Читать книгу The Temptations of Trade - Adrian Finucane - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

Britain Hopes for the “Riches of America,” 1713–1716

Through the seventeenth century, the English had been interested in taking over lands claimed by the Spanish, particularly in the West Indies and the North American mainland. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, this push for land was partially overtaken with a concern for trade as the main method of extracting Spanish American riches. The career trajectory of one South Sea Company agent, Thomas Dover, mirrors the shift in British strategies in regards to the Spanish. Although he had sailed against the Spanish during the War of the Spanish Succession, after the peace Dover became a company surgeon, profiting from the Spanish in an entirely new way. This was not a complete shift to trade for the British; among the many conflicting interests in the empire, there remained those who hoped to seize Spanish American lands throughout the British asiento period, but the early eighteenth century was a period of experimentation and possibility. During the difficult first years of the treaty, men like Dover took advantage of the newly agreed upon peace to take a new approach to the Spanish empire based on cooperative trade, an approach that pursued economic opportunities that would never be fully realized for the British Empire.

Dover already had quite a bit of experience in the Spanish Americas before the South Sea Company appointed him chief factor at its Buenos Aires factory in the fall of 1714. A physician educated at Oxford and Cambridge, with an active practice in the bustling port city of Bristol, Dover traveled to the West Indies several times on slaving voyages and explorations. As third in command on the famous voyage of privateer Woodes Rogers in 1708–1711, he had a hand in circumnavigating the world and attacking Spanish settlements along the American coast.¹ As a member of one of the early voyages meant to harass the Spanish and gather information for possible English encroachment into the area, Dover was part of the wartime move to begin to displace the Spanish. As a factor for the South Sea Company, he meant to profit from their presence in the Americas. These tensions, including the desire of some to oust the Spaniards, the need for them to be present and to consume British merchandise, and the pragmatic attempt of many to take advantage of the situation in the Americas regardless whether it benefited the empire or just their own pocketbook, persisted throughout the asiento period.

Dover sailed with the first group of ships to travel from Great Britain to the Spanish American coasts after the 1713 peace, but unlike many of the other South Sea Company employees, he had seen those shores before. As part of the Rogers voyage, Dover insisted on taking aggressive actions against the Spanish in 1709, despite the relative weakness of his own small fleet. Under Dover’s command, the English ships attacked and seized Guayaquil in what would become Ecuador, which had recently been ravaged by what Dover called a “plague,” and burned the city.² The city’s weary inhabitants capitulated to Dover’s assault, which permanently drove out many inhabitants whose wealth was seized and homes destroyed.³

When choosing Dover to conduct their trade in Buenos Aires, the South Sea Company opted for a man who had already taken an aggressive stance toward the Spanish. As a trading agent, he would be well positioned to take advantage of his location in the Spanish empire, whether it meant trading slaves and goods for Spanish specie or determining where the British might usefully make incursions into Spanish American land holdings. Dover bragged of his extensive travels and experiences abroad, opining that “if Travelling be necessary to make an accomplished Physician, I am very sure that I have travelled more than all the Physicians in Great Britain put together.”⁴ Dover’s explorations made him more useful both as a doctor and an agent of expansion for Britain’s merchant empire.

Dover and his fellow traders would find their loyalties challenged, their systems shocked by new social environments and climates, and their ability to conduct their trade thwarted by the vagaries of life in the West Indies. At the same time, these men participated both in the construction of their own nation’s overseas power and that of the often-enemy Spanish empire. As agents of the trade in slaves and other goods, the employees of the company simultaneously hoped to enrich themselves and their home country even as they lent support to the growing Spanish empire, supplying it with much-needed labor and supplies.⁵ By taking advantage of the asiento contract, the British government and its agents in the company could not help but assist the Spanish in building their own power in the Americas.

Dover was far from the only man with extralegal experience in the Spanish West Indies before turning his attention to supporting the interests of the South Sea Company. Manuel Manasses Gilligan, an Irish Catholic merchant, had also spent extensive time on the Spanish American coasts. During the 1702–1713 war, when the legality of trade to the Spanish empire was in flux and at times unclear, Gilligan took advantage of the confusion and conducted a trade to the Spanish Main. As far as the Barbados Vice-Admiralty Court was concerned, this was a contraband trade, and they prosecuted and convicted Gilligan. He eventually won an appeal in England and returned to his business, taking advantage of policies after 1704 that allowed a limited trade to the Spanish coast by English and Dutch vessels despite the war. As the war came to a close, the British government called Gilligan to Madrid, where he was asked to draw on his extensive experience with legal and illegal Anglo-Spanish trade in the Caribbean to participate in negotiations for the asiento contract.⁶ His work had been limited and illegal at the beginning of the war; at the end, his flouting of English colonial law transformed him into a valuable asset to those in Britain interested in formalizing the trade. Like Dover, Gilligan moved from illegal or quasi-legal activities to participating in official aspects of the expansion of the British Empire, and potential profits, on the coasts of Spanish America. These South Sea Company agents, like so many of their countrymen, took advantage of the British Empire in whatever way seemed most profitable at the time.

The British Asiento Contract

Dover and his fellow factors had permission from the Spanish to live in the Spanish Americas because of the asiento contract. Spain’s King Philip V and Britain’s Queen Anne signed the asiento treaty on March 26, 1713, intending it to come into effect on the first of May of that same year. The contract stipulated that for a period of thirty years, until 1743, the British would supply the Spanish Americas with slaves brought from Africa.⁷ This had the dual benefit of creating a legal way for Great Britain to trade to the Spanish Americas and banning the rival French from these same areas. It required the South Sea Company, which had been given a charter that allowed them the sole right to trade from British territories to South America from 1711 onward, to provide the vast regions of the Spanish Americas with 144,000 slaves, at the rate of 4,800 per year.⁸ In order to conduct this massive trade in human beings the Spanish permitted the British to construct trading posts, known as factories, and to place agents known as factors at the Spanish American cities of Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Vera Cruz, Havana, Panama, Santiago de Cuba, Caracas, and Portobello, and allowed them to import slaves to but not live in several additional Spanish ports.⁹ The Spanish also made an exception to the laws forbidding most non-Spanish trade with the colonies, allowing the British to send one ship to Portobello each year for the major trade fair.¹⁰ This trade agreement gave Britain more extensive access to Spanish American markets than even the French had enjoyed, and the Spanish agreed to this stipulation reluctantly, given the damage it was sure to do to the monopoly previously enjoyed by their own importers.¹¹ This “permission ship” had an advantage over British trade through Cádiz or Seville, as merchants were able to avoid paying Spain’s taxes.¹² The British ship would bring a variety of goods coveted in the Spanish Americas: according to the Spanish trade official Joseph de Veitia Linage, these included serges, woolen hose, silk hose, wrought pewter and tin, Scotch linen, calicoes, pepper, musk, amber, civet, and other merchandise.¹³ In return for these considerations, the Spanish king required that the South Sea Company provide him with a payment of two hundred thousand pieces of eight, in addition to a duty on each slave sale.¹⁴ The trade would provide needed goods and slaves to Spanish ports, enrich the Spanish king, and fill the pockets of the South Sea Company’s investors.

Though the contract technically existed between the monarchs, Queen Anne granted the right to fulfill the trade to the South Sea Company, formed in 1711 by the Tory lord treasurer, Robert Harley.¹⁵ The East India Company and others had set a precedent for overseas trading, but the South Sea Company was engaging in a fundamentally different sort of commerce, bringing slaves and merchandise mainly to the subjects of another European power in the Americas. The South Sea Company did not ultimately support the type of settlement and establishment of sovereignty over the areas to which they traded exercised by the East India Company, though some did have aspirations in that direction, especially considering the important routes to the Pacific controlled by the Spanish.¹⁶ Early on, the South Sea Company’s designs for the Spanish Americas extended beyond controlling its interimperial commerce, as in 1712 the company planned to send an expedition into Pacific South America to establish a settlement that could trade directly to the Spanish colonies surrounding it, though this was not carried out.¹⁷

As a corporation meant to take over a major overseas trade concession, the South Sea Company was organized to govern itself and the small groups of Britons it sent abroad. The company’s charter established a court of directors of thirty members under a governor, subgovernor, and deputy governor, all to be elected by the stockholders. The directors maintained regular contact with the company’s agents abroad, making decisions about who to hire and where to deploy their merchants and surgeons. While the company did not have control of large areas of land as the East India Company eventually would, they did have “ordering, rule, and government” of their forts and settlements, and were allowed to organize a force for their defense. While they were required to adhere to some Spanish laws, they were permitted to create a court of judicature to hold hearings on merchant and maritime cases. The crown intended this legal power to allow them to prevent others from trading in the South Sea Company’s jurisdiction.¹⁸

The Spanish allowed this British presence in order to maintain importations of enslaved African laborers. As holders of the asiento contract, the Spanish required the South Sea Company to import 4,800 piezas de indias, the standard unit for slaves, annually, for a period of thirty years. For each of these slaves the company would pay the Spanish crown at a rate of 33 1/3 pesos, except for the last 800, which were to be sold without duty.¹⁹ The company would never successfully import the full complement of slaves they were allowed, and may not have expected that that portion of the trade would be particularly profitable. Instead, the real value of the asiento trade lay in the political power it offered, as well as the profit possibilities inherent in the annual “permission” ship and the extensive contraband smuggling that accompanied the movement of British ships onto Spanish American shores.²⁰

For many in Britain, the most important function of the company was financial. It agreed to absorb a significant portion of the public debt that built up during the War of the Spanish Succession, offering stock at ever-increasing prices through 1720, when the wild speculation had run its expensive course and the bubble burst.²¹ While this failure has been widely studied, the trading activities of the company have been of interest to fewer scholars, despite the fact that the South Sea Company continued to function in the Spanish Americas long after it ceased to be of financial benefit to the nation.²²

The provisions of the asiento treaty suggest some of the hopes and fears with which each of these empires entered the agreement. The British saw an enticing opportunity to expand their own trade in slaves and manufactured goods and to exercise their considerable naval power; long before the moral debates about abolition became widespread, this seemed simply another opportunity for financial gain.²³ Taking over the trade also allowed the nation to reduce the trading power of the French, who had previously dominated Spanish American trade.²⁴ While the contract allowed the ships bringing slaves and goods into the Spanish Empire to belong to and be crewed by either their own or British subjects, the British preferred and used their own extensive fleet, a key part of the Navigation Acts.²⁵ The Spanish demonstrated their own fears over the new presence of large trading delegations from the long-oppositional British Empire by demanding that “neither the Commanders of those ships … nor the Mariners do give any Offence, or cause any Scandal to the exercise of the Roman Catholick Religion.”²⁶ It would have been unnecessary to create injunctions against British sailors offending the Catholic religion unless the Spanish expected that this would be an inevitable problem, as it had long been with English merchants living in Old Spain.²⁷

Like the Spanish, the British too worried, as they did during the trade to Old Spain, about the possibility of religious conflict or the prospect of Catholic conversions, voluntary or coerced. An early abstract for the South Sea Company charter required the company to employ an Anglican minister for each of their factories and their larger ships.²⁸ These religious men would tend to the souls of those living in the factories, saving them from the temptations of Catholicism. The abstract further required these ministers to learn Spanish or Portuguese, as well as whatever native languages were in use in the area, suggesting that the court of directors could have anticipated some evangelism.

The 1713 contract allowed British individuals like Dover into the Spanish empire in an official capacity as long-term residents. They were permitted to live in the ports, and were to “be regarded and treated as if they were Subjects of the Crown of Spain,” allowed to travel and trade in the colonies, according to the text of the treaty. This display of generosity and trust by the Spanish government was immediately qualified, however, with the stipulation “that there shall not reside in any one of the said Ports of the Indies, more than Four or Six Englishmen.”²⁹ These scattered factors would process the slaves moving through Spanish American ports and would travel into the interior of the continents in order to conduct slaves to other areas for sale.³⁰ In 1724 the company argued further that they should be allowed to send additional agents known as supercargoes to sell the goods of the annual ship throughout the empire, and that those men should be treated as subjects of Spain, just as the company’s factors in the ports were entitled to by the original contract.³¹ The Spanish crown was resistant to these additional encroachments into their territory. The limitation to such a small number of Britons, combined with the insistence that these men conform to Spanish laws and respect Catholicism, suggests that the Spanish worried that their presence would disrupt the smooth running of their empire. By keeping the numbers of troublesome Britons at a minimum, local civil and ecclesiastical officials could expect to repress their potentially negative influence.³²

The contract gave these small numbers of authorized factors permission not only to live in Spanish American ports, but to hold land there. The ninth article of the asiento granted Dover and his fellow factors land in the Rio de la Plata area “sufficient to plant, to cultivate, and breed Cattle therein, for the subsistence of the Persons belonging to the Assiento, and their Negroes.”³³ This situation presupposed that the peace would persist for a long time, long enough for land to be cultivated and crops to be harvested. Given that the Spanish Americas were poor in labor but rich in land area, it is likely that this allowed the Spanish to accommodate the need for provisions at the distant Buenos Aires factory while facilitating the cultivation and settlement of lands that they would not themselves be required to tend. The second part of the ninth article prevented the factors from becoming too comfortable, however, decreeing that houses were to be built of timber only, and that no fortifications were to be permitted.³⁴ Furthermore, a royal officer would be appointed to live on the South Sea Company’s land, to observe the activities there and report to Spanish officials as necessary.³⁵ It appears that the Spanish expected British individuals living in the Spanish empire to prove at least a marginal threat, and that they had to be watched, lest the privileges extended to them by the king of Spain result in British fortifications being constructed on vulnerable Spanish territory.

The South Sea Company’s trade to the Spanish Americas forced contact between groups that for a long time had been largely officially oppositional in the Americas. While some British merchants, factors, and ambassadors lived within Spain itself during the decades before the British gained the asiento, the establishment of the South Sea Company’s factories marked the first incorporation of subjects of the British monarch within the borders of the broader Spanish empire as important agents of trade.³⁶ Within the Spanish-controlled regions of the West Indies and South America, an area of continued contest between empires and in which no European power’s control was completely consolidated, these factors’ presence was both useful and potentially dangerous for the Spanish empire.

Officials in both nations expected that the execution and maintenance of the asiento would be bumpy, and they attempted to avoid problems in the text of the treaty. In the twentieth article, the Spanish crown promised to personally ensure that “in case the said Assientists be molested in the Execution and Performance of this Assiento,” legally or otherwise, their troubles would be addressed quickly. This provision to ensure British rights balanced article twenty-two, which explained that all ships entering Spanish ports would be searched, from the top “even to the Ballast,” by the governor and royal officers of that area. In other words, the Spanish expected that their British counterparts would attempt, either systematically or as individuals, to import and sell goods that were declared contraband by previous international laws. Persons found engaging in this sort of trade faced harsh treatment. They were “to pay a Forfeiture proportionable to their Offence, [to be] severely punished, and declared incapable to hold thereafter any Employment in the Service of this Assiento.”³⁷ For its part, the company could be reasonably sure that there would be attempted smuggling of slaves into Spanish American ports by outside traders unauthorized to compete with them. While the French still held the asiento, factors, in combination with Spanish officials, were authorized to board others’ ships in order to halt the illegal trade in slaves.³⁸ These provisions during the British asiento would ultimately do little to halt the massive contraband trade that grew up in the area, conducted by private traders out of Jamaica and other British territories, by agents of the company itself, and by foreign vessels, particularly the French and Dutch.

The text of the asiento treaty created an uneasy alliance between the merchants of the South Sea Company and the port cities of Spanish America. Dover and his fellow factors inhabited a liminal space, in which they were not really Spaniards, but also not treated entirely like other Britons. This would allow some to become integrated into Spanish trade networks more deeply than previous traders to the Spanish coasts while at the same time retaining their British subjecthood and allegiance. This opportunity appealed to many who joined the company’s service. But not everyone in Britain was so sure about the benefits of engaging in trade with such long-term enemies in the vulnerable waters of the Americas.

Debating the Trade

The British gaining access to the asiento trade stirred quite a bit of controversy in Britain and Spain alike, and on both sides of the Atlantic. For Spain, the British asiento was essentially a forced concession after the War of the Spanish Succession. While they certainly required some foreign contact in order to supply the empire with enslaved laborers, the imperial government recognized that allowing Britons into their territories meant a gradual loss of the monopoly they had attempted to maintain through the early eighteenth century. For those trading to Spanish America, opinions were mixed; merchants in Spain harbored legitimate concerns that the British would take over some of the trade to the Americas, while those subjects living in the Americas sometimes welcomed the opportunity for new merchandise and price competition.³⁹

Even despite the promises of financial benefit to their own country, many in Great Britain did not immediately embrace the establishment of the asiento contract. A flood of pamphlets published during consideration of the contract and after its signing reveal extensive objections to Britons’ engaging in this type of trade with Spain, to the positioning of British factors in Spanish American ports, and to the amount that engagement with this trade would cost the British government and private individuals alike. These objections indicate not only the fears that Britons had about the Spanish empire and its potential powers in the Old and New Worlds, but also the fears they had of their own abilities to spend themselves into debt, and to embarrass the nation by being unable to control British subjects’ conduct or contraband trade abroad. Significantly, Britons, particularly those in the colonies, leveled objections not to the trade in human beings, but rather to the potential damage that any kind of trade would do to the nation.

The objections began while the War of the Spanish Succession was still raging. In a 1711 letter to the earl of Oxford, the future governor of Bermuda, John Pullen, warned that “if it ever comes to that length, that the South Sea Company shall have occasion to send their Servants to reside amongst the Spaniards in America, the utmost Care and Prudence must be employ’d in procuring able Men to send in the beginning, for if the Spaniards should have reason to entertain a despicable Opinion of them, it would be the work of an Age to retrieve it.” The close interaction that the asiento would facilitate between British subjects and individuals and officials in the Spanish empire would leave the British Empire particularly vulnerable to international embarrassments should their representatives fall short in performance or manner. Pullen had very little faith in the proposed British factors, and put forth two further examples of ways in which the nation might suffer in deciding to pursue this trade. First, the merchants would need to provide “exorbitant Bribes” to Spanish officers, “who are true sons of the Horse-Leech.” Second, the arrangement ensured little accountability, and was vulnerable to any dishonesty on the part of factors; the contract gave the company “a great Opportunity to your servants to abuse you,” charging with impunity larger amounts than were actually needed to carry on the trade.⁴⁰

The people of Jamaica immediately resented the possibility of formalizing and monopolizing trade to the Spanish Americas, for a variety of reasons. Some had long been resistant to the idea of peaceful trade with the Spanish; Thomas Modyford, governor of Jamaica from 1664 to 1671, aggressively supported the large buccaneer population based on the island.⁴¹ These pirates, along with the guardacostas, employed by the Spanish to retaliate, made shipping to and from the island more dangerous, but did enrich those who seized cargo and specie from Spanish crews.⁴² Some continued to support the quasi-military seizure of Spanish goods, rather than direct trade.

From another perspective, Jamaica’s merchants, many already engaged in a longstanding, albeit often illegal, trade with the Spanish colonies, expected that the South Sea Company would cut off an important source of profit for the island. Trade to the Spanish had long been significant to the island’s commerce. Commercial activity with Spanish territories constituted a considerable amount of Jamaica’s economic development in the late seventeenth century, even before the robust growth of agriculture. The traffic in slaves made up a lot of this trade; the Royal African Company seems to have sold large proportions of its imports of enslaved African laborers to the Spanish during the 1680s.⁴³ In an effort to limit French trade and aid English commerce, after 1704 the English government condoned trade from Jamaica to the Spanish Americas in wartime, provided they did not ship materials meant to support the Spanish war effort, though once the war ended this was no longer permitted due to the South Sea Company’s monopoly.⁴⁴ Despite the dangers of trading to the coast during the contract, ships from Jamaica continued to smuggle slaves into the Spanish coasts through peace and war, some colluding with company agents and some independently. Early in the contract, the Vera Cruz factory complained that a Jamaica sloop had landed on the coast with seventy-three African slaves on board, violating their monopoly.⁴⁵ Decades later, Captain Fayrer Hall explained that the South Sea Company’s activities had damaged the Jamaican merchants’ business.⁴⁶ Throughout the asiento period, antimonopolistic interests in Jamaica and the metropole continued to decry the limitations the contract placed on trade, considering the informal trade that had long flourished between the island and the Spanish colonies.⁴⁷

At the beginning of the asiento trade, the vast majority of British objections focused on economic troubles. Some objected that engaging in this trade would be too expensive to justify the profits. An anonymous pamphlet by a Jamaica resident, published in London in 1714, advised the company to reduce its costs by cutting the number of factors to just two at each port, with the majority of the business and organization handled in Jamaica, where the company would set up a large factory in any case.⁴⁸ Jamaica’s William Wood warned in 1714 that the asiento could in no way be more profitable than the trade that was already being carried on—illegally—between Jamaica and Spanish America.⁴⁹ Given the commercial duties that the company would owe, the restrictions placed upon the trade by the Spanish crown, and the possibility for treachery on the part of Spanish officials, it would actually weaken the strategically valuable island of Jamaica and make it more vulnerable to capture by foreign powers, particularly the French.⁵⁰

Further on in the asiento period, others objected to the South Sea trade because of the financial issues that it would eventually create. One aspect of the company that was particularly attractive for the British crown was that it took on and restructured a portion of the massive national debt that had accrued as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession. In order to reduce this debt, South Sea Company stock was both sold and exchanged for securities that had previously been issued by the government. The stock became incredibly popular, and rose astronomically in price through early 1720. As with all speculative crazes of this sort, the South Sea bubble eventually burst early in the decade, bankrupting many and turning much public opinion against the company.⁵¹

Other celebrations and rejections of the treaty moved beyond the issue of economics, to the very ideology of empire. The early eighteenth-century British government was deeply divided over the benefits of this project. While the supporters of the Tory government rallied around the idea of expansion in trade and land made possible by the South Sea Company’s asiento, many Whig thinkers balked at the plan, privileging the added value of people and labor over territorial gains in building the empire. They preferred the Dutch model of extensive trade but minimal settlement, and rejected the idea of taking land by force. Rather than marveling at the mines they might control if only British forces could seize Potosí and Zacatecas, they feared that such riches would stifle their own empire’s productivity and create distinctively Spanish moral dissipation among the people.⁵² At the same time, the South Sea Company might be a particularly easy way to access some Spanish silver through trade, which both sides agreed would benefit the nation.⁵³ This conflict between a model of imperial expansion and national success based on land and one based on trade was not necessarily so dichotomous for some in Britain and particularly on the ground in the Americas; the agents of the South Sea Company would often end up taking the most pragmatic approach to profit, personal, and if convenient, national, rather than considering the ideals being argued in London. While some of those who lived in the West Indies would in later years champion the idea of expanding the British Empire into territories held at the time by the Spanish and even provide crucial strategic information about Spanish lands, those trading to the West Indies before the South Sea Company’s monopoly resisted these changes in policy, which would inevitably damage the legal and illegal trade they were already conducting in the region.⁵⁴

Arguments for the trade largely focused on the opportunities it might present, rather than the guaranteed profits. Other European nations had considerable success in the Spanish American trade. One pamphleteer reminded readers of the French accomplishments in the area, which included ships “loaden with the Riches of America, but principally with Gold and Silver.”⁵⁵ Undertaking this trade themselves, the author urged, would allow Britain to enrich not only its merchants, but also its manufacturers and farmers. Given the possibilities, and the opportunity to seize this trade from their French rivals, the contract seemed a clear benefit to the nation at many levels.

Among those engaged in the arguments surrounding the South Sea Company, Daniel Defoe wrote particularly passionately, and in addition to encouraging Harley in establishing the company, he acted as a prolific propagandist for the trade. He noted the advantages that commerce with the Spanish Americas provided to the French before and during the war, pointing out that taking over that portion of Spain’s trade would weaken the other major Catholic power in the West Indies by depriving it of profits. Long before the crash a decade later, he imagined that the availability of stock would benefit many Britons, just as the trade would be lucrative for the South Sea Company. By establishing areas of trade on the Spanish American coasts, Defoe expected that wealth would flow to Britain, and that new opportunities for selling British manufactures would be opened. He imagined new employment for the poor and for mariners, an increase in land values, and a revival of the struggling Royal African Company, which for a long time had the official monopoly on the slave trade in West Africa.⁵⁶ In a 1712 pamphlet, he decried the focus of many on the shortcomings of the trade, arguing that the unfortunate restrictions should not be enough to justify abandoning the possibility of a trade that was “well worth all the Hazard, Adventure, Expence, and Pains of the Undertaking.” Attention must be given to possible gains rather than limitations, Defoe wrote, “that we may not presently argue our selves out of all the Trade, because we have not the Gates of Mexico opened to us.”⁵⁷ If organized correctly, Defoe hoped, English settlements nestled among the Spanish American claims, like the one they had already established at Jamaica, could supply the Spanish Americas without the long-required expensive stop in Cádiz.⁵⁸

A major component of Defoe’s excitement over the South Sea Trade, in addition to the profits he anticipated, lay in the possibilities he saw for the establishment of British trading and settlement to expand into other areas of the Spanish empire. As he saw it, the asiento would offer a perfect opportunity to “find out or discover some Place or Places in America, where we may fix and settle a British Colony.” This implies both the collection of information on the Spanish empire that would suddenly be open to Britons legally trading with and living in the Spanish Americas, and the subsequent opportunity to carve out parts of that empire for British “Planting, Settling, Inhabiting, Spreading, and all that is usual in such cases.” Regardless of the technical restrictions on unsanctioned trading between the Spanish and British subjects, Britons’ presence would have to be advantageous; “let the English get a good Footing on the South-Sea Coast of America, and let them and the Spaniards alone for Trading with one another, let the King of Spain prevent it if he can.”⁵⁹ In contrast to writers like the Secretary of State Lord Bolingbroke, who felt that trade and conquest could not be undertaken at the same time, Defoe saw them as part of the same approach to overseas profit.⁶⁰ England could be expected to thrive even where the Spanish had not been successful, with its North American colonies positioned to support the newly developing settlements.⁶¹ Defoe’s extensive publishing in support of establishing a colony in South America, along with the detailed maps of cartographers like Moll, alerted the British public to the possibilities that lay across the Atlantic.⁶² The company’s Court of Directors shared these aspirations, in their words, to be able to make both “a trade to and settlement in the South Sea,” establishing bases from which English influence and economic advantage could expand.⁶³ Here the aims some Britons had not only to trade with but to settle and control large parts of the Spanish empire, and to take advantage of the productive mines and large markets in those parts of the Americas, become clear. During subsequent periods of interimperial unrest, Britons with firsthand experience of Spanish America once again championed specific seizures of land, as Lionel Wafer and William Dampier had done in decades past.

Unfortunately for the Court of Directors and stockholders of the South Sea Company, those who opposed the company saw the future more clearly than Defoe. Repeated problems arose in the factories and with the conduct of trade, and the company had ample cause to complain during the tenure of the contract that they were not achieving the profits they expected.⁶⁴ It is likely that the contract most benefited those who engaged in contraband trade under the guise of bringing slaves or goods to the ports or fairs of Spanish America.⁶⁵ Indeed, the opportunity that this officially limited trade to the Spanish Americas provided for Britons to bring contraband into the region was a major reason for some to support the asiento.⁶⁶ The nature of the Spanish American ports into which the British South Sea Company factors moved lent itself to both unusual levels of personal contact between members of each empire and opportunities for corruption and smuggling. At the level of individuals, the empires, and their success, became increasingly entwined. During the course of the asiento, some Britons would find this closeness to the Spanish tempting, and even challenging to their imperial loyalty. As the nations implemented the agreement laid out in the 1713 treaty, the benefits and dangers of trade became more fully realized.

Implementation

In 1714 Queen Anne authorized two South Sea Company ships to travel to the Spanish Americas. The Warwick, captained by Henry Partington, sailed to Buenos Aires with Thomas Dover and his fellow employees on board. Robert Johnson captained the Anglesea, bringing Chief Factor Gilbert Grimes and his fellow company agents to Cartagena.⁶⁷ Scandal surrounded the project almost from the start. Johnson reported that he had been asked by Arthur Moore, an agent of Bolingbroke, to stop in Cádiz to collect the viceroy of Peru and the new governor of Panama for transport across the Atlantic. In addition, Moore proposed smuggling a large cargo onboard the Anglesea, though when he reported Moore to the court of directors Johnson insisted that he had rejected Moore’s plan out of consideration for his own reputation. The Spanish American officials in Cádiz ultimately had to find a different way to travel to the Americas, and the viceroy, Carmine Caracciolo, the Prince of Santo Buono, spent much of his short administration in Peru working against the sort of contraband traffic Moore was proposing.⁶⁸ In response to Johnson’s accusatory letter, the South Sea Company court found that Moore, from his position of power in the company, had “encouraged a design of carrying on a clandestine trade, to the prejudice of this corporation.”⁶⁹ Even before agents arrived to establish their factories, individuals at all levels of the company’s organization were attempting to take their own advantage of the Spanish American connection, even when it might damage the company’s position.

In a less scandalous but still troubling case, Captain Partington wrote to the company repeatedly about the difficulties he faced in having the agents on board; they were, according to him, already trying to circumvent the rules of the court of directors and the treaty. In February of 1715, he reported that the factors came onboard in England according to plan, but that they had brought ten African servants and nine additional white people, including five women, onto the ship, despite the restrictions that the treaty placed on the British presence in the Spanish American ports.⁷⁰ Even with this first foray into Spanish American cities, the factors challenged the limits of the asiento, potentially trying the patience of the Spanish. Partington wished to refuse to sail with the additional passengers, but was instructed to proceed, bringing Dover, his fellow factors, and the rest of the Britons first to Madiera and from there to the South American coast.⁷¹

Landing factors in Spanish ports was only the first step in establishing this trade. More complex, the company needed to acquire and deliver enslaved African laborers. The company took a number of approaches to securing a steady supply of slaves for Buenos Aires and the other factories during the asiento period. The Royal African Company had held the monopoly on British trade to Africa since 1672; in 1698 it lost its coveted status, and the coast was opened to independent traders.⁷² The members of the Royal African Company responded enthusiastically to the opportunity presented by the creation of the South Sea Company, hoping that an exclusive contract would revive their organization. In August of 1713, committees from the two companies met, and the Royal African Company agreed to supply the total quota of 4,800 slaves per year, even before the South Sea Company had mapped out the locations of their Spanish American factories.⁷³ The Royal African Company’s troubles continued, however, and the South Sea Company soon had to turn to other private sources to fulfill its need for slaves, though it did revisit the possibility of a long-term contract with the Royal African Company in the early 1720s.⁷⁴ In addition to the Royal African Company, independent traders brought slaves directly to the Spanish American coast or to the factory in Jamaica, where they would be redirected to the necessary ports of the Caribbean and South America. Housing and selling these enslaved laborers was then the primary task of the South Sea Company’s agents who had themselves recently come to those cities.

On their arrival in the Americas, those factors who had lived most of their lives in Great Britain found an area of intense movement and mixing of peoples. Diverse religious, ethnic, and racial groups already circulated extensively in the West Indies by the time the British began their legal trade to the Spanish.⁷⁵ Creole and Spanish Americans in the port cities of the empire lived alongside native Central and South Americans, African slaves, and individuals of various blended cultural and ethnic backgrounds, who now mixed with British factors, traders, and hangers-on, in addition to the various other Europeans who legally, or at times illegally but openly, moved through the area as merchants.⁷⁶ Lands periodically changed hands, as with Jamaica in 1655 and St. Kitts in 1713. The proximity of a number of European empires, and the periodic native and slave resistance that flared up in the area, made it difficult for any one nation to consolidate power.

For those reasons, the Caribbean was unusually dynamic and largely dissimilar to contested lands in Europe. While the movement of peoples and shifting of geographic control in the West Indies mirrored the conflict and movement that occurred in disputed European areas such as Gibraltar, and the intermixing of people for the reasons of trade was not unlike that which had long occurred in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean’s New World situation and the opportunities it offered for mining and trade made it a unique location for European disputes.⁷⁷ Europeans had settled their territories heavily, and control over the lands there was established in some cases by centuries of treaty and international recognition. The Americas, having been divided by the European powers relatively recently, and containing lands that were still to be discovered, offered far more opportunity for the expansion of European monarchs’ control over lands than attempts made on the European continent. Alliances with native peoples or signatures on European treaties could allow Spanish or British settlers to lay claim to American land, and to benefit from the attendant gold or silver, native labor, natural resources, and trading potential. This shifting of sometimes very weak control, coupled with the high stakes represented by control over the richest trading opportunities to the New World, made the Caribbean an unusual area of mixing and conflict.

Figure 2. Map of the locations of the South Sea Company’s factories. Despite restrictions on non-Spanish residents in the colonies, the company was officially allowed to station a small number of agents at each of its factories. Map by Darin Grauberger, University of Kansas Cartographic Services.

The West Indian and Spanish American ports in which these British factors lived were also very different from the British ports, including London, to which many of them were accustomed. In places like Jamaica, Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Panama, and Portobello, the employees of the South Sea Company encountered a hugely diverse group of people, unfamiliar terrain, and an inhospitable climate like none in Europe. Some men adapted well to these new conditions and stayed for years, while others either returned home quickly or succumbed to illness in the tropical or subtropical heat.⁷⁸

Dover and his company arrived into this context of cosmopolitanism and uncertainty when they reached the port of Buenos Aires in the summer of 1715. Partington held the ship off the coast for several months, guarding the factors against external dangers while they established themselves on shore.⁷⁹ While in Buenos Aires Partington reported that several of his crew had died since coming into the Rio de la Plata area, including his cook and boatswain, presumably from subtropical diseases.⁸⁰ The city’s location on the southern Atlantic coast put them far from the other company factories, but close to a major source of Spanish wealth. Merchants from Buenos Aires, both British and Spanish, could trade nearly directly to Potosí, the great mountain of silver in Bolivia, despite official rules mandating that that trade occur only through Lima. Buenos Aires was one of the most important cities in the Spanish Atlantic empire when the factors arrived, and in the middle of doubling its population, which rose to nearly nine thousand within the decade. This economically vital region stood on the edge of the empire, in an agriculturally rich area sometimes raided by native groups living on the frontier.⁸¹ The port was of particular importance to the South Sea Company; in the later part of the contract period, the company would be allowed to send groups of several hundred slaves inland, to Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, giving them access to a huge area of the Spanish Americas.⁸² In the time after enslaved laborers’ arrival on company or independent ships and before willing buyers could be found, the agents housed them on various farms and estates. The factory, far from British supply routes, provided its own food with its farm near the river.⁸³

In Jamaica, where the factors sometimes paused en route to their respective ports of employ and where the main South Sea Company factory conducted much of the trade, some new arrivals had a first introduction to their new life. Jamaica had a large enslaved population, and small proportion of Europeans compared to Great Britain.⁸⁴ Here individuals of different races came into regular contact. Both slaves and indigenous individuals from other islands and the mainland migrated to Jamaica, and slaves purchased by the company were often brought to the island for “refreshment” before continuing on to Spanish America.⁸⁵ In addition to its demographic diversity, Jamaica’s economy integrated closely into the multi-imperial Caribbean system of commerce, exporting the produce of its plantations and importing manufactured goods and European foods. Internally, Europeans in Jamaica relied on Spanish coins for their day-to-day exchanges.⁸⁶

If the physical heat and human company in Jamaica seemed strange and perhaps unwelcome, the Spanish American ports proved more removed still from a European way of life. In Cartagena, where the Anglesea deposited its group of factors, the majority of inhabitants belonged to indigenous groups. Traveling to the area in 1735, Antonio de Ulloa described the country as not particularly wealthy, but home to a number of “splendidly furnished” houses and rich men. Cartagena, about the size of a third-tier European city, lay on the edge of the water, supplied from the east, where “several fruitful valleys” and largely depleted gold mines stretched for many leagues.⁸⁷ The South Sea Company factors traveling to Cartagena aboard the Anglesea could expect to meet several distinctive castes of people, from peninsulares born within Spain to a wide number of individuals of mixed parentage. Ulloa, himself Spanish, spoke highly of the men and women he met in Cartagena, who he felt “possessed a great deal of wit and penetration.” Though they appeared sluggish and possessed a “wan and livid complexion,” they were quite healthy, Ulloa assured readers.⁸⁸ But the very foreign geography and population doubtless shocked some of the merchants.

Cartagena was placed strategically, in a location that allowed it to protect possessions on the Spanish Main, but under the Hapsburgs it had become an undersupplied place of disorder. While the empire prohibited most foreign trade, the people of Cartagena threatened rebellion if their access to foreign flour was restricted.⁸⁹ Early in the century, the judges of the city overthrew and imprisoned the president and captain general over similar differences.⁹⁰ The Bourbons responded to this disorder with a series of reforms in 1717 that included the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada and a reassignment of the American trade to Cádiz rather than Seville.⁹¹ This attempt at a reassertion of imperial power was a reflection in part of the variety of interests at play in the colony and the metropole, a situation that the South Sea Company and its individual agents would sometimes exploit to their own advantage.

Factors inhabiting another key strategic site in the empire at Portobello found themselves on the eastern side of the Isthmus of Panama, a three-day journey over land from the port of Panama.⁹² Ulloa described these cities as substantially similar to Cartagena, though Portobello was particularly infamous for its inclement weather.⁹³ Some expressed concerns that the British factors sent to the area might be at particular risk for catching infections “among the Spaniards,” given the unhealthy climate.⁹⁴ Portobello had poor soil and few provisions; its main value was as a gateway to Panama and the rest of South America from the Atlantic Ocean.⁹⁵ For two centuries, Panama was one terminus of the carrera de Indias, a sailing of fleets of ships between Spain and the Americas, convoys meant to secure the Spanish monopoly on their trade and to protect their cargoes.⁹⁶

For a few weeks each year, as the fleet arrived, Portobello would fill up for the annual trading fair. Vessels crowded the harbor, huge numbers of mules laden with the gold of Peru milled about the town, and tents were erected for the display and sale of goods. More than half a century earlier, the English traveler Thomas Gage described having seen “heaps of silver wedges [that] lay like heaps of stone in the street,” and imagined that this was the greatest fair in all the world. The sheer quantity of wealth that congregated in the city attracted merchants and smugglers who engaged in a robust contraband trade through and around the fair, despite repeated attempts by the crown to keep all trade visible and taxable. The asiento permitted the company to send one “permission ship” of five hundred tons each year, a significant penetration into the Spanish American market that no other country had managed. In addition to this allowed amount, Ulloa reported that by sailing with separate ships for the crews’ provisions and by reloading from still other ships, the factors were able to bring almost twice that load of merchandise into the city. At the 1721 fair, the English ship the Royal George received goods from more than twenty other English ships, significantly driving down prices among the other merchants as the Spanish government had feared when they first attempted to limit the British to one five-hundred-ton ship. In addition, factors could smuggle merchandise on shore from their regular ships by claiming that the goods were meant for the maintenance of the slaves. This smuggling comprised a significant and critical part of the Caribbean economy, and was warmly accepted by local colonists, given the inability of the Spanish to otherwise supply all the needs of their colonies.⁹⁷ Given the usual restriction of travel to the annual fair only to subjects of Spain, the British were as enthusiastic about this unprecedented access to the Spanish empire and its markets as the Spanish were nervous about what this British incursion on Spanish trade monopolies and movement in Spanish American lands might mean for their control of large areas of the Americas.

The factories these Britons inhabited in the New World were not only places of business through which the trade in slaves and goods flowed, but also the factors’ own homes. Factors inhabited midsized buildings near large warehouses meant to store goods and provisions, and structures to hold slaves until they were sold. The factory at Veracruz had a kitchen well stocked enough to suggest that the factors often had company; they had more than eighteen pewter plates, twelve stools, and several chairs, plenty for the four to six factors and either British or Spanish guests. Marble and mahogany tables filled a common living area, and mirrors hung on the walls. The factors surrounded themselves with shelves of books in English. Their bedrooms held chests full of clothing, and each employee had an English cot to sleep on. A chiming clock kept the factory’s occupants on schedule.⁹⁸

The asiento allowed a maximum of four to six British factors to reside at each port to facilitate the sale of slaves coming into Spanish American lands on British ships. In order to run smoothly, a factory needed at least one or two factors working on slave sales and perhaps traveling into the interior with groups of slaves, as well as a bookkeeper and a surgeon; the latter would tend both the South Sea Company employees and the African men and women moving through the port after their voyage through the middle passage.⁹⁹ In addition to this permanent group, British supercargoes attended the ships that came into these ports with the slaves and goods that supplied the factories, and often stayed in these ports for several months.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, from the incomplete records of the South Sea Company it appears that there were often many more British subjects living in and around the factories and traveling through the Spanish Americas than the Spanish officially sanctioned. Factors sometimes invited their own British servants to work in the factories alongside the many Spanish servants that they hired. Even British musicians traveled through the Spanish Americas, entertaining Britons and Spanish officials alike.¹⁰¹

Though much of the correspondence sent from the Spanish American factories to the company’s directors in London has been lost, some copies of the instructions sent from the court of directors to the company’s factors have survived, containing suggestions about the difficulties these factors faced in establishing their factories and the expectations the court and the nation had for the company’s activities abroad. These letters show that from early on the South Sea Company experienced problems with controlling their factors abroad. Issues of language, conduct, and contact arose several times.

The court of directors hoped that some degree of contact would be beneficial to those who supported the idea of taking over Spanish lands directly. In a series of long letters providing instructions to the factors on how to structure their correspondence, the directors included an entire section titled “Concerning the Laws and Customs of the Country.” There, they instructed factors to “give us an Account not only of the Government of Veracruz and Mexico, but all other places you can get information, where we may have any trade, or through which our goods or negroes are to pass … or any thing else that might affect our commerce.”¹⁰² Although the company sought information about Spanish American markets to maximize commercial efficiency and reap profits, it also demonstrated a wider curiosity about the Spanish American empire. In many ways, this interest in collecting information about the Spanish empire echoes Defoe’s concern for finding and settling productive and trade-ready areas of the Spanish empire. Collecting information about the areas that the Spanish had already subjected and to various extents settled could position the British Empire well to eventually expand into Spanish territories. Dover wrote to the Prince of Wales directly, offering “a plan of this city & river with the best description I can get of these parts,” which would likely be useful in the case of a British invasion.¹⁰³ He also sent along a sample of a kind of local tea, a small reminder of the riches, both botanical and mineral, to be had in South America.¹⁰⁴

The South Sea Company’s court of directors expected that its factors would learn to speak the Spanish language fluently. The court reminded the Veracruz factors that Spanish was “necessary for your managing our affairs.” The court admonished its employees, scolding them that they had not yet advised the company of the progress that each employee was making with the language; it is possible that they neglected both their language learning and their duties to keep their superiors in London appraised of their lack of progress.¹⁰⁵ Many factors joined the company’s ranks without having already learned Spanish, making this repeated instruction necessary. This linguistic knowledge held importance for the company, which was made clear in the stress some individuals placed on their proficiency in petitions for employment or advancement. A petition from Elizabeth Davidson on behalf of her son’s promotion explains that her son spent more than five years in the West Indies, less than two of them in the service of the company, “to get Master of the Spanish language, which he now speaks, Reads, and Writes” fluently.¹⁰⁶ The company could not take for granted that its employees would be able to communicate with their Spanish counterparts.

While repeated instructions to the factors to learn the Spanish language might indicate that they were not interacting with the inhabitants of these port cities extensively enough, later instructions to the American factories suggest they might have been having—and enjoying—too much interaction with these Spanish subjects for the comfort of the British company. Some made close Spanish friends, many through a shared interest in revelry, trade, or natural science. Dover and some other company physicians corresponded heavily with prominent British men of science like James Petiver and Hans Sloane, sending specimens and observations from Spanish American shores for their collections. Petiver encouraged factors to make Spanish Jesuit contacts, as that religious order had a well-known proclivity for scientific pursuits.¹⁰⁷

Even when factors did not purposefully set out to make Spanish contacts, they did employ Spanish servants, who may have lived in or near these factories. The presence of these servants and the dinners that the factories would host for local officials meant that all the British factors regularly came into contact with Spanish subjects, as masters, equals, and subordinates.¹⁰⁸ It appears that the court of directors feared that this constant interaction with the Spanish, along with the dearth of British women in the Spanish Americas, would lead to unacceptable pairings. They wrote to the Veracruz factory, “We conceive it very inconvenient for our service, that any of you should marry any of the natives or other inhabitants of America, lest by that means our effects under your management should be hazarded.” Beyond being a threat to the company’s goods, marriage to Catholics could threaten the factors’ souls. The employees were instructed that if any one of them chose to marry Spanish women, “or depart from the Protestant religion, the rest are to take our effects out of his or their hands, and dismiss him or them from our service.”¹⁰⁹ In 1723 the factory at Cuba had just such a case, and the court of directors instructed the other factors to relieve a Mr. Walsh of his duties, as he “is married to a native of that Island, and is a Roman Catholick himself.”¹¹⁰

The instructions provided to the factors of the South Sea Company, and the dismay of the court of directors on discovering a Roman Catholic in their employ, reveal the simultaneous desire for positive relationships between the British and Spanish for trading purposes and the fear of contamination and blurring of identities that might occur in such close contact with the opposing empire. While interactions had long happened between British merchants and the residents of Spanish port cities such as Seville and later Cádiz, in the Americas this contact could be particularly damaging, as it occurred geographically far from the center of the empire and could lead to the transfer of critical knowledge about an empire’s resources and defenses to a potential future enemy. Factors could expect to interact with the Spanish, but the court of directors cautioned them not to become too close. The very proximity required to create long-term, profitable trade endangered both sides of the commerce; as individuals became closer, and trade relationships intensified, the opportunity for fractures in these relationships to disrupt international relations grew. This in turn endangered those individuals and interest groups most deeply involved in the interimperial trade.

While the instructions sent to the South Sea Company’s factors said a great deal about the Spanish, and contained detailed explanations of how they were to proceed with the importation and trading of slaves as merchandise, they said almost nothing about the interaction that factors were to have with slaves as human individuals. These documents do not reflect on the shared experience of mastery common to the British and Spanish, which shaped the development of their empires. Despite this omission in the official correspondence, the constant presence of African slaves and their interactions with British and Spanish colonists at both the individual and imperial levels could not fail to influence the formation of Anglo-Spanish relationships and the situation in the West Indies. As slave populations grew in both empires, the threat of slave insurrection, together with smaller-scale and more individual acts of resistance, would repeatedly challenge European hegemony in the Americas. This, together with external troubles, would shake the British and Spanish empires throughout the course of the trade.

Trouble Begins

Very early during the asiento period, the South Sea Company encountered problems with the complexities of the logistics of a massive interimperial organization such as that authorized by the asiento. Finding and organizing factors to travel abroad took the Court of Directors a significant amount of time. Though the trade was scheduled to begin immediately in 1713, the Court sent factors to Panama and Cartagena only by late 1714.¹¹¹ Factors were not dispatched for Veracruz until months later.¹¹² Once they arrived in the New World, some encountered further problems with local officials. When the British factors arrived at Portobello, the Royal Hacienda ministers objected that, because the peace was not yet proclaimed in the area, the contract was not valid. Only the president of Panama’s insistence that the factors be allowed to enter and begin their business kept them from being stranded outside of Portobello until the arrival of a ship with royal orders.¹¹³ In April 1715 the Spanish king issued official commands that allowed the assigned factors to enter his kingdoms in order to conduct their business.¹¹⁴

As these factors set out on their assignments, the first of many British ships sailed to bring supplies and slaves to their new bases of operation in Spanish American ports. The Bedford and the Elizabeth, British men of war on loan from the crown to the company, sailed in 1715 for Cartagena and Portobello, carrying both legal and excess goods. The Spanish king sent word not to hinder the ships in their business and to allow them to freely leave the ports, though he prohibited them from selling more than the treaty-allotted five to six hundred tons of merchandise.¹¹⁵ The annual permission ships did not depart as quickly, as problems within the company led to a delay of the first of these until late in 1716. This, at least, did not improve much as trade continued. That ship, the Royal Prince, was one of only seven annual permission ships to travel between Great Britain and the shores of Spanish America during the course of the asiento.¹¹⁶ This was only the beginning of the troubles Britain would face in implementing the contract, including both internal problems within the company and international conflicts that delayed ships and interrupted trade often during the asiento period.

British traders, both those working for the South Sea Company and for private interests trading in the West Indies, immediately began overstepping the bounds of the trade outlined in the treaty. The asiento contract prohibited British ships from trading any goods to the Spanish Americas except in the case of the annual permission ship. The factors quickly found ways to circumvent these rules. Ships traveling to the ports of Spanish America with slaves would also bring flour and other goods, ostensibly as supplies for the factories, but in fact in such large quantities that they were actually intended for sale. The South Sea Company managed to supply the substantial flour market in Cartagena and elsewhere, to the detriment of merchants from inside the Spanish empire.¹¹⁷ In 1715, James Pym, a Cartagena factor, shipped illegal goods on the permission ship the Bedford on his own account, bribing local officials to allow him to land his cargo. While initially the Spanish government seized the majority of merchandise from the ship, noting that its weight far exceeded the five hundred tons allowed in the treaty, over a year later a Madrid court ruled in the company’s favor.¹¹⁸ Individual traders unaffiliated with the Company also continued to sail illegally to the Spanish coast.

In order to guarantee adherence to the restrictions established in the asiento treaty, Spanish vessels began stopping British ships in the area, to search them and at times seize crews and merchandise, regardless of the actual contents of the ships. In addition, the Spanish king sent officers to the Americas that he hoped would be particularly harsh on contrabandists.¹¹⁹ As early as 1715 the governor of Jamaica, Archibald Hamilton, wrote to Secretary of State James Stanhope of the disheartening situation for Jamaican merchants, that “Many of our trading vessels have of late been attacked & taken by Spaniards, pretending to have commissions for guarding the coast, whereby our merchants are so discouraged that I look on our trade to Cartagena and Porto Bello to be now entirely over.”¹²⁰ Some confusion existed as to which of the Spanish ships were guardacostas authorized by the government and which were simply pirates claiming that name without any governmental permission. Only a few months after the first complaint, Hamilton was compelled to write again, alerting the secretary to the “frequent … robberys & hostilitys committed on the subjects of his Britanick Majesty … by Spanish Vessels said to have commissions for guarding their coasts.”¹²¹ The British government replied by authorizing Jamaican settlers to launch their own ships in order to capture the pirates. Shares of the vessels captured by these British ships or recaptured from the Spanish would be divided among the owners of the ship and those that captured it.¹²²

The illegal detention and seizure of ships was not a Spanish project alone. The Spanish in the Caribbean complained of both the British ships authorized by the king to sail from Jamaica in order to recapture goods and ships taken by the Spanish, and the many unauthorized British vessels that continued to attack Spanish ships unprovoked long after the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht.¹²³ Even Hamilton, in his letter complaining about the depredations of the Spanish, conceded that “restitution ought to be made to the subjects of his Catholick Majesty, for their losses sustained by hostilities committed on them by the subjects of his Brittanick Majesty since the first suspension of arms.”¹²⁴ British ships could not continue to pursue unauthorized Spanish prizes if the peace and the valuable asiento treaty were to be maintained between the kings of Spain and Britain. Both British and Spanish empires were finding it difficult to curb the actions of subjects who were for so long accustomed to disliking and doing damage to those affiliated with the opposing empire.

Those living in the area found the striking contrast between the legal peace and the situation on the ground (and on the water) in the West Indies quite evident. Colonel Peter Heywood of the British forces wrote to the governor of Havana in 1716, noting the gap between official policy and enactment. Both sides, he observed, acted unjustly and contrary to the orders of their respective crowns. In fact, wrote Heywood, referring to the unjust taking of several English ships in the area of Trinidad and Cuba, “their majestys subjects here in the Indies seem to be at open war … whilst there is so perfect a union and good understanding at home which must certainly reflect on their respective governours to avoid which I wish your excellency would take such measures as [will] put a stop to all such illegal proceedings hereafter.”¹²⁵ Any “understanding” on paper did not translate seamlessly into “understanding” among groups in the West Indies. In many ways, the Peace of Utrecht created a convenient fiction that the subjects of Britain and Spain were sudden friends, an attempt to overcome the years of conflict and continuing theft of goods and ships through agreements made in Europe. Despite these attempts, enmity persisted between these two groups.

The stuttering progress of the trade—the movement of slaves through Jamaica and Barbados en route to the Spanish settlements, yet the persistent interruption of this traffic—brought complaints from the free inhabitants of those islands. Certainly the unreliability of shipping caused problems for both the supply of the island and the merchants and investors who lived there. Jamaican residents observed that the move to crack down on piracy caused a panic among the sailors, many of whom, Jamaican Thomas Onslow explained, felt pushed into the illegal activity. Complaints sprang too from the effects that the legal portions of this trade had on the Jamaican economy. The price of slaves went up due to the company’s control of large portions of the trade, and the movement of goods from Jamaica to New Spain had “ruin’d all commerce” in the eyes of many Jamaican planters and traders. While smuggling might certainly continue from the Jamaican coast, the South Sea Company trade opened up the possibility of shipping goods directly from Britain, removing Jamaica from the equation altogether. Previously, the French, Portuguese, and Spanish asiento holders had relied heavily on Jamaica for slaves and supplies, but with a direct link to the metropole, the company was not so dependent on the island. Many of the planters and sailors who lived in Jamaica were leaving. They contributed much of the money made on the island to the economy of Great Britain in the form of remittances, and they needed security. As the Spanish periodically became more aggressive toward Jamaica, the dangerous conditions in the West Indies kept many from engaging in their normal trade; indeed, Onslow informed the secretary, “The Spaniards &c watch us so, that there is no stirring in safety out of the island.”¹²⁶ The increased interaction with the Spanish, instigated by the establishment of the asiento, created considerable discomfort among many of the British colonists and merchants in the region and made the treaty widely unpopular in Jamaica.

The Jamaican case illuminates the large variety of hopes and expectations for empire among British subjects, and makes clear the ways in which shifts in the organization of empire could leave some who profited from previous iterations without opportunity. Various groups held interests, sometimes in harmony but often competing, in the establishment of empire, and in the asiento project. These groups included the crowns of Britain and Spain, the South Sea Company, merchants and planters in Jamaica, merchants in Liver-pool, Bristol, and London, local Spanish American officials, South Sea Company factors, and Spanish colonists among others.¹²⁷ The wealth of some Jamaican merchants during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century arose from the proximity of a massive rival empire, the Spanish, to which they could trade clandestinely or at times legally. Their success arose from their access to the goods and ships of the English empire, which the Spanish could not directly tap into. Once the British Empire became stronger in the area and exercised its right to monopoly, however, the benefits of being British diminished for those who had long engaged in the interimperial trade. As empire became more efficient, it also became less useful to certain interest groups. At the same time, this very opportunity to hold a monopoly on what they largely intended to be a new trade stood at the center of the South Sea Company and its agents’ excitement in moving into the area. Once factors had spent significant time in the Spanish Americas, they would form their own ideas of how their position within the British and Spanish empires could benefit their own interests. As with the Jamaica merchants, these interests would not always be in line with larger imperial hopes for expansion in trade, land, and population.

Renegotiating the Asiento

In response to the difficulties of the early trade, the Spanish and British crowns agreed to negotiate once again. George Bubb Doddington, the envoy to Spain from the British court, laid before the Spanish ministers the many difficulties that the company and its agents had faced during the early years of the trade, and secured some concessions in a new treaty signed May 27, 1716. This agreement maintained many of the stipulations established by the original asiento treaty of 1713. Bubb’s main concerns, addressed in the 1716 revisions, were the chronological terms of the treaty, the variability of the annual fairs, and the sometimes inevitable transfer of excess goods to the West Indies. Bubb himself had not supported the original treaty, and resented having to do the company’s bidding in bettering their position, especially given the frustrations of working in Philip V’s court. He complained repeatedly to Stanhope, then secretary of state, that he had always considered “the assiento as an affair that we cou’d never be gainers by” and that “the Assiento business puts me entirely beyond all temper.”¹²⁸ Even with these misgivings, Bubb successfully renegotiated the treaty, taking into account the difficulties of the early trade.

The British South Sea Company had gotten off to a slow start with the late departures of the factors to Veracruz, Cartagena, and Panama. Concerned that this delay would not allow them to enjoy the entire thirty-year term of the asiento, the company appealed to the Spanish king, who agreed that both the payments due from the company to the crown and the first permission to send both slaves and an annual ship could be shifted to the first of May, 1714.¹²⁹ Philip V required the company to pay the fees that accumulated for the first two years in 1716 in return for this extension of the treaty. With the assurance that they would be able to take full advantage of the trade, the factors could go about establishing themselves in Spanish America more firmly.

The original asiento treaty had granted the British the sudden and exciting ability to trade their manufactured goods and the products of their empire directly to the Spanish American market. The annual permission ships of five hundred tons were to travel to the trade fair at Portobello each year, carrying merchandise that would supply the colonies of South and Central America and fill the purses of British merchants. The British almost immediately encountered problems with this arrangement, however; the “annual” trade fair was far from being a yearly event, and often the British vessel had no indication of when or if the fair would happen before departing London. Recognizing this difficulty, the Spanish king agreed that a fair would be held each year in his American domains, and that he would advise the company annually as to when the Spanish galleons, or flota, planned to depart from Cádiz for the relevant port. If the Spanish ships had not left by June, the British would be allowed to sail alone, but would be required to wait in the Spanish American port for up to four months. When the Spanish galleons arrived, or when four months had passed, the British were permitted to sell their goods to the Spanish American traders who flocked from as far away as present-day Peru and Mexico in order to purchase European goods.¹³⁰

The more frequent trade in slaves conducted by the South Sea Company posed its own problems for the exact fulfillment of the 1713 version of the asiento treaty. This early iteration of the agreement prohibited the British from bringing any trade goods into the Spanish Americas apart from those transported on the annual permission ship. The vicissitudes of the slave trade, subject to supply and demand, made this particularly difficult, according to the company’s merchants. Company or private ships traveled to the coast of Africa, carrying goods to trade in exchange for slaves; however, the rates of exchange were not constant, and the ships could easily leave the African coast with some of the trade goods they had originally expected to need in purchasing enslaved laborers. The company’s supercargoes argued that if they could not bring these goods with them to the Spanish American ports, they would be forced to throw them into the sea at a great loss. Though the Spanish crown insisted that the company not be allowed to sell these excess goods, they were to be allowed to transport this cargo to the Indies and deposit it in the royal storehouses, to be secured by keys held by the royal officials of the port and a representative of the company.¹³¹