt, commercial exchanges with foreigners became the only available means of supplying the Spanish possessions in Amer­i­ca. During the 1810s, the scarcities and need for weapons created by the in­de­pen­dence wars forced both royalists and republicans to turn to foreigners to maintain the war effort. As a ­whole, in the four de­cades between 1780 and 1820, trade with foreigners moved from generally prohibited to absolutely necessary. Initially regarded as both a much needed complement and a harmful competition to Spanish transatlantic commerce, trade with foreigners became the only means for Neogranadans to obtain flour, liquor, spices, oil, iron, clothes, weapons, and many other commodities not readily available in the viceroyalty.28 During the 1780s, the argument for the establishment of foreign trade found its most high-­ranking supporter in Viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora (in office between 1782 and 1789). The viceroy’s mea­sures favoring commercial exchanges with foreigners met opposition from both the interior and

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coastal provinces of New Granada and ­were accompanied by an increased surveillance of New Granada’s coasts to curtail contraband. Caballero y Góngora defended his mea­sures by arguing that the influx of foreign foodstuffs and artillery was required to successfully colonize the Darién—an area where indios bárbaros (nomadic groups who had successfully resisted Spanish conquest), aided by British smugglers, lived in­de­pen­dently from the Spanish crown. In his opinion, the scarcity of flour in the area forced him to allow the import of “foreign flours” as his “only recourse” to “not let his Majesty’s vassals perish.”29 Juan Álvarez de Veriñas, Caballero y Góngora’s most ardent opponent in New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean coast, thought other­wise. Entrusted with the mission of curtailing contraband between the Ca­rib­bean islands, mainly Jamaica, and the coast of northern South Amer­i­ca from the mouth of the Orinoco River to Panama, Veriñas believed that granting permission to “national and foreign vessels” to take “foodstuffs to the towns in the Darién” provided the best “pretext” for contraband. Moreover, he argued, permission to trade with foreigners was the reason New Granada’s ports w ­ ere populated “with more foreigners than Spaniards.”30 Despite the opposition, trade with foreigners, especially with Jamaica, was further legitimized during the early 1790s as a way of promoting the viceroyalty’s agricultural production. Perceiving Saint-­Domingue’s plantation economy as a development model worth emulating, leading figures of Santa Marta and Cartagena argued for the need to import slaves en masse.31 Granted to Cartagena and Riohacha in the first quarter of 1791, the permission to import slaves from foreign colonies faced immediate criticisms. Opponents of the mea­ sure argued that traveling to foreign colonies to buy slaves was “only a pretext to trade clothes” and claimed that “the ships that went [to foreign colonies] to look for blacks, brought back contraband goods.”32 Despite t­ hese well-­founded complaints, l­egal trade with foreigners (and the contraband conducted u ­ nder its cover) continued unabated during the first half of the 1790s. The outbreak of the Anglo-­Spanish War in 1796 inaugurated a new phase in British-­Spanish commercial entanglements in the southern Ca­ rib­bean. With Spain and G ­ reat Britain at war, the thriving trade between Jamaica and Spanish Amer­i­c a became outlawed, and its very existence was altogether threatened. In order to avoid shortages during the war, Spanish authorities resorted to trade with neutrals to guarantee the supply of New Granada’s ports. Thus, the decline in trade with Jamaica was accompanied by the opening of new routes connecting New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean port



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 225

cities—­mainly Cartagena and Santa Marta—­with the United States and the Danish Ca­rib­be­an. The end of the war against Britain in 1808 only came as a direct result of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. In turn, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain quickly resulted in the eruption of civil war throughout Spanish Amer­i­ca.33 In Ca­rib­bean New Granada, the provinces of Cartagena and Santa Marta went to war in 1811, with Santa Marta’s government declaring its loyalty to the Spanish king and Cartagena leaning ­toward declaring in­de­pen­dence from Spain.34 In November 1811, when Cartagena declared its absolute in­de­pen­dence from Spain, the emergence of a new po­liti­cal actor—­the in­de­pen­dent government of Cartagena—­further transformed commercial exchanges between New Granada and Jamaica. For Kingston’s merchants, the first half of the 1810s constituted a golden age that witnessed “the height of the ­free port trade.”35 The British-­Spanish alliance against Napoleon and Britain’s pledge to remain neutral in the conflict between Spain and its Spanish American territories allowed Kingston’s merchants to trade with both Cartagena and Santa Marta.36 The previous analy­sis highlights the role of imperial policy makers in passing legislation that provided the conditions for an intensification of trade between Spanish and British colonies in the Ca­rib­bean. From the perspective of New Granada, the combination of the British f­ ree port acts and the Spanish allowances to trade with foreign neutrals set the stage for increased transimperial exchanges. While this “policy convergence” ­toward freer trade clearly facilitated transimperial entanglements, transfer of legislation into practice is never automatic.37 That imperial policy makers authorized interimperial trade does not explain how interimperial trade happened. To understand the mechanisms through which trade connected British Jamaica and Spanish New Granada, as well as the magnitude of this trade, we need to turn to t­ hose who plied the ­waters, turning policies into practice, often taking advantage of the policies to stretch the allowances beyond the realm of legality.

Implementing Entanglements Sailors on board small schooners w ­ ere responsible for implementing the transimperial entanglements that commercial policies facilitated. An analy­sis of British shipping returns recording the arrivals and departures of foreign vessels to and from Kingston, coupled with an examination of Spanish books of

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arrivals and departures for the ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta, makes it pos­si­ble to reconstruct—­partially—­the commercial world that ­these schooners and their sailors inhabited (and created). In par­tic­u­lar, crisscrossing British and Spanish shipping returns makes it pos­si­ble to uncover the routes through which sailors implemented entanglements, the goods that constituted the life force of t­ hese entanglements, and the magnitude and frequency of the exchanges that brought together British Jamaica and Spanish New Granada.38 Between the 1780s and the 1810s, a significant number of foreign ships entered the ­free ports of Jamaica. From 250 in 1784, the number ­rose to 474 in 1815.39 While ports like Montego Bay, Port Antonio, and Savanna la Mar handled some foreign shipping, throughout the period Kingston was by far the most impor­tant ­free port not only in Jamaica but throughout the British Ca­rib­bean. At the time, Kingston was also “one of the most impor­tant centers of Black Atlantic life in the New World” and “one of the five major towns in British Amer­i­ca.”40 Vessels from the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish Ca­rib­bean frequently entered Kingston. Trade with foreigners was so impor­ tant to Kingston’s commercial activity that in 1785, more than twenty years before the ­free port trade reached its zenith, 33 ­percent of the ships entering the port ­were foreign vessels. Foreign ships entering Kingston in the 1780s ­were mostly French, with Spanish ships accounting for 26 ­percent out of a total of 237 in 1785.41 However, with the onset of the Haitian Revolution and the British takeover of several Dutch possessions including Curaçao, the distribution of foreign vessels suffered a drastic change, with the Spanish percentage rising to 51 ­percent in 1792 and to 100 ­percent in 1810 and 1814.42 By the 1810s, trade with Spanish Amer­i­ca in Spanish vessels had become the “mainstay of [Kingston’s] urban economy,” and Kingston was regarded as the “emporium of Cuba, Guatimala, . . . ​Mexico, . . . ​Carthagena, Santa Martha, and Rio-­ de-­ la-­ Hache . . . ​ ; of Maracaibo and Porto-­ Cavello.”43 Merchant-­turned-­novelist Michael Scott, a resident of Kingston between 1810 and 1817, described Kingston as a “superb . . . ​mercantile haven,” that gathered “the ­whole of the trade of Terra Firma, from Porto Cavello down to Chagres, the greater part of the trade of the islands of Cuba and San Domingo, and even that of Lima and San Blas, and the other ports of the Pacific.” During this period, he added, “the island [of Jamaica] was in the hey-­day of its prosperity,” thanks in large part to its thriving trade with Spanish Amer­i­ca. The result of this profitable trade, Scott claimed, “was a stream of gold and silver flowing directly into the Bank of ­England to the extent of three millions of pounds sterling annually.”44 New Granada’s participation in Kingston’s



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Spanish American trade was significant and comparable to that of Cuba. During the height of the British ­free port system in 1814, 30 ­percent of the 402 vessels that entered Kingston from Spanish Amer­i­ca did so from New Granada, a percentage comparable to the 40 ­percent that entered Kingston from Cuba and im­mensely superior to the 5 ­percent that entered from Venezuela. About a de­cade earlier, in 1796, New Granada’s percentage had been 30 ­percent, with Cuba, Venezuela, and other Spanish ports accounting for 39, 8, and 25 ­percent, respectively.45 Kingston’s shipping returns reveal the commercial dynamism not only of this key British Ca­rib­bean port but also that of several ports in the viceroyalty of New Granada. While Cartagena, the port Spanish authorities designated as the only major port in the viceroyalty, played an impor­tant role in the Kingston–­New Granada trade, ports classified as minor (Portobelo, Santa Marta, and Riohacha) and even hidden coves, like Sabanilla and Chagres, and tiny islands, like San Andrés, appear as actively engaged in this interimperial trade. Between 1784 and 1817, the vessels entering Kingston from New Granada’s minor ports always outnumbered t­hose entering from Cartagena. In 1785, of the twelve vessels that entered Kingston from New Granada, ten came from minor ports (five from Riohacha, four from Santa Marta, and one from Portobelo).46 Throughout the period, the trade between Kingston and Neogranadan ports grew steadily u ­ ntil its collapse at the beginning of the 1820s. In 1810 and 1814, during the height of the ­free port system, seventy-­nine (out of a total of 164) vessels entering Kingston from New Granada did so from minor ports. Cartagena’s participation in t­ hese two years was 5 ­percent (two ships) and 27 ­percent (thirty-­t wo ships), with hidden ports (Chagres, San Andrés, and Sabanilla) accounting for 24 ­percent (eleven ships) and 29 ­percent (thirty-­five ships), respectively.47 The increasing participation of minor and hidden ports in trade with Jamaica reveals an undermining of Cartagena’s dominance that generated multiple complaints from its merchants about the contraband undertaken in Portobelo and Riohacha.48 In addition, the active participation of Portobelo, Santa Marta, and Riohacha in the Ca­rib­bean trade networks represented an intensification of the drive t­ oward a Kingston-­centered Ca­rib­bean ­free trade area. Bullion, cotton, ­cattle and hides, woods, and dyewoods w ­ ere the most impor­tant commodities transported from New Granada to Kingston.49 The ships trading between Kingston and Neogranadan ports generally specialized in a par­tic­u ­lar geographic area and typically entered Kingston with commodities produced in the vicinities of their port of departure. Through the

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Cartagena-­K ingston route, cotton and bullion reached Kingston and Cartagena was legally supplied with dry goods, flour, liquors, iron, earthenware, and slaves. A variation of the Cartagena-­K ingston route included a stopover in the hidden port of Sabanilla before entering Cartagena from Kingston. This stopover, Cartagena merchants complained in 1795, allowed “almost all ships that sail with licenses to bring slaves from Jamaica” to transport “considerable quantities of clothes which they unload in Sabanilla or the Rosario Islands,” both in the vicinities of Cartagena.50 Impor­tant during the late colonial period, the Cartagena-­K ingston route became vital during in­de­pen­dent Cartagena’s war against loyalist Santa Marta. Between 1811 and 1815, when Cartagena was an in­de­pen­dent state, it depended almost completely on Jamaica for military supplies and victuals, which w ­ ere exchanged for Cartagena’s cotton. During 1814, at least four schooners—­the Annette, the San Josef, the Marinero Alegre, and the Veterano—­made several round trips between Cartagena-­ Sabanilla and Kingston.51 Riohacha and Santa Marta commanded another route—­the eastern route—­a nd Portobelo was the center of western New Granada’s route. Nicaragua wood, ­cattle, and hides constituted the main commodities ­exported from New Granada via the eastern route, while bullion and some tortoise shell from the neighboring San Blas island w ­ ere the main exports of the western route. Riohacha was home to a small merchant fleet that maintained a particularly strong connection with Kingston. One of the ships of this fleet—­the schooner Esperanza—­made at least seven Kingston-­R iohacha round trips in 1814.52 The Kingston-­R iohacha route was one of the most traversed paths between the 1780s and the late 1810s. Complementing the Riohacha-Kingston route was a triangular itinerary that connected Santa Marta and Riohacha with Kingston. ­Either entering from Riohacha and departing ­toward Santa Marta (like the Samaria in 1814) or entering from Santa Marta and departing ­toward Riohacha (like the Providencia), a number of vessels anchored at Kingston as part of a route that supplied eastern New Granada’s ports.53 Western New Granada’s route, for its part, was likewise well traversed by a handful of vessels d ­ oing the Kingston-­Portobelo round trip (for example, the Alexandre in 1817) and several ships suspiciously sailing in ballast from Chagres.54 In addition, the island of San Andrés, con­ve­niently located in the ­middle of the Portobelo-­ Jamaica and Cartagena-­ Jamaica routes, conducted an impor­tant trade with Kingston. Inhabited during the 1790s by a largely British population, though legally part of the viceroyalty of New Granada, San



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 229

Andrés’s role as a hub for contraband with Jamaica was a permanent concern for Spanish authorities. A par­tic­u­lar source of apprehension was the practice of sending bullion and cotton to San Andrés in order to exchange it for all sorts of British goods imported from Kingston.55 According to viceroy Antonio Amar y Borbón, a number of vessels, of which Antonio Figueroa’s Santísima Trinidad constituted a recent example, extracted bullion from Portobelo, which they used “to buy victuals in the islands of San Andrés.”56 The island’s connections with Jamaica seemed to have strengthened with the growing success of the British f­ree port system, to the point that in 1814, twelve vessels entered Kingston from San Andrés. Of t­hese, at least three—­ the Esperanza, the Perla, and the Penelope—­did several round trips.57 The Esperanza, the Perla, the Penelope, and all the other vessels involved in New Granada’s Jamaican connection can be seen as impor­tant agents of New Granada’s participation in the Ca­rib­bean networks of interimperial trade. Two other characteristics shared by ­these merchant vessels—­their size and the frequency of their trips—­further contributed to the strengthening of this interimperial trade system. New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean foreign trade was conducted in small vessels, unable to carry huge amounts of products but fast enough to avoid enemies at sea and foreign ports. In order to sell large quantities of merchandise, t­ hese small vessels—­which, following Fernand Braudel’s characterization of vessels in the Indian Ocean trade, can be called peddler-­vessels—­relied on frequent trips and relatively short stays in ports, rather than on large cargoes and extended periods of time anchored in ports.58 Small vessels, multiple round trips, and short stays in port diffused the risk associated with a trade that many times, as in the trade in clothes conducted ­under cover of the ­legal trade in slaves, included an illegal component. This method also allowed for a dynamic exchange of news, ideas, and rumors that, just as contraband trade, greatly concerned Spanish authorities and merchants with an interest in the Spanish transatlantic trade. Like the Bermudian sloops studied by Michael Jarvis, New Granada’s peddler-­vessels, of which Domingo Pisco and Josef Borregio’s Esperanza is a useful example, countered “what they lacked in size” with “speed and efficiency.” Speed and efficiency, not only mea­sured in terms of ­actual navigation speed but also in their ability to spend “less time in port loading and unloading,” to reach ports and semi-­hidden coves that “deep-­water ships could not,” and to make multiple round trips within a single year, made Jarvis’s conclusion that “bigger was not always better” as valid for the southern Ca­rib­bean as he found it to be for the northwestern Atlantic.59

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Information for selected years on the tonnage and crew size of vessels entering and leaving Kingston from New Granada provides a good sense of the types of vessels engaged in New Granada’s trade with Jamaica. Most of them classified by customs officers as schooners, Spanish vessels entering Kingston ­were largely of less than fifty tons (68 ­percent), with a significant 25 ­percent weighting between fifty-­one and one hundred tons. Large vessels of over one hundred tons w ­ ere a strange occurrence.60 Similarly, when mea­sured by number of men, the vast majority of vessels entering Kingston from New Granada classify as small schooners manned by ten or fewer men (70 ­percent), with medium-­sized schooners of eleven to thirty men accounting for close to 30 ­percent.61 Since small vessels can afford only very limited cargoes, therefore producing less profit than larger ships, frequent travels constituted an impor­tant condition for the trade of small vessels in the Jamaican connection to be profitable. According to Santa Marta’s governor Antonio Narváez y la Torre, a typical schooner traveling to foreign colonies to sell c­ attle and dyewoods and buy slaves for l­ater sale in Cartagena or Santa Marta, d ­ oing eight round trips to Jamaica and six round trips to Curaçao could produce a hefty profit. Assuming round-­trip times of fifteen days to Jamaica and twenty-­five days to Curaçao, and ­after accounting for sailors’ salaries and rations, customs duties, and the cost of buying the heads of ­c attle and the dyewood, Narváez calculated that each schooner engaged in this trade could import about three hundred slaves and, a­ fter selling them, generate about 30,000 pesos in profit. The transactions, he further explained, would not only be attractively profitable but would greatly contribute to the transformation of the northern provinces into highly productive economies based on the development of commercial plantations.62 Frequency and size ­were also crucial to diffuse the risk associated with shipwrecks, capture by ­enemy forces, and seizure of merchandise by Spanish officials in New Granada’s ports and coasts. A detailed analy­sis of the lists of Spanish vessels trading between Kingston and New Granada makes it pos­si­ble to identify about forty vessels that ­were actively engaged in this commercial network. As ­Table  11.1 shows, New Granada’s trade with Jamaica was largely dependent on a relatively small fleet of frequent visitors. A conservative estimate of the number of peddler-­vessels maintaining New Granada’s connection with Jamaica shows that at least thirteen peddler-­ vessels w ­ ere in operation in 1810 and no fewer than twenty-­t wo in 1814.63 This fleet of peddler-­vessels was not only undertaking trade but also, ac-



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 231

­Table 11.1. Spanish Vessels Trading Between New Granada and Kingston, 1785–1817 Identified Peddler-­Vessels (Number of Ships) A. By arrivals to Kingston Number of entries

B. By departures from Kingston

Year

2

3&4

5+

% of total

1785 1796* 1810 1814 1817 Total %

2 3 10 12 3 30 65.2%

0 1 3 8 2 14 30.4%

0 0 0 2 0 2 4.4%

4.3% 8.7% 28.3% 47.8% 10.9% 46 100%

Number of departures Year

2

3&4

5+

% of total

1785 1796* 1810 1814 1817 Total %

2 1 8 19 3 33 63.5%

1 0 4 8 2 15 28.8%

0 0 3 1 0 4 7.7%

5.8% 1.9% 28.8% 53.9% 9.6% 52 100%

Source: Colonial Office 142/12–29, National Archives, Kew, UK. *Does not include data for the April–­June trimester.

cording to Spanish authorities, undermining Spanish control of New Granada’s coasts. In the context of the revolutionary period, the operations of this fleet of peddler-­vessels constituted an impor­tant m ­ atter of concern for Spanish royal officials apprehensive of the diffusion of revolutionary pamphlets, ideas, and news about “the inquietudes France is currently suffering.”64 The existence of this fleet also preoccupied merchants, especially from Cartagena, who faced competition by the contraband t­ hese ships surreptitiously introduced in the many hidden coves and uninhabited coasts that surrounded New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean port cities. In their complaints and proposed solutions, high-­ ranking imperial authorities and merchants emphasized the interrelation between size and frequency as an impor­tant source of the prob­lem created by Ca­rib­bean peddler-­vessels. In two reports on contraband trade in New Granada’s ports written in 1800 and 1804, leading Cartagena merchant José Ignacio de Pombo reiteratively referred to the “many trips and entries” and to the practice of “repeated trips” as facilitators of contraband. Combined with the habit of sailing “in ballast” along the coast, frequent trips to Jamaica and other foreign islands w ­ ere, in Pombo’s opinion, the main source of the conspicuousness of contraband in Ca­rib­bean New Granada.65 A de­cade earlier, Viceroy Ezpeleta had expressed similar concerns, proposing as a pos­si­ble solution the need to augment the minimum “number of tons of the vessels occupied in the slave trade.” This mea­sure, he believed, would reduce the number of trips

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and limit the ships’ efficiency unloading illegal cargoes in the shallow coasts in the vicinities of New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean ports. Almost counterintuitively, Ezpeleta concluded that in order to curtail the contraband trade that, in his opinion, resulted “from the permits granted to travel to foreign colonies in search of slaves” and the “allowance to ship frutos del país to foreign colonies,” increasing Ca­rib­bean vessels’ size and tonnage was the best suited mea­sure.66

Experiencing Entanglements The p ­ eople, information, and goods that traveled on board the peddler-­vessels connecting Kingston and New Granada touched the lives of many coastal residents. Even staying put on land, New Granada’s coastal residents lived in a transimperial field of social interaction.67 Inhabiting this transimperial milieu allowed sedentary coastal residents to gain access to the latest British fashion, to obtain weapons to resist Spanish authorities, to imagine and fear transcolonial conspiracies that could spread revolution through New Granada, and to experience entanglements in a variety of dif­fer­ent ways.68 The story of the inspection of tailor shops that opened this chapter provides a clear example of how urban residents in Ca­rib­bean New Granada experienced the benefits of transimperial entanglements. While it was common for merchants with an interest in the trade with Spain to decry the general scarcity that characterized life in the Ca­rib­bean provinces of New Granada, multiple reports pointed to the alternative means through which coastal residents gained access to much needed clothes. “The lack of registros [registered shipments] from Spain,” Cartagena merchant Francisco Salceda de Bustamante complained in 1798, resulted in “the absolute scarcity of clothes in this ­ ouses of Cartagena’s tailors demoncity.”69 As the confiscations made in the h strate, ­these scarcities, associated with the almost complete inability of Spanish vessels to conduct trade between Spain and the Amer­i­cas during war with Britain, did not curtail elite’s access to Eu­ro­pean fashion. Reports from Riohacha, in northeastern New Granada, further demonstrate the extent to which transimperial commercial exchanges guaranteed an adequate supply of clothes. The sale of “clothes, aguardiente [a type of liquor], and other goods [illegally] imported from Jamaica,” according to Riohacha resident Miguel Cotes, was a “public and scandalous” affair in this provincial capital. In his denunciation of a “gang of smugglers” that frequently unloaded British clothes from Jamaica “without the least reservation,” Cotes described how



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 233

schooners claiming to sail to Cuba actually went to Jamaica to obtain clothes. Upon returning to Riohacha, they unloaded their illegal cargo using small canoes and then, protected by provincial authorities, transported the contraband to ­houses that served as ware­houses, from which the clothes ­were then distributed to the public.70 Similar schemes in place in Portobelo reveal the extent to which transimperial entanglements—­combining ­legal methods with illegal means—­guaranteed a stable supply of clothes at a time when the official supply lines through trade with Spain ­were unreliable. While the transimperial connections that made British clothes readily available in New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean provinces directly affected the Spanish crown’s finances, some entanglements generated more urgent geopo­liti­cal concerns. The ability of autonomous indigenous groups to use transimperial commercial networks to obtain weapons and the immediate threat that the spread of revolutionary ideas could represent for Spain’s continued rule in New Granada ranked high on the list of concerns of Spanish authorities. Efforts to subdue unconquered indigenous groups inhabiting the northern provinces of New Granada—­like the Wayuu and the Cuna—­reveal the sense of geopo­liti­ cal urgency that Spanish authorities assigned to controlling (if not completely curtailing) transimperial interactions. In reference to the trade between the Wayuu of the Guajira Peninsula and British traders, viceregal officers decried the interactions that made “guns . . . ​and instructions” readily available to the Wayuu. ­These weapons and the training to use them, Francisco Moreno y Escandón complained, allowed the Wayuu “to wage continued war on us.”71 Through trade the Wayuu ­were able to obtain “­rifles, gunpowder, ­bullets . . . ​blankets, machetes, and even some clothes.” In exchange for t­ hese products, they supplied foreigners with c­ attle (horses, cows, and mules), dyewoods (palo brasil), pearls, salt, and cotton.72 Like the Wayuu, the Cuna of the Gulf of Darién used transimperial commercial networks to keep Spanish forces at bay. Access to British weapons, according to viceroy Antonio Caba­ llero y Góngora, accounted “for the obstinacy with which ­these indios bárbaros [insist] on defending that territory.”73 Transimperial interactions with British merchants from Jamaica reveal the extent to which the Wayuu and the Cuna understood the Ca­rib­bean as a sea of opportunities. Sales of c­ attle, pearls, dyewoods, and possibly slaves provided them with the financial means to obtain weapons to resist Spanish incursions. Their military might, largely communicated through the possession of British guns, conveyed for Spaniards the message that the best way to gain the ­favor of Wayuu and Cunas was through negotiation. Wayuu and Cunas, in turn, did not have to travel across po­liti­cal

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borders (although some of them did) to experience the benefits of transimperial entanglements. Closely associated with the ability of autonomous indigenous groups to remain unconquered was Spanish authorities’ concern with the role transimperial exchanges played in the spread of revolutionary ideas and the threat ­these ideas could pose to Spanish rule in New Granada and other Spanish territories in the circum-­Caribbean. The dangers associated with the spread of news and ideas about the Haitian Revolution to New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean provinces w ­ ere at the forefront of Spanish authorities’ concerns during the first de­cade of the nineteenth c­ entury. Customs officers routinely asked captains arriving to New Granada’s ports to provide information about upheavals and revolutionary rumors in the ports they had visited. As part of standard inspections called visitas de entrada, captains ­were required to provide their names and nationality, the name of the vessel u ­ nder inspection, the name of the last ports visited, the cargo transported, the number of sailors that made up the ships’ crews, and the number of passengers who traveled on the ship. In addition, customs inspectors asked captains to give details about other ships encountered during navigation and about occurrences at sea, in par­tic­u­lar if ­there had been “any ruin b­ ecause of the disobedience of the members of the crew.”74 During such visitas, Spanish officers first heard of the eruption of the slave revolt that grew to become the Haitian Revolution and obtained (fake) news about the end of this revolutionary upheaval, a­ fter a Spanish captain informed Caracas’s captain general that “the black caudillo Toussaint, forced by hunger and thirst . . . ​had surrendered” and, as a result, “the ­whole country” had returned to French possession.75 Transimperial entanglements, as ­these examples demonstrate, informed the life of many coastal residents who did not directly participate in the transimperial routes that sailors navigated on a daily basis. For urban dwellers, autonomous indigenous groups, customs officers, and many other coastal residents, moving across po­liti­cal borders was not a requirement to experience the entangled nature of life in the Atlantic world during the Age of Revolutions.

Pursuing Entanglements to Uncover Other Worlds In the last de­cade, Atlantic historians have identified a tendency for Atlantic history to reproduce what David Hancock rightly called the fiction of the existence of an “Age of Imperial Self-­Sufficiency.”76 Despite vari­ous calls to ex-



Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement 235

plore the “entangled histories” of what Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra and Benjamin Breen recently referred to as “hybrid Atlantics,” the historiography of the Atlantic world remains largely compartmentalized.77 A focus on compartmentalized British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese Atlantics, each functioning as a self-­sufficient unit, has created a historiographical map that distorts the lived experiences of Atlantic dwellers.78 Attention to the transimperial interactions that connected subjects of dif­fer­ent crowns has the potential to alter this historiographical map and pres­ent the lives of ­those who inhabited the early modern Atlantic world in a way that more closely reflects the entangled world they inhabited. The entanglements I studied in this chapter took the form of direct contact between Spanish and British subjects in the southern Ca­rib­bean sea space roughly (and somewhat arbitrarily, in the interest of brevity) limited to the north by Jamaica’s southern coast and to the south by New Granada’s northern shores. Transimperial interactions, of course, ­were not limited to this small area. Instead, New Granada’s sailors, through myriad trips connecting New Granada’s ports with locations stretching from South Amer­i­ca’s northern coast to port cities in the northeastern United States, created a transimperial Greater Ca­rib­bean space. Direct connections—­legal, illegal, or, as in the case of the commercial transactions undertaken by most of the peddler-­vessels I analyzed, a combination of both that reflects the ways in which formal commercial policy and informal trade informed and influenced each other—­provide a way to understand entanglements. As Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra and Brad Dixon demonstrate in Chapters 8 and 9, respectively, entanglements could also happen on a less tangible but no less significant plain: that of ideas. Facing north from New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean shores reveals a set of trans­ imperial connections that took place both b­ ecause of and despite imperial plans. Sailors who legally and illegally plied the ­waters of the southern Ca­rib­ bean created and participated in a world of transimperial entanglements that allowed New Granada’s coastal residents to experience and imagine the world in ways that challenge conventional geo­graph­i­cal frameworks or world-­ regionalization schemes that take po­liti­cal geographies as de facto units of geo­graph­i­cal analy­sis. During the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, imperial policy makers, captains and sailors, urban dwellers of New Granadas’s Ca­rib­bean ports, and autonomous Wayuu and Cuna Indians lived in an entangled world.

chapter 12

The Seven Years’ War and the Globalization of Anglo-­Iberian Imperial Entanglement The View from Manila kri s t ie pat ricia fl a nn e ry

It has been a de­cade since Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra and Eliga Gould boldly argued in the pages of the American Historical Review that the Spanish and British empires in the Atlantic world ­were deeply interconnected institutions that belonged to “the same hemispheric system or community.”1 “­There seems to be an emerging consensus,” Cañizares observed back in 2007, “that ‘the Atlantic’ as a category should deliver narratives on the circulations of ­peoples and staples (to say nothing of ideas), carving out a distinctly transnational space in the pro­ cess.”2 And so it has. This volume is proof that “the Atlantic” has redefined how historians understand Spanish and British imperial expansion and colonial rule within this transoceanic zone. We no longer imagine ­these empires as separate, comparable entities. Looking beyond national historiographies, we search for and interrogate the pro­cesses that pushed ­these empires together, and the consequences of their entanglement. Entwined empires are no longer an anomaly but an assumed characteristic of the early modern Atlantic world. Yet historians have been slow to consider the connected histories of Anglo and Iberian empires in other parts of the globe. The Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Ocean worlds remain marginalized in conversations about the ways Spain, Britain, Portugal, and their respective colonies ­shaped one an-



The Globalization of Anglo-­Iberian Imperial Entanglement 237

other. Decentering the Atlantic, this chapter considers the entanglement of Spain and Britain’s Asian empires in the second half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury from the vantage point of Manila, “the metropolis and capital of the Philippine Islands.”3 I am asking historians to imagine a differently connected world from the one that they have come to know. Take a moment to ponder the map of the greater Indian Ocean world in Figure 12.1. It shows indigenous and Eu­ro­pean settlements and hubs of trade in East Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, and the many maritime and overland trade routes that joined t­hese sites together in a polycentric economy. The illustrated trade routes link Manila to the Chinese port of Canton, the Portuguese colony of Macao, the Dutch trading post at Malacca, and Jolo, the capital of the Sulu sultanate. Commerce also connected Manila to Madras (present-­day Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata), the largest port cities in the Bay of Bengal that w ­ ere both British possessions by 1750. Even this s­ imple map disrupts dominant interpretations of Anglo and Iberian empire building in this vast space. Historians of the British Empire would be more accustomed to seeing maps of the British Indian Ocean world. It would incorporate Australia, the g­ reat southern continent the British began to colonize in earnest in 1788, and highlight connections between vari­ous British colonies in the region (the places traditionally colored red), rather than traffic across porous imperial borders.4 Historians of the Spanish Empire might question ­whether early modern Manila was part of the greater Indian Ocean world at all. They have traditionally gazed east from Manila ­toward Acapulco, imagining the archipelago as part of a discrete Spanish Pacific world connected to Mexico via the galleon ­ nder trade.5 New scholarship suggests that a historiographical re­orientation is u way. A wave of recent work explores Spanish Manila’s ties to Ming and Qing China and Japan.6 Other studies take seriously the links between Manila and Madras. Baswati Bhattacharya and Alberto Baena Zapatero and Xabier Lamikiz have examined networks of Armenian merchants operating in both port cities and their role in the development of licit and illicit interimperial trade.7 Shifting away from commerce, Pedro Luengo Gutierrez’s research reveals how British architects and the forts they erected in India influenced Spanish military engineers and the reform of urban space in Manila circa 1762–88.8 Contributing to this emerging history of entangled Anglo and Iberian worlds beyond the Atlantic, I argue that the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) abruptly collapsed the distance between Manila and Madras. The Spanish and British empires in Asia violently collided when a combined British Royal Navy

Figure 12.1. The greater Indian Ocean world in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. Adapted from the map presented in Bhaswati Bhattacharya, “Making Money at the Blessed Place of Manila: Armenians in the Madras–­Manila Trade in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Journal of Global History 3, no. 1 (2008): 9.



The Globalization of Anglo-­Iberian Imperial Entanglement 239

and East India Com­pany fleet with an army of 1,700 men invaded the Philippines capital in September 1762. Intramuros, the walled center of Manila, fell to the British a­ fter ten days of heavy shelling and fighting, but Simón de Anda y Salazar, a member of the Spanish Audiencia (governing council) of Manila, refused to surrender to the invaders. Anda declared himself governor of the Philippines and raised a ten thousand-­man strong army that waged war against the British ­until they withdrew from the colony, defeated, in April 1764. This chapter examines what the clash of the Spanish and British empires looked like on the ground in Spain’s Asian empire. In Chapter 6, Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara reveals that the Napoleonic Wars created opportunities for individuals such as the young Irish soldier George Dawson Flinter to cross imperial borders in the Atlantic world. The Seven Years’ War created comparable mobility in the greater Indian Ocean world. I demonstrate that war blurred the bound­aries between the “British” and “Spanish” bodies that converged in Manila as fighting men of all nations switched allegiances and moved between rival imperial armies. I also pay attention to the imperial repertoires that the British and Spanish shared in occupied Manila.9 Simón de Anda and Drake, the British governor of Manila, emulated one another’s strategies of persuading soldiers to join their respective armies. The British also mimicked long-­held Spanish policies of interacting with the large Chinese population, including Chinese segregation. Significantly, the failure or refusal of the sangleyes (as Manila’s Chinese w ­ ere known) to assimilate into the British social order in Manila highlights the limits to interimperial mobility. Zooming out from Manila, I show that the British invasion of the Phi­ lippines triggered major rebellions across Luzon as indios (indigenous Filipinos) exploited the war to recalibrate the colonial bargain. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the longer-­term consequences of the clash of empires. In the Philippines, the conflict created a resurgent Anglophobia and Sinophobia that functioned to harden the Spanish Empire’s borders to British and Chinese “­others.” However, the war si­mul­ta­neously deepened the entanglement of the Spanish and British empires by giving rise to a complex web of new alliances brokered between Asian and Eu­ro­pean powers in the region.

Blurring Imperial Bound­aries on the Battlefield The armies that converged in the Philippines in 1762 ­were heterogeneous, multiethnic assemblies of soldiers. The motley British army that attacked Manila

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was mobilized from Madras, which made it fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the British forces that saw action in the Atlantic world at this time. No more than one third of its troops ­were En­glishmen. It incorporated approximately three hundred French and other Eu­ro­pean troops who ­were taken prisoners at Pondicherry (Puducherry) when the French colony 170 kilo­meters south of Madras fell to the British in 1761. The British army also included a contingent of Coffreys (Africans) who had most likely traveled to southern India via the Indian Ocean slave trade that thrived between Portuguese Mozambique and Goa.10 More than six hundred soldiers ­were indigenous South Asian sepoys. The British brought an additional one hundred Indian lascars to Manila to perform the heavy l­abor of war: transporting supplies from ship to shore to battlefield and burying the dead.11 Anda’s Spanish army was also diverse. It combined more than six thousand indios, the majority of whom w ­ ere Pampangans, in addition to at least 1,500 Chinese and Chinese mestizos and several hundred Spanish and Mexican soldiers. The bound­aries between the “British” and “Spanish” armies proved porous. Several elite Spaniards went over to the British, including Francisco Zapata, the former justicia mayor in the province of Tondo. Zapata assisted the invaders as a guide in the expedition against the town of Pasig.12 Santiago Orendaín, previously employed as trea­surer of Manila’s Santa Cruzada funds, supplied the British with intelligence.13 Both men held grudges against the Spanish colonial government that surely eased their transition into the new British social world in Manila. Zapata had been arrested and prosecuted for violently assaulting indigenous p ­ eople in his jurisdiction in 1759.14 Orendaín had been charged with embezzlement and suffered the indignity of being thrown in prison as the state confiscated all of his property.15 During the war, hundreds of ordinary soldiers switched allegiances from one empire to the other, deserting their commanders and joining ­enemy units. French soldiers defected en masse to Anda’s army as soon as they arrived in the Philippines. It was rumored that an entire French garrison stole themselves away from the British camp in the dead of night disguised in ­women’s clothes.16 In February 1763, Drake was compelled to place his remaining French troops ­under lock and barrel on prison ships anchored in Manila Bay to prevent more of ­these highly skilled soldiers from ­running away and bolstering ­enemy forces.17 But the British army continued to hemorrhage troops. Sepoys and lascars as well as En­glish artillerymen abandoned their posts and enlisted in Anda’s battalions as b­ attles raged on.18 The crude demands of combat facilitated the flow of fighting men between the British and Spanish forces in



The Globalization of Anglo-­Iberian Imperial Entanglement 241

Manila. War constrained the capacity of military leaders to discriminate against troops on the basis of race or religion; a potential soldier’s faith or skin color mattered less than ­whether he knew how to ­handle a weapon and was willing to use it against the ­enemy. As Anda and Drake ­were obliged to compete for soldiers’ l­abor, they imitated each other’s strategies of attracting and retaining troops. The British ­adopted the Spanish colonial government’s long established practice of communicating with Filipino vassals via multilingual proclamations routinely posted in front of churches and other public places. In January 1763, the British distributed in Manila and surrounding towns “manifestoes in the Spanish and Tagal [sic] Languages” that promised to p ­ ardon and protect surrendering soldiers.19 Anda issued his version of a manifesto to the British troops stationed in Manila in July. It invited the men to “deliver up the garrison guns [and] ammunition” to the Spanish army for a $15 reward.20 In November, Drake offered five thousand silver dollars as a prize to anyone who brought him Anda, dead or alive. Anda retaliated by appropriating Drake’s tactic. Posters soon appeared across the city advertising a ten thousand dollar reward to anyone who delivered the British governor or any member of his council, living or deceased, to the Spanish camp.21 The practice of critical emulation that Gabrielle Paquette has discussed in his work was neither the exclusive domain of intellectuals nor a uniquely Atlantic phenomenon.22 The Spanish and British borrowed and learned from each other on bloody battlefields on the periphery of their global empires. Anda ultimately had the upper hand in negotiations with fighting men. He consistently offered soldiers more silver than the British could. When the treasure-­laden Filipino galleon arrived in the Philippines by mid-1763, Anda succeeded in transferring its haul to his camp, securing extensive reserves of silver for his government-­in-­exile to bargain with.23 In addition to money, Anda promised freedom to soldiers who would desert from British ranks. The Spanish governor guaranteed defectors that they would not be forcibly pressed into the Spanish ser­vice as was the custom of war. Rather, each surrendering soldier would be given the option of remaining in the Philippines and joining the Spanish army, for which they would be handsomely compensated with double the wages they received from the British, or traveling to “New Spain or any other place that you think proper.”24 Money and liberty enticed many men to abandon British battalions and join Anda’s cause. Yet even in the context of war, ­there w ­ ere limits to the fluidity of imperial bound­aries. Manila’s large Chinese population was unable, or unwilling,

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to move so smoothly between the British and Spanish forces in Manila. The British initially attempted to secure Chinese support for the occupation, relying on Eduardo Wogan and Diego O’Kennedy, two of Manila’s long-­term Irish residents, to act as intermediaries in negotiations with this community. Although we do not know precisely when O’Kennedy and Wogan arrived in the Philippines, it is clear they had been absorbed into Manila’s cosmopolitan ruling class prior to the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. Wogan was a Dublin-­born medical doctor. In 1750, Manileños trusted him enough to treat the city’s sick archbishop Martínez De Arizala.25 O’Kennedy was a  merchant married to Doña Maria Cayetana Esguerra, the ­daughter of a wealthy, land-­rich Manileño ­family.26 This preexisting entanglement of the British and Spanish empires abetted British efforts to govern a colony that perplexed them. Wogan served the British government of Manila as a translator. In the early days of the occupation, O’Kennedy convinced Drake that he was sufficiently bilingual and bicultural to serve as an effective liaison with the local Chinese community. O’Kennedy quickly became Drake’s trusted advisor on all m ­ atters relating to the Chinese. The Irishman’s influence is apparent in almost all of the British government’s extensive dealings with the diaspora in occupied Manila and its hinterland. O’Kennedy was instrumental in persuading Drake to recruit Chinese instead of indigenous Filipinos as soldiers and to create a Chinese cavalry unit attached to the British forces in Manila. O’Kennedy claimed that the Chinese w ­ ere the “properest p ­ eople to be trusted,” in contrast to the “Malays or Mestezes . . . ​[who] may go to the ­enemy with h ­ orse and arms.”27 He recruited “twenty five good resolute Fellows” to be part of the h ­ orse­back regiment, “reconnoitred [sic] a proper Place for Stables,” and or­ga­nized the purchase of s­ addles, bridles, and other equipment that the cavalry required. He also negotiated generous salaries to be paid to the Chinese cavalrymen to ensure their compliance with his plans.28 British sources also describe O’Kennedy’s efforts to or­ga­nize Chinese workers to remove the large copper bells hanging in church towers throughout the city and its hinterland so that Anda’s soldiers could not seize and smelt the metal to manufacture cannon shot.29 Furthermore, O’Kennedy arranged for the British government to purchase vari­ous supplies from Chinese shop­keep­ers in the Parián, including rice, dried fish, and the locally manufactured liquor arak. ­These victuals ­were essential to keeping the British army well fed and just a ­little bit drunk.30 O’Kennedy profited handsomely from all of ­these interactions.



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The British ­adopted long-­held Spanish strategies for governing the Chinese in Manila u ­ nder the influence of t­ hese go-­betweens. Drake learned that the Chinese traditionally enjoyed a degree of autonomy from the Spanish colonial government. Belonging to neither the Republic of Spaniards nor the Republic of Indians, the Spanish governed the Parián Chinese according to conventions unique to Spain’s Asian empire. The community had its own gobernadorcillo (literally, ­little governor) and a host of minor officials responsible for the day-­to-­day r­unning of the neighborhood, as well as the management of relationships with the state, including the collection and payment of the Chinese tribute or head tax.31 As Wogan explained in a report to the British admiralty, “­things [in the Parián] w ­ ere ordered to be continued on the same footing as when subject to the Spaniards” while Drake was governor of Manila.32 Manila’s Chinese residents also s­ haped Drake’s decision to leave the Spanish colonial system intact. The gobernadorcillo and his supporters staged noisy protests when British officers considered removing him from office. The Chinese official “presented many petitions [to the Manila Council], seeking another hearing and offering his life as a Sacrifice if any ­thing irregular or unjust could be proved upon him. Many p ­ eople interceded in his behalf, and numbers of the Chinese flocked to the palace as Evidence of his innocence and integrity.”33 This minor rebellion convinced Drake to re­spect the gobernadorcillo’s authority and appease the Parián Chinese. Despite initially promising to abolish all forms of tribute in the Philippines, the British government of Manila deci­ded to mimic the Spanish and impose this tax on the Chinese, although they preferred to describe the payment as a “gift.” Wogan explained how this “gift” was negotiated or coerced out of the Parián leaders. East India Com­pany officers suggested to the Chinese “that if this [tribute] had been a practice in former times, much more should they agree to it in the pres­ent Government u ­ nder which they received many ­favors, and more privileges w ­ ere granted to them then [sic] formerly, they all agreed to his proposal without the least compulsion.”34 Intriguingly, the British government eventually implemented the Spanish policy of Chinese segregation. Drake ordered all the inhabitants of the predominantly Chinese and Chinese mestizo district of Santa Cruz to relocate to the Parián, where they could be placed u ­ nder British surveillance in December  1763.35 Of course, Drake had encountered racial segregation prior to arriving in the Philippines. As Carl  H. Nightingale points out, “Madras was the first place in the world to officially designate its two sections

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by color: ‘White Town’ and ‘Black Town.’ ”36 However, Manila was the very first Anglo experiment with Chinese segregation—­the first occasion the British had explic­itly defined the Chinese as a dangerous other that needed to be physically contained. This fact has been wholly overlooked in the large historiography of the Chinese diaspora in the British Empire.37 Chinese segregation had a long history in the Spanish Philippines. The Spanish had attempted to physically separate sangleyes from Spaniards and indios in Manila since the late sixteenth c­ entury. Indeed, the city’s distinctive architecture reflected this objective. The walled “Spanish” center of the city, surrounded by thick and tall protective walls, was built across the river from the Parián. From ­these fortifications, Spanish cannons ­were permanently aimed at Chinese homes and business. In stark contrast to forts in other Spanish port cities designed to defend vassals from foreign invaders, Manila’s defenses ­were constructed to protect the city from an internal ­enemy: the Parián Chinese.38 The British emulation of Chinese segregation responded to their failure to absorb the Chinese into the colonial state they sought to establish in Manila. For Drake, segregation was a Spanish-­inspired solution to evidence that the Chinese ­were secretly supporting Anda’s re­sis­tance. ­A fter a year of occupation, the British w ­ ere convinced that the Chinese w ­ ere double agents for the Spanish governor-­in-­exile.39 Anda also strug­gled to integrate the Chinese into the Spanish colonial state in crisis. Studies of the British occupation of Manila have traditionally portrayed the entire Chinese community as traitors to the Spanish Empire during this war. In the early nineteenth c­ entury, the Augustinian priest and historian Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga asserted that “from the moment [the British] took possession of Manila, ­these Chinese gave them ­every aid and accompanied them in all their expeditions.”40 Shirley Fish uncritically reproduced this claim in her 2003 history of the occupation. Not surprisingly, the real­ity of Chinese responses to the occupation was far more complex. New research by Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack, and James B. Tueller reveals that Antonio Tuazon, the rich and power­ful Chinese merchant and captain of the Gremio de Mestizos de Binondo (Guild of Mestizos of Binondo), raised 1,500 Chinese and Chinese mestizos into a militia that fought alongside Anda against the British.41 The Seven Years’ War created a unique opportunity for men like Tuazon and ­those who joined his Chinese battalion to demonstrate their loyalty to Spain and the Catholic Church. Yet as other Chinese conspicuously aided the British, Anda oscillated from appealing to the diaspora for support to violently punishing them for col-



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laborating with the invaders. For example, Anda distributed public notices in Spanish and Chinese in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz in May 1763 offering a general ­pardon to all the Chinese who had sided with the En­glish on the condition they register their presence with Spanish officials and refrain from taking up arms against Spaniards or assisting the invaders in any other way.42 On another occasion, Anda hanged more than two hundred Chinese in retaliation for an alleged Chinese plot to assassinate him.43 This schizophrenic combination of cruel coercion and olive branches arose from the failure of the war-­torn Spanish colonial regime to assimilate the Chinese.

Rebels and Indian Conquistadors The British invasion and occupation of Manila reverberated far beyond the capital. Spain’s temporary loss of Manila created an unpre­ce­dented opportunity for indigenous Filipinos to contest Spanish rule. The war triggered two major indigenous rebellions in northern Luzon. Diego Silang led an armed uprising in the Ilocos province, and Juan De la Cruz Palaris headed a revolt in the province of Pangasinan. Encouraged by the knowledge that a British governor was installed in Intramuros, Silang and an angry mob of two thousand armed indios assembled at the Spanish mayor’s residence in the provincial capital of Vigan in December 1762.44 The protestors demanded the abolition of tribute and polo (forced ­labor) and the replacement of the Alcalde and the Principalia (indigenous and mestizo elites) who had long facilitated the exploitation of indigenous Ilocanos.45 The Palaris rebellion erupted in the town of Binalatongan also in late 1762, when the local indigenous community refused to pay tribute and called for the reimbursement of taxes they had already handed over to colonial officials. Spanish priests tried to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis by offering to suspend tribute obligations for as long as the British occupied Manila. Clearly the occupation bestowed indigenous communities with considerably more bargaining power than they wielded during peacetime. Palaris rejected the priests’ compromises and insisted that all Spaniards, including the clergy, evacuate Pangasinan. Missionaries w ­ ere forced to flee as the uprising 46 spread across the province. Popu­lar protests in Pangasinan peaked in December 1763, when an estimated ten thousand indios assembled in Binalatongan to insist that Palaris’s demands be met. The mob set fire to the town’s ­Dominican church and convent, underscoring the rebellion’s anti-­clergy agenda.

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The British role in ­these anti-­Spanish uprisings went far beyond providing the initial spark that ignited t­ hese revolts. The British entered into formal alliances with the rebels in order to cause as much damage as pos­si­ble to Spain’s Southeast Asian empire and to secure the foundations of a permanent British colony in the Philippines. Diego Silang shrewdly exploited interimperial rivalry and entered into negotiations with British as well as Spanish officials in order to meet his objectives. Silang wrote to Anda in early 1763, reassuring the Spanish governor that his intent to remove the corrupt Principalia from power in Ilocos did not undermine his loyalty to the king of Spain and his commitment to defeating the British.47 The rebel leader si­mul­ta­neously pursued a compact with the invaders.48 In May 1763, he wrote to Drake, declaring that he recognized King George III “as my king and master,” on the provision that Ilocanos be released from tribute and permitted to continue to practice their Catholic religion. It seems that Silang’s letter responded to earlier British efforts to obtain a kind of capitulation agreement with Spain’s indigenous vassals. In the early days of the occupation, the British had printed and distributed manifestos written in Spanish and Tagalog promising that indios who swore loyalty to the British monarch would “be treated in ­every re­spect as his Britannick [sic] Majesty’s Subjects” and freed from servitude and the burden of tribute.49 To sweeten the deal of a British-­Ilocano partnership, Silang gave Drake a gift of “twelve loaves of sugar, twelve baskets of calamy [sticky rice cake] and 200 cakes or balls of Choco­late.” This offering conveyed the genuineness of Silang’s promises, as well as the tangible benefits that would accrue to the British from an Ilocano alliance.50 The British enthusiastically accepted Silang’s invitation. They dispatched fifty soldiers (twenty Eu­ ro­pe­ans and thirty sepoys) with weapons and ammunition to Ilocos to support the rebels’ war against the units of Anda’s royalist army that had marched north to put down the rebellion.51 ­There is no evidence that Palaris or other leaders of the Pangasinan rebellion reached out to the British as Silang did, although the British certainly attempted to persuade Pangasinanos to join the anti-­Spanish co­a li­tion they ­were building from the bottom up. When the British government in Manila “received advice that the Pangasinan had revolted from Senor Anda” in March 1763, it promptly resolved to dispatch “a letter to the Governor and Chiefs of the province, offering them our Friendship and Protection, promising to assist them as much as in our Power and to secure them the f­ ree exercise of their religion with an open commerce.”52 When this letter was met with silence, a second was sent to the Pangasinan rebels in May 1763. The British



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proposed, “If you w ­ ill continue to oppose t­ hese evil Designs of the Malecontents [Anda’s royalist army] we ­will enter into an Alliance with you and when our ships which are shortly expected arrive we ­will send you such an assistance as with troops of your Province and IIocos w ­ ill enable us (with Gods Blessing) to crush Mr. Anda and his faction. You s­ hall enjoy e­ very liberty you can hope or expect.”53 We do not know if the leaders of the uprising in Pangasinan ever received this correspondence. If they did, they apparently chose to ignore British invitations to form a united front against Anda’s army: Palaris and his followers ­were not desirous of liberation by the British. Significantly, the British occupation of Manila not only created the conditions for indignant indios to rise up against Spanish colonial rule. This colonial crisis also afforded loyal indigenous vassals an extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate their fidelity to Spain. As previously noted, the majority of the indigenous ­people who joined Anda’s royalist army ­were Pampangans (Kapampangan-­speaking natives of the Pampanga province). The Pampangans ­were the original “Indian Conquistadors” of the Philippines.54 A Spanish-­ Pampanga co­a li­tion can be traced back to the late sixteenth c­ entury, when Pampangans mobilized to defend Manila from the Chinese pirate Limahong’s attack in 1594.55 In the seventeenth c­ entury, Pampangans participated alongside Spanish and Mexican soldiers in the military and spiritual conquest of the Mariana Islands.56 In the early eigh­teenth ­century, they collaborated with the colonial government to suppress indigenous revolts that periodically erupted closer to Manila, including uprisings that broke out in four indigenous pueblos in 1721.57 Pampangan soldiers ­were fully integrated into Spain’s Pacific presidio (fort) network by 1740, when they frequently accounted for at least half of the soldiers deployed at each military outpost in the Philippine Islands. The Cuyo Fort in the Calamianes and the Fort of San Francisco Javier in Iligan ­were even manned entirely by Pampangans.58 The British occupation of Manila enabled Pampangans to assert the continued relevance of their alliance with the Spanish at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions. In addition to fighting against the British, Anda’s royalist army waged and won a war against the rebels in Ilocos and Pangasinan. The clergy played a decisive role in the organ­ization of loyal indigenous militias to fight against the foreign invaders as well as the colony’s internal enemies. Diego Silang complained that the Augustinians “have pursued us as if we ­were wild boars, [and] neither has our submission, nor laying down our arms and crying for mercy availed us in the least for a further security.”59 It was with the blessing of Bishop Fray Bernado de Ustáriz that the loyal indigenous soldier Miguel

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Bicus slayed Silang in June 1763.60 The rebellion in Ilocos continued to rage ­a fter Silang’s death, led by his ­widow, Gabriela Estrada. The Augustinians raised their own army of eight or nine thousand indigenous soldiers, who continued to confront ­these rebels in ­battle. This Augustinian’s militia captured and hanged Estrada and more than ninety other rebels in late September 1763, effectively suppressing the rebellion.61 Dominican missionaries played a major role in the suffocation of the Palaris uprising. In February 1763, Fray Pedro Ire attempted to mediate a general p ­ ardon of the Pangasinan rebels on Anda’s behalf. He urged Pangasinanos to be obedient and loyal to Anda b­ ecause “God commands it.”62 The priest at Lingayen, the provincial capital of Pangasinan, refused to minister to his parishioners ­until they agreed to accept a Spanish alcalde (mayor) in their city and withdraw their support from Palaris. The Dominicans also took it upon themselves to gather four thousand pledges from indios in Pangasinan to fight with Anda’s forces against the rebels.63 Through such actions, the religious order contributed to the erosion of support for the Palaris rebellion, which effectively ended in early 1764, long before Palaris himself was captured and executed in 1765. Although the indigenous rebellions in Ilocos and Pangasinan ­were largely extinguished by the time the British withdrew from Manila, the impact of their defeat endured long ­after the Seven Years’ War came to an end. The Pampangans’ display of loyalty during the British occupation influenced the Spanish crown’s decision to expand indigenous militias in the de­cade following the war.64 Although we still have a limited knowledge of the milicias de indios (indigenous militias) in the Philippines, it is evident that ­these remained active in Spain’s Asian empire through the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries while they ­were being dismantled in Spain’s American colonies.65 The embroilment of the British and Spanish empires in the Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds highlighted the unique threats to Spanish colonial rule in Asia that indigenous soldiers w ­ ere apparently fit to confront. The violent defeat of the uprisings triggered by the British invasion ushered in a long peace between indigenous p ­ eoples in Luzon and the Spanish colonial government in Manila. Another major indigenous uprising would not emerge in Luzon ­until 1807.66

Entanglement ­A fter War The invasion and occupation continued to shape events in the Spanish Philippines long a­ fter the British withdrew from Manila. A wave of Anglophobia



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swept over the Spanish Empire in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, curtailing opportunities for British subjects to assimilate into the social world of Manileños. Surprisingly, shutting the En­glish out of Manila was not a foregone conclusion for the Spanish when the war came to an end. A garrison of En­glish soldiers who defected to Anda’s army during the occupation elected to remain in Manila when peace returned to the port city, and the Spanish colonial government tried to integrate t­ hese men into the colony’s permanent standing army. In early 1765, Manila’s new En­glish garrison was guarding Fort Santiago. Standing within Intramuros and connected to the thick walls that surrounded the heart of the city, Fort Santiago was arguably the most impor­tant fortress in all of the archipelago. Putting foreigners in charge of the fort proved to be a poor decision on the government’s part. In May 1765, the new Philippines governor Francisco de la Torre discovered that the troops w ­ ere plotting a mutiny. An En­glish artillery captain had allegedly persuaded his countrymen to seize Fort Santiago and bombard the government palace, the cathedral, and the barracks with cannon shot. All of ­these impor­tant buildings w ­ ere within the fort’s firing range. A dispute over pay and other privileges stirred the men into disobedience. The soldiers became angry when their wages ­were cut, as “they believed the salaries they received during the war would continue to increase, and that they would live in frank liberty.”67 Although the mutiny was suppressed, the Council of the Indies was furious when news of the thwarted uprising reached Spain. The king’s advisors on colonial affairs scolded the governor for being so irresponsible as to entrust the capital’s defenses to foreigners and for having punished them so leniently for a crime so grave. The Council of the Indies was far more unwilling to accommodate British subjects in Spain’s Asian empire ­after the mutiny. The council’s increased intolerance of En­glishmen was made explicit when it rejected the Discalced Franciscans’ 1768 request for Agustín Stent to remain in the Philippines. Stent was an En­glish surgeon who arrived in Manila with the British forces from Madras in 1762 and remained in the port city ­after the war ended. Three years ­later, the En­glishman was living as part of this religious community, wearing the habit of a donado or lay member or the order. Evidently Stent’s En­glishness did not prevent him from being accepted by the Franciscans. Friar Juan de Jadraque, the procurador general of the order in the Philippines, petitioned the council to permit Stent to become a naturalized Spaniard, join the Franciscans, and lawfully remain in the colony. Despite his devout faith, the council ordered that Stent immediately leave the Islands. As far as the council was

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concerned, Stent’s En­glishness made him an unworthy member of Spanish colonial society, particularly in a colony so close to the bloating British Empire.68 The British occupation of Manila also reinvigorated latent Sinophobia in the Philippines. Although many Chinese remained loyal to Spain during the war, the entire Chinese diaspora was made a scapegoat for the occupation in its aftermath. In June 1764, Anda wrote a letter to King Charles III in which he accused the sangleyes of being traitors to Spain as well as godless heathens and recommended they all be expelled from the Philippines. The king accepted Anda’s advice. The royal order to banish the Chinese from the colony arrived in Manila in 1767. The government forcibly ejected a reported 2,460 Chinese men, w ­ omen, and c­ hildren from the Philippines between 1767 and 1771. An additional three thousand Chinese fled Manila ­under the threat of vio­lence before the expulsion was officially decreed.69 The fierceness of the postwar surge of anti-­Chinese sentiment was captured in a portrait of Anda produced in the aftermath of the occupation.70 The engraving depicts a smiling Anda towering triumphantly, sword in hand, over a generic Filipino landscape with his son and successor Tomás by his side. The governor’s defeat of the British may be implied in this image, but first and foremost it is a cele­bration of Anda’s victory over the colony’s internal enemies: the Chinese. The severed heads of five sangley men, distinguished by their long queue hairstyles, are vis­i­ble in the foreground of the engraving. A burning church observed in the background suggests that the murdered men have been punished for betraying the crown and the Catholic Church. The insistence that the Chinese w ­ ere heathens was key to identifying them as the other—­a ­people apart from the Spanish Republic of the Philippines. In addition to the expulsion of the Chinese, the resurgence of Sinophobia in Manila led to the radical reor­ga­ni­za­tion of urban space in the capital. The Spanish colonial government attempted to remove the physical traces of Chineseness from the city in the postwar period. The archbishop of Manila decreed the prohibition of statues of snakes and caimans placed on the roofs of homes and other buildings throughout the city in 1771. Chinese builders had crafted ­these “idols” prior to 1762. The archbishop insisted that even though the sangleyes had been “almost exterminated” in the Philippines, ­these extant physical traces of their superstitious, unchristian beliefs needed to be destroyed and ideally replaced with crosses.71 The British occupation of



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Manila instigated a thorough reconceptualization of what a Spanish colony in Asia should and should not be. The clash of empires prompted Spanish officials to reimagine Manila as a colony f­ ree of Chinese and implement drastic policies to make this a real­ity. The exclusion of British and Chinese ­people from the Philippines was not permanent. Anglophobia and Sinophobia waned as time wore on and imperial bound­aries once again became more fluid. The Chinese expulsion decree was officially revoked in 1776. A softening of hostility ­toward the En­glish became apparent a de­cade ­later. In 1787, the Inquisition in Mexico published an English-­language catechism or a short introduction to Catholic doctrine that was designed to assist priests in converting En­glish speakers to Catholicism.72 This book was distributed throughout the viceroyalty of New Spain, which encompassed the Philippines. The Anglo and Iberian worlds in Asia ­were pushed closer together even as it became more difficult for some individuals to transgress imperial bound­ aries. In the de­cade that followed the British occupation of Manila, the British and Spanish empires in the Indian Ocean world became more deeply entangled in a complex web of new alliances brokered between indigenous and Eu­ro­pean powers in the region. As Spain was at war with the Moro (Muslim) maritime states of the Sulu zone in the southern Philippines archipelago when the British invaded Manila, the Moros w ­ ere natu­ral allies of the British. An alliance between the British and the sultan of Sulu A’zim-­ud-­Din and his son Mohammed Israel was in the making months before the occupation began, when both men w ­ ere prisoners in Manila. In captivity, the sultan maintained secret communication with his f­amily in Jolo, the capital of the Sulu sultanate, as well as with British East India Com­pany agents. In November  1761, A’zim-­ud-­Din even signed a trade agreement with the com­pany. During the British occupation of Manila, the sultan and the com­pany entered into a mutual defense and trade agreement that granted the British the right to “erect Forts or Factories” in Jolo and its dependent territories.73 In 1763, the com­pany escorted the sultan and his son to Jolo at their request. The com­ pany also “advanced to Prince Israel the sum of 1,000 Dollars” that he was to repay “in the goods of his Country” to kick-­start a healthy commercial relationship between the two parties. The East India Com­pany and Sulu sultanate sustained friendly relations a­ fter the British retreated from Manila.74 For example, in June 1775 the sultan of Maguindanao Fakih Maulana wrote to the East India Com­pany

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and King George III seeking a new compact with the British. He proposed, “if your Majesty ­will be allied to me and my House, I ­will be glad of the alliance; I ­w ill consider your Majesty’s subjects as my own; they may come into my Country to trade with all freedom and safety.”75 He also offered land for a British trading post along with an army to protect it.76 Although the crown and the com­pany declined to establish a factory at Maguindanao, the com­pany developed strong commercial relationships with Spain’s Moro enemies, trading guns and opium for Filipino slaves and exotic agricultural products.77 In the same period, the Spanish Empire forged alliances with Britain’s enemies in India. In December 1773, two Eu­ro­pe­ans visited the Spanish court in Madrid claiming to represent Hyder Ali, the sultan of the Kingdom of Mysore. The Hamburg-­born Jewish merchant Isaac Goldsmith and his Prus­sian soldier friend André Hearton may have been odd emissaries, but they w ­ ere granted a meeting with the Marqués de Grimaldi, the Spanish secretary of state. Goldsmith and Hearton explained that the sultan was seeking Spain’s assistance in his continued strug­gle against the British and their local allies for control of southern India, or the region that Eu­ro­pe­ans knew as the Carnatic. The emissaries proposed that Spain send an embassy to Mysore to negotiate a lucrative trade and mutual defense pact between the two powers. The promise of profits and the opportunity to constrain British imperial expansion in the greater Indian Ocean world persuaded the Marqués to accept this invitation. The crown funded Goldsmith and Hearton’s passage to Manila, where preparations w ­ ere made for the Spanish del­e­g a­t ion to Mysore.78 It is true that we wander onto dangerous territory when we contemplate alternative history and ask ourselves what would have happened if the British had never invaded Manila. Nonetheless, to fully appreciate the impact of this collision of imperial powers, we must admit that it appears unlikely that ­these trans–­Indian Ocean diplomatic agreements would have eventuated if the Royal Navy and East India Com­pany had not so spectacularly threatened the security of Spain’s Asian possessions. Colonial officials in Manila seized this chance to establish a fort and trading post in Mysore u ­ nder Hyder Ali’s protection. Anda, once again serving as governor of the colony, drafted a treaty that required the sultan to grant “land on the banks of a navigable river” for this purpose. It seems likely that Anda intended to imitate the prosperous British outposts expanding in southern India. Yet previous Spanish outposts in Asia may have also inspired Anda’s plans for a push into the Carnatic. The Spanish had operated a fort



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and factory in Ternate from 1606 to 1663 and had also experimented with settlements in Siam in the first half of the eigh­teenth ­century.79 In return for commercial privileges in Mysore, Spain promised extensive military support to Hyder Ali. Anda’s treaty specified that Manila would send the sultan men “instructed in the art of war and commerce to assist you in both fields.” The governor also pledged to sell to the sultan “bronze and iron cannons of all sizes, cannon shot, r­ ifles, gun powder” and “thick cloth for soldiers’ uniforms.” He sent to Mysore three thousand ­rifles with bayonets, five hundred helmets, and six thousand pounds of copper to sell to the sultan to demonstrate Spain’s commitment to this new alliance.80 The Manila del­e­ga­tion arrived in the court of Hyder Ali in 1776. The mission did not run entirely smoothly. Ramón Yssassi, the head of the mission, died shortly a­ fter arriving in India, leaving the engineer Miguel Antonio Gómez in charge. Gómez soon came to the conclusion that Goldsmith and Hearton w ­ ere “extremely untrustworthy p ­ eople” who had misled Spanish authorities about local geopolitics.81 Nonetheless, the embassy succeeded in establishing friendly ties with Hyder Ali. Gómez proudly returned to Manila with an elephant that the sultan had gifted to Charles III, an impor­tant symbol of his commitment to a lasting compact with the Spanish.82 The escalation of war between the Kingdom of Mysore and the British meant the Spanish factory in India never came to fruition. Hyder Ali died in 1782, and his son Tipu Sultan was defeated by the British in 1792 during the Third Mysore War.

Conclusion Burbank and Cooper theorize that “the trajectory of Eu­ro­pean expansion is best understood not as a narrative of ‘expansion’ whose dynamics lay in characteristics peculiar to Eu­ro­pe­ans but in relationships and competitions among empires.”83 This certainly rings true for the Spanish and British empires in Asia ­a fter 1762. The Seven Years’ War transformed the entanglement of Anglo and Iberian worlds from an Atlantic to a global phenomenon. In Manila and its hinterland, the conflict created conditions for soldiers to move between empires, and the battlefield became a fertile ground for interimperial emulation. The war also created the conditions for indigenous Filipinos to rise up in rebellion and make demands on the Spanish colonial system, and thus for loyal indios to rally against ­these uprisings and assert their relevance to the crown. The bridges between the Spanish and British empires may have become

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more difficult for individuals to cross in the immediate postwar era. Yet the war ultimately bound t­hese colonies more tightly together, drawing them into a web of diplomatic relationships that traversed the seas separating Manila and Madras. Evidently, approaching the history of the Spanish and British empires as a form of interconnected history beyond the Atlantic offers fresh perspectives into empire building in other parts of the globe.

Afterword eli g a   h . g ould

On the western tip of Iceland’s rugged Snæfellsnes Peninsula, not far from the volcano that Jules Verne used as the point of entry for his novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, stands a picturesque Lutheran chapel. Although the current building dates to the early twentieth ­century, t­ here has been a church at Ingjaldshóll since the ­Middle Ages. In 1477, according to a painting that hangs in the activity hall, a Genoese merchant named Christopher Columbus made a brief visit as a sailor on an En­glish fishing boat. ­W hether Columbus actually visited Thule, as he called the island in a memoir shortly before his death, is a m ­ atter of debate. Some scholars think he did. O ­ thers are not so 1 sure. What no one doubts is that he could have. During the ­later ­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, trade between ­England and Iceland was brisk. One of the main commodities was the dried cod and oil that merchants from Bristol bought from En­glish fishermen at the Vestmannaeyjar Islands, off Iceland’s south coast. A sizable portion went to Portugal, traveling ­either directly to Lisbon or, more typically, to the Irish port of Galway, where it was sold to Portuguese middlemen.2 If Columbus did go to Iceland, he was able to do so ­because the En­glish and Iberian Atlantic worlds w ­ ere already deeply and profoundly entangled. Focusing on the three hundred years that followed Columbus’s ­later, better documented voyages, the contributors to this volume remind us just how far-­flung and diverse the connections that entwined the Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic w ­ ere. The ties that connected the ­peoples of the Iberian Peninsula to ­those of Britain and Ireland w ­ ere linguistic and religious, commercial and pharmacological, and, of course, familial and ge­ne­tic. In Eu­rope, the connections involved Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews. In the world beyond, they included p ­ eople who already belonged to or would eventually join the

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Abrahamic faiths, along with millions who did not. As always, in m ­ atters of consanguinity, the ­great dynastic houses—­Tudor, Habsburg, Braganza, and Stuart—­showed the way, forming u ­ nions that joined the kingdoms that they ruled in surprising and sometimes random ways, but their subjects readily followed their lead. Nor ­were the connections limited to the inhabitants of the landmasses on ­either side of the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea but included Africa, the Amer­i­cas, India, China, and the Philippines. If we think of the Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic as an entangled web, it was a web with strands that reached into ­every corner of the globe. With their dependence on national archives, which tend to “sever” the cross-­border stories that entangled histories are about, historians have not always been attuned to the extent or significance of ­these connections. This is a point that Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra makes brilliantly in the volume’s introduction. For a scholar working in the British National Archives at Kew or the Archivo General de Indias in Seville but not both, Philip II’s short-­lived marriage to Mary I, which produced neither an Anglo-­Spanish heir nor a lasting Anglo-­Spanish ­u nion, might appear to be a historical curiosity and l­ittle more. For En­glish and Spanish humanists, however, to say nothing of merchants, courtiers, and adventurers, the brief juncture expanded horizons in both kingdoms. E ­ ngland, in par­tic­u­lar, went through a period of Hispanophilia that had a profound impact on how ­later Elizabethan and Jacobean adventurers approached the founding of V ­ irginia and Mas­sa­chu­setts.3 In both Britain and the United States, the Spanish Empire continued to be a model, positive as well as negative, into the nineteenth ­century.4 ­Because entangled histories tend to be asymmetric, with some parts receiving more attention than ­others, and as such differ from comparative histories, which invite scholars to devote equal resources to the vari­ous parts being compared, historians working on entangled subjects are likely to have a home archive, where they do the majority of their research. At the same time, entangled approaches are multicentered in ways that histories based on national frameworks usually are not, and they remind us that archives, whose bound­aries comparative histories tend to accept (and often reinforce), are invariably “severed archives,” in Cañizares-­Esguerra’s evocative words. No repository ever contains the ­whole story. As I am sure the contributors to this volume would agree, entangled histories are no more or less impervious to distortion than other forms of history. To speak of the Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic, for example, is to invite readers to privilege one set of connections over ­others. From the somewhat nar-

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row standpoint of dynastic politics, France was at least as centrally involved in the affairs of Britain and Spain, and vice versa, as the two monarchies ­were with each other. During the marriages of Catherine of Aragon, first to Prince Arthur, then to Henry VIII, and the ­union of Philip and Mary, France was an aggressive and per­sis­tent rival—­waging near-­constant war with Spain and using the “auld alliance” with Scotland to court or weaken ­England. ­A fter 1700, the roles changed, as Louis XIV’s grand­son gained the Spanish throne as Philip V and Britain and France went to war on a global scale, with the fate of Spain and its empire hanging in the balance. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, France intervened again, providing the spark that ignited the Spanish American wars of in­de­pen­dence. To say that the Atlantic contained other entangled communities is to take nothing away from the many benefits of studying the connections that entangled Britain, Spain, and Portugal. But one could just as beneficially devote a volume to the Franco-­Iberian or Anglo-­French Atlantic. Indeed, to look no farther than North Amer­i­ca’s so-­called Spanish borderlands, t­ here w ­ ere places in the Anglo-­ Iberian Atlantic—­say, the West Florida enclave around Mobile or Louisiana at the time of its accession to the United States—­that could appear in any number of volumes. Another challenge is to avoid the “too-­often unselfconscious Eurocentrism of Atlantic history,” as Cañizares-­Esguerra and James Sidbury have written ­ eople whose histories are elsewhere.5 If severed archives distort the rec­ords of p better documented in other repositories, the evidence that they yield for ­people without any archives at all—at least in the Eu­ro­pean sense of the term—­poses obstacles of a dif­fer­ent kind.6 In Native Amer­i­ca and Africa, local powerbrokers such as Buckor Sano, the “­great blacke merchant” in Michael Guasco’s chapter on Africans and En­glish colonialism, played leading, often dominant roles, deciding who gained access to regional goods and markets and who did not. To think of Sano as peripheral or a subaltern figure, as Guasco rightly notes, is to miss how both Sano and the Eu­ro­pe­ans who traded with him understood the relationship. B ­ ecause our only source about Sano is the En­glish adventurer Richard Jobson’s 1623 memoir, however, even the most sensitive treatment can only go so far in reconstructing how ­things appeared to Sano.7 Had Sano written his own memoir, would he have described the slave trade in the same way as Jobson? Would he have mentioned slavery at all? For that ­matter, would he have mentioned Jobson? Unfortunately, the answer to all three is a shoulder-­shrugging “who knows?” If entangled approaches allow historians to escape the insularity of one set of archives by ­going to ­others,

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the prob­lem changes when ­there is only one archive to consult. With Buckor Sano, the impression that he made on Richard Jobson is all we have. Not all entangled histories are the same. Just as some are more far-­flung and diverse than ­others, some have more rhetorical power and a greater hold on the imagination. ­W hether or not Columbus actually visited Iceland, the painting in the church hall at Ingjaldshóll is a testimonial to the enormous resonance that his part of the Anglo-­Iberian Atlantic’s entangled history still enjoys, even in the Atlantic Ocean’s northernmost reaches. So are the far more numerous Icelandic monuments to Leif Erikson. Only with Columbus’s voyage to the West Indies did it become pos­si­ble (or necessary) to proclaim the Iceland-­born Viking as the New World’s real first Eu­ro­pean “discoverer,” a status that neither Erikson nor the medieval bards who chronicled his exploits sought. No less impor­tant, the painting at Ingjaldshóll is a reminder of the Anglo-­Iberian world’s diversity and extent. Although Iceland was a minor player, that it was a player at all shows just how far the connections that bound the Anglo and Iberian communities together extended, as well as the tremendous force of their gravitational pull. In the fifteenth c­ entury, the Snæfellsnes Peninsula was a long way from Britain and the Iberian Peninsula. But it was not too far for the En­glish vessels that fished in its ­waters, the Bristol and Portuguese merchants who created a market for the produce that they caught, or—in all likelihood—­the Genoese navigator who visited its coast. Although entangled history is a relatively new way of thinking about the past, the interconnected world that it seeks to recover is anything but.

notes

introduction 1. Ralph Hamor, A true discourse of the pres­ent estate of ­Virginia, and the successe of the affaires t­here till the 18 of Iune 1614. Together with a relation of the seuerall En­glish townes and fortes, the assured hopes of that countrie and the peace concluded with the Indians. The christening of Powhatans ­daughter and her marriage with an English-­man (London: Printed by Iohn Beale for W. Welby, 1615 ), “To the Reader,” A6; see also 51. 2. Ibid., 48. 3. Ibid., 28 4. Ibid., 50 5. Ibid., 11–16. 6. Ibid., 64. 7. Ibid., 61–68 8. On the complex history of the Spanish presence in ­Virginia as antecedent to En­glish colonization, see Anna Brick­house, The Unsettlement of Amer­i­ca: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 9. Jorge Canizares and Ben Breen, “Hybrid Atlantics: F ­ uture Directions for the History of the Atlantic World,” History Compass 11 (2013): 597–609; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic ­Virginia Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth ­Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Jean M. Hébrard and Rebecca J. Scot, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 10. Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Amy Butler, Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Jennifer L. Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Erika Monahan, “Locating Rhubarb: Early Modernity’s Relevant Obscurity,” in Early Modern Th ­ ings: Objects and Their Histories, 1500– 1800, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2012), 227–51. 11. Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Choco­late in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 12. Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra and Bradley J. Dixon, “ ‘The Oversight of King Henry VII’: Imperial Envy and the Making of British Amer­i­ca,” in The World of Colonial Amer­i­ca: An Atlantic Handbook, ed. Ignacio Gallup-­Diaz (New York: Routledge, 2017), 39–57.

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13. David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Ca­rib­bean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 14. Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Socie­ties in British Amer­i­ca, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 15. Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 16. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British Amer­i­ca, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 17. David Freedberg The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natu­ral History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Sebastian Conrad, How to Be a Global Historian (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2016); Judith A. Carney and Richard N. Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery; Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 18. Neil Safier, Mea­sur­ing the New World: Enlightenment Science and South Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); James Delbourgo, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Choco­ late and the Whole History of the Cacao,” Social Text 29 (2011): 71–100. 19. Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Michel-­Rolph Trouillot., Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

chapter 1 1. Proceso contra Pero Sánchez, Inquisition documents, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1571, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico [hereafter cited as AGN], Inquisición, vol. 49, 7, 70 folios. Transcribed in G. R. G. Conway Collection, vol. 1 (Library of Congress). 2. Ibid. 3. Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an En­glish Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 31–36, 78. 4. Henry Hawks, “A relation of the commodities of Nova Hispania and the maners of the inhabitants,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2nd ser. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 96–114; originally published in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (London, 1589). 5. Henry Hawkes apprenticeship event, September 13, 1546, Rec­ords of London’s Livery Companies Online: Apprentices and Freemen 1400–1900, http://­londonroll​.­org ​/­e vent​/­​ ?­c ompany​= ­d rp&event​_­id​=­DREW6770 (accessed April 21, 2017); Henry Hawkes Freedom event, September 13, 1557, Rec­ords of London’s Livery Companies Online: Apprentices and Freemen 1400–1900, http://­londonroll​.­org​/­event​/­​?­company​= ­drp&event​_­id​=­DREW6771 (accessed April 21, 2017). 6. Gordon Connell-­Smith, Forerunners of Drake: Study of En­glish Trade with Spain in the Early Tudor Period (London: Greenwood Press, 1954), 31–55; David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 28–56. 7. Connell-­Smith, Forerunners of Drake, 31–55; Sacks, The Widening Gate, 28–56. On West Country trade with the Azores, see G. V. Scammell, “The En­g lish in the Atlantic Islands,



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c. 1450–1650,” The Mari­ner’s Mirror 72, no. 3 (1986): 308–11; Pauline Croft, “Trading with the ­Enemy, 1585–1604,” Historical Journal 32, no. 2 (1989): 289. 8. Gordon Connell-­Smith, “En­glish Merchants Trading to the New World in the Early Sixteenth ­Century,” Historical Research 23, no. 67 (1950): 53–66; Gordon Connell-­Smith, “The Ledger of Thomas Howell,” Economic History Review 3, no. 3 (1951): 363–70; Heather Dalton, “Negotiating Fortune: En­glish Merchants in Early Sixteenth-­century Seville,” in Bridging of the Early Modern Atlantic World: ­People, Products, and Practices on the Move, ed. Caroline Williams (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 57–74; Heather Dalton, “ ‘Into Speyne to Selle for Slavys’: Slave Trading in En­glish and Genoese Merchant Networks Prior to 1530,” in Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-­Colonial Western Africa, ed. Toby Green and José Lingna Nafafé (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 91–123; Heather Dalton, “Fashioning New Worlds from Old Words: Roger Barlow’s ‘A Brief Summe of Geographie,’ ” in Old Worlds, New Worlds: Eu­ro­pean Cultural Encounters, c.1100–­c.1750, ed. Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelmann, and Kim Phillips (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 75–98; Consuelo Varela, Ingleses en España y Portugal, 1480–1515: Aristócratas, Mercaderes, e Impostores (Lisbon: Colibri, 1998); Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Andalucia, 1450–1550 (Granada: Universida de Granada, 1992). Examples of evidence from the notary archive in Seville include Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, Oficio v, 1525, Libro I, folio 390; Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, Oficio v, 1525, Libro I, folio 607; Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, Oficio v, 1525, Libro I, folio 617d. 9. Real Cédula dando licencia para pasar a Indias dos esclavos negros a Juan Brujas, en sustitución de Antonio Sánchez, que estaba nombrado con anterioridad, pagando los 4 ducados al cambio de la corte, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain [hereafter cited as AGI], Indiferente, 422, L. 16, F. 68R (3), 1532; Real Cédula a Alonso Inglese [sic por Inglés], dándole licencia para pasar a Indias un esclavo y una esclava negros para servicio personal, AGI, Indiferente, 422, L. 15, F. 129R (3), 1532; Real cédula a Tomás Inglés, dándole licencia para pasar a Indias un esclavo y una esclava negros, para servicio personal, AGI, Indiferente, 422, L. 15, F. 230R (13), 1533. 10. Real Cédula, AGI, Indiferente, 1966, L. 14, F. 449–50V, 1563; Croft, “Trading with the ­Enemy.” 11. Croft, “Trading with the E ­ nemy.” 12. G. R. G. Conway, An En­glishman and the Mexican Inquisition, 1556–1560: Being an Account of the Voyage of Robert Tomson to New Spain, His Trial for Heresy in the City of Mexico and Other Con­temporary Historical Documents (Mexico City: Privately Printed, 1927), 1–22; Leonora de Alberti and A. Beatrice Wallis Chapman, eds., En­glish Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition in the Canaries: Extracts from the Archives in Possession of the Most Hon. The Marquess of Bute (London: London Rec­ords Society, 1912), xiii; Pauline Croft, “En­glishmen and the Spanish Inquisition, 1558–1625,” En­glish Historical Review 87, no. 343 (1972): 249–68. 13. Naturalezas de extranjeros en España, AGI, Contratación, 596B, no. 11. 14. Ana Crespo Solano, Mercaderes atlánticos: Redes del comercio flamenco y holandés entre Europa y el Caribe (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2009); Juan Manuel Bello Leon, Extranjeros en Castilla (1474–1501), Notas y documentos para el studio de su presencia en el reino a fines del siglo XV (La Laguna: Instituto de Estudios Hispánicos de Canarias, Centro de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas de la Universidad de La Laguna, 1994); Eberhard Crailsheim, “Extranjeros entre dos mundos: Una aproximación proporcional a las colonias de mercaderes extranjeros en Sevilla, 1570–1650,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas—­Anuario de Historia de Amer­i­ca Latina 6 (2016), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­7767​/­jbla​ .­2011​.­48​.­1​.­179 (accessed April 18, 2017).

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15. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in Amer­i­ca, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), xvii. 16. Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Barbara Fuchs, “An En­glish Picaro in New Spain: Miles Philips and the Framing of National Identity,” New Centennial Review 2 (2002): 55–68; Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 17. John Parker, Books to Build an Empire (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965); Donald Beecher, “John Frampton of Bristol, Trader and Translator,” in Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carmine Di Biase (New York: Rodolpi, 2006), 103–22. 18. Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an En­glish Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Parker, Books to Build an Empire. 19. Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-­Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 764–86. 20. Ibid., 765. 21. Ibid. 22. Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Londa Schiebinger, “Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World,” in Soundings in Atlantic History, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 294–328; Kim Klooster, “Inter-­Imperial Smuggling in the Amer­i­c as, 1600–1800,” in Bailyn and Denault, Soundings in Atlantic History, 141–80; Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 23. Conway, An En­glishman and the Mexican Inquisition, 1–22. 24. Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an En­glish Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 31. 25. Hawks, “A relation of the commodities of Nova Hispania.” 26. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of E ­ ngland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Herbert Grabes, Writing the Early Modern En­glish Nation: The Transformation of National Identity in Sixteenth-­and Seventeenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001); William Maltby, The Black Legend in ­England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971). 27. Crailsheim, “Extranjeros entre dos mundos.” 28. Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 29. Manuel Fernández Chaves and Mercedes Gamero Rojas, “Nations? What Nations? Business in the Shaping of International Trade Networks, Seville XVIIIth C ­ entury” (unpublished paper presented at Connectors of Commercial Maritime Systems: Merchants and Trade Networks Between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean [1600–1800] [conference], Seville, June 20–21, 2014). 30. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-­Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 31. Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Ca­rib­be­an: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).



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32. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: En­glish Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 33. Fuchs, “An En­glish Picaro in New Spain,” 55–68. 34. Ibid., 59. 35. Ibid., 60. 36. John Chilton, A notable discourse of M. Iohn [H] Chilton, touching the ­people, maners, mines, cities, riches, forces, and other memorable t­ hings of New Spaine, and other prouinces in the West Indies, seene and noted by himselfe in the time of his trauels, continued in t­hose parts, the space of seuenteene or eigh­teene yeeres, in Richard Hakluyt, The principal nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the En­glish nation made by sea or ouer-­land, to the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, at any time within the compasse of t­ hese 1600. yeres (London, 1600); originally published in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (London, 1589). 37. Ibid. 38. Thomas Nichols, “A description of the Fortunate Ilands, other­wise called the Ilands of Canaria, with their strange fruits and commodities. Composed by Thomas Nicols, En­glish man, who remained ­t here the space of seven yeeres together,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (London, 1599), 2:3–7. 39. Fuchs, “An En­glish Picaro in New Spain,” 65; Hawks, “A relation of the commodities of Nova Hispania.” 40. Proceso contra Pero Sánchez. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Robert Tomson, “The Voyage of Robert Tomson, marchant, into Nova Hispania in the yeere 1555, from Hakluyt’s Voyages, 1589,” reproduced in Conway, An En­glishman and the Mexican Inquisition, 1–22; originally published in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (London, 1589). 44. Ibid., 2. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 3. 47. Ibid., 9. 48. Ibid., 14. 49. Ibid., 17. 50. Ibid., 12. 51. Proceso de Cristobal de Toledo contra Roberto Tomson, 1560, México, Inquisition documents, Mexico City, Mexico, 1560, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 32, 8, 32 folios. Transcribed in Conway, An En­glishman and the Mexican Inquisition, 130–52; translated by Conway as “Inquisitorial Proceedings in Mexico City Against Robert Tomson, 1559–1560,” in An En­glishman and the Mexican Inquisition, 23–77. 52. Conway, “Inquisitorial Proceedings in Mexico City Against Robert Tomson, 1559–1560,” 33. 53. Robert Tomson’s apprenticeship ceremony for the Drapers Livery Com­pany, 1548, Rec­ ords of London’s Livery Companies Online: Apprentices and Freemen 1400–1900, http://­ londonroll​.­org​/­event​/­​?­company​= ­drp&event​_­id​=­DRML1208 (accessed April 21, 2017). 54. Sacks, Widening Gate, 104–14. 55. Ibid., 72. 56. Ibid., 35.

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57. Ibid., 40. 58. Ibid., 41. 59. Ibid., 66–67. 60. Ibid., 37. 61. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-­Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), first published in Italian as Il formaggio a I vermin (1976). 62. Conway, “Inquisitorial Proceedings in Mexico City Against Robert Tomson, 1559–1560,” 34. 63. Ibid. 64. Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader (London: Yale University Press, 2003); see particularly chap. 1, “The Uses of Duplicity,” 1–33. 65. Ibid., 76. 66. Ibid. 67. “Proceso contra Pablo Haquines de la Cruz Ingles de la Armada de Juan Haquines; van agregadas las diligencias de los herederos para poder tener empleos y honores. Guadalajara,” Inquisition documents, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1573, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 55, 1, 220 folios. 68. Croft, “Trading with the E ­ nemy,” 302. 69. De Alberti and Wallis Chapman, En­glish Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition, 64 and 77; Croft, “Trading with the E ­ nemy.” 70. “Confessions of Bartholomew Cole,” in de Alberti and Wallis Chapman, En­glish Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition, 58–81. 71. ­These two letters ­were preserved in the Henry Hawks Inquisition case files in Proceso contra Pero Sánchez. 72. Clarence Henry Haring, Trade and Navigation Between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Hapsburgs (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 109. 73. Dalton, “Negotiating Fortune.” 74. Tomson, “Voyage of Robert Tomson,” 10. 75. Ibid., 5. 76. Ibid., 5. 77. Robert Tomson letter to Henry Hawks, April 25, 1567, in Proceso contra Pero Sánchez; letter transcribed in Conway, An En­glishman and the Mexican Inquisition, 95–96. 78. Rafael y Fantoni Benedi, “Linajes nobles, emparentados y relacionados con Valdepanas,” Elucidario 2 (Septiembre 2006): 276. 79. Ibid. 80. In t­ hese sources, John Sweeting goes by the name “Juan Setin” or “Cetin”: Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, 1549, Oficio XV, Libro 1, Escribania: Alosno de Cazalla, folio 680, fecha 30 de marzo; see Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, 1551, Oficio XV, Libro 2, Escribania: Alonso de Cazalla, folio 2.031, fecha 21 de noviembre. 81. “Autos entre partes, número 14,” 1614, AGI, Contratación, 789; “Autos entre partes, número 9,” AGI, Contratación, 744. 82. Fantoni Benedi, “Linajes nobles.” 83. “Proceso contra Juan Farenton, Ingles de la Armada de Juan Haquines por hereje Luterano. Guadalajara,” Inquisition documents, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1573, AGN, Inquisición, vol. 53, 2, 122 folios. 84. Fuchs, “An En­glish Picaro in New Spain,” 60.



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85. Chilton, A notable discourse of M. Iohn [H] Chilton. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Public Rec­ords Office, State Papers, 1/124, folio 252, quoted in John Smythe, The Ledger of John Smythe, 1538–1550 (Bristol: British Rec­ord Society, 1974), 14. 92. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, vol. 13, part 2, August–­ December  1538, http://­w ww​.­british​-­history​.­ac​.­u k​/­report​.­a spx​?­compid​= ­75792&strquery​ =­Hugh%20tipton%201538​.­ 93​.­ “Real Cédula,” AGI, Indiferente, 1966, L. 14, F. 61, V-62, 1561. 94. Hugh Tipton commended in letter from Robert Hogan to the Earl of Leicester, March 8, 1570, Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Vol. 9, 1569–1571, March 1570, http://­ www​.­british​-­history​.­ac​.­u k​/­report​.­a spx​?­compid​= ­73068&strquery​=­Tipton​.­ 95​.­Hugh Tipton to Challoner, February 25, 1562, no. 1452, Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Vol. 5, 1562, http://­w ww​.­british​-­h istory​.­ac​.­u k ​/­report​.­a spx​?­c ompid​ =­71972&strquery​=­Hugh Tipton. 96. Leonard Chilton to Challoner, April 14, 1564, no. 324, Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, Vol. 7, 1564–1565, http://­w ww​.­british​-­h istory​.­ac​.­u k ​/­report​.­a spx​?­c ompid​ =­72183&strquery​=­Tipton; Leonard Chilton to Challoner, July 18, 1565, no. 576, Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, Vol. 7, 1564–1565, http://­w ww​.­british​-­history​.­ac​.­uk​/­report​.­aspx​?­compid​ =­72189&strquery​=­Tipton; Leonard Chilton to Challoner, September 18, 1564, no. 678, Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, Vol. 7: 1564–1565, http://­w ww​.­british​-­history​.­ac​.­uk​/­report​ .­a spx​?­compid​= ­72191&strquery​=­Tipton 97​.­ Hugh Thomas, Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 102. 98. Robert Tomson, “The Voyage of Robert Tomson,” 5. 99. “The second voyage to Guinea set out by Sir George Barne, Sir John Yorke, Thomas Lok, Anthonie Hickman and Edward Castelin, in the yere 1554. The Captaine whereof was M. John Lok,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the En­glish Nation Made by Sea or Overland to the Remote & Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of t­ hese 1600 Yeares, http://­w ww​.­perseus​.­tufts​.­edu​/­hopper​ /­text​?­doc​=­Perseus%3Atext%3A1999​.­03​.­0070%3Anarrative%3D522​.­ 100​.­ Connell​-­Smith, Forerunners of Drake, 215 and 222. 101. Alexandre Cioranescu, Thomas Nichols, mercader de azúcar, hispanista y hereje. Con la edición y traducción de su Descripción de las Islas Afortunadas (Tenerife: La Laguna de Tenerife, 1963), 87. 102. Ibid.

chapter 2 1. Paul Edwards, “The Early African Presence in the British Isles,” in Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain, ed. Jagdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1992), 9–29. Imtiaz Habib has produced an invaluable study that identifies 448 rec­ords from En­glish

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sources documenting the history of Africans in E ­ ngland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See his Black Lives in the En­glish Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 2. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the En­glish Nation, 12 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 6:217. The Principal Navigations was originally published in 1598–1600. Richard Eden had previously included information about John Lok’s voyage (which Hakluyt lifted verbatim) in his edition of Peter Martyr’s De­cades of the Newe World (London, 1555). 3. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 6:200. 4. Ibid., 6:217. With regard to the importance of language and communication, see P. E. H. Hair, “The Use of African Languages in Afro-­European Contacts in Guinea, 1440– 1560,” Sierra Leone Language Review 5 (1966): 7–17. 5. “From the first,” Jordan wrote, “En­glishmen tended to set Negroes over against themselves, to stress what they conceived to be radically contrasting qualities of color, religion, and style of life, as well as animality and a peculiarly potent sexuality.” Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes ­Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 43. 6. P. E. H. Hair, “Attitudes to Africans to 1650 in En­glish Primary Sources up to 1650,” History in Africa 26 (1999): 43–68. In reference to the work of scholars who have emphasized pervasive derogatory En­glish attitudes t­ oward Africans, such as Jordan, Elliot H. Tokson, The Popu­lar Image of the Black Man in En­glish Drama, 1550–1688 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), and Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Blacks in En­glish Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), Hair notes that much of the evidence for anti-­black prejudice in early modern E ­ ngland is found in imaginative lit­er­a­ture, not the written accounts authored by participants who engaged in face-­to-­face encounters. 7. “The first voyage of Robert Baker,” in Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the En­glish Nation (London, 1589). Th ­ ere are two modern reprint editions of the poem: Boies Penrose, Robert Baker: An Ancient Mari­ner of 1565 (Boston: Club of Odd Volumes, 1942) and The Travails in Guinea of an Unknown Tudor Poet in Verse, ed. P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990). Neither Penrose nor Hair can offer much in the way of a biography, except to suggest that Baker’s work may have originally been published in 1568. 8. The estimate is Hair’s from his “Attitudes to Africans to 1650,” 46. 9. On Portuguese trade in the region, see David Northrup, “The Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic World,” in The Atlantic World and ­Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 170–93. 10. Alden T. Vaughan and ­Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Before Othello: Elizabethan Repre­ sen­ta­tions of Sub-­Saharan Africans,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (January 1997): 32; Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 115. See also Bernhard Klein, “ ‘To Pot Straight Way We Goe’: Robert Baker in Guinea, 1562–1564,” in Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 243–55. 11. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1589), 141. 12. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 11:172–78 (Fenton); 7:90–94 (Rainolds).



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13. P. E. H. Hair and Robin Law, “The En­glish in Western Africa to 1700,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 248–54. 14. Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade, or, A Discovery of the River Gambra (London, 1623), 88–89. 15. I have addressed this subject in much greater detail elsewhere. See Slaves and Englishmen: ­Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 80–120. 16. Jobson, The Golden Trade, 27, 28, 31–32. 17. Ibid., 83, 164–66. 18. Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to Amer­i­ca, vol. 1, 1441–1700, ed. Elizabeth Donnan (Washington, DC: Car­ne­gie Institution, 1930), 128; Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series [hereafter CSP:CS], 40 vols., ed. William Noel Sainsbury, J. W. Fortescue, Cecil Headlam, and A. P. Newton (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1860–1939), 1:339. 19. The Dutch had largely replaced the Portuguese as the major threat to En­glish trading activities along the coast of West Africa by the 1640s. On the En­glish side, the Guinea Com­ pany had the extent of its trading mono­poly narrowed considerably in 1651 as much of coastal West Africa was thrown open to f­ ree trade. In 1657, the East India Com­pany assumed the remaining years of the Guinea Com­pany’s diminished mono­poly only to find itself on the short end of the stick when, upon Charles II’s restoration in 1660, a new charter was issued for the Com­pany of Royal Adventurers into Africa. 20. CSP:CS 5:119–20 (January 1663). The En­glish, through the activities of the London merchant Nicholas Crispe, began constructing and manning their own forts along the Gold Coast during the 1630s. See Robert Porter, “The Crispe ­Family and the African Trade in the Seventeenth ­Century,” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 57–77. 21. CSP:CS 5:294–95 (April 1665). The strug­gle for control of West Africa and the way it encouraged Eu­ro­pean powers to cooperate with Africans is contextualized in Margaret Makepeace, “En­glish Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1668: An Analy­sis of the East India Com­ pany Archive,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 237–84. 22. CSP:CS 5:294–95 (April 1665). 23. Alison Games, The Web of Empire: En­glish Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Richard Jobson does not come in for treatment in this book, but I suspect that his story would have fit in nicely with Games’s treatment of En­glish travelers. 24. Th ­ ere is a parallel h ­ ere to the emergence of “the Black Legend,” which is usually considered in light of Northern Eu­ro­pean Protestant characterizations of Spanish activities in the Amer­i­cas vis-­à-­vis Indians. Something quite similar seemed to be occurring in early Africa as well, with a special emphasis on Iberian abuses of trade (including slavery). 25. Sir William Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies (London, 1624), 7. 26. Hakluyt, “A Discourse of the Commodity of the Taking of the Straight of Magellanus,” in The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, 2 vols., ed. E. G. R. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), 1:142–43; “Discourse of Western Planting,” in Original Writings, 2:318. 27. Jobson, The Golden Trade, 29. 28. The Drake Manuscript in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Histoire Naturelle des Indes, trans. Ruth S. Kraemer (London: André Deutsch Limited, 1996), 57, 97, 98, 100, 102, 106.

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29. Some of this interest can be mea­sured by the publication, and re-­publication, of two works during the early seventeenth ­century edited by the nephew and namesake of Sir Francis Drake: Sir Francis Drake Revived (1626, 1662) and The World Encompassed (1628, 1635, and 1652). Philip Nichols, a minister, was the primary author of the former work. Francis Fletcher, another minister, authored the latter work. 30. Thomas Gage’s Travels in the New World, ed. J. Eric S. Thompson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958; orig. 1648), 51, 73, 97, 203. 31. Ibid., 212, 214, 269, 297. The angry “idolators” managed to catch up with Gage when Dalva was not around and beat him up, but not before “a mulatta slave to a Spaniard in the valley passed by . . . ​came into the yard” and saved him” (288). 32. Ibid., 215. 33. CSP:CS 5:166–67 (November 1, 1663); CSP:CS 5:229 (1664). 34. The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615–1646, ed. Vernon A. Ives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 123–24. 35. Ibid., 17, 58, 59, and 176. 36. CSP:CS 1:225 (March 19, 1636). 37. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1657), 43, 47. 38. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, 2 vols. (London, 1707), 1:B3, xcix. 39. See, especially, John Coombs, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate’: Rethinking the Rise of ­Virginia Slavery,” in Early Modern V ­ irginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, ed. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2011), 239–78; and Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Plea­sure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 40. Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667, ed. V. T. Harlow (London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), 26. 41. CSP:CS 1:247 (March 19, 1637), 249 (March 29, 1637), 255 (June 22, 1637), and 275 (June 10, 1638). 42. Alexander, An Encouragement to Colonies, 7. 43. While a­ ctual numbers are difficult to come by, it is clear that numerous Africans had been in the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic world before being re-­deposited in an En­glish settlement. 44. Bermuda Colonial Rec­ords (1615–1713), 9 vols. (microfilm), Bermuda Archives, Hamilton, Bermuda, 2:85. 45. With regard to the Sarnandos’ familiarity with Catholic practices, John Thornton has argued that Catholicism likely pervaded the African community in central Africa, which very easily could have been Sarnando’s or his wife’s homeland. If they did not originate t­ here, the likelihood that they had lived the early part of their lives somewhere in Spanish or Portuguese Amer­i­ca is also quite high. 46. As Stuart Schwartz has shown for Brazil, ritual godparentage “created a set of bonds, of spiritual kinship, between the godchild (afilhado) and his or her godfather (padrinho) and godmother (padrinha), and between the natu­ral parents and the godparents.” On ritual godparentage, see Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. 406–12 (quotation on 406). 47. A very few Protestants may even have believed that slaveholding itself was inconsistent with Chris­tian­ity. Samuel Rishworth suggested as much on Providence Island in 1635 and was rebuked for his views. CSP:CS 1:202–3 (April 20, 1635); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Prov-



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idence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 168–69. 48. Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth ­Century: A Documentary History of V ­ irginia, 1606–1700, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 204; Alden T. Vaughan, “Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Princi­ples’: A Seventeenth-­C entury Critique,” in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 69. 49. Ligon, A True & Exact History, 50. Other impor­tant seventeenth-­century proponents of conversion include the Quaker George Fox and the Anglican Morgan Godwyn. With the exception of the London merchant Thomas Tryon and a few ­others, however, few of ­t hese men can easily be characterized as decidedly “anti-­slavery.” See Phillipe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-­C entury Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (2004): 609–42; and Travis Glasson, Mastering Chris­tian­ity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 47–50. 50. Cited in Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-­A mericans, circa 1600–1780,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 170. 51. Alden T. Vaughan, “Blacks in ­Virginia: Evidence from the First De­cade,” in Roots of American Racism, 130; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 40. 52. Warren M. Billings, “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-­Century ­Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 467–74. 53. A similar pattern can be detected in early En­glish considerations of the indigenous inhabitants of dif­fer­ent parts of the Amer­i­cas. See, for example, Michael Guasco, “ ‘To doe some good upon their countrymen’: The Paradox of Indian Slavery in Early Anglo-­A merica,” Journal of Social History 41 (2007): 389–411. 54. CSP:CS 5:21 (March 1661); Colonial Office [CO] 140/1, 75 (February 1, 1663), National Archives, Kew, UK; D. J. Buisseret and S. A. G. Taylor, “Juan de Bolas and His Pelinco,” Ca­rib­bean Quarterly 25 (1978), 3; CO 140/1, 76 (February 1, 1663), National Archives. See also Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Re­sis­tance, Collaborations & Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988), 17–23. 55. CO 140/1, 76 (February 1, 1663), National Archives. 56. Ruth Pike, “Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth-­Century Panama,” Amer­i­cas 64 (2007): 342–66. 57. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Com­pany (London: Longmans, 1957), 328–29. See also Trevor Burnard, “Who Bought Slaves in Early Amer­i­ca? Purchasers of Slaves from the Royal African Com­pany in Jamaica, 1674–1708,” Slavery & Abolition 17 (August 1996): 68–92. 58. William Blathwayte Papers, MS 1946.2, vol. 25:1 (December 11, 1684), John D. Rocke­ fel­ler Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 59. This is a story explored in greater depth in Chapter 10.

chapter 3 1. Bernardo Gomes de Brito, Historia tragico-­maritima (Lisbon, 1736). For an En­g lish translation about the wreck of the San Alberto, see Charles Boxer, The Tragic History of the Sea

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(London: Hakluyt Society, 1957), 111. As Josiah Blackmore explores in Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), Brito’s 1735 collected edition was a compilation of pamphlets and broadsheets (most of which are now lost) that had been published in seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­ century Lisbon. 2. A. J. R. Russell-­Wood, A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and Amer­ i­ca, 1415–1808 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 73. 3. Paulo J. A. Guinote, “Ascensão e Declínio da Carreira da Índia,” Vasco da Gama e a Índia (Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1999), 2:7–39. See also James Duffy, Shipwreck and Empire: Being an Account of Portuguese Maritime Disaster in a ­Century of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). 4. Charles R. Boxer, “An Introduction to the História Trágico-­Marítima,” in Miscelânea de estudos em honra do Prof. Hernâni Cidade (Lisbon: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 1957), 48–99. 5. The best overview of this complex period of Luso-­Dutch warfare is A. R. Disney, A  History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, vol. 2, The Portuguese Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 226–31. 6. Anonymous (Alexandre da Paixão?), “Monstruosidades Do Tempo E Da Fortuna. ­Vistas Em O Reino De Portugal Desde 1662 Até 1680,” Academia da Ciências de Lisboa, MS Vermelho II 620. 7. For further reading, see L. M. E. Shaw, The Anglo-­Portuguese Alliance and the En­glish Merchants in Portugal, 1654–1810 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998); and Eduardo Brazão, The Anglo-­Portuguese Alliance (London: Sylvan Press, 1957). 8. On the early tea trade, see H. Mui and L. H. Mui, “Smuggling and the British Tea Trade Before 1784,” American Historical Review 74 (1968): 44–73; and Jordan Goodman, “Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Eu­rope Took to Soft Drugs,” in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt (New York: Routledge, 1995), 121–42. 9. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The ­Career and Legend of Vasco de Gama (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1997), 160. 10. Antonio Carbonel, Encyclopedia metòdica (Madrid: Imprenta de Sancha, 1794), 22. “Drogas ­simples” (­simple drugs) refers h ­ ere to the medieval and early modern definition of a “­simple” as a discrete materia medica, as distinct from a “compound medicine” composed of many dif­fer­ent s­imples. The addition of “sin manupularlas” is to clarify that the spicers dealt in the raw materials of the medicine trade, selling their wares to apothecaries (boticarios) who used proprietary formulae and methods to convert materia medica into saleable medicaments. 11. When it emerged in the f­ourteenth c­ entury from the Old French drogue or M ­ iddle Dutch droge, the word referred simply to the gamut of dry goods, from medicinal herbs and spices to dyes, incenses, pigments, animal parts, and minerals. The lexical scope of “drugs” changed subtly in the sixteenth ­century, gaining associations with spices, medicines, and poisons from the Indies and serving to christen a new profession—­t he druggists, or droguistas in the Iberian languages. While it was not u ­ ntil the late nineteenth and early twentieth c­ entury that drug gained a formalized secondary association with recreational usage in both Germanic and Romance languages, clear connections between drugs and intoxication begin to emerge in the early de­cades of the seventeenth ­century, as I argue in chapter 1 of my dissertation, “Trop-



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ical Transplantations: Drugs, Nature, and Globalization in the Portuguese and British Empires, 1640–1755” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2015). 12. Glenn Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, ca. 1640–1683 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000). 13. For a slightly more negative view, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700 (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 198. 14. James Sweet employs the complementary concepts of a “Portuguese world” and “African-­Portuguese world” in his first book, which argues for cultural continuities bridging West and West Central Africa and the plantation cultures of early modern Brazil. See Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-­Portuguese World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). In Lusophone scholarship, terms like the “Mundo Portugûes” or the “Lusotropical” world have a more ideological connotation (the Salazar dictatorship hosted an explic­itly racist/imperialist Exposição do Mundo Português in Lisbon in 1940, for instance). “Mundo lusófono” (Lusophone world) has less baggage but would seem to implicitly rule out Portuguese-­influenced yet non-­Lusophone regions like the central African hinterlands and the crioulo communities of Ayuthaya studied by Stephan Halikowski-­Smith in his Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: The Social World of Ayutthaya, 1640–1720 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 15. Earl of Sandwich (Edward Montagu) to Lord Chancellor Clarendon (Edward Hyde), May 20, 1662, transcribed in Thomas Henry Lister, ed., Life and Administration of Edward, First Earl of Clarendon (London, 1837), 196. 16. “Catarina de Bragança,” in Grande enciclopédia portuguesa e brasileira (Lisbon: Editorial Enciclopédia, 1935), 5:287; Caetano Beirão, As negociações para o casamento da Infanta D. Catarina com Carlos II da Inglaterra (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1942). 17. Portuguese accounts tend to mention warm cider rather than ale, and I have been unable to locate a seventeenth-­century source for e­ ither, suggesting that this may be a l­ater invention. Virgínia Rau, Catarina de Bragança, rainha de Inglaterra (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1941), 99; Isabel Sitwell, Catarina de Bragança: A coragem de uma infanta portuguesa que se tornou rainha de Inglaterra (Esfera dos Livros: Lisbon, 2008), 266. 18. Thomas Garway, An exact description of the growth, quality, and vertues of the leaf tee, alias tay (London, 1658). 19. Harold Cook, M ­ atters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 293. 20. Goodman, “Excitantia,” 126. 21. Cornelis Bontekoe, “Tractaat van het excellenste kruyd Thee” (Amsterdam, 1678). ­Simon Schama cites a 1696 Dutch newspaper report claiming that Bontekoe’s extreme fondness for tea had by that time so dried his “balsamic sap” that “his joints rattled like castanets.” Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 172. 22. All quotes are from Garway, An exact description. Tea was sometimes portrayed as the antidote to the soporific effects of other Indies drugs like opium. As the author of a 1708 digest of courtly gossip put it, “My ­Sister prescribes the use of Tea and Coffee” to defeat “drowzy Humour[s]. . . . ​it is much better than Opium and Poppys.” Marie-­Catherine d’Aulnoy [pseudonym], Memoirs of the Court of ­England (London, 1708), 112. 23. Lorinda B. R. Goodwin argues that tea drinking in the seventeenth ­c entury “was strongly engendered as feminine,” although Julie E. Fromer’s study of Victorian perceptions of

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tea implies that the femininity of tea was an eighteenth-­c entury phenomenon. See Lorinda B. R. Goodwin, An Archaeology of Manners: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Mas­sa­chu­setts (New York: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 179; Julie E. Fromer, “ ‘Deeply Indebted to the Tea-­Plant’: Repre­sen­ta­tions of En­glish National Identity in Victorian Histories of Tea,” Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 36 (2008): 531. 24. The ­Women’s Petition Against Coffee (1674) along with a lesser-­k nown pamphlet, The Ale Wives Complaint Against the Coffee Houses (1675), played off of popu­lar anx­i­eties about the new drink, with both documents being supposedly written by London wives complaining that it caused impotence and loss of sexual appetite among their husbands. Stephen Pincus has disputed the assumption that coffee­houses ­were predominantly male spaces that excluded ­women (“ ‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffee­houses and Restoration Po­liti­cal Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 [1995]: 812–17), but as Brian Cowan points out, “even the most indefatigable proponents of the openness of coffee­houses to genteel ­women have been able to uncover only a handful of references.” Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee­house (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 254. See also Annie Gray, “ ‘The Proud Air of an Unwilling Slave’: Tea, ­Women and Domesticity, c. 1700–1900,” in Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations, ed. Suzanne M. Spencer-­Wood (New York: Springer, 2013), 25. 25. Nahum Tate, “Preface,” in Panacea: A poem upon tea (London, 1700). Some scholars identify nepenthe with the opium poppy. See Alfred C. Andrews, “The Opium Poppy as a Food and Spice in the Classical Period,” Agricultural History 26 (1952): 152–55. 26. Clyde Leclare Grose, “The Anglo-­Portuguese Marriage of 1662,” Hispanic American Historical Review 10 (1930): 313–52. 27. Antonio de Mello de Castro to the Overseas Council, January 5, 1665, transcribed in C. R. Boxer, “Three Sights to Be Seen: Bombay, Tangier and a Barren Queen, 1661–1684,” Portuguese Studies 3 (1987): 80. 28. See, for instance, the poet Edmund Waller’s birthday ode to Catherine in 1663: “The best of Queens, the best of herbs, we owe / To that bold nation which the way did show / To the fair region where the sun doth rise, / Whose rich productions we so justly prize.” Printed in Waller, Poems &c. Written upon Several Occasions and to Several Persons (London, 1722), 228. 29. Samuel Hinde, Iter Lusitanicum (London, 1662), xiii. 30. On the medieval conceptual links between paradise and the spice and drug trade, see Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 31. Hinde, “The Alarum to the Spaniard,” in Iter Lusitanicum. 32. Ibid. 33. Dispatches sent and received by Mello in the years bookending the marriage (some of which are numerically coded) are h ­ oused at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo [hereafter AN/TT], LMP 0001, “Documentos relativos ao casamento da infanta D. Catarina,” 1662. 34. This invasion was unsuccessful, but the Duke of Lancaster’s friendship with King John I of Portugal did yield substantive results, not least the establishment of the “Alencastro” (Lancaster) ­family as one of the leading aristocratic dynasties in Portugal. Through his ­daughter Philippa, John of Gaunt was also the grand­father of Henry the Navigator. Thomas Mortimer, A New History of ­England (London, 1764), 657. 35. Granted, if asserted as a bald historical fact, this claim is easy to poke holes in: the notion of a national alliance is anachronistic in the family-­based dynamics of medieval



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politics. But as an idea, the notion of an ancient alliance has exerted a power­f ul influence on diplomatic relations between Portugal and ­England from Tudor times up to World War II. For more on the fourteenth-­century dynamics of Anglo-­Portuguese relations, see Tiago Viula de Faria and Flavio Miranda, “ ‘Pur Bone Alliance et Amiste Faire’: Diplomacia e comercio entre Portugal e Inglaterra no final da Idade Média,” Cultura, Espaço & Memória 1 (2010): 109–28. 36. Lorenzo Magalotti, Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II: His Relazione D’Inghilterra of 1668, ed. and trans. W. E. Knowles Middleton (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980), 32. 37. The best summary of the complex negotiations leading to the Portuguese handover of Bombay can be found in Dauril Alden’s The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 190–96. 38. Sir William Foster, ed., The En­glish Factories in India, 1655–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 55. 39. Miles Ogborn, “Writing Travels: Power, Knowledge and Ritual on the En­glish East India Companies Early Voyages,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, no. 2 (2002): 157. 40. Richard Jobson, The golden trade: Or, A discouery of the riuer Gambra, and the golden trade of the Aethiopians (London, 1623), 24. 41. Russell-­Wood, A World on the Move, chap. 5. 42. Walter Baley, A short discourse of the three kindes of peppers in common use and certaine special medicines made of the same (London: Eliot’s Court Press, 1588). 43. Ibid., 14. 44. On the patterns of citation in writings about drugs, see Benjamin Breen, “Semedo’s Sixteen Secrets: Tracing Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Networks in the Portuguese Tropics,” in Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2017). 45. Sir William Monson, Sir William Monson’s Naval Tracts in Six Books (A. and J. Churchill, London: 1703), 392. 46. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621), 52. 47. George Abbott, Briefe Description of the Whole World (London, 1636), 150. 48. Thomas James, The strange and dangerous voyage of Captaine Thomas Iames (London, 1633), 107. 49. Thomas Bowrey, A Geo­graph­i­cal Account of the Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, ed. Sir Richard Carnac T ­ emple (Cambridge, 1905; originally published London, 1679), 75. Petro de Loveyro numbered among what Bowrey elsewhere describes as the “Portingals” who “beare arms in the Honourable En­glish East India Com­pany’s Ser­vice as private Centinels” (Bowrey, Geo­g raph­i­cal Account, 4). This “ancient Portuguees” appears to have adapted to the rising British presence in India quite early; already by 1663 he figured in a letter from an East India Com­pany merchant at Balasor as the “experienced Pi­lott Pedro de Lavera,” and he appears again as an agent in the East India Com­pany’s “private trade” in a 1678 letter, ferrying an illicit shipment of goods to the Maldives at the behest of an En­glish ­factor. See Richard Carnac ­Temple’s footnote in Bowrey, Geo­graph­i­cal Account, 75, citing a letter from Shem Bridges to Captain Charles Wilde, October 13, 1663, and Vincent and Read to Edwards at Balasor, January 29, 1678. 50. Bowrey, Geo­graph­i­cal Account, 78.

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51. Robert Hooke, “An Account of the Plant, call’d Bangue, before the Royal Society,” Philosophical Transactions, London, December 18, 1689. 52. When another East India Com­pany merchant, Robert Knox, wrote about cannabis use in Sri Lanka (he credited it with saving his life by serving as an “Antidote and Counter-­ Poyson against the filthy venomous w ­ ater”), he too drew on Portuguese pre­ce­dents. “It is only a dry leaf,” Knox explained. “They call it in Portugueze Banga.” Robert Knox, An historical relation of the Island Ceylon (London, 1681), 154. 53. Garcia da Orta, Coloquios dos ­simples, e drogas he cousas medicinais da India (Goa, 1563), 26r. 54. See, for instance, Robert James, Pharmacopoeia Universalis (London, 1747), 250; Charles Alston, Lectures on the Materia Medica (London, 1770), 335; William Lewis, An Experimental History of Materia Medica (London, 1784), 187. 55. On empiricism in the Iberian tropics, see Junia Ferreira Furtado, “Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 127–51. 56. Charles Borges, The Economics of the Goa Jesuits, 1542–1759 (New Delhi: Concept, 1994), 87. 57. The East India Com­pany surgeon John Fryer claimed that the Jesuit pharmacy in Goa made an annual income of 50,000 xerafins on the sale of the stones, although Dauril Alden points out that this is an unsubstantiated claim. John Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia (London, 1698); and Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise, 543. 58. “They are a dark green colour,” Berlu adds, “mixed with Gold Streaks, in shape almost of a large Olive, cutting very fine within, of a gray colour.” John Jacob Berlu, The Trea­ sury of Drugs Unlock’ d or a Full and True Description of all sorts of Drugs and Chymical Preparations, sold by Drugists, Whereby you may know the place of their growth, and from whence they come, ­etc. (London: John Harris and Tho. Hawkins, 1690), 67. 59. John Ovington, A Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, ed. H. G. Rawlinson (Delhi: Asian Educational Ser­vices, 1996; first printed 1689), 155–56. 60. “Deposition of Captain Kidd,” Boston, September 4, 1699, Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, vol. 17, Amer­i­ca and the West Indies, 1699, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908), 417. 61. Tate, Panacea, 3. 62. Richard Griffith, Observations made upon the Brasillian root, called ipepocoanha, imported from the Indies (London, 1682). The fact that Griffith, a member of the conservative Royal College of Physicians, endorsed the “wonderful Virtue” of the Brazilian root was a testament to the changes in attitudes ­toward Iberian-­traded drugs in the preceding de­cade. 63. Robert Hooke, “Observations about Gems, and other Valuable Commodities, extracted by Dr. Hook, Dec. 15, 1690,” in Philosophical experiments and observations of the late Dr. Robert Hooke (London, 1726), 212. 64. Hans Sloane, “On the Use of Ipecacuanha, for Looseness,” Philosophical Transactions, no. 238 (1698): 69. 65. Robert Boyle, Hydrostatics applied to the materia medica (1690), collected in The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq. Volume 2 (London, 1725), 329. 66. Royal Society Archives [hereafter RSA], MS 189, Folio 16 (Robert Boyle’s notes for his hydrostatics research, undated [1684]).



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67. RSA, Boyle Papers, 8, Folio 20. On Boyle’s desiderata, see Vera Keller, “The ‘New World of Sciences’: The Temporality of the Research Agenda and the Unending Ambitions of Science” Isis 103 (2012): 727–34; and Anna Marie Roos, “Perchance to Dream: Science and the ­Future” Appendix 2 (July 17, 2014). 68. Caetano de S. António, “Prologo,” Pharmacopea lusitana (Lisbon, 1711), 1. 69. José Rodrigues Abreu, Historiologica Medica (Lisbon, 1733), 422; Luis Caetano de Lima, “Epitome Willisiana,” (1728), Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Manuscritos Reservados, Cod. 2050–52. 70. Macedo’s transplantation letters are discussed briefly in Carl A. Hanson, Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal, 1688–1703 (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 87, and by Manuel Francisco de Barros e Sousa, Visconde de Santarem, Quadro elementar das relações politicas (Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1874), 18:112–13, but have not been analyzed in any detail to date. See chapter 4 of “Tropical Transplantations” for more on ­t hese in­ ter­est­ing texts. 71. Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo, “Discurso sobre a Transplantação das Plantas de Especiarias da Asia para a América,” AN/TT, T/TT/MSBR/39. 72. Oldenburg to Thomas Hill, August 30, 1671, with enclosure for an unknown Jesuit in Brazil, in A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, eds., The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 8:236, 244. For the original document, see Royal Society Archives, Cl.P/19/73, “Enquiries About Brazil Recommended to Thomas Hill.” See John Gascoigne, “The Royal Society, Natu­ral History and the P ­ eoples of the New World(s), 1660–1800,” British Journal of the History of Science 42 (2009): 545, for a brief discussion of this letter. 73. RSA, Journal Book of the Royal Society 3 (April 25, 1667): 70. 74. RSA, Journal Book of the Royal Society 3 (August 10, 1668). 75. Nathaniel Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis (London, 1681), 385. 76. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697), 1:72. 77. Gideon Harvey, The Conclave of Physicians (London, 1686), 106. 78. Dampier, A New Voyage, 1:406. 79. See William Hacke, A Collection of Original Voyages (London: James Knapton, 1699), 43. 80. John Tennent, Physical Enquiries, discovering the Mode of Translation in the Constitutions of Northern Inhabitants on g­ oing to . . . ​Southern (London, 1742), 22. 81. Ibid., 29. 82. On the role of credit and trust in the global drug trade, see Cook, M ­ atters of Exchange. 83. James H. Sweet, “The Quiet Vio­lence of Ethnogenesis,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (2011): 209–14. 84. Belinda Peters, Marriage in Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Po­liti­cal Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 85. On early modern diplomatic gift giving, see Maija Jansson, “Mea­sured Reciprocity: En­glish Ambassadorial Gift Exchange in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” Journal of Early Modern History 9 (2005): 348–70; and Claudia Swan, “Birds of Paradise for the Sultan: Early Seventeenth-­Century Dutch-­Turkish Encounters and the Uses of Won­der,” in De Zeventiende Eeuw: Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief 29, no. 1 (2013). 86. Ana Simões, Ana Careiro, and Maria Paula Digo, “Constructing Knowledge: Eighteenth-­C entury Portugal and the New Sciences,” in Archimedes: New Studies in the

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History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, ed. Jed Z. Buchwald (Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media, 1999), 2:35. Timothy Walker’s Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal During the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2005), the most carefully researched investigation of early modern Portuguese medical culture to date, does make a salutary effort to provide a revisionist view, but ­little work has been done on the connections between Portuguese and “northern” practices of natu­ral philosophy. 87. See Walker, Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition, chap. 3; Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro, and Maria Paula Diogo, “The Scientific Revolution in Eighteenth-­Century Portugal: The Role of the Estrangeirados,” Social Studies of Science 30 (2000): 591–619; Rómulo de Carvalho, Portugal nas Philosophical Transactions no séculos XVII e XVIII (Coimbra: Tipografia Atlântida, 1956); Gonçalves Rodrigues, “A correspondência científica do Dr. Sachetti Barbosa com Emmanuel Mendes da Costa, Secretário do Sociedade Real de Londres,” Biblos 16 (1938): 346–408.

chapter 4 1. John Parker, Books to Build an Empire: A Bibliographical History of En­glish Overseas Interests to 1620 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965), 38. 2. Cf. ibid. 3. As observed by David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49. On De­cades being the En­glish’s first exposure to reading about the Amer­i­cas, see Ralph Bauer, “A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-­Century Atlantic,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2008), 103. 4. David Gwyn, “Richard Eden, Cosmographer and Alchemist,” Sixteenth ­Century Journal 15 (Spring 1984): 34; Claire Jowitt, “ ‘Monsters and Straunge Births’: The Politics of Richard Eden, A Response to Andrew Hadfield,” Connotations 6 (1996–97): 54. 5. Edmund Valentine Campos, “West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourse of En­glish Imperialism,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Re­nais­sance Empires, ed. Margaret Rich Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 247–69. 6. Michael G. Brennan, The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500–1700 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 28. See Glyn Redworth, “ ‘­Matters Impertinent to ­Women’: Male and Female Monarchy ­Under Philip and Mary,” En­glish Historical Review 112 (June 1997): 597–613; Alexander Samson, “Changing Places: The Marriage and Royal Entry of Philip, Prince of Austria, and Mary Tudor, July–­August 1554,” Sixteenth ­Century Journal 36 (Fall 2005): 761–84; and Corinna Streckfuss, “ ‘Spes maxima rostra’: Eu­ro­pean Propaganda and the Spanish Match,” in Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, ed. Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 145–58, for reconsiderations of Philip’s reign, including its high point, when he led the En­glish army to brief victory against the French in 1557, before the ignominious loss of Calais. 7. John Edwards, Mary I: E ­ ngland’s Catholic Queen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 200. 8. Andrew Hadfield, “Peter Martyr, Richard Eden and the New World: Reading, Experience, and Translation,” Connotations 5 (1995–96): 1–22; Anthony Pagden, “Peter Martyr



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and Richard Eden: A Letter,” Connotations 6 (1996–97): 65–66; Bauer, “A New World of Secrets,” 103. 9. Barbara Fuchs, “Religion and National Distinction in the Early Modern Atlantic,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 58–60, 62, 68. David Read, Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2000), 29–30, previously emphasized Eden’s call for emulation. 10. Ralph Bauer has meditated on this early exploration lit­er­a­ture’s occult sleight of hand, suggesting that “Occult Philosophy functioned ideologically and rhetorically in the early historiography about the New World by synthesizing the mercantile values under­lying the proj­ects of exploration and conquest, typically conducted by the nonaristocratic sectors of Eu­ro­ pean society, with the aristocratic values of the courts, on whose sponsorship or f­avors early transoceanic expansionism critically depended.” Bauer, “A New World of Secrets,” 102. On how Philip’s arrival to E ­ ngland was a New World arrival, see Glyn Redworth, “¿Nuevo mundo u otro mundo? Conquistadores, cortesanos, libros de caballerías y el reinado de Felipe el Breve de Inglaterra,” in Actas del Primer Congreso Anglo-­Hispano, Tomo III: Historia, ed. Richard Hitchcock and Ralph Penny (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1994), 115. 11. On Peruvian silver and the creation of the global economy, see Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity Through the Mid-­ Eighteenth ­C entury,” Journal of World History 13 (Fall 2002): 391–427. For how the commoditization of Peruvian silver was the foundation of global ecological capitalism, see Jason  W. Moore, “ ‘Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway’ Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire, and Nature in the Disapora of Silver, 1545–1648,” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (January 2010): 33–68. Peru’s indigenous and Eu­ro­pean population would plant many utopias in the centuries following. See Alberto Flores Galindo, In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes, trans. Carlos Aguirre, Charles F. Walker, and Willie Hiatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1986]); Emily Berquist Soule, The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 12. For Peruvian silver and E ­ ngland’s economy, see Glyn Redworth, “Philip I of E ­ ngland, Embezzlement, and the Quantity Theory of Money,” Economic History Review, n.s., 55 (May 2002): 248–61. 13. Moore, “ ‘Amsterdam Is Standing on Norway’ Part I,” 40–41. 14. For a register of the early En­g lish interest in Peru, see Peter T. Bradley, “Peru in En­glish: The Early History of the En­glish Fascination with Peru,” in Habsburg Peru: Images, Imagination, and Memory, ed. Peter T. Bradley and David Patrick Cahill (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); for how that interest specifically s­ haped the nature of En­glish interaction with Amerindians, see Christopher Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own: En­glish Grave-­Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early Amer­i­ca,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 73 (October 2016): 609–46. 15. E. G. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485–1583 (London: Methuen, 1930), 7; David Beers Quinn, ­England and the Discovery of Amer­i­ca, 1481–1620 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 9–13, 160. 16. On the depth of Mexico’s “diabolic” reputation within Spanish Amer­i­ca and beyond ­a fter its conquest, see Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971); Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The

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Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); and ­Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-­Century Eu­rope: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 17. “Columbus’s Lettera Rarissima to the Sovereigns, 7 July 1503,” in Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. and ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1963), 383. 18. Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of Amer­i­ca, ed. Luciano Formisano, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 65. As quoted in Barbara Fuchs, “Religion and National Distinction in the Early Modern Atlantic,” 63. 19. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, La Utopia de América (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1925); more recently, see Francisco Fernandez Buey, Utopia e illusions natu­rals (Barcelona: Viejo Topo, 2007). 20. Miguel Martínez López, “Re­nais­sance Visions of Paradise: Ancient Religious Sources of Thomas More’s The Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia,” Sederi 4 (1993): 129. 21. As translated in A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia: Written in Latine by Syr Thomas More knyght, and translated into Englyshe by Raphe Robynson citizein and goldsmythe of London, at the procurement, and earnest request of George Tadlowe citezein [and] haberdassher of the same citie (London: Abraham Vele, 1551), lvii. 22. Barbara Fuchs, “Religion and National Distinction in the Early Modern Atlantic,” 63. Regarding the Spanish American connection, it has been suggested that in 1535, the Mexican oidor Vasco de Quiroga used Utopia to ­counter colonists’ desire for indigenous slavery. Vasco de Quiroga suggested a separate “City of Equals,” in which Indian families w ­ ere or­g a­nized in groups of thirty, each beneath a pyramid of indigenous officials and—­the only Spaniard immediately in the system—­the corregidor, who reported to the viceroy. ­Later, as the first bishop of Michoacán, Vasco de Quiroga gathered Indians in towns, or pueblo-­hospitales, which Silvio Zavala long ago argued was based on Utopia’s communal industry, owner­ship, and education, without corruptive Spanish exploitation of their ­labor. Silvio Zavala, “La utopia de Tomás Moro en la Nueva España,” Recuerdo (1937): 9–40. See also Bernardino Verástique, Michoacán and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 119–31, and Fernando Gómez, Good Places and Non-­Places in Colonial Mexico: The Figure of Vasco de Quiroga (1470–1565) (Lanham, MD: University Press of Amer­i­ca, 2001), 145–49, 158. I look forward to Mackenzie Cooley’s forthcoming research on this point. 23. For a detailed study of Barlow, see Heather Dalton, “Fashioning New Worlds from Old Words: Roger Barlow’s A Brief Summe of Geogrpahie, c. 1541,” in Old Worlds, New Worlds, ed. Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelmann, and Kim M. Phillips (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 75–97. 24. As suggested in Henry Harisse, John Cabot, the Discoverer of North-­America and Sebastian, His Son (London: B. F. Stevens, 1896), 188–190; and Taylor, Tudor Geography, 56. 25. Roger Barlow, A Brief Summe of Geographie (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932 [1541]), 162–63. 26. “Letter from Hernando Pizarro to the Royal Audience of Santo Domingo,” November 1533, reprinted in Francisco de Jerez, True Account of the Conquest of Peru, ed. Iván R. Reyna (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 96–106.



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27. See, for example, William Pepwell to C ­ romwell, November 21, 1534, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 7 (1534), ed. J. Gairdner (London: Longman & Co., 1883), entry no. 1457; Edmond Harvel to C ­ romwell, November 25, 1537, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 12, pt. 2 (1537), ed. J. Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1891), entry no. 1127. 28. E. G. R. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Barlow, A Brief Summe of Geographie, l–li. For that relationship with Charles, see David Loades, Henry VIII: Church, Court, and Conflict (Kew: National Archives, 2007), 69–77. 29. Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 23–35; William Howard Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the En­glish Re­nais­sance (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1995), 173. 30. A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia, +.iii–­+iii.v. 31. Parker, Books to Build an Empire, chap. 4; David Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 23–24; Hadfield, “Peter Martyr,” 13 (quote). 32. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 49–50; Barbara Fuchs, “Religion and National Distinction in the Early Modern Atlantic,” 63. 33. Arthur E. Morgan’s Nowhere Was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias Make History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 15–88, embarked from the unlikely possibility that this is exactly what happened: that More’s sailor was real, that E ­ ngland had heard of Peru by 1516, and that the Incas w ­ ere the Utopians. 34. Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 18–19. 35. Matthew Adam McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 175n128, 183. 36. Richard Eden, “To the right hyghe and mighty Prince, the Duke of Northumberlande, hys grace,” in A treatyse of the newe India, with other new founde landes and Ilandes . . . ​ ­after the description of Sebastian Munster in his boke of univerversall Cosmographie . . . ​Translated out of Latin into En­glishe. By Rycharde Eden (London: Edward Sutton, 1553), A6. That E ­ ngland’s failed 1517 expedition was actually to the “New Found Lands,” and led by Sir Thomas More’s brother-­in-­law, John Rastell, not Sperte, as Gwyn noted, only further underlines the retroactive importance lent to Peru (Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 25n40). 37. Eden, “Epistle to the Reader,” in A treatyse of the newe India, n.p. See Bauer, “A New World of Secrets,” 105–6, for the suggestion that Eden framed Münster within a tradition of occult knowledge—­a Columbian cloaking of commercial adventure in courtly ideology that mystically mixed material gain and spiritual renewal. 38. Emphasis mine. André Thevet’s North Amer­i­ca: A Sixteenth-­Century View, ed. and trans., with notes and introduction, by Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler (Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press, 1986), 133 (from Les Singularitez de la France antarctique [Paris, 1557], 148v). See also Quinn, E ­ ngland and the Discovery of Amer­i­ca, 152; Harisse, John Cabot, 365. 39. For reference to rumors of rebellion, see Richard Eden, “To the Reader,” in The De­ cades of the Newe Worlde or West India . . . ​Written in the Latine tounge by Peter Martyr of Angleria, and translated into Englysshe by Rycharde Eden (London: William Powell, 1555), in The First Three En­glish Books on Amer­i­ca [?1511]–1555 A.D., ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, UK: Turnbull & Spears, 1885), 53. Although I have consulted the original, I ­will be citing from the Arber edition, for ease of reference. 40. Harisse, John Cabot, 365–66.

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41. Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-­Century New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992 [1949]). 42. Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 27–28. On the quiet involvement of Spanish friars, see John Edwards, “The Spanish Inquisition Refashioned: The Experience of Mary I’s E ­ ngland and the Valladolid Tribunal, 1559,” Hispanic Research Journal 13 (February 2012): 41–54. 43. Valentine Campos, “West of Eden,” 250. 44. Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 29; Arber, “The Life and ­L abours of Richard Eden,” in The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, xxxix (quote). 45. Hadfield, “Peter Martyr,” 16–17; Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Vio­lence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517–1751 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), chap. 3. 46. William Tyndale, The Newe Testament in En­glishe and in Latin. = Nouum Testamentum Anglice et Latine (London: Imprynted by Wyllyam Powell dwellynge in Fletestrete at ye sygne of the George nexte vnto saynt Dunstons Churche, Anno D[omi]ni 1548). The publication by Powell was Oratio Leonhardi Goretti Equitis Poloni de matrimonio serenissimi ac potentissi, serenissimae potentissimaeq[ue] Dei gratia Regis ac Reginae Angliae, Hispaniae. &c. Ad populum principesq[ue] Angliae (London: William Powell, 1554). For the context of such praising accounts, many of which came from continental authors, see Streckfuss, “ ‘Spes maxima rostra,’ ” 146. 47. See Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel: ­England and Zu­rich, 1531–1558 (Zu­rich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2006), 194n155, 210n31–32, 211n34, 212n39–40, 224n88; Jonathan Willis, Church M ­ usic and Protestantism in Post-­Reformation ­England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 125; Blackford Condit, The History of the En­glish Bible: Extending from Earliest Saxon Translations to the Pres­ent Anglo-­American Revision (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1882), 196. Jugge would become the Queen’s Printer u ­ nder Elizabeth in the 1570s: Graham Rees, “The King’s Printers’ Bible Mono­poly in the Reign of James I,” in Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book, ed. Pete Langman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 19. 48. Catherine Davis, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), 28. 49. Valentine Campos, “West of Eden,” 251, also notes this. 50. David Loades, The Reign of Mary Tudor: Politics, Government and Religion in E ­ ngland, 1553–58 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013 [1979]), 73; Redworth, “ ‘­Matters Impertinent to W ­ omen,’ ” 598. On movable goods, see Samson, “Changing Places,” 763. 51. See Redworth’s inspired “Philip I of E ­ ngland,” 248–61, for the description of this moment. For maravedis, see Teodoro Hampe Martinez, “Agustín de Zárate: Precisiones en torno a la vida y obra de un cronista indiano,” Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-­brésilien 45 (1985): 32. 52. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 54. As Valentine Campos suggests, this may have felt to Eden “like the partial fulfillment of a dream linking the Tower of London on the Thames to Seville’s Torre de oro on the Guadalquivir” (“West of Eden,” 252). 53. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 51, 137. Cf. Pedro Mártir de Angleria, Decadas del nuevo mundo (Mexico: Jose Porrua e Hijos, Sucs., 1964), 287–88 (Tercera Decada, Libro I). It should be remembered that just a year l­ater Philip would be excommunicated by the pope and, like Henry, would briefly consider establishing a national church. Samson, “Changing Places,” 778; Geoffrey Parker, “The Place of Tudor ­England in the Messianic Vision of Philip II of Spain: The Prothero Lecture,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 174–76.



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54. Barbara Fuchs, “Religion and National Distinction in the Early Modern Atlantic,” 61; The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 52 (quote). 55. Glyn Redworth, “¿Nuevo mundo u otro mundo?” 113–17. Only the Marquis del Valle was included in the Honor Military and Civill, printed in London in 1602, but as Anna Lanyon, The New World of Martin Cortes (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 101–2, notes, it seems unlikely the younger son would travel without his elder b­ rother, the mestizo Martín Cortés, who was a member of his retinue. 56. Agustín de Zárate, Historia del descubrimiento y conquista de las provinces del Perú (Antwerp, 1555); Hampe Martinez, “Agustín de Zárate,” 32–33. 57. Agustín de Zárate, A History of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, trans. Thomas Nicholas (London: 1974 [1581]), 40. 58. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 54–55. 59. Ibid., 49–50. 60. Eden worked from the 1533 Basle edition, which was mostly based on the 1516 Alcála edition. Michael Brennan, “The Texts of Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo De­cades (1504–1628): A Response to Andrew Hadfield,” Connotations 6 (1996–97): 236. 61. Eden used the edition of Oviedo published as Corónica delas Indias: La hystoria general de las Indias agora nueuamente impresse,corregida y emendada. 1547. Y con la conquista del Peru (Salamanca: Juan de Junta, 1547). The following authors w ­ ere also translated or cited in some form in the text: Sebastian Cabot, Antonio Pigafetta (on Amerigo Vespucci), Andreas de Corsali, Sebastian Münster, Johann Faber, Jacob Ziegler, Geralamo Cardano, Paolo Giovio, Sigismund von Herberstein, and o­ thers. Scholars have sometimes treated Eden’s De­cades as only a translation of Martire. One reprint even cuts the text off a­ fter the end of the Martire translation: Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, The De­cades of the Newe Worlde or West India (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966). 62. For one example of Eden’s editing, see Jowitt, “ ‘Monsters and Straunge Births,’ ” 59, which meditates on Eden’s insertion of “misbirth” to Martire’s description of misshapen pearls. Although this period’s inconsistent authorial control over typesetting and publication can make it difficult to assign authorship to marginal glosses, b­ ecause the glosses are identical across The De­cades’ four simultaneous editions—­each published by a dif­fer­ent printer, coordinated by William Powell—it seems reasonable to assume that they are e­ ither solely Eden’s or the product of his collaboration with Powell. See Arber, “The Life and L ­ abours of Richard Eden,” xxxix. 63. As Anthony Pagden notes, the relationship of Martire’s De Orbe Novo to his Epistolarum is complex: “Peter Martyr and Richard Eden,” 65–66. De Orbe Novo grew from Martire’s correspondence with vari­ous prelates, including Pope Leo X. An abbreviated version of the first “De­cade” was published in 1504, seemingly without Martire’s permission. Martire then turned it into a sweeping proj­ect of reportage, interpretation, and publication, pivoting between “ ‘old’ and ‘new’ perspectives on geography and travel,” promoting acquisitive Spanish exploration while working out “essential terms of the indigenous population,” as Michael Brennan argues. The “Fourth De­c ade” shifted his concerns, meditating less on exploration and indigenous ­peoples than on prudent colonial exploitation. See Brennan, “The Texts of Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo De­cades,” 228–35. 64. Hadfield, “Peter Martyr,” 16; Brennan, “The Texts of Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo De­cades,” 236. 65. It would have been less surprising to ­t hose few who had read Barlow’s unpublished translation of Enciso, which similarly emphasized growing indigenous complexity beyond the

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edge of the Ca­rib­bean, along with knowledge of natu­ral wealth. See Barlow, A Brief Summe of Geographie, 174, for a Colombian example. 66. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 76, 78, 95, 104, 148, 182–83. 67. Ibid., 186, 187–89, 190, 192, 196. 68. Ibid., 197. 69. Ibid., 117. 70. As observed in Hadfield, “Peter Martyr,” 5–6, citing Anthony Pagden, “The Savage Critic: Some Eu­ro­pean Images of the Primitive,” Yearbook of En­glish Studies 13 (1983): 32–45. 71. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 117. 72. Hadfield, “Peter Martyr,” 6. 73. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 117. 74. Hadfield, “Peter Martyr,” 15–16. 75. Barbara Fuchs, “Religion and National Distinction in the Early Modern Atlantic,” 61–64, quote on 63. See also Read, Temperate Conquests, 31, for a meditation on how Spanish texts acted as En­glish mirrors. 76. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 117. 77. Ibid., 57, 117. 78. B ­ ecause ­t hose texts on the northern reaches ­were unmentioned on the title page, it has been suggested they w ­ ere not part of Eden’s original plan but a “goodwill offering” on the occasion of Richard Chancellor’s return from Muscovy. Arber, “The Life and ­L abours of Richard Eden,” xxxix. 79. Cristían A. Roa-­de-­la-­Carrera, Histories of Infamy: Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism, trans. Scott Sessions (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), 209–11. 80. Francisco López de Gomara, Historia General de las Indias y Vida de Hernan Cortes, Prólogo y Cronología by Jorge Gurria Lacroix (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 183–86. For that grave-opening English afterlife, see Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own.” 81. Roa-­de-­la-­Carrera, Histories of Infamy, 1–14. 82. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 342, 343. 83. López de Gomara, Historia General, 180. 84. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 343. 85. A fruteful, and pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Vtopia, lvii. 86. The First Three Books on Amer­i­ca, 55, 242, 288, 344–46. 87. To know how to judge w ­ hether their gold or silver was real, Eden added The Booke of Metals, his translation of Vannucio Biringoccio’s Pyrotechnia, a practical text for the industrialization of metallurgic enterprises “for use and profit in an emerging capitalistic environment,” as Valentine Campos put it in “West of Eden,” 253. 88. David Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 31. For the number burned, see David Loades, “The En­glish Church During the Reign of Mary,” in Reforming Catholicism in the ­England of Mary Tudor: The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza, ed. John Edwards and Ronald Truman (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 34. 89. Edwards, “The Spanish Inquisition Refashioned,” 48. 90. John Ponet’s A Short Treatise of Politike Power denounced the Marian regime, condemned the Spanish for their treatment of Indians, and suggested that En­glishmen would be sent to New Spain where “ye shalbe tyed in chaynes, forced to rowe in the galie, to digge in the



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mynes and to pike up the golde in the hotte sande.” Jowitt, “ ‘Monsters and Straunge Births,’ ” 56. See Gwyn, “Richard Eden,” 28, for the possibility that it was Eden being cited. 91. See Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34; Read, Temperate Conquests, 25–30, 67–69, and 95–113; Roger Stritmatter and Lynne Kositsky, “ ‘O Brave New World’: The Tempest and Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo,” Critical Survey 21 (Fall 2009): 7–42. 92. Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of En­glish Colonization: From Ireland to Amer­ i­ca,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30 (1973): 593–594. On Sidney escorting Philip to ­E ngland, see Margaret  P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10. 93. Brennan, “The Texts of Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo De­cades,” 237–38. 94. Richard Willes, “Preface unto the Reader, wherein is set downe a generall summe as it w ­ ere of the w ­ hole worke,” in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera et al., The history of travayle in the West and East Indies; A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by Thomas R. Adams (Delmar, NY: John Car­ter Brown Library and Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1992 [1577]), iii. 95. Brennan, “The Texts of Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo De­cades,” 238–40. 96. Valentine Campos, “West of Eden,” 268–69. 97. Heaney, “A Peru of Their Own,” 624 (quotes).

chapter 5 1. Joseph Addison, Spectator, September 27, 1712 (no. 495). 2. Joseph Addison, Spectator, March 1, 1711 (no. 1). 3. Joseph Addison, Spectator, November 3, 1711 (no. 213). 4. Joseph Addison, Spectator, September 27, 1712 (no. 495); for a slightly dif­fer­ent approach to Spectator no. 495 than mine, see also Richard Braverman, “Spectator 495: Addison and ‘the Race of ­People Called Jews,’ ” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 34 (Summer 1994): 537–52. 5. John H. Elliott, Spain, Eu­rope, and the Wider World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 249–50. 6. The strug­gle of Portuguese Jews to establish a Sephardic community in Hamburg in the mid-­seventeenth ­century represents a case in point. For a brief overview, see R. Po-­Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Eu­rope, 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1992), 76–80. See also Elliott, Spain, Eu­rope, and the Wider World, 95, 103–4. 7. One illustration of this tendency to omit mention of Jewish, crypto-­Jewish, or new Christian merchants as individuals, let alone as a category of analy­sis at the imperial level, can be found in John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the En­glish State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Brewer briefly mentions the Anglo-­Jewish financier Sampson Gideon and the Dutch Jewish financier Isaac De Pinto without recognizing that ­either man’s ideas about finance may have been influenced by their experience as Jews, and he provides no discussion of Jewish participation in the establishment of the Bank of ­England as stockholders. The index lacks entries for “Jews,” “Conversos,” “New Christians,” “Crypto-­Jews,” or anything with the subheading “Jewish.” Brewer, Sinews of Power, 131, 208, 210, 279–90. I emphasize that this is only one of many such examples, and I have singled it out

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only b­ ecause the text was readily at hand; a list of all pertinent texts would prove too tedious to read and consume far more space than any publisher would allow. 8. As to the erasure of the Jewish past in ­England, see Elisa Narin van Court, “Invisible in Oxford: Medieval Jewish History in Modern ­England,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26, no. 3 (April 2008): 1–24; David S. Katz, “The Marginalization of Early Modern Anglo-­Jewish History,” Immigrants & Minorities 10, no. 1–2 (June 1991): 60–77. 9. See Jonathan I. Israel, Eu­ro­pean Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, 3rd ed. (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998); Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-­Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Daniel Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth C ­ entury Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000); Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-­D utch Jews and Eighteenth-­Century Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978). Most recent work in Jewish economic history focuses, in fact, on Jewish enterprise during the industrial revolution, whereas works on the economies of par­tic­u ­lar early modern empires mention the contribution of Jewish merchants only in passing. See, for example, Derek Penslar, Shylock’s ­Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Eu­rope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Jonathan Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Eu­rope, 1638–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Despite the date range supplied in Karp’s subtitle, the focus of his work is strongest in discussing the period ­a fter 1785. For critiques of this type of approach to early modern Jewish history, see Lois Dubin, “ ‘Wings on Their Feet . . . ​and Wings on Their Head’: Reflections on the Study of Port Jews,” Jewish Culture and History 7, no. 1–2 (January 2004): 14–30; Holly Snyder, “Navigating the Jewish Atlantic: The State of the Field and Opportunities for New Research,” in The Atlantic World, ed. D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly (London: Routledge, 2015), 413–37. 10. Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, “Plural Identities: The Portuguese New Christians,” Jewish History 25, no.  2 (May  2011): 129–51. Pulido argues, using numerous examples, that attempts to reify converso identity into a singular set of ideals grounded in religion and nationality falsify the complex historical realities of the converso experience. Concrete evidence of the complexity of converso identity is provided in case studies by Francois Soyer and Richard D. Barnett. Soyer pres­ents the case of Custodio Nunes, who claimed to be si­mul­t a­neously a Christian and a Jew when tried for Judaizing by the Portuguese Inquisition in 1604; Barnett, in analyzing the case of Dr.  Samuel Nunes Ribeiro in the early eigh­ teenth ­century, brings to the fore the letter of his nephew Antonio Ribeiro Sanches, which details both the personal and familial tribulations of making a commitment to practice ­e ither Judaism or Chris­t ian­ity. Francois Soyer, “ ‘It Is Not Pos­s i­ble to Be Both a Jew and a Christian’: Converso Religious Identity and the Inquisitorial Trial of Custodio Nunes (1604–5),” Mediterranean Historical Review 26, no. 1 (June 2011): 87–91; Richard D. Barnett, “Dr. Samuel Nunes Ribeiro and the Settlement of Georgia,” in Migration and Settlement, ed. Aubrey Newman (London: Jewish Historical Society of E ­ ngland, 1971), 74–77. That such personal decisions ­were ongoing over many generations is attested to in Bruno Feitler’s long-­range study of the Paraiba province of Brazil. See Bruno Feitler, “Four Chapters in the History of Crypto-­Judaism in Brazil: The Case of the Northeastern New Christians (17th– 21st Centuries),” Jewish History 25, no. 2 (May 2011): 207–27; Bruno Feitler, Inquisition, juifs et



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nouveaux-­chrétiens au Brésil: Le Nordeste XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003). 11. David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 23–48. Katz identifies the “Jewish advocates” on whom Henry relied as Elijah Menachem Halfan, an ordained rabbi and physician who maintained his medical practice among the social elites of Venice, and Marco Raphael, a Jewish convert to Chris­tian­ity; they, along with the Christian Hebraist Francesco Giorgi, advised on rabbinical interpretations of key sections of Leviticus and Deuteronomy that appeared to support Henry’s claim that the marriage had never been valid in the first place. 12. James Shapiro provides a succinct summary of aliens suspected to be Jews residing in Elizabethan London in his Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 68–75. The most infamous of ­t hese was Roderigo (also called Ruy) Lopez, who became notorious for his involvement in an alleged plot to poison the queen, whom he served as both physician and spy. See also Katz, The Jews in the History of E ­ ngland, 49–106. A ­ fter his execution at Tyburn in 1594, Lopez was popularly remade into the figure of the iconic Jewish villain, a feat abetted by London’s popu­lar playwrights; but despite this unfortunate literary reincarnation, Lopez had lived a reputable public life as a Protestant prior to his involvement in the plot. Katz, The Jews in the History of E ­ ngland, 49–50, 52–53, 96, 100–102; Stephen Greenblatt, ­Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 275–78; Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 71. 13. See, generally, David S. Katz, Philo-­Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to E ­ ngland, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 14. See Katz, The Jews in the History of ­England, 107–9. The quote appears on 109. 15. Such entanglements encompassed Jews of ­every stripe, even t­hose who did not face the severe challenges to acknowledging Jewish belief and heritage that confronted Iberians of Jewish extraction a­ fter 1492. For examples of geo­graph­i­cal entanglements among Ashkenazim, see Marvin Herzog, Vera Baviskar, and Uriel Weinreich, The Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1992–2000), documenting the many dialects of Yiddish from Rus­sia to the Netherlands. Interested researchers may wish to note that the original interviews with Yiddish speakers that Weinreich conducted in pursuit of this proj­ect are ­housed in the Columbia University Library, where they are currently being digitized. A more recent study that builds on Weinreich’s early work is Dovid Katz, Yiddish and Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); see especially Katz’s map of Yiddish dialects at p. 3. (Katz is best known for his work on Northeastern Yiddish.) For a dif­fer­ent cultural take on the same general theme, see also the piece by NPR’s Foodways writer Deena Prichep, exploring the geographic history that s­ haped the culinary bound­a ries within Poland between sweet and salty versions of the Jewish holiday staple known as gefilte fish—­a distinction that did not exist before the cultivation of sugar beets. Prichep, “The Gefilte Fish Line: A Sweet and Salty History of Jewish Identity,” NPR, September 24, 2014, http://­w ww​.­npr​.­org​/ ­blogs​ /­t hesalt​ /­2 014 ​/­0 9​/­2 4 ​/­351185646​/­t he​-­g efilte​ -­f ish​-­l ine​-­a​ -­s weet​-­a nd​ -­s alty​-­h istory​-­of​ -­j ewish​ -­identity. 16​.­See, e.g., Jonathan Ray, “Iberian Jewry Between West and East: Jewish Settlement in the Sixteenth ­Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Studies 18, no. 1 (2009): 44–65; Daniel J. Schroeter, “Oriental Jews of the Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 4, no. 2 (1994): 183–96; Kenneth Stow, “Ethnic Rivalry or Melting Pot: The ‘Edot’ in the Roman Ghetto,” Judaism 41, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 286–96.

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17. Lucien Wolf, “Jews in Elizabethan ­England,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of ­England 11 (1924–27): 8–9, 13. 18. See Calendar of State Papers Foreign: Elizabeth, 1558–1589, vols. 12 (p. 415), 16 (pp. 244, 712), 20 (pp. 26, 472–73, 508), 21, part I (pp. 79–84); Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, vols. 2 (p. 513), 13 (p. 215): citations provided in State Papers Online database, consulted March 2015. See also Charles Meyers, “Lord Burleigh’s Support in the Privy Council for Dr. Hector Nunes and His Commercial Ventures,” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005): 1–6; Charles Meyers, “Alien Diplomat,” Jewish Historical Studies 39 (2004): 35–43. David Katz provides a detailed discussion of the role of Nuñez, Roderigo Lopez, and other conversos in London and Italy as spies who provided impor­tant intelligence for key areas of Anglo-­Iberian conflict during the last two de­cades of Elizabeth’s reign, such as the attack of the Spanish Armada and machinations over the Portuguese succession. Katz, The Jews in the History of ­England, 49–89. 19. Wolf, “Jews in Elizabethan E ­ ngland,” 12–17; Shapiro, Shakespeare’s Jews, 115. Wolf suggests that Coryat’s contact in Constantinople was Dunstan Añes’s second son, Jacob Añes. 20. Katz, The Jews in the History of E ­ ngland, 57–58, citing accounts of the poet Gabriel Harvey and the surgeon William Clowes. 21. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 71–72; Katz, The Jews in the History of ­England, 101. One frequently cited con­temporary account suggests that Lopez’s professions of Christian belief from the scaffold evoked universal laughter. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 73; Katz, The Jews in the History of E ­ ngland, 96. Lucien Wolf identifies the author of the mysterious letter as Lopez’s ­brother, Diego Lopez Alleman. Wolf, “Jews in Elizabethan ­England,” 20–21. 22. Lucien Wolf, “Crypto-­Jews U ­ nder the Commonwealth,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of ­England 1 (1893–94): 53–88; Katz, The Jews in the History of ­England, 135–37; Holly Snyder, “En­glish Markets, Jewish Merchants and Atlantic Endeavors: Jews and the Making of British Transatlantic Commercial Culture, 1650–1800,” in Atlantics Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-­Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 50–51. A few of the key documents in the Robles case, along with the petition to ­Cromwell, are transcribed (imperfectly, as Katz notes) and printed as an appendix to Wolf ’s article, at 76–86. 23. One way to mask adherence to Judaism was to adopt a Hebrew name for use only in synagogue affairs. While some of London’s Jewish merchants ­adopted only a Hebrew first name to signify their commitment to Judaism or used a Hebrew first name with a modification of their Iberian names, ­others went to ­great lengths to obscure their Iberian identities by using an entirely separate Hebrew surname along with a Hebrew first name for religious purposes, making it exceptionally difficult to identify that par­t ic­u ­lar Iberian merchant as a religious Jew. Robles apparently employed the last of the three techniques: Edgar Samuel has matched Robles to synagogue member Ishac Barzillay, who served as Gabay (trea­surer) of the London synagogue in 1660 and as Parnas (president) in 1665. Previously, the connection between the two was unknown. Edgar Samuel, “Antonio Rodrigues Robles, c. 1620–1688,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of ­England 37 (2001): 113–15. 24. Lucien Wolf, “The First En­glish Jew: Notes on Antonio Fernandes Carvajal with Some Biographical Documents,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of E ­ ngland 2 (1894–95): 15–18, 26–28; [John Bland], Trade Revived, or a Way Proposed to Restore, Increase, Inrich, Strengthen and Preserve the Decayed and even D ­ ying Trade of this our En­glish Nation, in its Manufactories, Coin, Shiping and Revenue . . . ​Set forth by a Wel-­wisher to the Nation and its



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Prosperity (London: T. Leach, for Thos. Holmwood, 1660), 21; Wolf, “Crypto-­Jews U ­ nder the Commonwealth,” 55–75; Wilfred S. Samuel, The First London Synagogue of the Resettlement (London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne, 1924); Snyder, “En­glish Markets,” 52–54. 25. Lucien Wolf, “­Cromwell’s Jewish Intelligencers,” in Essays in Jewish History, ed. Cecil Roth (London: Jewish Historical Society of E ­ ngland, 1934), 93–114. 26. Ibid., 102–3. 27. Ibid., 104–10. 28. Lucien Wolf, ed. and trans., Jews in the Canary Islands: Being a Calendar of Jewish Cases Extracted from the Rec­ords of the Canariote Inquisition in the Collection of the Marquess of Bute (London: Jewish Historical Society of E ­ ngland, 1926; reprinted Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), xxxix–xl, 176–79. 29. Ibid., 136–43, 159–61. 30. David Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity Among ‘Men of the Nation’: ­Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 15, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 32–65; Bruno Feitler, Inquisition, Juifs et Nouveaux-­C hretiens au Bresil: Le Nordeste XVIIe et XVIIIe Siecles (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003); David Graizbord, “Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-­Building in Seventeenth-­C entury Bayonne and Peyrehorade,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 147–80. 31. See Holly Snyder, “Rules, Rights and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British Atlantic Port Towns, 1740–1831,” Jewish History 20, no. 2 (June 2006): 147–70. 32. Edmund Valentine Campos, “Jews, Spaniards, and Portingales: Ambiguous Identities of Portuguese Marranos in Elizabethan ­England,” ELH 69 (2002): 606; Katz, The Jews in the History of E ­ ngland, 105–6. 33. See Chapter 1 in this volume. Sheaves documents a number of cases of En­glish merchants who established themselves in Spain and operated successfully as merchants by using techniques such as adopting Spanish names, taking a local wife, and establishing correspondence with Iberian contacts in distant parts of the Iberian overseas empire. 34. Evidence of the kinds of skills in which Jewish merchants excelled is provided in the City Freedom Archives, originally maintained in the Corporation of London Rec­ords Office and now h ­ oused in the London Metropolitan Archive. In a set of petitions submitted in 1722– 23, a Jewish merchant seeking appointment as a sworn broker on the Royal Exchange was bound to emphasize not only that he “very well understands the Course of Exchanges of Money” and “has . . . ​bin a Dealer in buying and selling Shares of Ships and is well Skilled in the Goods and Commodities of divers Countries” but also “Being a Linguist” with par­tic­u ­lar command of “the En­g lish Portuguese, Italian, french & Spanish Languages.” See, e.g., Petitions of Moses Abendanon, Ephraim Abarbanel, Aaron Arias, and Cohen Henriques, Petitions of the Jews (BR/PJ-1-48), City Freedom Archives, Corporation of London Rec­ords, London Metropolitan Archive. 35. [Edward Long], The History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 1:557–58, 570, 573. 36. “Original Petition of the Merchants at Port Royal to Sir Thomas Lynch Concerning the Jews, &c.” (undated but endorsed June 11, 1672), Colonial Office [CO] 1/28, f. 159–60, National Archives, Kew, UK, printed in Herbert Friedenwald, “Material for the History of the Jews in the British West Indies,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 5 (1897): 73–75. The petition does not state the number of Jews involved; this information is provided

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in the correspondence of Governor Lynch, which indicates that “­here was 13 f­ ree Jewes, and 16 not soe, w[hi]ch acted ­under the o­ thers.” See Sir Thomas Lynch to Council, March 10, 1671, CO 1/28, f. 57, National Archives. 37. “Memorandum of the Jews in Jamaica” (undated, unsigned), Board of Trade, Jamaica, 1689–92, CO 137/2, f. 209, National Archives. Although this document is undated, its reference to “the death of my Lord Incequin late Govern[o]r of the said Island” places it in 1692. 38. President and Council of Jamaica to the Board of Trade, January 28, 1692/3, CO 137/53; abstracted in Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, Amer­i­ca and West Indies, vol. 13, 1689–1692, 593–94. 39. Governor and Council of Jamaica to the Board of Trade, undated, Board of Trade, Jamaica, 1699–1703, CO 137/5, f. 57, National Archives. This document was produced as part of an investigation by the Board of Trade that was requested by William III in response to a petition from Manuel de Belmonte (alias Isaac Nunes), Baron of Belmonte, a Dutch Jewish diplomat, on behalf of the Jews in Jamaica. See, e.g., folios 10–13, 50–56. See also Holly Snyder, A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British Amer­i­ca, 1654–1831 (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2000), 103–6. 40. Ishack Pereyra to the Board of Trade and Plantations (undated but marked “received and read March 8, 1702/3”), Board of Trade, Jamaica, 1699–1703, CO 137/5, f. 334, National Archives. 41. Ibid. Pereyra did not mention, and perhaps was unaware, of the participation of Port Royal merchant David Gomez in the mission sent to Cartagena by Governor Thomas Lynch in 1671 to negotiate trading terms with the governor of New Granada ­under the Treaty of Madrid. The mission is discussed in some detail by April Lee Hatfield in Chapter 10 of this volume. Gomez was a man of means who died possessed of both real property and chattel (primarily livestock) in October of 1673; his w ­ ill reflects substantial transatlantic ties to kin in London and Amsterdam. His inclusion in Governor Lynch’s mission was likely to have been at least in part due to his fa­cil­i­t y with both Spanish and En­glish, along with his knowledge of Spanish trade. W ­ ill of David Gomez, October 18, 1673, Liber of W ­ ills, vol. 1, f. 73, Island Rec­ord Office, Jamaica; transcript in the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati. 42. Journal of the Assembly of Jamaica, vol. 2, From March the 1st, 1709–10 . . . ​to February the 19th, 1730–31 (London: J. Whiting, 1824), 124–28. 43. Geoffrey Plank, “Making Gibraltar British in the Eigh­teenth ­C entury,” History 98 (2013): 350–53. 44. Charles Meyers, “Dr. Hector Nunez: Elizabethan Merchant,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of ­England 28 (1981–82): 129–31; see also Katz, The Jews in the History of ­England. 45. Maurice Woolf, “Foreign Trade of London Jews in the Seventeenth ­Century,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of ­England 24 (1970–73): 38–46. 46. Ibid., 46–47. 47. Ibid., 48. The index to Backwell’s customer ledgers, which date from 1663 through 1672, has been transcribed and mounted to the Web by the Royal Bank of Scotland Archives Group, which holds the originals of ­these rec­ords. The transcription of the index may be viewed online or downloaded at http://­heritagearchives​.­rbs​.­com​/­content​/­dam​/­rbs​/­Documents​/­History​ /­Hub​/­backwell​-­customer​-­account​-­ledgers​.­pdf (consulted November 2014).



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48. Nuala Zahedieh, “Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth C ­ entury,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9 (December  1999): 146n14, 155. By contrast, Zahedieh found ten merchants out of the fifty-­eight (17.2 ­percent) could be identified as Quakers. 49. Ibid., 157–58; Arthur P. Arnold, “A List of Jews and Their House­holds in London, Extracted from the Census Lists of 1695,” Miscellanies of the Jewish Historical Society of ­England 6 (1962): 73–141. The con­temporary account was compiled by Abraham Zagache, an Amsterdam merchant who resided in London between 1680 and 1684. Zagache compiled a brief account in Spanish listing all of the Iberian Jewish families in London, whom he numbered at 414. The original list is found in the archives of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews Congregation in London and was transcribed and printed in Lionel D. Barnett, ed., Bevis Marks Rec­ords (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 1:16–20. (The original rec­ords are now h ­ oused in the London Metropolitan Archive.) The analy­sis of the 1695 census list estimates a total of 778 Jews residing in the parishes within the London wall; an additional seventy-­five Jews resided in parishes considered outside the London walls at that date. Although the identification of Jewish ­house­holds in this accounting is imperfect, the estimate does provide general ballpark figures for the Jewish population of London at that moment in time. For comparative purposes, the total population recorded u ­ nder the 1695 census is estimated at 69,581 residents in parishes within the walls and an additional 53,508 in parishes outside the walls. The Jewish population within the walls is thus rendered at no more than 1.1 ­percent of the total population in that part of the city where they ­were most highly concentrated. 50. Zahedieh, “Making Mercantilism Work,” 150. 51. Steven Pincus, “Addison’s Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early 18th ­Century,” Parliamentary History 31 (February 2012): 102–7; Braverman, “Spectator 495,” 537–39; John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in G ­ reat Britain and Ireland: On the Same Foot with All Other Nations (London: J. Roberts, 1714). 52. Deposition of Abraham Sarzedas, September 2, 1763, recorded in Miscellaneous Bonds 1765–1772 (Vol. 1), Book R, Georgia Colonial Rec­ords, Collections of the Georgia Department of Archives and History. Sarzedas swore out this deposition in the parish court for Hanover, Jamaica, soon ­a fter the events in question. He ­later had it recorded in the official rec­ords for Georgia ­a fter his removal from the island to Savannah l­ater in the de­cade. 53. Preliminary efforts in this regard by literary historians lack the grounding of socioeconomic perspective. See, e.g., Anne J. Cruz, ed., Material and Symbolic Circulation Between Spain and ­England, 1554–1604 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); David Howarth, The Invention of Spain: Cultural Relations Between Britain and Spain, 1770–1870 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007). 54. See, in this volume, Chapter 1, Chapter 6, and Chapter 7.

chapter 6 1. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, or The Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an En­glishman, in an Attempt to circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (London: Cassell, 1908), 518. Almost a ­century ­later, Pío Baroja glossed this story, attracted to Flinter as another “man of action” from the revolutionary era like his relative Aviraneta, the protagonist of several of

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his historical novels. See “Flinter, el irlandés,” in Siluetas románticas y otras historias de pillos y de extravagantes (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1934), 233–42. Flinter, in Baroja’s view, was too much the lion and not enough the fox, though his complicated po­liti­cal itinerary beginning in the Ca­rib­ bean shows that he was not only decisive but also shrewd, even if his calculations did not pan out. 2. Flinter’s Spanish ser­vice rec­ord (hoja de servicio) states his age as forty on June 15, 1836, though it does not note his birth date. Archivo Militar General de Segovia (AGMS), sección primera, legajo F1493. A short biographical note dated November 29, 1836, in an Irish newspaper, written by a childhood friend, says that Flinter was forty-­one or forty-­t wo. See “Brigadier-­ General Flinter,” Belfast News-­Letter, November 29, 1836. 3. Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 520–21. 4. His most widely read work was An Account of the Pres­ent State of the Island of Puerto Rico (London: Longman, 1834), written in response to abolition in the British West Indies. 5. Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara, “Continental Origins of Insular Proslavery: George Dawson Flinter in Curaçao, Venezuela, Britain, and Puerto Rico, 1810s–1830s,” Almanack 8 (November 2014): 55–67. 6. In addition to works cited subesquently in this chapter on the Irish in Spain and Spanish Amer­i­ca, see Oscar Recio Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010); Oscar Recio Morales, ed., Redes de nación y espacios de poder: La comunidad irlandesa en España y la América española (Valencia: Albatros, 2012); Igor Pérez Tostado and Enrique García Hernán, eds., Irlanda y el Atlántico ibérico: Movilidad, participación e intercambio cultural (1580–1830) (Valencia: Albatros, 2010); Enrique García Hernán and M. Carmen Lario de Oñate, eds., La presencia irlandesa durante las Cortes de Cádiz en España y América, 1812 (Valencia: Albatros, 2013); and the special issue of Irish Migration Studies in Latin Amer­i­ca 8 (2014), ed. Margaret Brehony, “Archives of Irish Interest in Cuba, Spain, and Peru.” 7. Cornelius Ch. Goslinga, A Short History of the Netherlands Antilles and Surinam (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), ch. 10; Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie, eds., Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 1795–1800 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011); and Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 8. Ramón Aizpurua, “Revolution and Politics in Venezuela and Curaçao, 1795–1800,” in Klooster and Oostindie, Curaçao in the Age of Revolutions, 102–5. Felipe was the ­brother of Manuel Piar, a leader in the Venezuelan in­de­pen­dence strug­gle, whom Bolívar would have executed in 1817. 9. See Goslinga, A Short History, chap. 10. 10. See the letter of Le Couteur to Bathurst dated Curaçao, October 14, 1814, British National Archives [BNA], War Office [WO] 1/115. 11. Hodgson to Liverpool, Curaçao, January 31, 1812, BNA, WO 1/111. 12. See the letter from Hodgson dated Pall Mall Court, August 29, 1815, BNA, WO 1/116. 13. Hodgson to Bathurst, Curaçao, September 27, 1812, BNA, WO 1/112. 14. Hodgson to Bathurst, Curaçao, August 26, 1813, BNA, WO 1/113. 15. Curaçao, April 12, 1814, BNA, WO 1/115. 16. On the use of po­liti­cal vio­lence and terror in this phase of the war and in the Spanish American revolutions more broadly, see Clément Thibaud, “ ‘Coupé têtes, brûlé cases’: Peurs et désirs d’Haiti dans l’Amérique de Bolívar,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 58, no. 2 (2003): 305–31; Alejandro Gómez, “La revolución de Caracas desde abajo,” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, May  17, 2008, http://­nuevomundo​.­revues​.­org​/­32982; Jeremy Adelman, “The Rites of



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Statehood: Vio­lence and Sovereignty in Spanish Amer­i­ca, 1789–1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90 (August 2010): 391–422; and Karen Racine, “Message by Massacre: Venezuela’s War to the Death, 1810–1814,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 2 (2013): 201–17. 17. Curaçao, April 29, 1813, BNA, WO 1/113. 18. Letter included in Hodgson’s dispatch to Bathurst, Curaçao, April 12, 1814, BNA, WO 1/115. 19. Hodgson’s British in­for­mant did tell him that “The refusal of Monteverde to exchange the Creole Prisoners at Porto Cabello, for the Eu­ro­pean Spaniards at Caracas and La Guayra, the perseverance in this system by the Chiefs ­under Monteverde, Salomon and other Spanish officers, and fi­nally the Murder of Palou and some other Creole Officers, led the way to the dreadful scene I have lately witnessed, viz about 800 to 1000 Eu­ro­pean Spaniards put to death. Although to my mind no arguments founded on the barbarity and impolicy of the Spaniards are sufficient to justify so horrid an alternative, yet in the eye of retaliation and revenge such mea­sures are natu­ral results.” Ibid., emphasis in the original. 20. On counterrevolutionary attitudes among the British elite ­a fter the American Revolution and their implications for governance of colonial spaces, see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989); and Eliga H. Gould, “American In­de­pen­dence and Britain’s C ­ ounter Revolution,” Past & Pres­ ent 154 (February 1997): 107–41. On the suspension of law and expectation of ruleless vio­ lence in colonial territories, see Eliga  H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Vio­lence: The ­L egal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003): 471–510. 21. This is the subject of Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 22. Curaçao, April 15, 1814, BNA, WO 1/115. 23. Stein and Stein, Crisis in an Atlantic Empire. 24. See the list of officers dated March 4, 1816, BNA, WO 1/117. 25. The lit­er­a­ture is vast, but see Matthew Brown, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries, and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006). 26. The dossier on Flinter’s activities in 1819 is in Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid), Estado, legajo 5511. See also his recollection of his actions, and the betrayal of the liberal government that came to power in 1820, in his A Letter to His Most Gracious Majesty, George the Fourth, King of ­Great Britain and Ireland (Trinidad: Port of Spain Gazette, 1829); and in his Spanish hoja de servicio in AGMS, sección primera, legajo 1493, dated June 15, 1836. 27. Micheline Kerry Walsh, “The Wild Goose Tradition,” Irishmen in War from the Crusades to 1798: Essays from the Irish Sword (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), 1:180–91; Graciela Iglesias Rogers, British Liberators in the Age of Napoleon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ch. 2; and Brown, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies. One might add that Flinter was following another Irish path, the sojourner to the Amer­i­cas, seeking his fortune in some aspect of the Ca­rib­bean sugar complex, a sort of Irish indiano. Nini Rod­gers’s description of the luck of the merchant Samuel Watt might just as well apply to Flinter: “like the majority of his sojourning kind . . . ​[he] would not achieve riches.” See her Ireland, Slavery and Anti-­Slavery: 1612–1865 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chap. 4, quotation on 93. 28. I explore the literary aspects of Flinter’s works in “Continental Origins of Insular Proslavery.” On British literary treatments of the Hispanic world in the revolutionary era, see

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Joselyn Almeida, “British Romanticism and Latin Amer­i­ca, 2: Atlantic Revolution and British Intervention,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 7 (2010): 1–22. 29. Address to the British Subjects, ­going out in the Expedition to South Amer­i­ca. By a British Officer, Who has been on the Scene of Action since the Commencement of the Revolution, Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid) Estado, legajo 5511, exp. 1; and A History of the Revolution of Caracas; comprising an impartial narrative of the atrocities committed by the contending parties, illustrating the real state of the contest, both in a commercial and po­liti­cal point of view. Together with a description of the llaneros, or ­people of the plains of South Amer­i­ca (London: Printed for T. and J. Allman, 1819). 30. Address to British Subjects, 1. 31. See Jeremy Adelman, “Colonialism and National Histories: José Manuel Restrepo and Bartolomé Mitre,” in Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, ed. Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara and John Nieto-­Phillips (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 163–86. 32. Address to British Subjects, 4. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. History of the Revolution of Caracas, 148. 38. Richard Stites, The Four Horse­men: Riding to Liberty in Post-­Napoleonic Eu­rope (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23. 39. History of the Revolution of Caracas, 86. 40. Anne E. Mellor, “Making a ‘Monster’: An Introduction to Frankenstein,” Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12, paraphrasing David Punter, The Lit­er­a­ture of Terror. 41. H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3. 42. Stites, The Four Horse­men, 23–27. 43. History of the Revolution of Caracas, 43, 66–67. However, John Lynch notes that Bolívar was opposed to Briceñ­o’s gruesome tactics: Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 72–73. Gerhard Masur showed the same: “when [Bolívar] received the heads of two Spaniards from Briceño, accompanied by a note written in blood, he was horrified and parted com­pany with him. In fact, he reported the insane intentions of this man to Congress, since they struck him as unmilitary and unpolitic.” Simón Bolívar (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948), 174. Obviously, given his rhetorical and po­liti­cal aims, it was expedient for Flinter to ascribe all responsibility to Bolívar’s actions and ­orders, though he did not differ so greatly from the British commanders in Curaçao, who reported back to London in a similar vein in 1813 and 1814. 44. History of the Revolution of Caracas, 58–59. 45. Ibid., 90. 46. Ibid., 137. 47. Ibid., 86. 48. Ibid., 146. 49. Ibid., 148–49. 50. Ibid., 178–79.



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51. Bibiano Torres Ramírez, Alejandro O’Reilly en las Indias (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-­A mericanos, 1969), 5. 52. “Memoria de D. Alexandro O’Reilly a S. M. sobre la Isla de Puerto Rico, en 1765,” Boletín Histórico de Puerto Rico 8 (1921): 114. 53. On Spanish checks on the transatlantic slave trade, see Josep M. Delgado Ribas, “The Slave Trade in the Spanish Empire (1501–1808): The Shift from Periphery to Center,” in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, ed. Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-­ Nowara (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 13–42. 54. Flinter, An Account of the Pres­ent State of the Island of Puerto Rico. On the changes to the island’s economy and social structure, see Francisco Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). 55. See the splendid biography by Martin Murphy, Blanco White: Self-­Banished Spaniard (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 56. See Murphy, Blanco White, chs. 5–7. And on Spanish intransigence during the revolutionary era, see Stein and Stein, Crisis in an Atlantic Empire. 57. Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos y reflexiones sobre este tráfico considerado moral, política, y cristianamente (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1814). On the complicated negotiations that resulted in the 1817 treaty, which Spain would circumvent for the next five de­cades, see David Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 58. I explore Blanco White’s translation and rewriting in “Wilberforce Spanished: Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–1814,” in Fradera and Schmidt-­Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 158–75. 59. This last point was articulated more fully by another of the Spanish antislavery writers of the revolutionary period, Isidoro de Antillón, with whom Blanco White collaborated before fleeing Spain in 1810. See Antillón’s Disertación sobre el origen de la esclavitud de los negros, motivos que la han perpetuado, ventajas que se le atribuyen y medios que podrían adoptarse para hacer prosperar nuestras colonias sin la esclavitud de los negros (Mallorca: Imprenta de M. Domingo, 1811). 60. A Portuguese edition of the Bosquexo was published in 1821 to influence Portuguese and Brazilian opinion during the Portuguese revolution. Bosquéjo sobre o Commercio em Escravos, e reflexões sobre este trafico considerado moral, politica e christamente (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1821). 61. See Schmidt-­Nowara, “Continental Origins of Insular Proslavery”; Rafael Marquese and Tâmis Parron, “International escravista: A polítca da Segunda Escravidão,” Topoi 12 (July–­ December  2011): 97–117; and Dale Tomich, ed., The Politics of the Second Slavery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016).

chapter 7 1. On t­hese overlapping contexts, see Rafe Blaufarb, “The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American In­de­pen­dence,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 742–63; Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. 95–96; Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), ch. 6.

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2. On how the cooperation of the planter class was essential to the success of in­de­pen­ dence movements, see Woody Holton, Forced Found­ers: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in V ­ irginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Dev­il’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 219–32; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Ca­rib­be­an (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). On how overthrowing the planter class could be essential to revolution, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. 91–114. 3. Florida scholars have a long if inconsistent rec­ord of illustrating the “intimate connection” between the Spanish and Anglo worlds. See Rufus Kay Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 12 (December  1928): 325 (quote); Amy Turner Bushnell, “Borderland or Border-­Sea? Placing Early Florida,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (July 2003): 643–53; Robert Cassanello and Daniel S. Murphree, “The Epic of Greater Florida: Florida’s Global Past,” Florida Historical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (July 2005): 1–9. 4. Whites ruled in northeastern Florida, but natives dominated most of the peninsula. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 204, 214. On Afro-­Floridians during the second Spanish period (1784–1821), see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 5. This approach differs from how historians have viewed allegiance in American borderlands. See Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Andrew McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). On the many pos­si­ble allegiances in the Gulf South, see Gene Allen Smith and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands, 1760s–1820s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). 6. The best biography of Clarke is Louise Biles Hill, “George J. F. Clarke, 1774–1836,” Florida Historical Quarterly 21 (1943); see 204–7 on his parents and siblings. On the centrality of intimate and familial bonds in Atlantic empires, see Julie Hardwick, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, and Karin Wulf, “Introduction: Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” William and Mary Quarterly 70 (April 2013): 205–24; Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 7. Paul E. Hoffman, Florida’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 245. 8. Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 46, 56–58. For another Floridian whose ­family thrived through t­ hese pursuits, see Susan R. Parker, “Success Through Diversification: Francis Philip Fatio’s New Switzerland Plantation,” in Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, ed. Jane Landers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 69–82. 9. On Clarke’s economic pursuits and official positions, see Hill, “George J. F. Clarke,” 197–98, 213–14, 217–18, 221–22; Jorge Clarke to Governor, Ysla Amelia, April 15, 1809, bundle 178L17, sect. 43, 133–38, reel 76, East Florida Papers, Library of Congress [EFP]; Clarke to Governor, Fernandina, April 19, 1814, bundle 178L17, sect. 43, 133–38, reel 76, EFP, 175–76.



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10. Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish Amer­i­ca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Sylvia L. Hilton, “Loyalty and Patriotism on North American Frontiers: Being and Becoming Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 1776, 1803,” in Smith and Hilton, Nexus of Empire, 19–25. 11. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 2–3, 7–28, 163. The classic work on the relative leniency of slavery in Spanish Amer­i­ca compared with Anglo Amer­i­ca is Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Amer­i­cas (New York: Knopf, 1946). 12. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 242; Hill, “George J. F. Clarke,” 211. 13. “The Last W ­ ill and Testament of George J. F. Clarke, Esq.,” August 28, 1834, 1, 2, 9, 11, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida [PKY]. 14. My thoughts ­here are inspired by Annette Gordon-­Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American ­Family (New York: Norton, 2008), esp. 106–8, 316 (quote), 353–55, 364; and Trevor G. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-­Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 7, 28–29, 211, 238. 15. “A Native Floridian [Clarke],” East Florida Herald, January 4, 1823, vol. 1, no. 19, MF 4481, Library of Congress Newspapers [LCN]. 16. Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. et al., “Memorial to Congress by Citizens of the Territory of Florida (1833),” in Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley, ed. Daniel Stowell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 84. On Kingsley, see Daniel L. Schafer, Zephaniah Kingsley  Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013). 17. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 242–43. 18. For example, George Clarke claimed that he could rally fifty whites and fifty blacks to defend Fernandina in 1812. James G. Cusick, The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 114. See also Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 230. 19. See Gabriel Paquette, “The Dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy,” Historical Journal 52 (March 2009): 179–80. 20. Quote is from “Testimony of George Clark [sic],” in United States Appellants vs. Francis P. Ferreira, Administrator of Francis Pass, Deceased, Supreme Court of the United States No. 197, Senate Misc. Documents No. 55, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, DC, 1860), 18. On Mathews’s efforts to win the support of McIntosh and other landed powerbrokers, see Rufus Kay Wyllys, “The East Florida Revolution of 1812–1814,” Hispanic American Historical Review 9 (November 1929): 425–27; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 1, 31, 58–63, 74–75. 21. George J. F. Clarke to O’Reilley, Fernandina, March 19, 1812, reproduced in “The Surrender of Amelia, March, 1812,” Florida Historical Society Quarterly 4 (October 1925): 90. 22. Quote is from Jorge Clarke to Dn. Juan José de Estrada, Fernandina, July 7, 1812, bundle 198C16, 234, EFP; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 134, 212, 246. 23. Henry Yonge to Gov., Saint Marks Fort, Saint Augustine, March 22, 1812, bundle 198C16, 223, EFP (quote); Wyllys, “The East Florida Revolution,” 425, 429. 24. “The Patriot Constitution of 1812,” Florida Memory, http://­floridamemory​.­com​/­items​ /­show​/­264067​?­id​=­5. 25​.­Yonge to Gov., Saint Marks Fort, Saint Augustine, March 22, 1812, bundle 198C16, 224, EFP; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 61.

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26. Quotes from Clarke to O’Reilly, Fernandina, March 19, 1812, in “The Surrender of Amelia,” 92–94. See also “Testimony of George Clark [sic],” 19; Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 114–16, 125. 27. Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 202–3. 28. Jorge Clarke to Dn. Juan José de Estrada, Fernandina, July 7, 1812, bundle 198C16, 233–34, EFP. 29. Clarke to [Gov. Senastián Kindelán y O’Regan], Fernandina, January 31, 1813, [no page nos.] (quote); Clarke to [Gov. Kindelán], Fernandina, November 9, 1812, [no page nos.]; Clarke to [Gov. Kindelán], Fernandina, July 28, 1812, 368–69; Clarke to [Gov. Kindelán], Fernandina, September 21, 1812, [no page nos.]; all in bundle 198C16, EFP. 30. Clarke to [Gov. Kindelán], Fernandina, October 25, 1812, [no page nos.], bundle 198C16, EFP. 31. Clarke to Estrada, Fernandina, July 11, 1812, 347, bundle 198C16, EFP. 32. Clarke to Gov. Henry White, Broadaway’s Camp, St. Mary’s River, January 7, 1811, 111–12, bundle 198C16, EFP. See also “Testimony of George Clark [sic],” 17; Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island,” 299. 33. Clarke to [Gov. Kindelán], Fernandina, December 5, 1812, [no page nos.], bundle 198C16, EFP. See also Henry Yonge to Gov., St. Marks Fort, St. Augustine, March 22, 1812, 221, 223, 225, bundle 198C16, EFP; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 110–19. 34. McIntosh to Monroe, July 30, 1812, quoted in Cusick, The Other War of 1812, 213. 35. On the importance of black and Indian fighters to ousting the Patriots, see Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 112–19. 36. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “The Emancipation of Amer­i­ca,” American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 144. 37. Clarke to [Kindelán], Fernandina, December 14, 1812, [no page nos.], bundle 198C16, EFP (quote). On Clarke’s translation, see Clarke to [Kindelán], Fernandina, April 11, 1813, [no page nos.], bundle 198C16, EFP. 38. Herzog, Defining Nations, 159. 39. Kindelán to Apodaca, June 13, 1813, quoted in D. C. Corbitt, “The Return of Spanish Rule to the St. Marys and St. Johns, 1813 to 1821,” Florida Historical Quarterly 20 (July 1941): 56; Cusick, Other War of 1812, 270. 40. Corbitt, “The Return of Spanish Rule,” esp. 49–50, 53–56, 59; Rodríguez O., “The Emancipation of Amer­i­ca,” 147. 41. Clarke to Capt. John R. Bell, Saint Augustine, July 25, 1821, in “George I. F. Clarke,” ed. Seton Flemming, Florida Historical Society Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1925): 32–35. See also Hill, “George J. F. Clarke,” 197, 226–30; Frank Lawrence Owsley and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 1800–1821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 120–21. 42. Blaufarb, “The Western Question,” 743, 750–54. On a similar Anglo revolutionary, see Chapter 6 in this volume. 43. Quoted in L. David Norris, “Failure Unfolds: The Loss of Amelia Island,” in La República de Las Floridas: Texts and Documents, ed. David Bushnell (Mexico City: Pan American Institute of Geography and History, 1986), 23 (quote); Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth, 195; Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island,” 297–303; Owsley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 121–27. 44. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, 131–35; Blaufarb, “The Western Question,” 752–53.



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45. Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island”; Landers, Atlantic Creoles, 131–35; Karen Racine, “Fireworks over Fernandina: The Atlantic Dimensions of the Amelia Island Episode, 1817,” in La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence, ed. Viviana Díaz Balsera and Rachel A. May (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 192–208. 46. MacGregor, “Proclamation,” June 30, 1817, quoted in Norris, “Failure Unfolds,” 22; Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island,” 304. 47. “Declaration of Martial law by Louis Aury,” from Niles Register 13:207, reproduced in Bushnell, La República de Las Floridas, 61. On Aury’s and MacGregor’s idealism as revolutionaries, see Racine, “Fireworks over Fernandina,” 178–82. 48. Norris, “Failure Unfolds,” 23; Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island,” 304, 314; Owsley and Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists, 128; Clarke to O’Reilley, Fernandina, March 19, 1812, in “The Surrender of Amelia,” 37. 49. Clarke to Governor José Coppinger, Pueblo de Sta. Maria, July  6, 1817, bundle 151H12, sect. 32, 422, reel 63, EFP (quote); Hill, “George J. F. Clarke,” 231; Norris, “Failure Unfolds,” 25. 50. Clarke to Capt. John R. Bell, Saint Augustine, July 25, 1821, in “George I. F. Clarke,” 37. 51. Tomás Llorente to Coppinger, September 15, 1817, bundle 151H12, sect. 32, reel 63, EFP, quoted in Norris, “Failure Unfolds,” 31. 52. Clarke to Governor José Coppinger, Pueblo de Sta. Maria, July 6, 1817, bundle 151H12, sect. 32, 422, reel 63, EFP (quote); see also Clarke to Coppinger, Sta. Maria, August  13, 1817, 473–76, bundle 151H12, sect. 32, 422, reel 63, EFP; Clarke to Coppinger, Sta. Maria, September 4, 1817, 539–42, bundle 151H12, sect. 32, 422, reel 63, EFP; Clarke to Coppinger, Rio de Sta. Maria, October 5, 1817, 641–643, bundle 151H12, sect. 32, 422, reel 63, EFP . 53. For Aury, this occupation was clear evidence of U.S. leaders’ hy­poc­risy, imperialism, and betrayal of the revolutionary cause they had sparked. Wyllys, “The Filibusters of Amelia Island,” 317–19. 54. Coppinger to Antonio Argote Villalobos, St. Augustine, June 1, 1818, bundle 107C9, sect. 26, 11:971, reel 41, EFP (quote); Clarke to Coppinger, Sta. Maria, May 18, 1818, bundle 107C9, sect. 26, 11:961–62, reel 41, EFP; Clarke to Coppinger, Santa Maria, June 15, 1818, bundle 107C9, sect. 26, 11:613, reel 41, EFP. 55. [Dialogue between Clarke and Capt. Payne], in Clarke to Coppinger, October 19, 1818, bundle 107C9, sect. 26, 11:657–58, reel. 41, EFP. 56. Titian Ramsey Peale, “A Visit to Florida in the Early Part of the C ­ entury,” Titian R. Peale Collection: Florida Expedition, Coll. 55, 4, Acad­emy of Natu­ral Sciences of Philadelphia. 57. Thomas Say to John Melzheimer, Philadelphia, June 10, 1818, Thomas Say to J. Melzheimer Letters, 1813–1825, Coll. 113, Acad­emy of Natu­ral Sciences of Philadelphia. 58. From a Native Floridian, Florida Herald, August 5, 1826, vol. 4, no. 46, quoted in Hill, “George J. F. Clarke,” 242. 59. Clarke to Capt. John R. Bell, Saint Augustine, July 25, 1821, in “George I. F. Clarke,” 39. 60. George I. F. [sic] Clarke to John Low, “Circular to the Officers and P ­ eople of the Northern Division of East Florida, St. Mary’s, Florida, 13th August, 1821,” in “George I. F. Clarke,” 40. 61. Clarke to John Q. Adams, Charleston, SC, May 1, 1823, in “A Letter of G. I. F. Clarke’s Relating to Port St.  Joseph, East Florida,” Florida Historical Society Quarterly 5, no.  1 (1926): 52.

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62. James G. Forbes, Sketches, Historical and Topographical, of the Floridas: More Particularly of East Florida (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1821), 125. 63. [Clarke], “From a Native Floridian, no. IX,” East Florida Herald, November 1, 1823, vol. 2, no. 10, Microfilm AN2 F6 S2 G39, University of Florida Libraries [UF]; “From a Native Floridian, no. XI,” November 15, 1823, vol. 2, no. 12, Microfilm AN2 F6 S2 G39, UF; Hill, “George J. F. Clarke,” 236–42; “Committee of the Agricultural Society of East Florida,” East Florida Herald, July 3, 1824, vol. 2, no. 45, Microfilm 4481, LCN; James Gadsden, Oration Delivered to the Florida Institute of Agriculture, Antiquities and Science, at Its First Public Anniversary (Tallahassee: Office of the Florida Intelligencer, 1827), 8. 64. “From a Native Floridian, no. III,” East Florida Herald, September 13, 1823, vol. 2, no. 3, Microfilm AN2 F6 S2 G39, UF (“floating garden”); “From a Native Floridian, no. XI,” East Florida Herald, November 15, 1823, vol. 2, no. 12, Microfilm AN2 F6 S2 G39, UF (“Havana cigar” and “pulque”). 65. “From a Native Floridian, no. III,” East Florida Herald, September 13, 1823, vol. 2, no. 3, Microfilm AN2 F6 S2 G39, UF. 66. “From a Native Floridian, no. XIII,” East Florida Herald, December 6, 1823, vol. 2, no. 15, Microfilm AN2 F6 S2 G39, UF; Clarke, “A Penny Weight of Preventative Is Worth a Pound of Remedy, Concluded,” East Florida Herald, November 29, 1823, vol. 2, no. 14, Microfilm 4481, LCN. 67. Clarke, “A Penny Weight.” 68. Clarke to Capt. John R. Bell, St. Mark’s, August 15, 1821, MS 00,460, PKY. On philanthropists, see Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction; Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973). 69. “From the MS of the late George I. F. [sic] Clarke, St. Mary’s, E. Florida, July 1st, 1822, no. 1,” Florida Herald, October 6, 1838, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, University of Florida Digital Collections, www​.­u fdc​.­u fl​.­e du; “From the MS of the late George  I. F. Clarke, July 1st, 1822, no. 2,” Florida Herald, October 13, 1838, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, University of Florida Digital Collections, www​.­ufdc​.­u fl​.­edu; “From the MS of the late George I. F. Clarke, July 1st 1822, no. 3,” Florida Herald, October 25, 1838, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, University of Florida Digital Collections, www​.­ufdc​.­u fl​.­edu. 70​.­“From the MS of the late George I. F. Clarke, July 1st 1822, no. 7,” Florida Herald and Southern Demo­crat, November 29, 1838, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, University of Florida Digital Collections, www​.­u fdc​.­u fl​.­edu; “From the MS of the late George  I. F. Clarke, July  1st  1822, no.  6,” Florida Herald and Southern Demo­crat, November  15, 1838, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, University of Florida Digital Collections, www​.­u fdc​ .­u fl​.­edu. 71​.­“From the MS of the late George I. F. Clarke, July 1st 1822, no. 7,” Florida Herald and Southern Demo­crat, November 22, 1838, Florida Digital Newspaper Library, University of Florida Digital Collections, www​.­ufdc​.­u fl​.­edu. 72​.­George I. F. [sic] Clarke, quoted in Charles Vignoles, Observations upon the Floridas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1977 [1823]), 137 (quote); Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., “A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-­Operative, System of Society,” in Stowell, Balancing Evils Judiciously. 73. For one Floridian influenced by Clarke, see John C. Richard, “Notes and Observations upon the Pres­ent Condition of Florida” [1843], 14–15, Florida Miscellaneous Manuscripts, PKY. On the importation of Anglo-­A merican ideas about race, see Edward  E. Baptist,



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Creating an Old South: ­Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 74. Florida’s significance in imperial entanglements has been a sticking point in recent debates. Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the Anglo-­A merican Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (December 2007): esp. 1416, 1419. 75. Compare with Thomas F. Glick, “Science and In­de­pen­dence in Latin Amer­i­ca (with Special Reference to New Granada),” Hispanic American Historical Review 71 (May  1991): 307–34; I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding ­Fathers: Science in the Po­liti­cal Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Madison (New York: Norton, 1995). 76. Compare with George Reid Andrews, Afro-­Latin Amer­i­ca, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. 49–50; John Lynch, “The Origins of Spanish American In­de­pen­dence,” in The In­de­pen­dence of Latin Amer­i­ca, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. 44–47; Lester D. Langley, The Amer­i­cas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 5, 157; McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties. 77. Compare with D. A. Brading, The First Amer­i­ca: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Rodríguez O., “The Emancipation of Amer­i­ca,” 138–39. 78. Compare with O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided. 79. Compare with Richard Graham, In­de­pen­dence in Latin Amer­i­ca: A Comparative Approach (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1994), esp. 62–66. 80. See Romney, New Netherland Connections. 81. On how borderland familial relationships could differ from ­t hose in more thoroughly conquered spaces, see James F. Brooks, Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

chapter 8 This chapter was first published in Spanish in Discursos de conquista y colonización al sur y al norte de América, ed. Francisco Castilla Urbano (Alcala de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, 2014). It was translated by Chloe Ireton. The author also benefited from comments by Brad Dixon for the En­glish version. 1. For a biography of Winthrop, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, 2nd ed. (New York: Library of American Biography, 1999). For the context of the failures of colonization in ­Virginia, see Karen Kupperman, The Jamestown Proj­ect (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). The early history of Plymouth is eloquently described by Nathaniel Philbrick in Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War (New York: Penguin, 2006). 2. See Morgan, Puritan Dilemma. 3. About En­g lish theories of sovereignty and dominium in Amer­i­c a, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ruth Barnes Moyniham, “The Patent and the Indians: The Prob­lem of Jurisdiction in Seventeenth- ­C entury New ­England,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2 (1977): 8–18; Wilcom E. Washburn, “The Moral and ­L egal Justification for Dispossessing the Indian,” Seventeenth-­Century Amer­i­ca: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton

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Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 15–32; Chester E. Eisinger, “The Puritans’ Justification for Taking the Land, Essex Institute Historical Collections 84 (148): 131–43. 4. My analy­sis of Williams and his radical separation of the spiritual and temporal sovereignties is based on the work of Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). Morgan explores Williams’s ideas about the radical separation of sovereignties in order to explain where Williams’s theories on religious tolerance and governance originated from, but he does not explore the relationship of t­hese themes to Williams’s debates about the justification of dominium and sovereignty in the colonization of Amer­i­c a. He repeatedly signals that Williams introduced radical visions of the state and religion but does not explore t­hese in any detail with regards to the consequences of such thoughts on the debates about colonial expansion, and he certainly does not connect t­ hese to the Hispanic debates of the sixteenth ­century. See, for example, the recent book by John M. Berry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Penguin, 2012). About the theories of papal spiritual sovereignty and royal temporal sovereignty and its impact on Hispanic debates about colonization, see the works of James Muldoon, Canon Law, the Expansion of Eu­rope, and World Order (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998) and The Amer­i­cas in the Spanish World Order:  The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth C ­ entury (Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 5. I use the facsimile version published in George Cheever, ed., The Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in New ­England, in 1620: Reprinted from the Original Volume (New York: John Wiley: New York, 1848). 6. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 6–11. 7. In 1613–14 in ­Virginia, Ralph Hamor talks about how the Chickahominy Indians submitted to the crown and became “king James’s noblemen.” Ralph Hamor, A true discourse of the pres­ent estate of V ­ irginia, and the successe of the affaires t­ here till the 18 of Iune 1614 (London: John Beale, 1615), 11–4. 8. “First the Imperial Gouemor Massasoit whose cir­cuits in likelihood are larger then ­England and Scotland, hath acknowledged the Kings Maiestie of E ­ ngland to be his Master and Commander, and that once in my hearing, yea and in writing, vnder his hand to Captaine Standish, both he and many other Kings which are vnder him, as Pamet, Nauset, Cummaquid, Narrowhiggonset, Namaschet, with diuers o­ thers that dwell about the baies of Fatuxet, and Massachuscl” (Cheever, Journal of the Pilgrims 104–5). 9. Ibid., 105. 10. I use the version of the manuscript Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation that belonged to and was annotated by Winthrop’s colleague, Sir John Eliot, and which was published in Proceedings of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Society 8 (1864–65): 417–30. 11. “­There ­were g­ reat and fundamentall errors in the former which are like to be avoyded in this, for first their maine end was Carnall & not Religious, secondly they used unfitt instruments a multitude of rude & misgov’ned psons, the very scumme of the p ­ eople, thirdly they did not establish a right forme of government” (Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation, 424). 12. “First, It ­will be a ser­vice to the Church of ­great consequence to carry the Gospell into ­t hose parts of the world, to help on the cominge in of fulnesse of the Gentiles and to rayse



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a Bulworke against the kingdome of Antichrist, which the Jesuites ­labour to rear up in ­t hose parts” (Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation, 420). 13. Ibid., 420. 14. Winthrop first uses references to Genesis to justify colonization: “Increase & multiply, replenish the earth & subdue it, which was againe renewed to Noah, the end is Double morall & naturall that man might injoy the fruites of the earth & god might have his due glory from the creature, why then should we stand hear striveing for places of habitation, (many men spending as much labo’ & cost to recover or keep somtymes a Acre or two of land as would p[ro]cure them many hundred as good or better in an other country) and in ye mean tyme suifer a w ­ hole Continent, as fruitfull & con­ve­nient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement” (Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation, 421). Once he establishes the general Deuteronomical right to occupy “empty” territory, then he identifies New ­England as the empty land he had in mind: “And for the Natives in New ­England they inclose noe land neither have any setled habitation nor any tame ­cattle to improve tlie land by, & soe have noe other but a natu­ral right to ­t hose countries Soe as if wee leave them sufficient for their use wee may lawfully take the rest, t­ here being more then enough or them & us” (ibid., 424). 15. I follow Cotton’s text, Gods Promise to His Plantation (London: William Jones and John Bellamy, 1630). 16. “First, if soveraigne Authority command and encourage such Plantations by giving way to subjects to transplant themselves, and set up a new Commonwealth” (Gods Promise to His Plantation, 11). 17. “To exhort all that are planted at home, or intend to plant abroad, to looke well to your plantation, as you desire that the sonnes of wickednesse may not afflict you at home, nor enemies abroad, looke that you be right planted, and then you neede not to feare, you are safe enough: God hath spoken it, I ­will plant them, and they ­shall not be moved, neither ­shall the onnes of wickednesse afflict them any more” (ibid., 17). 18. “Sixthly, and lastly, offend not the poore Natives, but as you partake in their land, so make them partakers of your precious faith: as you reape their temporalls, so feede them with your spiritualls: winne them to the love of Christ, for whom Christ died. They never yet refused the Gospell, and therefore more hope they ­will now receive it. Who knoweth ­whether God have reared this w ­ hole Plantation for such an end?” (ibid., 19–20). 19. John White, The Planters Plea or Grounds of Plantations Examined and Usual Objections Answered (London: William Jones, 1630). 20. “Shifting into empty Lands, enforce men to frugalitie, and quickneth invention: and the setling of new States require justice and affection to the common good: and the taking of large Countryes Pres­ents a natu­ral remedy against: couetousnesse, fraud, and vio­lence; when ­every man may enjoy enough without wrong or injury to his neighbor. Whence it was, that first ages, by t­ hese helpes, w ­ ere renowned for golden times, wherein men, being newly entred into their possessions, and entertained into naked soile, and enforced thereby to l­abor, frugality, slimplicity, and justice” (White, The Planters Plea, 4–5). 21. “And, although I dare not enter so farr into Gods secrets, as to affirme, that he avenged the neglect of this duty by Warres, Pestilences and Famines: which u ­ nless they had wasted the ­people of t­ hese parts of this word, wee should ere this, have devoured one another” (ibid., 7). 22. Ibid., 10. 23. Ibid., 15. 24. Ibid., 53.

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25. “Unlesse God should worke by miracle; neither can it be expected that worke should take effect untill we may be more perfectly acquainted with their language, and they with ours. Indeede it is true, both the Natives and En­glish understand so much of one anothers language, as may enable them to trade one with another, and fit them for conference about ­t hings that are subject to outward sense” (ibid., 52). 26. Morgan, Roger Williams. 27. Moyniham, “The Patent and the Indians.”

chapter 9 1. Robert Daniell to the Board of Trade, August 13, 1716, Colonial Office [CO] 5/1265, f. 94a, National Archives, Kew, UK. 2. Ibid. 3. Direct Spanish instigation of the war was unlikely. See Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 130–31. 4. Jose Miguel Gallardo, “The Spaniards and the En­glish Settlement in Charles Town,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 37, no. 2 (April 1936): 50n2. 5. Jerald T. Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 128. 6. For recent interpretations of the origins of the SPG, see Brent S. Sirota, The Christian Monitors: The Church of ­England and the Age of Benevolence, 1680–1730 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Travis Glasson, Mastering Chris­tian­ity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7. The Spanish missions ­were arguably of greatest influence on early Carolinians and caught the attention of more than a few SPG officials. For a consideration of both the Jesuit influence and the “legacy of the Franciscans,” see Oatis, A Colonial Complex, 91–95. 8. John Oldmixon, “History of the British Empire,” in Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708, ed. A. S. Salley (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1911), 364. 9. Sebastian van der Eyken, the clerk and a reader in the “Dutch Congregation, in her Majesties’ Royal Palace at St. James,” handled a good deal of the work and printed the Testaments out of his own pocket. See Petition of Sebastian van der Eyken, in Microfilm Publication of the Papers of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in the Lambeth Palace Library, 1701–1750, vol. 8, Correspondence: British Isles, July 1707–­undated, p. 245. 10. “Comry Johnston to the Secry, 27th Janry 1710/11,” in Carolina Chronicle: The Papers of Commissary Gideon Johnston, 1707–1716 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), 82. 11. For more, see Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 143–47. 12. “Extract of Col. Moore’s Letter to the Lords Proprietors 16 April 1704,” from John H. Hann, Apalachee: The Land Between the Two Rivers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 386. Vari­ous versions of Moore’s letters to the Lords Proprietors and to Sir Nathaniel Johnson exist. See Appendix 12 in Hann, Apalachee, 385–97. 13. Hann, Apalachee, 294; William L. Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 110–11.



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14. Steven J. Oatis cites complaints about the l­abor draft, abuses by Spanish soldiers and friars, and encroaching Spanish livestock traders. Oatis, A Colonial Complex, 48; Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the En­glish Empire in the South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 146–47; Hann, Apalachee, chap. 13. The land surveyor and traveler John Lawson described the South Carolinians as “absolute masters over the Indians” some of whom had once “groan’d u ­ nder the Spanish Yoke.” John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina, ed. Hugh T. Lefler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 10. 15. Le Jau to the Secretary, April 22, 1708, in Francis Le Jau, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, 1706–1717, ed. Frank M. Klingberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 39. 16. Ibid. 17. Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (New York: American Museum of Natu­ral History, 1994), 43–48. 18. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Ruling the ‘Republic of Indians’ in Seventeenth-­Century Florida,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2006), 201. 19. Ibid., 200. 20. Bushnell, Situado and Sabana, 31. 21. John H. Hann, “The Apalachee of the Historic Era,” in The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Eu­ro­pe­ans in the American South, 1521–1704, ed. Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 346. 22. Bushnell, “Ruling,” 205. 23. Le Jau to the Secretary, April 22, 1708, in Le Jau, Carolina Chronicle, 39. 24. Robert C. Galgano, Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-­Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 93–94. 25. Hann, “Apalachee,” 339. 26. Ibid., 340. 27. Ibid., 342–43. 28. From Thomas Nairne’s Memorial to Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, July 10, 1708, in Alexander Moore, ed., Nairne’s Muskogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 77. 29. Robert Sanford, in “A Relation of a Voyage on the Coast of the Province of Carolina, 1666, by Robert Sanford,” in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, 105–6. 30. William Owen to Lord Ashley, September 15, 1671, “Shaftesbury Papers,” Public Rec­ ord Office [PRO] 30/24/48, no. 37, 100, National Archives. 31. For the proprietors’ early efforts at incorporation and toleration and their failures, see Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 44–45. 32. Instructions from the Lords Proprietors of Carolina to William Sayle, Governor, July 27, 1669, W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, Amer­i­ca and West Indies, 1669–1674 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), 33, and CO 5/286, pp. 43–46, National Archives; see also the discussion about the proprietors’ Indian policy in Barbara Arneil, John Locke and Amer­i­ca: The Defence of En­glish Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 127. 33. Barbara Arneil, for instance, contrasted Spanish claims based on conquest with the proprietors’ methods in Carolina. See Arneil, John Locke and Amer­i­ca, 121; Amy Turner

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Bushnell, “ ‘­These ­People Are Not Conquered like Th ­ ose of New Spain’: Florida’s Reciprocal Colonial Compact,” Florida Historical Quarterly 92 (Winter 2014): 551. 34. Ibid. 35. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (London: 1670), 21. 36. Ibid. 37. David Armitage has argued that the En­glish turned to the “agriculturist argument” for dispossession as a result. See David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97–98, and “John Locke, Carolina, and the ‘Two Treatises of Government,’ ” Po­liti­cal Theory 32 (October 2004): 618–19. 38. James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of Amer­i­ca (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 71. 39. Maurice Mathews to Lord Ashley, August  30, 1671, “Shaftesbury Papers,” PRO 30/24/48, no. 75, f. 44b, National Archives. 40. Lord Ashley to Maurice Mathews, June  20, 1672, “Shaftesbury Papers,” PRO 30/24/48/55, pp. 110–11, National Archives. In time, Mathews would gain an unsavory reputation; one of his contemporaries described him as a combination of “Metchivell Hobs and Lucifer in a Huge lump of Viperish mortality [with] a soull as big as a musketo”; J. G. Dunlop and Mabel L. Webber, “Letters from John Stewart to William Dunlop (Continued),” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 32, no. 2 (April 1931): 114. 41. Shaftesbury to Stephen Bull, August 19, 1673, “Shaftesbury Papers,” PRO 30/24/48/55, p. 136, National Archives. 42. Ibid. 43. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 176. 44. See Instructions to Governor Joseph Morton, May 10, 1682, CO 5/287, f. 2a, National Archives. 45. Peter H. Wood, “Archdale, John (1642–1717),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​.­e zproxy​.­lib​.­utexas​.­edu ​/­view​ /­article​/­615 (accessed October 16, 2014); William S. Powell, The Proprietors of Carolina (Raleigh: Carolina Charter Tercentenary Commission, 1963), 51–52. 46. Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732, with a new preface by Peter H. Wood (1928; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 37–38. 47. John Archdale, A New Description of That Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina (London, 1707), 19. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 20. For more on Jews in proprietary South Carolina, see Theodore Rosengarten and Dale Rosengarten, eds., A Portion of the ­People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press), 76; Richard Gergel and Belinda Gergel, “ ‘A Bright New Era Now Dawns upon Us’: Jewish Economic Opportunities, Religious Freedom, and Po­liti­cal Rights in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina,” in The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina, ed. James Lowell Underwood and W. Lewis Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 98–99. 50. Laureano de Torres y Ayala to John Archdale, January 24, 1696, Document 10, John Archdale Papers, Colonial Governors’ Papers, CGP 1, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. 51. John Archdale to Laureano de Torres y Ayala, April 4, 1696, Document 12, John Archdale Papers, Colonial Governors’ Papers, CGP 1, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. 52. Ibid.



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53. Ibid. 54. Archdale, A New Description of Carolina, 19. 55. Ibid., 21. 56. Ibid., 3. 57. Alonso de Leturiondo, “Translation of Alonso de Leturiondo’s Memorial to the King of Spain,” trans. John H. Hann, Florida Archaeology, no. 2 (1986): 176. 58. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 318. 59. S.C. Commons House Journal, November 21, 1712, S.C.H.C., Commons House Journals, 1712–16, no. 4, 113, in Rec­ords of the States of the United States of Amer­i­ca: A Microfilm Compilation, ed. William Sumner Jenkins (Washington, DC: Library of Congress Photoduplication Ser­vice, 1949), South Carolina A1b, reel 1, unit 4. 60. John Oldmixon, “History,” in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, 344. 61. Oatis, A Colonial Complex, 25 and 47. 62. Le Jau to the Secretary, April 22, 1708, in Le Jau, Carolina Chronicle, 39. 63. Johnston to the Secretary, January 27, 1711–12, in Johnston, Carolina Chronicle, 82. 64. Leturiondo, “Translation,” 175. 65. Ibid., 176. 66. “14. Governor Zuñiga to the King. Upon the raid into Santa Fe and the expedition upon which Captain Romo was sent. San Augustín, September 30, 1702,” in H ­ ere They Once Stood: The Tragic End of the Apalachee Missions, ed. Mark F. Boyd, Hale G. Smith, and John W. Griffin (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1951), 38. 67. See Frank J. Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education in South Carolina, a Documentary,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 61, no. 1 (January 1960): 2–4; see also discussion in Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 230–31. 68. See Moore, Muskogean Journals, 1–31; William L. Anderson, “Nairne, Thomas (c. 1672– 1715),” in Colonial Wars of North Amer­i­ca, 1512–1763: An Encyclopedia, ed. Alan Gallay (New York: Garland, 1996), 467–68. 69. Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 2. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 3. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 2. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 3. 77. See “44. Col­o­nel Moore’s Letter to Sir Nathaniel Johnson, 16 April 1704 [This date is improbable.],” in Boyd, Smith, and Griffin, ­Here They Once Stood, 92. 78. Klingberg, “Early Attempts at Indian Education,” 3. 79. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 231. 80. A. S. Salley, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, June 5, 1707– ­July 19, 1707 (Columbia, SC: State Com­pany, 1940), 79. 81. A. S. Salley, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, November  20, 1706–­February  8, 1706/7 (Columbia, SC: State Com­pany, 1939), 22–23. Apalachee complaints also reached the newly established Board of Commissioners of the Indian Trade. W. L. McDowell, ed., Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, September  20, 1710–­August 29, 1718 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1955), 4.

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82. “Letter from the Governor & Council of Carolina,” September 17, 1708, CO 5/1264, no. 86, f. 155a, National Archives. 83. See Ramsey, Yamasee War, 110–11, and Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 148. 84. McDowell, Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, 4. 85. Ibid. 86. Hann, Apalachee, 232–33. 87. Moore, Muskogean Journals, 51. 88. Hann, Apalachee, 337. 89. John  H. Hann, trans., “Visitations and Revolts in Florida, 1656–1695,” Florida Archaeology, no. 7 (1993): 190. 90. See, for instance, the ­orders for Apalachee Province from the 1694 visitation in Hann, “Visitations and Revolts,” 190. 91. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade, 330–31. 92. Ibid., 333. 93. Oatis, A Colonial Complex, 55. 94. Ramsey, Yamasee War, 13. 95. Ibid., 16–17, 20–23, and 29. 96. Ibid., 20. 97. Hann, Apalachee, 42 and 103. 98. Bushnell, “Ruling,” 198. 99. Frank J. Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost Yamasee Prince,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 63, no. 1 (January 1962): 27. 100. Crane, Southern Frontier, 168–69. 101. Alexander Spotswood to Sec. Stanhope, May 27, 1715, CO 5/1264, no. 147.i, f. 293a, National Archives. 102. Le Jau to the Secretary, March 19, 1715/16, in Le Jau, Carolina Chronicle, 175. 103. Le Jau to the Secretary, May 14, 1715, in Le Jau, Carolina Chronicle, 155. 104. Quoted in Klingberg, “Yamasee Prince,” 27. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 29.

chapter 10 1. Sir Robert Southwell [?] to [Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham], March 23, 1688– 89, London, William Blathwayt Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, box 3. 2. Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-­Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 764–86. 3. The phrase derived from the 1559 Peace of Cateau-­Cambrésis between France and Spain, meant to hold only as far south and west as “lines of amity” established at the Tropic of Cancer and the prime meridian. Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The En­glish in the Ca­rib­bean, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 4. Nuala Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal, Jamaica, and Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1689,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43 (1986): 570–93; Zahedieh, “Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early En­glish Jamaica, 1655–1692,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (1986): 205–22; Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial



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Slave Trade of British Amer­i­ca, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 5. For estimates, see Zahedieh, “The Merchants of Port Royal,” 572. Among the numerous works on the asiento (prior to 1713), see especially G. Scelle, “The Slave-­Trade in the Spanish Colonies of Amer­i­ca: The Assiento,” American Journal of International Law 4 (1910): 612–61; Enriqueta Vila Vilar, Aspectos sociales en américa colonial: De extranjeros, contrabando y esclavos (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2001). 6. A Treaty for the Composing of Differences . . . ​and Establishing of Peace in Amer­i­ca between the Crowns of ­Great Britain and Spain: Concluded at Madrid the 8th/18 day of July . . . ​ 1670 (London: Assigns of John Bill and Christopher Barker, Printers to the King, 1670). Especially relevant are articles 8, 9, 10, and 15. For a discussion of Spanish officials’ interpretation of the treaty as preserving their right to control Ca­rib­bean ­waters outside En­glish shipping lanes, see Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 175–95, 280–84. 7. William Byam, Governor of Antigua, to William Lord Willoughby, Governor of Barbadoes, [1670], Colonial Office [CO] 1/25, no. 28, National Archives, Kew, UK. 8. “The Relation of Col­o­nel Beeston, his Voyage to Carthagena, for adjusting the Peace made in Spain, for the West-­Indies, &c.” in The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth Sharp and ­others, in the South Sea . . . ​and Col. Beeston’s Adjustment of the Peace between the Spaniards and En­glish in the West Indies, ed. Philip Ayres (London: R. H. and S. T., 1684), 160–72. Accessed in EEBO (Early En­glish Books Online). Hereafter cited as Beeston, “Voyage to Carthagena.” 9. Ayres appended the anonymous narrative description to a collection of piracy accounts that he published thirteen years ­a fter the event. 10. Both sides had v­ iolated the 1667 treaty, providing one of the reasons for the treaty’s renegotiation in 1670, explic­itly including the Amer­i­cas. For an account of Morgan’s attack, see Peter Earle, The Sack of Panamá: Captain Morgan and the B ­ attle for the Ca­rib­be­an (1981; repr., New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007). 11. Beeston, “Voyage to Carthagena,” 160. 12. Ibid., 162–63. 13. Ibid., 163–64. 14. Ibid., 164–65. 15. Ibid., 168–70. 16. Ibid., 165–66. Lynch received his commission January 15, 1671. For identification of Read, see Lieutenant Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to Sec. Lord Arlington, August 20, 1671, CO 1/27, no. 22, National Archives. For a discussion of what Jamaicans knew when, see Earle, The Sack of Panamá, 144–46. 17. For example, in negotiating a prisoner exchange, Beeston conceded to Spanish demands ­because he felt he had “to pacifie” Spanish officials angry over Morgan’s illegal attack. Beeston, “Voyage to Carthagena,” 166–67. 18. Ibid., 167–68. 19. For a description, see Jamaica Governor Thomas Lynch to Secretary of State Joseph Williamson, November 20, 1674, CO 1/31, no. 77, National Archives. 20. For Grillo, see Vila Vilar, Aspectos sociales; I[rene] A[loha] Wright, The Coymans Asiento (1685–1689) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924); Scelle, “Slave-­Trade”; Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21. Beeston, “Voyage to Carthagena,” 171.

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22. Ibid., 171–72. Beeston, who may have had to wait several years before he managed to sell enslaved Africans to Cartagena for coin or bullion, was, only six months a­ fter the Cartagena voyage, in Trinidad, Cuba, selling Africans and buying ­c attle. Richard Browne to Joseph Williamson, Port Royal, Jamaica, January  30, 1672, CO 1/33, no.  106a, National Archives. 23. Lieutenant Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to Sec. Lord Arlington, August 20, 1671, CO 1/27, no. 22, National Archives. Shortly a­ fter Beeston’s return to Port Royal, Governor Lynch sent a party to Santiago de Cuba on a similar mission. The twelve gentlemen he sent “­were 12 dayes nobly treated” but as in Cartagena proved unable to cement a formal commercial relationship between “the Governor and P ­ eople being at Variance” about trading with the En­glish. Sir Thomas Lynch to the Earl of Sandwich, President of the Council of Plantations, October 14, 1671, CO 1/27, no. 40, National Archives. 24. “Considerations about the Spaniards buying negroes of the En­glish Royal Com­pany,” February 2, 1675, Jamaica, CO 1/34, no. 5, National Archives. This document is anonymous but similar enough to Lynch’s ­later “Reflections” that he seems likely the author. 25. Ibid. He argued that if Spanish officials followed the reasoning of Jamaica’s planters, they could take heart that the slave trade would hinder Jamaica’s agricultural development by exporting the ­labor the planters demanded. 26. “Reflections on the state of the Spaniards and the island of Jamaica,” [by Sir Thomas Lynch], June 20, 1677, CO 1/40, no. 111, National Archives. 27. Charles II’s instructions to Lynch include the directive that he offer the privateers ­pardon to come in, but that if they refused, he was “to use all other meanes you ­shall judge necessary by force or persuasion to make them submitt.” See Instructions for Sir Thomas Lynch, Lieut. Governor of Jamaica, December 31, 1670, CO 1/25, no. 107, National Archives. Although issued the final day of 1670, Lynch acted on his instructions the following summer ­a fter his arrival in Jamaica. 28. Lieutenant-­Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to Secretary Lord Arlington, August 20, 1671, Jamaica, CO 1/27, no. 22, National Archives. 29. Sir Thomas Lynch to Sir Joseph Williamson, October 9, 1672, CO 1/29, no. 36, National Archives; and Proclamation of Sir Thomas Lynch, CO 1/29, no. 36iii, National Archives. 30. “A relation by Robert Hewytt of his voyage to Campeachy in his Majesty’s ser­vice, by order of Sir Thomas Lynch,” September 16, 1672, CO 1/29, no. 36i, National Archives. 31. Sir Thos. Lynch to Sec. Lord Arlington, December 25, 1671, CO 1/27, no. 66, National Archives; Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to the Governor of Havana, August 18, 1683, CO 1/52, no. 62, National Archives. 32. Richard Browne to Sir Joseph Williamson, Bristol, September 28, 1672, CO 1/29, no. 33, National Archives. 33. Sir Thomas Lynch to Sir Joseph Williamson, Jamaica, July 5, 1672, CO 1/29, no. 6, National Archives. 34. Richard Brown to Sir Joseph Williamson, Bristol, September 28, 1672, CO 1/29, no. 33, National Archives. 35. “A relation by Robert Hewytt.” 36. Don Fernando Franciso Escobedo, Governor of Campeachy, to Sir Thomas Lynch, April 6 1672, CO 1/29, no. 36ii, National Archives. 37. Sir Thomas Lynch to Sir Joseph Williamson, October 9, 1672, CO 1/29, no. 36, 36iii, National Archives.



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38. Peter Beckford to Sec. Sir Joseph Williamson, May 17, 1675, CO 1/34, no. 79, National Archives. 39. Lieutenant-­Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to Secretary Sir Joseph Williamson, Jamaica, November 20, 1674, CO 1/31, no. 77, National Archives. 40. See Order of the King in Council, July 14, 1675, CO 1/34, no. 117, National Archives; Petition of the Merchants and Freighters of the ship Virgin to the King and Council, August 4, 1675, CO 1/35, no. 1, National Archives; Petition of the Merchants and Freighters of the ship Thomas and Mary to the King in Council, August 4, 1675, CO 1/35, no. 2, National Archives. 41. Sir William Godolphin to the Lord Privy Seal, August 7–17, 1675, CO 1/35, no. 5, 5i, National Archives. 42. Sir Wm Godolphin to James Littleton, Madrid, August 7–17, 1675, CO 1/35, no. 10, National Archives. 43. Minutes of Committee for Trade and Plantations, March 5, 1673–74; Enclosure to Petition of Thomas Jarvis, et al., February 27, 1674, CO 1/31, no. 12, 12iii, National Archives. 44. Perhaps this was the same logwood cutting ship that provoked the previous conflict. 45. Gov. Sir Jonathan Atkins to Sec. Sir Joseph Williamson, November 4–14, 1675, CO 1/35, no. 41, National Archives. 46. “Reflections on the state of the Spaniards and the island of Jamaica” [by Sir Thomas Lynch], June 20, 1677, CO 1/40, no. 111, National Archives. 47. The King to Jamaica Governor Lord Vaughan, August 23, 1675, CO 389/6, p. 69, 70, National Archives. For a debate over the efficacy of the prohibition, see Journal of Lords of Trade and Plantations, November 13, 1677, CO 391/2, 154, National Archives. 48. Governor Lord Carlisle to Lords of Trade and Plantations, November 23, 1679, CO 1/43, no. 157, National Archives. 49. Governor Lord Carlisle to Secretary Coventry, November 23, 1679, Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series [hereafter CSP:CS], vol. 10 (1677–79), no. 1189, 445–46. 50. Bartholomew Sharpe’s expedition and its aftermath are described in Derek Howse and Norman J. W. Thrower, eds., A Buccaneer’s Atlas: Basil Ringrose’s South Sea Waggoner: A Sea Atlas and Sailing Directions of the Pacific Coast of the Amer­i­cas, 1682 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 51. Sir Henry Morgan to [Sir Leoline Jenkins], March 8, 1682, CO 1/48, no. 37, National Archives. 52. Sir Thomas Lynch to Lords of Trade and Plantations, August 29, 1682, CO 1/49, no. 35, National Archives; and Thomas Lynch to Robert Clarke, August 20, 1682, CO 1/49, no. 35i, National Archives. 53. Coxon, the original leader of the Sharpe expedition, left his comrades in Central Amer­ i­ca and returned to Jamaica to take advantage of the ­pardon to privateers who would declare their ­f uture good be­hav­ior. Sir Thomas Lynch to Lords of Trade and Plantations, August 29, 1682, CO 1/49, no. 35, National Archives. 54. Jamaica passed this act in 1681. Acts of Jamaica passed on the 2nd July 1681, July 2, 1681, CSP:CS, vol. 11 (1681–85), no. 160, 82–83. Parliament confirmed it in 1683. The laws of Jamaica passed by the assembly, and confirmed by His majesty in council, Feb. 23. 1683: To which is added, a short account of the island and government thereof, with an exact map of the island (London: H. Hills for Charles Harper, 1683), 46–54. EEBO.

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55. Circular letter from Secretary of State Leoline Jenkins to the Governors of the Plantations, March 25, 1684, CSP:CS, vol. 11 (1681–85), no. 1609, 611. 56. Governor Sir Thomas Lynch to the Governor of Havana, August 18, 1683, CO 1/52, no. 62, National Archives. The Spanish version is CO 1/52, no. 63. 57. Archivo General de Indias Patronato 271, R.7 (2), Consejo de Indias, 26 el Junio 1694. 58. Lieutenant-­Governor Sir William Beeston to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, February 12, 1694, CSP:CS, vol. 14 (1693–96), no. 876, 248–49. 59. Admiral Nevill to the Governor of Havana, July 25, 1697, Enclosure in Duke of Shrewsbury to Council of Trade and Plantations, November  23, 1697, CSP:CS, vol. 16 (1697–98), no. 57, 31–35. 60. Abstract of instructions from Nevill to envoy, CO 137/4, no. 74i, National Archives. 61. The Governor of Havana to Admiral Nevill, July 25/August 4, 1697; General of the galleons to Admiral Nevill, July 24/August 3, 1697. ­These are included in a collection of papers that the Duke of Shrewsbury forwarded to the Council of Trade and Plantations, November 23, 1697, CSP:CS, vol. 16 (1697–98), 31–35, no. 57, 57i. 62. If so, he may have convinced royal officials that he was the right man to reestablish imperial authority lost in Cartagena during the war: he was sent in 1702 to be governor of Cartagena, a position he held ­u ntil 1712, when he joined the Council of the Indies itself. 63. Richard Pares, “Barbados History from the Rec­ords of the Prize Court III. A Trader with the E ­ nemy, 1702: Manuel M. Gilligan,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 6, no. 2 (February 1939): 59–66. See also Aaron Alejandro Olivas, “Loyalty and Disloyalty to the Bourbon Dynasty in Spanish Amer­i­ca and the Philippines During the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–1715)” (Ph.D diss., UCLA, 2013). 64. Mr. Secretary Hedges to Governor Handasyde, January 17, 1706, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), no. 33, 15–18; H.M. Instructions for General Handasyde, January 14, 1706, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), no. 33i, 16. ­L ater he repeated his instructions in letters to Handasyde and the governors of Barbados, New York, Mas­sa­chu­setts, Mary­land, V ­ irginia, and the Leeward Islands. Mr. Secretary Hedges to Governor Sir B. Granville, September 3, 1706, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), no. 486, 217–18. 65. Mr. Secretary Hedges to Governor Handasyde, January 17, 1706, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), no. 33, 15–18; H.M. Instructions for General Handasyde, January 14, 1706, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), no. 33i, 16. 66. “An Account of the French monopolizing the Spanish West India Trade,” 1706, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–08), no. 33i, 17. 67. Governor Handasyd to the Council of Trade and Plantations, January  29, 1707, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), 362–365, no. 735, 735i–­iii. 68. Ibid. 69. Governor of Carthagena to Sir J. Jennings, January 5, 1707, Enclosure in Governor Handasyd to the Council of Trade and Plantations, January 29, 1707, CSP:CS, vol. 23 (1706–8), no. 735i, 364. This was Fernandez Córdoba, who as governor of Havana had prevented Nevill’s entry for w ­ ater. 70. The general narrative of Spanish decline has perhaps made us slow to see Spain’s continued power elsewhere as well, such as in the Pacific and on North Amer­i­c a’s Gulf coast during the eigh­teenth (and into the nineteenth) c­ entury. Recent correctives include Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of



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North Carolina Press, 2011); and Kathleen DuVal, In­de­pen­dence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015).

chapter 11 1. Joaquín Cañaveral to Diego Gardoqui, Cartagena, November 17, 1795, Archivo General de Indias [AGI], Santa Fe, 1015, no. 9. 2. “Sobre la causa que formó el exgobernador de Cartagena Joaquín Cañaveral contra el prior del consulado D. Tomás Andrés de Torres,” October 26, 1797, AGI, Santa Fe, 1147; Cañaveral to Godoy, Cartagena, February 29, 1796, AGI, Estado, 53, no. 68. 3. “Sobre la causa.” 4. Lorenzo Corbacho to Ezpeleta, Portobelo, November 6, 1794, AGI, Santa Fe, 645, no. 4; Corbacho to Ezpeleta, Portobelo, February 22, 1795, AGI, Santa Fe, 645, no. 5. 5. “Informe de Manuel Hernández . . . ​sobre el estado del comercio en el virreinato de Santa Fe,” AGI, Santa Fe, 959, no. 67. 6. For pioneering works that question this tendency to compartmentalize the Atlantic along national lines, see Julius Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-­A merican Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986); Olga Pantaleão, A penetracão comercial da Inglaterra na Amer­i­ca Espanhola de 1713 a 1783 (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1946); and Frances Armytage, The ­Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766–1822 (London: Longmans, Green, 1953). The quote is from Scott, “The Common Wind,” 68. 7. See Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (London: Frank Cass, 1963). 8. [James Stephen], War in Disguise; or, the Frauds of the Neutral Flags (London: C. Wittingham, 1806), 11–12. 9. J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The Eu­ro­pean Overseas Empires in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (New York: Praeger, 1971), 96–97. 10. Adrian Pearce, British Trade with Spanish Amer­i­ca, 1763–1808 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 18. 11. Halifax to Lords of Trade, May 12, 1764, quoted in Pearce, British Trade, 46; “Expediente sobre la arribada legítima del bergantín holandés Cornelia Luisa,” AGI, Santa Fe, 955. 12. [Stephen], War in Disguise, 12. 13. Johanna von Grafenstein, Nueva España en el Circuncaribe, 1779–1808: Revolución, competencia imperial y vínculos intercoloniales (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997), 88. 14. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 56. 15. For brief descriptions of the system, see Antonio Benítez-­Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Ca­rib­bean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 7; and Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 24–25. 16. Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 69–75. See also Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 13–100.

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17. Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 57. 18. Ibid., 143–85; John Fisher, The Economic Aspects of Spanish Imperialism in Amer­i­ca, 1492– 1810 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997); and Reglamento para el comercio libre 1778 (Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1978). 19. Pearce, British Trade, 51. See also Armytage, F ­ ree Port System, 42. 20. According to Armytage, in 1781 only thirty-­five vessels (Dutch and Danish) entered the British f­ ree ports. Armytage, F ­ ree Port System, 51. 21. Anthony McFarlane, Colombia Before In­de­pen­dence: Economy, Society, and Politics ­Under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 152–53. 22. Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 268. 23. Narváez to Minister of Finance, Panama, March 9, 1799, AGI, Santa Fe, 959. 24. Royal o­ rders allowing the ports of Cartagena, Santa Marta, and Riohacha to trade with foreigners are mentioned, described, or alluded to in the correspondence of Viceroy Ezpeleta with authorities in Madrid. See, for example, Ezpeleta to Lerena, Santa Fe, July 19, 1791, AGI, Santa Fe, 640, no. 12; and Ezpeleta to Lerena, Santa Fe, June 19, 1791, AGI, Santa Fe, 640, no. 129. 25. “El Consulado,” July 24, 1804, AGI, Santa Fe, 960, no. 83; “Reservada del virrey de Santa Fe,” May 19, 1795, AGI, Santa Fe, 645, no. 21. 26. José Ignacio de Pombo, Comercio y contrabando en Cartagena de Indias (Bogotá: Procultura, 1986), 20. 27. AGI, Santa Fe, 1015, no. 6; AGI Santa Fe, 641, no 129. 28. Detailed information of ships’ cargoes is available in individual customs inspections. See, for example, the report of the inspection of the U.S. ship Amable in Archivo General de la Nación, Colombia [AGNC], Sección Colonia [SC], Aduanas, 21, 836–51. 29. Caballero y Góngora, “Relación del estado del Nuevo Reino de Granada,” in Relaciones e informes de los gobernantes de la Nueva Granada, ed. Germán Colmenares (Bogotá: Ediciones Banco Popu­lar, 1989), 1:448. 30. Veriñas to H.M., Cartagena, December 31, 1787, AGI, Santa Fe, 655. 31. See Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Ca­rib­bean Colombia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 54–56. 32. “Informe de Juan de León Pérez al virrey,” Cartagena, October 30, 1794, AGI, Santa Fe, 645. 33. Jaime Rodríguez, The In­de­pen­dence of Spanish Amer­i­ca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49–59, 155. 34. Helg, Liberty and Equality; Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism During the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Steiner Saether, Identidades e independencia en Santa Marta y Riohacha, 1750–1850 (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2005). 35. Armytage, F ­ ree Port System, 113. 36. For British neutrality, see William Kaufmann, British Policy and the In­de­pen­dence of Latin Amer­i­ca, 1804–1828 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951); and D. A. G. Wadell, Gran Bretaña y la independencia de Venezuela y Colombia (Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, 1983). 37. For British-Spanish “policy convergence,” see Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 6.



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38. For a brief methodological discussion, see Ernesto Bassi, “The Space Between,” Appendix 2, no. 4 (December 2014), http://­t heappendix​.­net​/­issues​/­2014​/­10​/­t he​-­space​-­between. 39​.­ Armytage, ­Free Port System, 148–49. 40. Trevord Burnard, “Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of Modernity,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, Matt Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 126, 129, 125. 41. Colonial Office [CO] 142/22, National Archives, Kew, UK; Armytage, ­Free Port System, 113–37. 42. CO 142/26 and 142/28. National Archives. 43. Colin G. Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692–2002 (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006), 27; François Depons, Travels in South Amer­i­ca During the Years 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), 2:56. 44. Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log (Ithaca, NY: McBooks Press, 1999), 127, 129. 45. CO 142/22–29, National Archives. 46. Ibid. 47. CO 142/26 and 142/28, National Archives. 48. See, for, example Pombo, Comercio y contrabando; and “Representación de los comerciantes de Cartagena al virrey Ezpeleta,” Cartagena, April 30, 1795, AGI, Santa Fe, 1019. 49. CO 142/22–29, National Archives. 50. “Representación de los comerciantes de Cartagena al virrey Ezpeleta,” Cartagena, April 30, 1795, AGI, Santa Fe, 1019. 51. CO 142/28, National Archives. 52. Ibid.; AGNC, Archivo Anexo 1 (AA1), Aduanas, 47, 2­ 86–300. 53. CO 142/28, National Archives; AGNC, AA1, Aduanas, 47, 286–300. 54. CO 142/29, National Archives; AGNC, AA1, Aduanas, 51, 1–17. 55. “Informe de Manuel Hernández . . . ​sobre el estado del comercio en el virreinato de Santa Fe,” AGI, Santa Fe, 959, no. 67. 56. “Consulta de Amar sobre derechos a pagar,” Santa Fe, December 19, 1805, AGI, Santa Fe, 960. 57. CO 142/28, National Archives. 58. I use the term peddler-­vessels for small vessels with frequent entries into and clearances from the port of Kingston. Size (small) and frequency (two or more visits) are the defining characteristics of peddler-­vessels. In his 1979 study of global trade, Braudel proposed a distinction between ­wholesalers and peddlers as a tool to interpret the workings of Indian Ocean trade. Debating ­whether the early modern Indian Ocean was “a world of pedlars or of ­wholesalers,” Braudel concluded that he was “more inclined to see [the merchants of the Indian Ocean and the East Indies as] . . . ​­wholesalers.” Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th ­Century, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 120. 59. Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 122–25. 60. CO 142/22–29, National Archives. 61. Ibid. 62. Antonio Narváez y la Torre, “Provincia de Santa Marta y Río Hacha del Virreynato de Santa Fé” (1778), in Ensayos costeños: De la colonia a la república, 1770–1890, ed. Alfonso Múnera (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1994), 69–73.

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63. The estimate is conservative ­because I included only ­t hose vessels for which, based on name, captain, destination and origin, and size, it was pos­si­ble to confidently eliminate the risk of counting for one ship what ­were actually two or more ships. In the pro­cess, I chose not to include in the list of peddler-­vessels ships with common names like Carmen and San Josef. 64. Ezpeleta to Lerena, “Sobre la suspensión del comercio de negros por el contrabando que incentiva,” Santa Fe, December 19, 1791, AGI, Santa Fe, 641, no. 201. 65. Pombo, Comercio y contrabando, 68, 87, 97. 66. Ezpeleta to Lerena, Santa Fe, March 19, 1792, AGI, Santa Fe, 641, no. 228. 67. The term is an adaptation of Jesse Hoffnung-­Gasrkof ’s “transnational social field.” In his study of the twentieth-­century migration networks connecting New York City with Santo Domingo, Hoffnung-­Garskof claims that even t­hose Dominicans who stayed on the island and never traveled to New York City inhabited a “transnational social field,” in which life in Santo Domingo was informed by the collective experience of traveling to New York City or wanting to travel to New York City. Hoffnung-­Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York A ­ fter 1950 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2008), xvi. 68. The possibilities that inhabiting this transimperial field of social interactions opened for New Granada’s Ca­rib­bean dwellers are the subject of my book, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Ca­rib­bean World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 69. “Don Francisco Salceda de Bustamante del comercio de Cartagena y Santa Marta representa a VM la escasez absoluta de ropas que hay en dichas plazas y todo el reino” Cartagena, September 1, 1798, AGI, Santa Fe, 1019. 70. Riohacha, March 20, 1805, AGI, Santa Fe, 952. 71. Moreno y Escandón, “Estado del Virreinato de Santa Fe, Nuevo Reino de Granada,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, 1:247. 72. Astigárraga to Antonio Valdez, Santa Marta, February 3, 1789, Archivo General de Simancas, Guerra, 7072, no. 10; Moreno y Escandón, “Estado del Virreinato,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, 1:187; and Silvestre, “Apuntes reservados,” in Colmenares, Relaciones e informes, 2:82, 103. 73. Caballero y Góngora to Joseph de Gálvez, Cartagena, May 28, 1785, AGI, Santa Fe, 1095. 74. “Diligencia de entrada de la balandra española la Leonor,” Santa Marta, April 16, 1784, AGNC, Archivo Anexo–­Sección I [AAI], Aduanas, 8, 1–26. The customs rec­ords of AGNC contain information for many visitas undertaken in the ports of Cartagena, Santa Marta, Portobelo, and Riohacha. See, for example, AGNC, AAI, Aduanas, 8, 27–53; AGNC, SC, Aduanas, 21, 32; and AGNC, SC, Milicias y Marina, 80, 754–62. 75. AGNC, AAI, Gobierno, 13, 463–69; Pedro Corrales to Captain General of Caracas, Puerto Cabello, May 27, 1802, AGI, Estado, 60, no. 21. 76. David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), xvi. 77. Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-­Speaking Atlantic as Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (June  2007): 764–86; Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 787–99; Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra and Benjamin Breen, “Hybrid Atlantics: F ­ uture Directions for the History of the Atlantic World,” History Compass 11 (2013): 597–609. Atlantic historians have recently described Atlantic empires and their borders not only as “entangled” but also as “hybrid,” “porous,” “fluid,” and “permeable.”



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See James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 229; Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 10; Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 8; Hancock, Oceans of Wine, xv; Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in Eu­ro­pean Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. 78. For elaboration on the Atlantic’s historiographical map, see Ernesto Bassi, “Beyond Compartmentalized Atlantics: A Case for Embracing the Atlantic from Spanish American Shores,” History Compass 12 (2014): 704–16.

chapter 12 1. Eliga H. Gould, “AHR Forum: Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-­ Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 765. 2. Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, “Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 796. 3. Juan Grau y Monfalcón, “Memorial to the King (1635),” in The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, ed. Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1911), 25:48–73. 4. Many impor­tant studies have advanced the concept of an interconnected British world and explored the links between the diverse British colonies of the Second British Empire in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and North Amer­i­ca. However, this lit­er­a­ture has strug­ gled to accommodate the flows of p ­ eople, goods, and ideologies across the porous imperial bound­a ries. See, for example, Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain’s Convicts A ­ fter the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5. This transpacific trade inspired a rich body of scholarship that has revealed the social and economic relationships that bound generations of families across “the Spanish lake” and the cultural products of centuries of mestizaje between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Carmen Yuste López, Emporios Transpacíficos: Comerciantes Mexicanos en Manila 1710–1815 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007); Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, eds., Asia & Spanish Amer­i­ca: Trans-­Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2009). 6. Birgit Tremml’s doctoral thesis explores the history of “the Manila System,” a discrete, regional economy in the late sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century South China Sea that incorporated “Ming China, Azuchi-­Momoyama/Tokugawa Japan, and the Spanish Overseas Empire.” Birgit Magdalena Tremml, “When Po­liti­c al Economies Meet: Spain, China and Japan in Manila, ca. 1571–1644” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 2012); Juan Gil, Los Chinos en Manila: Siglos XVI y XVII (Lisboa: Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, 2011). 7. Alberto Baena Zapatero and Xabier Lamikiz, “Presencia de una diáspora global: Comerciantes armenios y comercio intercultural en Manila, c. 1660–1800,” Revista de Indias 74 (2014): 693–722; Bhaswati Bhattacharya, “Making Money at the Blessed Place of Manila:

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Armenians in the Madras–­Manila Trade in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Journal of Global History 3, no. 1 (2008): 1–20. 8. Pedro Luengo Gutiérrez, Manila, Plaza Fuerte (1762–1788): Ingenieros Militares Entre Asia, América y Europa (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas: Ministerio de Defensa, 2013), 73. 9. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010), 3. 10. Pedro Machado, “A Forgotten Corner of the Indian Ocean: Gujarati Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave-­Trade, c. 1730–1830,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-­Slave Studies 24, no. 2 (2008): 17–32. 11. On the composition of British forces, see Nicholas Tracy, Manila Ransomed: The British Assault on Manila in the Seven Years’ War (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 17; P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and Amer­i­ca, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61, 64. 12. Orden sobre causa de infidencia de Francisco Zapata, 1765, Archivo General de Indias in Seville [AGI], Filipinas, 335, L. 17. 13. Manilha Consultations: The Rec­ords of Fort St. George, 1763 (Madras: Superintendant of Government Press, 1940–42), vol. 6. 14. Expediente sobre prisión del fiscal Francisco Leandro de Viana, 1759, AGI, Filipinas, 186, no. 15. 15. Anulación de causa contra Santiago de Orendain, 1762, AGI, Filipinas, 335, L. 17, F. 213V– 221R. 16. Joaquín Martínez de Zuñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, o mis viajes por este país / por el padre Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga; publica esta obra por primera vez extensamente anotada, W. E. Retana, vol. Tomo Segundo (Madrid: Imp. de la Viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos, 1893), 64. 17. Manilha Consultations, 5:67–68. 18. For example, in early 1763 British major Fell and Captain Back­house advised their superiors “the desertion of the Soldiers, Sepoys and Lascars has been g­ reat.” Ibid., 70. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 130–31; Manilha Consultations, 6:145. 22. Gabriel B. Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1808 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 23. Manilha Consultations, 6:79; Fr. José Victoria and Fr. Manuel Rebollo, “Documento Inédito,” in Documentos Indispensables Para La Verdadera Historica de Filipinas: 1762–1763, ed. P. Eduardo Navarro (Madrid: Imprenta del Asilo del Huérfanos, 1908), 31. 24. Manilha Consultations, 5:129. 25. Carta de Pedro Martínez de Arizala pidiendo un obispo auxiliar, 1753, AGI, Filipinas, 292, no. 33. 26. United States Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, Part 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1995), 814. 27. Manilha Consultations, 5:127–28. 28. Manilha Consultations, 6:48, 128. 29. Manilha Consultations, 5:129. 30. Ibid., 81; Manilha Consultations, 6:96.



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31. Gil, Los Chinos en Manila, 249–56. 32. AGI, Filipinas, 292, no.  33; Edward Wogan, Edward Wogan to DD. Attested by James Bean, 1763, Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA, Papers of Sir George Pocock, 1734–93 [PO], 998. 33. James Bean, James Bean to Pocock: Memorandums and Remarks on the Cash Accounts, correspondence & subject of Noriega, 1767, Huntington Library, PO, 1035. 34. Wogan, Edward Wogan to DD; Letter to Dawsonne Drake. Attested by James Bean, 1763, Huntington Library, PO, 998. 35. Manilha Consultations, 5:232. 36. Carl H. Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New York,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 48–71. 37. Kay J. Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1991); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 38. Kristie Patricia Flannery, “Prohibited Games, Prohibited P ­ eople: Race and Gambling and Segregation in Early Modern Manila,” Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 8 (2014): 81–92. 39. Manilha Consultations, 5:152. 40. Joaquín Martinez de Zúñiga, An Historical View of the Philippine Islands: Exhibiting their Discovery, Population, Language, Government, Manners, Customs, Productions and Commerce, 2 vols. (London: J. Asperne, Cornhill, 1814), 2:655–68. Shirley Fish, When Britain Ruled the Philippines (Bloomington, IN: First Books, 2003). 41. Rainer F. Buschmann, Edward R. Slack, and James B. Tueller, Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 69. 42. Manilha Consultations, 5:131–32. 43. Documentos para la historia de la invasion y guerra con los ingleses en Filipinas desde 1762 a 1764: Fielmente copiados de los originales en 1765, 1765, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ayer, MS 1292. 44. Fernando Palanco, “Diego Silang’s Revolt: A New Approach,” Philippine Studies 50 (2002): 512–37. 45. In the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury, ­every indio in the Philippines was required to belong to a barangay, a po­liti­cal unit that consisted of an average of thirty families and was headed by a hereditary leader known as a cabeza de barangay. ­There ­were six thousand barangays in the Philippines in 1768. Multiple barangays came to together in pueblos ruled by gobernadorcillos (­little governors). Cabezas de barangay and gobernadorcillos formed the Principalia or indigenous ruling class. The Principalia also incorporated other elite Indians exempted from tribute, such as the cantores who sang in church ser­vices across the archipelago. D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: ­Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35. 46. José S. Arcilla, “The Pangasinan Uprising, 1762–1765,” Philippines Historical Review, no. 4 (1971): 38. 47. David Routledge, Diego Silang and the Origins of Philippine Nationalism (Diliman: University of Philippines Press, 1979), 21. 48. Manilha Consultations, 5:102.

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49. Manilha Consultations, 5:9. 50. Calamy or Kalamay is a sweet, glutinous rice cake. 51. Manilha Consultations, 5:102. 52. Manilha Consultations, 5:76. 53. Manilha Consultations, 5:133. 54. “Indian conquistadores” ­were not unusual in the Spanish Empire, although their presence has not been widely recognized in Spain’s Asian empire. Recent studies have drawn attention to the roles that Spain’s indigenous allies played in the conquest of the Amer­i­cas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The role that Pampangans played in Anda’s army suggests that Spain’s indigenous allies continued to be central to empire building in eigh­teenth c­ entury Asia. See Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 55. John A. Larkin, The Pampangans: Colonial Society in a Philippine Province (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 22–23; John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 133. 56. Francis Hezel and Marjorie C. Driver, “From Conquest to Colonization: Spain in the Mariana Islands 1690–1740,” Journal of Pacific History 23, no. 2 (1988): 141. The crown recognized the loyalty of Pampangan conquistadors in the Marianas. When Andrés de la Cruz, an Indio principal of the Pampanga nation, died a noble death in the Marianas fighting infidels in the ser­vice of his majesty, a Real Cédula freed de la Cruz’s three surviving orphans, Don Ynacio Pagtacotan, Don Julian, and Don Juan de la Cruz, from the payment of tribute, tributary ­labor obligations, and other forms of personal servitude. The orphans ­were also awarded the insignia of a medal of silver above gold adorned with effigies of the Queen Doña Maria Luisa. AGI, Filipinas, 349, L. 6. 57. AGI, Filipinas, 133, no. 11. 58. Fish, When Britain Ruled the Philippines, 93–96. 59. Manilha Consultations, 5:97–99, 102; Routledge, Diego Silang, 128–29. 60. Much twentieth-­c entury Filipino historiography has identified Miguel Bicus or Vicus as a Spanish mestizo, but Anda’s letter and the Real Cédula clearly identify him as an indio. See Eufronio Melo Alio, Po­liti­cal and Cultural History of the Philippines (Manila: Alip, 1964), 22, 25. Another Real Cédula relieved from the payment of tribute for the rest of their lives the field master (Maestro de campo) Pedro Bicbic and his sons, as a reward for their “contributions to the subjugation of the rebels in the province of Pangasinan.” AGI, Filipinas, 335, L. 17. 61. Palanco, “Diego Silang’s Revolt,” 529–32. 62. Arcilla, “Pangasinan Uprising,” 47. 63. Ibid., 38–39; M. R. P. Fr Joaquin Fonseca, Historia de los PP. Dominicos En Las Islas Filipinas Y En Sus Misiones Del Japon, China, Tung-­kin Y Formosa (Madrid: Orden Del M. R. P. Provincial, 1871), 675. 64. Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller, Navigating the Spanish Lake, 73–74. 65. Raquel Eréndira Güereca Durán, “Las Milicias de Indios Flecheros en la Nueva España, Siglos XVI–­X VIII” (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2013). 66. Jayson L. Antonio and Celerino F. Ancheta, “Revisiting the Basi Revolt of 1807: Its Historical and Axiological Relevance” (paper presented at the De La Salle University Research



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Congress, Manila, 2014); Roberto Blanco Andrés, “La revuelta de Ilocos de 1807,” Archivo Agustiniano: Revista de estudios históricos publicada por los PP. Agustinos 96, no. 214 (2012): 43–72. 67. “Reprensión a Francisco de la Torre por motín de ingleses,” AGI, Filipinas, 335, L. 17. 68. Orden de expulsar a Agustín Stent, cirujano inglés, AGI, Filipinas 336, L. 18, F. 14V–15R. 69. Salvador P. Escoto, “Expulsion of the Chinese and Readmission to the Philippines: 1764–1779,” Philippine Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 48–76; “A Supplement to the Expulsion of the Chinese from the Philippines: 1764–1779,” Philippine Studies 48, no. 2 (2000): 209–34. 70. Portrait of Simon Anda y Salazar & son, [1770?], Newberry Library, Ayer, MS 1921, no. 23. 71. Basilio Sancho de Santa Justa y Rufina, Decretos de Arz. Basilio Sancho de Santa Justa y Ruffina: Prohibition de figuras de serpientes y caimanes puestas en las casas de chino (1771), Archdiocesan Archives of Manila, box 1, B.4. 72. “A Short Abridgment of Christian Doctrine,” Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico, Inquisición, vol. 5116, exp. 16. 73. Manilha Consultations, 6:71–72. 74. The commercial and diplomatic relationships that developed between British agents and the Muslim maritime states in the southern Philippines archipelago and Malaysia during the second half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury is a well-­k nown example of the interconnectedness of the Anglo and Iberian Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds. James Francis Warren has presented the most detailed analy­sis of ­these relationships in several books and scholarly articles published over a long ­career spanning several de­cades. James Francis Warren, “Who ­Were the Balangingi Samal? Slave Raiding and Ethnogenesis in Nineteenth-­Century Sulu,” Journal of Asian Studies 37 (1978): 480; James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 1981). See also Nicholas Tarling, Sulu and Sabah: A Study of the British Policy ­Towards the Philippines and North Borneo from the Late Eigh­ teenth ­Century (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1978). 75. To George III, King of ­Great Britain, 1738–1820. Re a proposed alliance with ­England through the EIC. Copy 1775, Huntington Library, HM80330. This is an En­glish translation of the sultan’s letter prepared by the East India Com­pany. 76. To the EIC: Translation of letter re proposed trading and military terms from the Sultan of Mindanao 1775, Huntington Library, HM80329, Letters and documents relating to a proposed East India Com­pany Anglo-­Philippine expedition, 1769–1780. 77. James Francis Warren, “Balambangan and the Rise of the Sulu Sultanate, 1772–1775,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 50, no. 1 (1977): 73–93. 78. Salvador Escoto is one of the few scholars to have engaged with the exciting evidence of new diplomatic ties between the Spanish colonial officials in the Philippines and indigenous rulers in the Bay of Bengal. Salvador P. Escoto, “A Spaniards’s Diary of Mangalore, 1776–1777,” Asian Studies 28 (1980): 121–35; Salvador P. Escoto, “Haidar Alí: Un intento frustrado de relación comercial entre Mysore y Filipinas, 1773–1779,” Revista Española del Pacífico 10 (1999), http://­w ww​.­cervantesvirtual​.­com​/­servlet​/­SirveObras​/­01361631968917729422802​ /­p0000001​.­htm#6. 79​.­ María Lourdes Díaz-­Trechuelo, “Eigh­teenth ­C entury Philippine Economy: Commerce,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 14 (1966): 255–56. 80. Escoto, “Haidar Alí.” 81. Ibid.

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not es to pag es 2 53 – 25 7 82. AGI, Filipinas, 390, no. 85. 83. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History.

afterword 1. David B. Quinn, “Columbus and the North: E ­ ngland, Iceland, and Ireland,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 49 (April 1992): 278–97, makes a cogent argument that Columbus prob­ably did visit Iceland. For the argument against, see Alwyn A. Ruddock, “Columbus in Iceland, Geo­graph­i­cal Journal 86 (1970): 177–89. 2. Quinn, “Columbus and the North,” 280–81. 3. Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); see also Chapter 8 in this volume. 4. Eliga  H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-­Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (2007): 764–86. 5. James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-­E sguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd  ser., 68 (April  2011): 207. For Eurocentric tendencies specific to entangled history, see Sönke Bauck and Thomas Maier, “Entangled History,” InterAmerican Wiki, Bielefeld University Center for InterAmerican Studies, www​.­u ni​-­bielefeld​.­de​/­cias​/­w iki​/­e​_­Entangled​_­History​.­html (accessed November 12, 2016); Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton, “Introduction: Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and Eu­ro­pean Histories,” Colonial Latin American Review 26 (April  2017): 1–17, http://­w ww​ .­tandfonline​.­com​/­action​/­showCitFormats​?­doi​=­10​.­1080​/­10609164​.­2017​.­1287321. 6​.­For the classic statement of the prob­lem, see Eric Wolf, Eu­rope and the ­People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 7. Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade, or a Discovery of the River Gambra . . . ​also the Commerce with a ­great blacke merchant called Buckor Sano (London, 1623).

contributors

Ernesto Bassi is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University and ­author of An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Ca­rib­bean World. Benjamin Breen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published articles in the Journal of Early American History, Journal of Early Modern History, and History Compass. Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His publications include How to Write the History of the New World, Puritan Conquistadors, and Nature, Empire, and Nation. Bradley Dixon is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Dixon studies how Native Americans engaged with law during the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. Material from this proj­ect has been published in The Atlantic Millennium: Journal on Atlantic Civilizations. Kristie Patricia Flannery is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests are focused on Spain’s global empire with an emphasis on the Pacific world. Her article “Battlefield Diplomacy and Empire-­Building in the Early Modern Pacific World” appeared in Itinerario. Eliga H. Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. His publications include Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire and The Per­sis­tence of Empire: British Po­liti­cal Culture in the Age of the American Revolution.

322 C o nt r ibu to r s

Michael Guasco is Associate Professor of History at Davidson College. His book, Slaves and En­glishmen: H ­ uman Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World, was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. April Lee Hatfield is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University and the author of Atlantic ­Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth ­Century. Christopher Heaney is Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-­Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu. Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara was Professor of History and Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization at Tufts University and author of The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth ­Century. Mark Sheaves is a gradu­ate student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches connections between the Iberian and Anglo Atlantic worlds during the sixteenth and early seventeenth c­ entury, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the relationship between commerce, religion, and science. Holly Snyder is curator of the American historical collections in the Hay Library at Brown University Library and holds a PhD from Brandeis University. Cameron  B. Strang is Assistant Professor of History at the University ­Nevada, Reno. His articles appear in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of American History.

Index

Abolitionism, 9, 10 Adams, John Quincy, 154 Addison, Joseph, 9, 105–7, 114, 116, 120–121, 123 Africans, En­glish interaction with: in Africa, 43–51; in En­glish Amer­i­ca, 54–61; in Spanish Amer­i­ca, 51–54 Alchemy, and colonization, 8, 85–87, 90, 101, 277n10, 279n37, 282n87 Alexander VI, Pope, 164 Ali, Hyder, 252–253 Alvarez, Duarte Henriquez, 113–114 Amelia Island, 10 Americae pars decima: quae continentur Solida narratio de moderno provinciae Virginiae statu (De Bry), 168 Amsterdam, 113, 119 Anda y Salazar, Simón de, 14, 239–253 Andover, 30–31 Añes, Gonlsalvo (alias Dunstan Añes and Benjamin George), 110 Anglo-­Iberian relations: decline of, 21–22, 24, 26–28, 32; growth of trade, 20, 26, 30, 32–33 Anglo-­Portuguese alliance, 66–70, 75 Answer to all such objections . . . ​against the lawfulness of En­glish plantations, An (Cushman), 166 Antichrist, 164, 170 Antigua, 13 Antwerp, 109–110, 111 Apalachee Indians, 12, 179–182, 188–193; and colonial compact in Florida and South Carolina, 183, 190; request for priests from the Carolinians, 180; use of En­glish ­legal pro­cesses, 190–192 Apocalypse: and discourses of colonization, 171; and Franciscans, 165, 175; and Satan, 164

Aramburco, Francisco, 131 Arango y Parreño, Francisco de, 139 Archdale, John, 185–186 Archives, 5–7 Arias, Diego Rodriguez, 113 Arminians, 163, 171 Aruba, 127 Ashley, Lodowick, 146 Asiento, 9, 13, 14, 117, 199, 200, 201, 203–206, 209, 214 Atahualpa, 164, 169 Atlantic, as a hemispheric system, 22, 39–41 Atlantic port cities, 19–23, 25 Aury, Luis, 10, 151–152, 297n53 Azores, 37 Backwell, Edward, 120 Baker, Robert, 45–48 Bangue (Cannabis indica), 72–73 Barbados, 4, 13, 54, 56–59 Barlow, Roger, 89, 278n23 Barrera, Maria de la Maria de, 37 Bassi, Ernesto, 13 Batavian Republic, 127 Beeston, William (Lt. Gov. of Jamaica), 117, 201–203, 211 Ben Israel, Menasseh, 108 Bermuda, the island, 54–59 Bermuda City (­Virginia), 1 Berry, John, 176 Black African as carriers of knowledge, 22 Black Legend, 86, 102–104, 282n90 Blanco White, Joseph, 9, 126, 137–141; Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos (1814), 138; as editor of El Español, 138; first Spanish abolitionists, 137; translation of Wilberforce’s Letter on the Slave Trade, 138 Bohemia, Wars of Religion, 163, 171

324 Index Bolivar, Simón, 125, 151; British intelligence of in Curacao, 128; as monster, 133–134; war to the death, 126 Bonaire, 127 Borderlands, North American, 257 Borrow, George, 124 Boti, Jacome, 35 Boves, José Tomás, 126; as monster, 134–135 Boyle, Robert, 7, 74–75 Brazil, 7 Breen, Ben, 7 Briceño, Antonio Nicólas, 129 Bristol, 19, 29–30 British f­ ree port system, 222, 225–227, 229 Buenos Aires, Republic of, 151 Bull, Stephen, 183–184 Burials: disinterment by En­glish, 277; disinterment by Spanish, 100; indigenous, 88, 95 Cabot, Sebastian, 88, 90–91 Cadiz, 33–35, 39 Calizeto (Cuba), 121–122 Campeche, 206–207 Canary Islands, 20, 23, 26, 29, 32–33, 37, 39, 112, 113–154, 119 Cañizares-­E sguerra, Jorge, 11 Cape Cod, 170 Cape Verde, 4 Caracas, earthquake of 1812, 128 Ca­rib­bean, 22 Carolina: apparent infiltration of polities by early Carolina traders, 183–184; constitution of, 12, 182–183; incorporation of by the Carolina colony, 182–184 Cartagena de Indias, 13, 14, 118, 200–203, 206, 215, 217–218, 223–228, 230–232, 288n41 Carvajal, Antonio Fernandes, 112–113 Castelin, Jacome, 38 Castilin, Edward, 37–38 Castillian royal decrees, trade embargoes, 20, 32, 36 Catherine of Aragon, Queen of E ­ ngland, 107 Catherine of Bragança, 7, 64, 74; wedding of, 65–66 Cecil, William, 90 cha (tea), 7 Chagres, 13, 226–228 Charles I, King of E ­ ngland, 108, 163, 164, 170, 172

Charles II, King of E ­ ngland, 7, 112 Charles V, King of Spain, 8 Charter companies, 161–177 passim; del­e­ga­tion of temporal and spiritual power to, 164 Chartered Companies, 11–12 Chickahominy, 1, 3, 168, 169 Chilton, John, 26, 36, 38 Chilton, Leonard, 33–34 Chinese (Sangley), 239–245, 247, 250–251 Chris­tian­ity: and conversion, 93; and dissimulation, 93; and empire, 85–87, 94–95, 101, 103 Clarke, Charles, 146 Clarke, George J. F., 10, 142–158; allegiance to Florida, 142, 151–152, 154, 157–158; allegiance to the Spanish Empire, 144–145, 147–149, 152–153; and interracial relationships, 146, 149, 157–158 Cochran, James, 178–179 Cod fishing, 162 Cole, Bartholomew, 32–33 Colonization: discourses, of, 11; and Puritan apocalypse, 175; as scape valve for En­glish overpopulation, 174; Spanish discourse of, 176. See also Pilgrims; Puritans Columbus, Christopher, 88–89, 103, 255, 258 Comogrus, 98, 101 Conquest, Christian, 86, 89, 96, 98 Constantinople (other­wise Istanbul), 110 Contraband, 217–219, 223–224, 227, 229, 231–233. See also Smuggling Conversion: as Puritan civilizing-­ pedagogical pro­cess, 165, 167, 171–172, 174, 175; as Puritan linguistic accommodation, 176 Converso, 3, 8–9; culture, 106, 109, 111–114 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, first earl of Shaftesbury, 12, 182–184 Coppinger, José, 151–153 Cortés, Hernán, 2, 164, 169 Cosmography, 86–105 passim; En­glish, 87–89, 90–91, 94; Spanish, 91, 94–95 Cotton, John, 172–174; Gods Promise to His Plantation, 172 ­Cromwell, Oliver (Lord Protector of ­England), 108, 111–112, 113 Cruz Palaris, Juan de la, 245–248 Cuba, 221, 226–227, 233 Curaçao, 10, 226, 230; British intelligence hub, 126; famine and Haitian shipments

Index of food (1814 and 1815), 127; first British occupation (1800–1802), 127; port of Willemstad, 125; second British occupation (1807–1816), 125, 127; slave rebellion of 1795, 127; smuggling into Venezuela, 126; Spanish American refugees, 126, 128 Cushman, Robert, 165–166; An answer to all such objections . . . ​against the lawfulness of En­glish plantations, 166; Reasons and considerations about the legality of establishing outside of ­England in parts of Amer­i­ca, 166; A Relation or Journal of the beginning and proceedings of the En­glish plantation settled at Plimoth of New E ­ ngland, 166 Dale, Thomas, 1 Dampier, William, 77–78 Darien, 14, 88, 98 De Bry, Theodor, 168 De­cades of the Newe Worlde or West India, The (Eden), 8, 86–87, 92–103; publication history of, 281nn61–62, 282n78 Denmark, 163 De Orbe Novo (Martire d’Anghiera), 8, 86, 95–96, 281n63 Devereux, John, 131 Diplomacy, 197–199, 201–203, 207–215 Dixon, Bradley, 12 Dormido, Manuel Martinez, 119 Drake, Dawsonne, 239–246 Drake, Francis, 26 Drugs, medicinal, 63, 70–72; perceived effects on dif­fer­ent bodies, 78; testing of, 73–75; trade in, 64–65, 80 Duke of San Carlos (Spanish ambassador to London), 131 Dutch, 7; in Africa, 45, 49–50; in the Ca­rib­bean, 198, 200, 201, 203, 204, 210; empire, 64–65 East Florida, 10 Eden, Richard, 8, 32, 85–86, 90–103, 279n37, 281nn61–62; alchemical interests, 90, 101, 279n37, 282n87; The De­cades of the Newe Worlde or West India, 8, 86–87, 92–103; patronage of, 89–93; portrayal of Spanish conquest, 86–87, 92, 94–98, 100; A treatyse of the newe India, 90 El Español, periodical (1810–1814), 138 Elizabeth I (Queen of ­England), 20, 102–103, 108, 109–111, 119

325

Empire, shared Christian understandings of, 86–87, 94–95, 101–103 ­Enemy aliens, denization and rights of the subject, 111, 115–118, 119–120 En­glish Catholics, 31–32, 35, 39 En­glish Civil War, 9 En­glish colonization efforts, inspired by Spanish, 86, 88, 92, 96, 98, 101–103 En­glish Empire, creation of, 21 En­g lish Livery Companies, 20–21, 30, 37–38 Enslaved blacks: natu­ral knowledge of, 154, 156; sexual relationships with planters, 145–146; and Spanish American in­de­pen­ dence, 157–158; in Spanish Florida, 145–146; in the United States, 146, 149–150, 157 Entangled history, asymmetry of, 256; and Eurocentrism, 257–258 Entanglement, concept of, 3–5, 198–200 Erasures of knowledge, 5, 77–79 España, José María, 127 Estrada, Juan José de, 148 Ethnography: effect upon colonization, 104; of Florida Crackers, 155; of Florida Indians, 156–157; sixteenth-­century, 87, 92, 96–97, 99 Fantoni y Peri, Juan Andrea, 35 Farenton, John, 35 Fatio, Francis Philip, Jr., 150 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 34, 131, 132, 146, 150 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 8 Fernandina (Amelia Island, Florida), 10, 144, 147–153 Fields, John, 29, 33–34 Filibusters, into Spanish Florida, 146–149, 151–153 First Carlist War (1833–1840), 124 Flannery, Kristie Patricia, 14 Flinter, George Dawson, 9, 124–141; against Simon Bolívar, 125; and First Carlist War (1833–1840), 124; as pro-­slavery advocate, 125; as Spanish loyalist and agent, 131–136; Venezuelan in­de­pen­dence as racial war, 132–136 Flora, manumitted Floridian, 145 Florentine noble merchant families, 35 Florida, 22, 142–158 Forne, Juan Baptista, 38

326 Index France, 256–257 Franciscans, 179, 182–183, 189, 190, 191; and Apocalypse, 165, 175; observed by Carolinians as models, 12, 179, 182, 188–189 ­Free blacks, in Spanish Florida, 143, 145–146, 149–151; and Spanish American in­de­pen­ dence, 157–158 French: in the Ca­rib­bean, 198, 203, 204, 209, 211, 212–213, 214–15; colonization efforts, 91 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 12, 182–183 Gage, Thomas, 52–54, 62 Gambia, 4 Genesis 1:28, discourses of colonization, 169 George, “Yamasee Prince,” 180, 193–194 Georgia, 4, 144–145, 147–148, 151–153 Gibraltar, 9 Go-­betweens, 4, 242–243 Gods Promise to His Plantation (Cotton), 172 Gold, 88–90, 94–95, 97–101. See also Metals Gómez, David, 288n41 Gregor, MacGregor, 151–153 Guadalajara, 19 Guajira, 14 Gual, Manuel, 127 Guasco, Michael, 6 Guatemala, 36 Haitian Revolution, 226, 234 Hakluyt, Richard, 21, 23–25, 27–20, 45, 51–52, 103 Hakluyt, Richard, the elder, 19 Hall, James, 148 Hamor, Ralph, 1–3, 168; True discourse of the pres­ent estate of ­Virginia, 168 Hannah, enslaved Floridian, 145 Hatfield, April Lee, 13, 118, 288n41 Havana, 13, 207–208, 210–211, 212–213 Hawkins, John, 32 Hawkins, Paul, 32, 40 Heaney, Christopher, 8 Henricus, 1 Henry Hawks (also known as Henry Hawkes or Pedro Sánchez), 19–24, 27–28, 33, 38–41 Henry VII, King of E ­ ngland, 107 Henry VIII, King of E ­ ngland, 20, 36, 107–108

Hickman, Anthony, 37 Hispanicized En­glish merchants: as a group, 23, 26–27, 31–40; as a network, 23, 27, 33–40 Hodgson, John (British governor Curacao), 128, 134, 135; views of Venezuela’s War of In­de­pen­dence as racial war, 129–130 Hooke, Robert, 7 House of Trade, Seville, 19 Huguenots, 171 Hybrid identity, as a strategy, 20, 22–23, 25–33, 40 Iceland, 255, 258 Ilocos, 14 Imperial decline, 68–69 Incas, 89, 279n33. See also Peruvians Indian Ocean, 236–240, 251–252 Indigenous Americans, kings of: as object of colonization, 87, 96–101, 104, 281–282n65; portrayal of by Eu­ro­pe­a ns, 85, 87–8, 92, 95–102, 104. See also Incas; Mexicans; Peruvians; Utopians Indios bárbaros (autonomous indigenous groups), 219, 224, 233–235 Indonesia, 7 Inquisition, The, 251 Interracial love, 143, 145–146, 149, 157–158 Intoxication, 68 Ireland, 255 Irish, 9; immigration, 125–141; in Manila, 14; military ser­vice to the Spanish crown, 125–141; pro-­slavery and abolitionism, 125–141; refugees into Spain, 132 Iron, 87–88, 97, 99. See also Metals Isabel II (of Spain), 124 Israelites: and Canaanites, 1–2; migration compared to Puritans’, 173 Jackson, Andrew, 11, 153 Jamaica, 4, 9, 56, 60–61, 199–216, 218, 222–232, 234–235; En­glish control of, 13; Kingston, 13, 118, 221–222, 225–232 James I, King of ­England, 108, 164 Jamestown, 162; indigenous attack of 1622, 171; low social status of settlers, 171 Japan, 7 Jerusalem, T ­ emple of, 1 Jewish merchants: as carriers of knowledge, 22; in Cuba, 121–122; in Gibraltar, 118–119; in Jamaica, 115–118, 121–122; in London, 109–114, 119–120

Index Jobson, Richard, 47–49, 52, 55, 59, 62 Johnston, Gideon, 180, 187, 194 Jolo, Muslim sultanate of, 15 Just War, 11, 164 Katz, David S., 108, 114 Kindelán y O’Regan, Sebastián, 148, 150 Kingsley, Zephaniah, 10, 146, 151, 156 Kings of E ­ ngland, old migration to Amer­i­ca and discourse of colonization, 167 Kingston (Jamaica), 118, 221–222, 225–232 Kinsale, B ­ attle of (1602), 132 Knowledge networks, 5, 65, 71–72, 75–77 Lady Dormer, 37 La Guaira, failed Republic of (1797), 127 La historia de las Indias y conquista de México (Francisco López de Gómara), 96, 99–100 La Laguna, Tenerife, 38 Land purchase, as discourse of colonization, 177 Lapis de Goa, 73–74 La Rochelle, fall of, 163, 171 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 12, 162, 165, 167, 176 Laud, William, 163, 171 Leiden, 165 Le Jau, Francis, 180–181, 187, 193 Letter on the Slave Trade (1807), 138 Ligon, Richard, 56, 58–59 Lisbon, 119 Livorno, 118 Local social identities, 25–26, 28, 34–40 Locke, John, 12, 182–183 Lok, John, 42–44, 47, 49, 62 London, 19, 109–114, 118, 119–120 Lopez, Roderigo (alias Ruy Lopez), 110–111, 112, 114 López de Gómara, Francisco, 8, 96, 99–100 Luangos, runaway Curaçaon slaves in Venezuela, 127 Luke 14, in Catholic colonization, 167 Luke 19, in Calvinist colonization, 167 Lynch, Thomas (governor of Jamaica), 115, 201, 203–210 Macedo, Duarte Ribeiro de, 75–76 MacGregor, Gregor, 10, 151 Madras, 15, 237–240, 243, 249, 254 Madrid, 118

327

Maine, 162; colony of Popham, 166 Malaga, 19 Manila: British occupation of, 14; Chinese (Sangley) in, 14; Irish in, 14 Manila galleon, 237, 241 Maracaibo, 127 Marianas, Islands, 14 Maroons, 51–52, 54, 60–61 Martire d’Anghiera, Pietro, 8, 86, 94–96, 98, 281n63; De Orbe Novo, 8, 86, 95–96, 281n63 Mary Tudor of E ­ ngland, 20, 31–32; cosmographical production during reign of, 85–86, 92–96, 101–102; marriage to Philip II, 85, 92–94; religious persecution u ­ nder, 102 Mas­sa­chu­setts, 162; Puritans’ 1630 settlement of, 164 Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Com­pany, control of executive board by settlers, 170 Massasoit (emperor of New ­England), 169 materia medica, 7 Mathews, General George, 146–147 Mathews, George, 10 Mathews, Maurice, 183–184 Mayflower, 170 McClure, William, 153 McIntosh, John H., 146–147, 149 Mercantile interests, En­glish, 88–89, 92–93 Metals: Indigenous possession of, 88, 97–101, 281–282n65; physical circulation from Spanish Amer­i­ca, 93–95, 101, 103, 277n11, 282n87; role in En­glish understandings of Amer­i­ca, 86–88, 97–98, 101. See also Gold; Iron; Silver Mexicans (indigenous), repre­sen­ta­tion of in sixteenth c­ entury cosmography, 88, 97, 100, 277n16 Mexico, Republic of, 151 Mexico City, 29, 33–34, 37 Miranda, Francisco de, 129, 151 Monteverde, Juan Domingo de, 128, 129, 130 Montezuma, 2, 164, 169 Moore, James Sr., 180 More, Sir Thomas, 8, 85, 88, 100, 279n33, 279n36 Morgan, Edmund, 176 Morillo, Pablo, 126, 135 Morse, Jedediah, 156 Mysore, sultanate of in India, 15, 252–253

328 Index Nairne, Thomas, 188–190, 193; praises Spain’s execution of terms of papal donation, 189 Napoleon, 146, 148 National identity: as a bureaucratic label, 27–28, 33, 39–40; definitions of, 24; En­glish, 23–24; hardening of in the bureaucracies of E ­ ngland and the Iberian Atlantic, 21, 24, 27–28, 33, 40 Natu­ral catastrophes, as providential sign of rightful possession, 173 Naturalization, 19–20, 24, 28 Navigation Acts, 114 Nehemiah, 1 New Biscay, 36 New E ­ ngland, 11; 1550s imaginings of, 91–92; plagues of 1617 and 1619, 173 New Granada, 218, 222–235 New Plymouth, 162; divisions among religious and lay settlers, 170; Pilgrims’ settlement of 1620, 164; settled in 1620, 166 New World Knowledge: creation of, 19, 20, 22, 40–41; nationalization of, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 40–41 New York, 121 Nicholas, Thomas, 26, 38–39 North­umberland, Duke of (John Dudley), 89–92 Nova Scotia, 162 Nueva Granada, Republic of, 151 Nuñez, Hector, 109–110, 119 O’Kennedy, Diego, 242 Ord, George, 153 O’Reilly Alejandro, 9, 126, 136–137; pro-­slavery and Puerto Rico’s plantation economy, 137 Orinoco, 14 Orta, Garcia da, 71, 74 Owen, William, 182, 188 Pampangans, 14, 247 Panama, 1671 En­glish attack on, 201, 202, 206–207 Pangasinan, 14 Panton, Leslie, and Co., 144–145 Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation (Winthrop), 170 Patriot War of 1812, 146–149 Pensacola, 11

Pereyra, Ishack, 117–118 Peri, Andrea, 35 Peru, 89–91, 95, 100–102, 104; En­glish depictions of, 85, 87, 100–101, 279n33; rebellions within, 91, 95. See also Peruvians Peruvians (indigenous), En­glish understandings of, 85, 95, 97, 100–101, 104, 279n33. See also Utopians Peterloo Massacre, 132 Philip II, King of Spain, 8, 20, 31–32, 36, 95, 276n6, 280n53; marriage to Mary I, 85, 92–94; role of En­glish reign in transfer of Spanish American wealth and knowledge, 87, 93–95, 103 Philip III, King of Spain, Protector of the Irish (refugees), 132 Philips, Miles, 25, 35 Piar, Felipe, 127 Pilgrims, 11; discourses of colonization, 161–177; low social status of settlers, 170 Piracy, 4, 10, 198, 199, 201, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210; and knowledge, 5 Pizarro, Francisco, 164, 169 Planters: as powerbrokers, 142–144, 146–148, 150–154; allegiance of, 143, 157 Planters Plea or The Grounds of Plantations Examined and Usual Objections Answered (White of Dorchester), 172, 174 Pocahontas, 2 Po­liti­cal economy, 197–199, 204 Portobelo, 14, 218, 220, 227–229, 233 Port Royal (Jamaica), 115–116 Portuguese: in Africa, 43–49; empire, 70–71; perceived decline of, 63–65 Potosí, 8, 87, 90. See also Metals; Silver Powhatan, 1, 168 Principal Navigations (Hakluyt), 6 Privateering, 199, 200, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 214. See also Piracy Prophecy, in Calvinist colonization, 166 Protestantism, slavery and, 54, 57–59, 268n47, 269n49 Providence Island, 56–57 Publishers, En­glish, role in promoting colonization, 90–93, 280n47, 281n62 Puerto Rico, 10 Puritans: discourses colonization of, 11, 161–177; social status of settlers, 170 Purity, 74, 78

Index Queen Mary, 8 Raleigh, Walter, 8 Reasons and considerations about the legality of establishing outside of ­England in parts of Amer­i­ca (Cushman), 166 Reformation, 21, 23, 26, 28–31 Relation or Journal of the beginning and proceedings of the En­glish plantation settled at Plimoth of New ­England, A (Cushman), 166 Religion, as identity, 25 Religious persecution, inquisition, 20, 23, 27, 29–30 República de españoles, 181, 183 República de Indios, British, 12, 181–183, 187 Riohacha, 13, 221, 224, 226–228, 232–33 Roanoke, 8 Robert Hogan, 37 Robles, Antonio Rodrigues, 111–112, 114, 119–120, 286n23 Robynson, Ralph, 90 Rolfe, John, 2 Royal Society of London, 7, 76–77, 81 Ruíz de Córdoba, Gonzalo, 34 Sabanilla, 13, 227–228 Sailors, 218–219, 225–226, 230, 234–235 Saint Augustine, Florida, 10, 144, 148, 154, 178–179, 185–186, 193 San Andrés, 13, 227–229 Sánchez Pedro (also known as Henry Hawks or Henry Hawkes), 19–24, 26 San Juan de Uloa, 32 San Lucar de Barrameda, 20, 29, 33, 36–37 Santa Marta, 14, 221, 224–228, 230 Santo Domingo, 29, 148–149 Sarzedas, Abraham, 121–122 Satan: and Apocalypse, 164; and Spain, 1 Say, Thomas, 153 Schmidt-­Nowara, Christopher, 9 Scotland, 256 Second slavery, 140 Segregation, 239, 243, 253–254 Seminole Indians, 11, 147–149, 153–156 Senegal, 4 Sephardim, Western, 109, 123 Sepúlveda, Juan Gines de, 167 Seven Years’ War, 14; Hibernian Regiment in, 9; slavery reforms, 137 Seville, 19, 25, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 39

329

Sheaves, Mark, 5, 115, 123, 287n33 Shipwrecks, 63–64 Silang, Diego, 245–248 Silver, 13, 86–89, 94–95. See also Metals; Potosí Slave trade: Africa, 42–51; Amer­i­ca, 9, 51–62; and Asiento, 9, 13, 14, 117, 199, 200, 201, 203–206, 209, 214; Ca­rib­bean, 218, 220–222; and moral economy, 7; New Granada, 223–224, 228–233 Smuggling, 13, 126, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 211, 213; in the Ca­rib­bean borderlands, 21. See also Contraband Snyder, Holly, 8 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 12, 179, 180, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193 Southampton, 30 South Carolina, 4, 12, 145 Sovereignty and jurisdiction, 199, 200, 216 Spanish Amer­i­ca: En­glish in, 51–55, 59, 61; in East Florida, 151–153; in­de­pen­dence movements, 157–158 Spanish constitution of 1812, 149–150 Spice trade, 63, 71–72 Sri Lanka, 7 Standish, Myles, 169 Stent, Agustín, 249–250 St. Mary River, 10 Strang, Cameron B, 10 Stuart, Charles (­later Charles II, King of ­England), 112 Sweeting, Bartoloma, 35 Sweeting, John, 34–36, 38 Sweeting, Robert, 25, 36, 38 Tallahassee, 12 Tea, 64, 67 Texcoco, 33–34 Thomas Jefferson, 146 Tipton, Hugh, 36–37 Tlaxcala, 2 Tobacco, 3 Toland, John, 121 Tomson, Edward, 30 Tomson, Robert, 22–24, 28–31, 33–41 Tomson, Tanar, 30 Torres y Ayala, Laureano (governor of Spanish Florida), 185 Trade, En­glish in Africa, 43, 45, 47, 49–51, 267n19

330 Index Trade international, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204–226, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215 Transatlantic commercial networks, development of, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 33–35, 38, 40–41 Transimperial entanglements, in the Ca­rib­bean, 219, 223, 225, 232–35 Transimperial trade, in the Ca­rib­bean, 218–220, 222–226, 228–235 Translatio imperii, 164, 168, 169 Translation, Spanish to En­glish, 87–88, 90–91, 96–7, 100–101, 281n61 Treaty of Madrid, 1670, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 209, 210, 307n10 True Discourse of the Pres­ent Estate of ­Virginia, 1 True discourse of the pres­ent estate of ­Virginia, A, (Hamor), 168 United States: acquisition of Spanish East Florida, 153–154; expansion of, 142, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155, 158; slavery in, 146, 149–150, 157 Utopia (More), 8, 85, 87–88, 90, 101, 279n33; reception in Spanish Amer­i­ca, 277n11, 278n22. See also Utopians Utopians, 87–90, 97–98, 101, 279n33 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713), 13 Valladolid, debate of, 167 Venezuela, Republic of, 151 Venice, 107 Veracruz, 34 Vespucci, Amerigo, 88, 90, 98 ­Virginia, 1, 4, 11, 54–56, 58–59, 87, 102, 104

­Virginia Com­pany of London, 166; transfer of charter to Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Com­pany, 170 ­Virginia Com­pany of Plymouth, 166 Vitoria, Francisco de, 12, 162, 165, 176 War of the Spanish Succession, 213–216 West Africa, 4, 7 West African slave trade, growth of, 20, 22 White of Dorchester, John, 172, 174–175; Planters Plea or The Grounds of Plantations Examined and Usual Objections Answered, 172, 174 Wilberforce, William, 10, 138 Willes, Richard, 103 Williams, Roger, 12, 162; as Puritan Las Casas, 165, 176–177 Winthrop, John, 162–163, 169–172; Paper of considerations concerning the Plantation, 170 Wogan, Eduardo, 242–243 Wolf, Lucien, 112 Yamasee Indians, 12, 178–180, 185–188, 190, 192–194; En­glish hopes of converting, 187; as military auxiliaries, 187; Spanish concern for exposure to En­glish “heresies,” 188; war on Carolina, 193; Yamasee War (1715), 12 Yarmouth (Isle of Wight,), 162 Yonge, Philip, 150–151 Yucatan, 13 Zahedieh, Nuala, 120 Zárate, Agustín de, 8, 95, 103

a c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

Without the energy, ideas, and vision of Bradley Dixon, Kristie Flannery, Christopher Heaney, and Mark Sheaves, this proj­ect would not have been pos­ si­ble. They helped me or­ga­nize the workshop “Entangled Histories of the Early Modern British and Iberian Empires and Their Successor Republics,” held at the University of Texas at Austin in November of 2014. Chloe Ireton was crucial in getting many of the logistical details right. I thank all the participants who came from near and far with essays, sharp insights, and generous enthusiasm: Ernesto Bassi, Kristen Block, Ben Breen, William S. Goldman, Eliga H. Gould, Michael Guasco, April Lee Hatfield, Ga­ briel Paquette, Karen Racine, Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara, Holly Snyder, and Cameron B. Strang. Eliga was not only an inspiration for the very conception of the workshop; he also generously agreed to write an afterword for this volume. Many of my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin attended the workshop and pored over the papers, delivering sharp and constructive cri­ tiques: Julie Hardwick, Neil Kamil, Philippa Levine, Bob Olwell, Alan Tully, and Ann Twinam. James Sidbury also served as commentator, commuting from Rice University in Houston. This event was made pos­si­ble by the generous financial support of the following institutes, programs, departments, and schools at the University of Texas at Austin: History, the Gradu­ate School, the Teresa Lozano Long Insti­ tute of Latin American Studies, and the British Studies Program. Robert Lock­ hart at the University of Pennsylvania Press has g­ ently and wisely guided the publication of this book. I am also thankful to the two anonymous review­ ers, whose comments helped improve many of the essays in this book. A year ­a fter our workshop, Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara died. I met Chris in Madrid in 1993 at the National Library, where we spent many after­ noons sharing coffee and the life of the mind. I always relished his gentle ways, his adamant determination to enjoy the quotidian despite hardships, and his warm, steadfast friendship. I dedicate this book to him.