INTRODUCTORY
I.—THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM
At the time of the discovery of
America the Spaniards, as M.
Leroy-Beaulieu has remarked, were
perhaps less fitted than any other
nation of western Europe for the
task of American colonization.
Whatever may have been the political
rôle thrust upon them in the
sixteenth century by the Hapsburg
marriages, whatever certain
historians may say of the grandeur
and nobility of the Spanish national
character, Spain was then neither
rich nor populous, nor industrious.
For centuries she had been called
upon to wage a continuous warfare
with the Moors, and during this time
had not only found little leisure to
cultivate the arts of peace, but had
acquired a disdain for manual work
which helped to mould her colonial
administration and influenced all
her subsequent history. And when the
termination of the last of these
wars left her mistress of a united
Spain, and the exploitation of her
own resources seemed to require all
the energies she could muster, an
entire new hemisphere was suddenly
thrown open to her, and given into
her hands by a papal decree to
possess and populate. Already
weakened by the exile of the most
sober and industrious of her
population, the Jews; drawn into a
foreign policy for which she had
neither the means nor the
inclination; instituting at home an
economic policy which was almost
epileptic in its consequences, she
found her strength dissipated, and
gradually sank into a condition of
economic and political impotence.
Christopher Columbus, a Genoese
sailor in the service of the
Castilian Crown, wishing to find a
western route by sea to India and
especially to Zipangu (Japan), the
magic land described by the Venetian
traveller, Marco Polo, landed on
12th October 1492, on "Guanahani,"
one of the Bahama Islands. From
"Guanahani" he passed on to other
islands of the same group, and
thence to Hispaniola, Tortuga and
Cuba. Returning to Spain in March
1493, he sailed again in September
of the same year with seventeen
vessels and 1500 persons, and this
time keeping farther to the south,
sighted Porto Rico and some of the
Lesser Antilles, founded a colony on
Hispaniola, and discovered Jamaica
in 1494. On a third voyage in 1498
he discovered Trinidad, and coasted
along the shores of South America
from the Orinoco River to the island
of Margarita. After a fourth and
last voyage in 1502-04, Columbus
died at Valladolid in 1506, in the
firm belief that he had discovered a
part of the Continent of Asia.
The entire circle of the Antilles
having thus been revealed before the
end of the fifteenth century, the
Spaniards pushed forward to the
continent. While Hojida, Vespucci,
Pinzon and de Solis were exploring
the eastern coast from La Plata to
Yucatan, Ponce de Leon in 1512
discovered Florida, and in 1513
Vasco Nunez de
Balboa descried the Pacific Ocean
from the heights of Darien,
revealing for the first time the
existence of a new continent. In
1520 Magellan entered the Pacific
through the strait which bears his
name, and a year later was killed in
one of the Philippine Islands.
Within the next twenty years Cortez
had conquered the realm of
Montezuma, and Pizarro the empire of
Peru; and thus within the space of
two generations all of the West
Indies, North America to California
and the Carolinas, all of South
America except Brazil, which the
error of Cabral gave to the
Portuguese, and in the east the
Philippine Islands and New Guinea
passed under the sway of the Crown
of Castile.
Ferdinand and Isabella in 1493
had consulted with several persons
of eminent learning to find out
whether it was necessary to obtain
the investiture of the Pope for
their newly-discovered possessions,
and all were of opinion that this
formality was unnecessary.1
Nevertheless, on 3rd May 1493, a
bull was granted by Pope Alexander
VI., which divided the sovereignty
of those parts of the world not
possessed by any Christian prince
between Spain and Portugal by a
meridian line 100 leagues west of
the Azores or of Cape Verde. Later
Spanish writers made much of this
papal gift; yet, as Georges Scelle
points out,2
it is possible that this bull was
not so much a deed of conveyance,
investing the Spaniards with the
proprietorship of America, as it was
an act of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction according them, on the
strength of their acquired right and
proven Catholicism, a monopoly as it
were in the propagation of the
faith. At that time, even Catholic
princes were no longer accustomed to
seek the Pope's sanction when making
a new conquest, and certainly in the
domain of public law the Pope was
not considered to have temporal
jurisdiction over the entire world.
He did, however, intervene in
temporal matters when they directly
influenced spiritual affairs, and of
this the propagation of the faith
was an instance. As the compromise
between Spain and Portugal was very
indecisive, owing to the difference
in longitude of the Azores and Cape
Verde, a second Act was signed on
7th June 1494, which placed the line
of demarcation 270 leagues farther
to the west.
The colonization of the Spanish
Indies, on its social and
administrative side, presents a
curious contrast. On the one hand we
see the Spanish Crown, with high
ideals of order and justice, of
religious and political unity,
extending to its ultramarine
possessions its faith, its language,
its laws and its administration;
providing for the welfare of the
aborigines with paternal solicitude;
endeavouring to restrain and temper
the passions of the conquerors;
building churches and founding
schools and monasteries; in a word,
trying to make its colonies an
integral part of the Spanish
monarchy, "une société vieille dans
une contrée neuve." Some Spanish
writers, it is true, have
exaggerated the virtues of their old
colonial system; yet that system had
excellences which we cannot afford
to despise. If the Spanish kings had
not choked their government with
procrastination and routine; if they
had only taken their task a bit less
seriously and had not tried to apply
too strictly to an empty continent
the paternal administration of an
older country; we might have been
privileged to witness the
development and operation of as
complete and benign a system of
colonial government as has been
devised in modern times. The public
initiative
of the Spanish government, and the
care with which it selected its
colonists, compare very favourably
with the opportunism of the English
and the French, who colonized by
chance private activity and sent the
worst elements of their population,
criminals and vagabonds, to people
their new settlements across the
sea. However much we may deprecate
the treatment of the Indians by the
conquistadores, we must not
forget that the greater part of the
population of Spanish America to-day
is still Indian, and that no other
colonizing people have succeeded
like the Spaniards in assimilating
and civilizing the natives. The code
of laws which the Spaniards
gradually evolved for the rule of
their transmarine provinces, was, in
spite of defects which are visible
only to the larger experience of the
present day, one of the wisest, most
humane and best co-ordinated of any
to this day published for any
colony. Although the Spaniards had
to deal with a large population of
barbarous natives, the word
"conquest" was suppressed in
legislation as ill-sounding,
"because the peace is to be sealed,"
they said, "not with the sound of
arms, but with charity and
good-will."3
The actual results, however, of
the social policy of the Spanish
kings fell far below the ideals they
had set for themselves. The
monarchic spirit of the crown was so
strong that it crushed every
healthy, expansive tendency in the
new countries. It burdened the
colonies with a numerous, privileged
nobility, who congregated mostly in
the larger towns and set to the rest
of the colonists a pernicious
example of idleness and luxury. In
its zeal for the propagation of the
Faith, the Crown constituted
a powerfully endowed Church, which,
while it did splendid service in
converting and civilizing the
natives, engrossed much of the land
in the form of mainmort, and filled
the new world with thousands of
idle, unproductive, and often
licentious friars. With an innate
distrust and fear of individual
initiative, it gave virtual
omnipotence to royal officials and
excluded all creoles from public
employment. In this fashion was
transferred to America the crushing
political and ecclesiastical
absolutism of the mother country.
Self-reliance and independence of
thought or action on the part of the
creoles was discouraged, divisions
and factions among them were
encouraged and educational
opportunities restricted, and the
American-born Spaniards gradually
sank into idleness and lethargy,
indifferent to all but childish
honours and distinctions and petty
local jealousies. To make matters
worse, many of the Spaniards who
crossed the seas to the American
colonies came not to colonize, not
to trade or cultivate the soil, so
much as to extract from the natives
a tribute of gold and silver. The
Indians, instead of being protected
and civilized, were only too often
reduced to serfdom and confined to a
laborious routine for which they had
neither the aptitude nor the
strength; while the government at
home was too distant to interfere
effectively in their behalf. Driven
by cruel taskmasters they died by
thousands from exhaustion and
despair, and in some places entirely
disappeared.
The Crown of Castile, moreover,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries sought to extend Spanish
commerce and monopolize all the
treasure of the Indies by means of a
rigid and complicated commercial
system. Yet in the end it saw the
trade of the New World pass into the
hands of its rivals, its own marine
reduced to a
shadow of its former strength, its
crews and its vessels supplied by
merchants from foreign lands, and
its riches diverted at their very
source.
This Spanish commercial system
was based upon two distinct
principles. One was the principle of
colonial exclusivism, according to
which all the trade of the colonies
was to be reserved to the mother
country. Spain on her side undertook
to furnish the colonies with all
they required, shipped upon Spanish
vessels; the colonies in return were
to produce nothing but raw materials
and articles which did not compete
with the home products with which
they were to be exchanged. The
second principle was the mercantile
doctrine which, considering as
wealth itself the precious metals
which are but its symbol, laid down
that money ought, by every means
possible, to be imported and
hoarded, never exported.4
This latter theory, the fallacy of
which has long been established,
resulted in the endeavour of the
Spanish Hapsburgs to conserve the
wealth of the country, not by the
encouragement of industry, but by
the increase and complexity of
imposts. The former doctrine,
adopted by a non-producing country
which was in no position to fulfil
its part in the colonial compact,
led to the most disastrous
consequences.
While the Spanish Crown was
aiming to concentrate and monopolize
its colonial commerce, the
prosperity of Spain itself was
slowly sapped by reason of these
mistaken economic theories. Owing to
the lack of workmen, the increase of
imposts, and the prejudice against
the mechanic arts, industry was
being ruined; while the increased
depopulation of the realm, the
mainmort of ecclesiastical lands,
the majorats of the nobility and
the privileges of the Mesta, brought
agriculture rapidly into decay. The
Spaniards, consequently, could not
export the products of their
manufacture to the colonies, when
they did not have enough to supply
their own needs. To make up for this
deficiency their merchants were
driven to have recourse to
foreigners, to whom they lent their
names in order to elude a law which
forbade commerce between the
colonies and traders of other
nations. In return for the
manufactured articles of the
English, Dutch and French, and of
the great commercial cities like
Genoa and Hamburg, they were obliged
to give their own raw materials and
the products of the Indies—wool,
silks, wines and dried fruits,
cochineal, dye-woods, indigo and
leather, and finally, indeed, ingots
of gold and silver. The trade in
Spain thus in time became a mere
passive machine. Already in 1545 it
had been found impossible to furnish
in less than six years the goods
demanded by the merchants of Spanish
America. At the end of the
seventeenth century, foreigners were
supplying five-sixths of the
manufactures consumed in Spain
itself, and engrossed nine-tenths of
that American trade which the
Spaniards had sought so carefully to
monopolize.5
In the colonies the most striking
feature of Spanish economic policy
was its wastefulness. After the
conquest of the New World, it was to
the interest of the Spaniards to
gradually wean the native Indians
from barbarism by teaching them the
arts and sciences of Europe, to
encourage such industries as were
favoured by the soil, and to furnish
the growing colonies with those
articles which they could not
produce themselves, and of which
they stood in need. Only thus could
they justify their monopoly of the
markets of Spanish America. The same
test, indeed, may be applied
to every other nation which adopted
the exclusivist system. Queen
Isabella wished to carry out this
policy, introduced into the
newly-discovered islands wheat, the
olive and the vine, and acclimatized
many of the European domestic
animals.6
Her efforts, unfortunately, were not
seconded by her successors, nor by
the Spaniards who went to the
Indies. In time the government
itself, as well as the colonist,
came to be concerned, not so much
with the agricultural products of
the Indies, but with the return of
the precious metals. Natives were
made to work the mines, while many
regions adapted to agriculture,
Guiana, Caracas and Buenos Ayres,
were neglected, and the peopling of
the colonies by Europeans was slow.
The emperor, Charles V., did little
to stem this tendency, but drifted
along with the tide. Immigration was
restricted to keep the colonies free
from the contamination of heresy and
of foreigners. The Spanish
population was concentrated in
cities, and the country divided into
great estates granted by the crown
to the families of the
conquistadores or to favourites
at court. The immense areas of Peru,
Buenos Ayres and Mexico were
submitted to the most unjust and
arbitrary regulations, with no
object but to stifle growing
industry and put them in absolute
dependence upon the metropolis. It
was forbidden to exercise the trades
of dyer, fuller, weaver, shoemaker
or hatter, and the natives were
compelled to buy of the Spaniards
even the stuffs they wore on their
backs. Another ordinance prohibited
the cultivation of the vine and the
olive except in Peru and Chili, and
even these provinces might not send
their oil and wine to Panama,
Gautemala or any other place which
could be supplied from Spain.7
To maintain the commercial monopoly, legitimate
ports of entry in Spanish America
were made few and far apart—for
Mexico, Vera Cruz, for New Granada,
the town of Cartagena. The islands
and most of the other provinces were
supplied by uncertain "vaisseaux de
registre," while Peru and Chili,
finding all direct commerce by the
Pacific or South Sea interdicted,
were obliged to resort to the
fever-ridden town of Porto Bello,
where the mortality was enormous and
the prices increased tenfold.
In Spain, likewise, the colonial
commerce was restricted to one
port—Seville. For in the estimation
of the crown it was much more
important to avoid being defrauded
of its dues on import and export,
than to permit the natural
development of trade by those towns
best fitted to acquire it. Another
reason, prior in point of time
perhaps, why Seville was chosen as
the port for American trade, was
that the Indies were regarded as the
exclusive appanage of the crown of
Castile, and of that realm Seville
was then the chief mercantile city.
It was not a suitable port, however,
to be distinguished by so high a
privilege. Only ships of less than
200 tons were able to cross the bar
of San Lucar, and goods therefore
had to be transhipped—a disability
which was soon felt when traffic and
vessels became heavier.8
The fact, nevertheless, that the
official organization called the
Casa dé Contratacion was seated
in Seville, together with the
influence of the vested interests of
the merchants whose prosperity
depended upon the retention of that
city as the one port for Indian
commerce, were sufficient to bear
down all opposition. The maritime
towns of Galicia and Asturia,
inhabited by better seamen and stronger races,
often protested, and sometimes
succeeded in obtaining a small share
of the lucrative trade.9
But Seville retained its primacy
until 1717, in which year the
Contratacion was transferred to
Cadiz.
The administration of the complex
rules governing the commerce between
Spain and her colonies was entrusted
to two institutions located at
Seville,—the Casa de Contratacion,
mentioned above, and the
Consulado. The Casa de
Contratacion, founded by royal
decree as early as 1503, was both a
judicial tribunal and a house of
commerce. Nothing might be sent to
the Indies without its consent;
nothing might be brought back and
landed, either on the account of
merchants or of the King himself,
without its authorization. It
received all the revenues accruing
from the Indies, not only the
imposts on commerce, but also all
the taxes remitted by colonial
officers. As a consultative body it
had the right to propose directly to
the King anything which it deemed
necessary to the development and
organization of American commerce;
and as a tribunal it possessed an
absolute competence over all crimes
under the common law, and over all
infractions of the ordinances
governing the trade of the Indies,
to the exclusion of every ordinary court.
Its jurisdiction began at the moment
the passengers and crews embarked
and the goods were put on board, and
ended only when the return voyage
and disembarkation had been
completed.10
The civil jurisdiction of the
Casa was much more restricted
and disputes purely commercial in
character between the merchants were
reserved to the Consulado,
which was a tribunal of commerce
chosen entirely by the merchants
themselves. Appeals in certain cases
might be carried to the Council of
the Indies.11
The first means adopted by the
northern maritime nations to
appropriate to themselves a share of
the riches of the New World was
open, semi-piratical attack upon the
Spanish argosies returning from
those distant El Dorados. The
success of the Norman and Breton
corsairs, for it was the French, not
the English, who started the game,
gradually forced upon the Spaniards,
as a means of protection, the
establishment of great merchant
fleets sailing periodically at long
intervals and accompanied by
powerful convoys. During the first
half of the sixteenth century any
ship which had fulfilled the
conditions required for engaging in
American commerce was allowed to
depart alone and at any time of the
year. From about 1526, however,
merchant vessels were ordered to
sail together, and by a cedula
of July 1561, the system of fleets
was made permanent and obligatory.
This decree prohibited any ship from
sailing alone to America from Cadiz
or San Lucar on pain of forfeiture
of ship and cargo.12
Two fleets were organized each year,
one for Terra Firma going to
Cartagena and Porto Bello, the other
designed for the port of San Juan
d'Ulloa (Vera Cruz) in New Spain.
The latter, called the Flota, was
commanded by an "almirante," and
sailed for Mexico in the early
summer so as to avoid the hurricane
season and the "northers" of the
Mexican Gulf. The former was usually
called the galeones (anglice
"galleons"), was commanded by a
"general," and sailed from Spain
earlier in the year, between January
and March. If it departed in March,
it usually wintered at Havana and
returned with the Flota in the
following spring. Sometimes the two
fleets sailed together and separated
at Guadaloupe, Deseada or another of
the Leeward Islands.13
The galleons generally consisted
of from five to eight war-vessels
carrying from forty to fifty guns,
together with several smaller,
faster boats called "pataches," and
a fleet of merchantmen varying in
number in different years. In the
time of Philip II. often as many as
forty ships supplied Cartagena and
Porto Bello, but in succeeding
reigns, although the population of
the Indies was rapidly increasing,
American commerce fell off so sadly
that eight or ten were sufficient
for all the trade of South and
Central America. The general of the
galleons, on his departure, received
from the Council of the Indies three
sealed packets. The first, opened at
the Canaries, contained the name of
the island in the West Indies at
which the fleet was first to call.
The second was unsealed after the
galleons arrived at Cartagena,
and contained instructions for the
fleet to return in the same year or
to winter in America. In the third,
left unopened until the fleet had
emerged from the Bahama Channel on
the homeward voyage, were orders for
the route to the Azores and the
islands they should touch in
passing, usually Corvo and Flores or
Santa Maria.14
The course of the galleons from
San Lucar was south-west to
Teneriffe on the African coast, and
thence to the Grand Canary to call
for provisions—considered in all a
run of eight days. From the Canaries
one of the pataches sailed on alone
to Cartagena and Porto Bello,
carrying letters and packets from
the Court and announcing the coming
of the fleet. If the two fleets
sailed together, they steered
south-west from the Canaries to
about the latitude of Deseada, 15'
30", and then catching the Trade
winds continued due west, rarely
changing a sail until Deseada or one
of the other West Indian islands was
sighted. From Deseada the galleons
steered an easy course to Cape de la
Vela, and thence to Cartagena. When
the galleons sailed from Spain
alone, however, they entered the
Caribbean Sea by the channel between
Tobago and Trinidad, afterwards
named the Galleons' Passage.
Opposite Margarita a second patache
left the fleet to visit the island
and collect the royal revenues,
although after the exhaustion of the
pearl fisheries the island lost most
of its importance. As the fleet
advanced into regions where more
security was felt, merchant ships
too, which were intended to unload
and trade on the coasts they were
passing, detached themselves during
the night and made for Caracas,
Santa Marta or Maracaibo to get silver,
cochineal, leather and cocoa. The
Margarita patache, meanwhile, had
sailed on to Cumana and Caracas to
receive there the king's treasure,
mostly paid in cocoa, the real
currency of the country, and thence
proceeded to Cartagena to rejoin the
galleons.15
The fleet reached Cartagena
ordinarily about two months after
its departure from Cadiz. On its
arrival, the general forwarded the
news to Porto Bello, together with
the packets destined for the viceroy
at Lima. From Porto Bello a courier
hastened across the isthmus to the
President of Panama, who spread the
advice amongst the merchants in his
jurisdiction, and, at the same time,
sent a dispatch boat to Payta, in
Peru. The general of the galleons,
meanwhile, was also sending a
courier overland to Lima, and
another to Santa Fe, the capital of
the interior province of New
Granada, whence runners carried to
Popagan, Antioquia, Mariguita, and
adjacent provinces, the news of his
arrival.16
The galleons were instructed to
remain at Cartagena only a month,
but bribes from the merchants
generally made it their interest to
linger for fifty or sixty days. To
Cartagena came the gold and emeralds
of New Granada, the pearls of
Margarita and Rancherias, and the
indigo, tobacco, cocoa and other
products of the Venezuelan coast.
The merchants of Gautemala,
likewise, shipped their commodities
to Cartagena by way of Lake
Nicaragua and the San Juan river,
for they feared to send goods across
the Gulf of Honduras to Havana,
because of the French and English
buccaneers hanging about Cape San
Antonio.17
Meanwhile the viceroy at Lima, on
receipt of his letters, ordered the
Armada of the South Sea to prepare
to sail, and sent word south to
Chili and throughout the province of
Peru from Las Charcas to Quito, to
forward the King's revenues for
shipment to Panama. Within less than
a fortnight all was in readiness.
The Armada, carrying a considerable
treasure, sailed from Callao and,
touching at Payta, was joined by the
Navio del Oro (golden ship), which
carried the gold from the province
of Quito and adjacent districts.
While the galleons were approaching
Porto Bello the South Sea fleet
arrived before Panama, and the
merchants of Chili and Peru began to
transfer their merchandise on mules
across the high back of the isthmus.18
Then began the famous fair of
Porto Bello.19
The town, whose permanent
population was very small and
composed mostly of negroes and
mulattos, was suddenly called upon
to accommodate an enormous crowd of
merchants, soldiers and seamen. Food
and shelter were to be had only at
extraordinary prices. When Thomas
Gage was in Porto Bello in 1637 he
was compelled to pay 120 crowns for
a very small, meanly-furnished room
for a fortnight. Merchants gave as
much as 1000 crowns for a
moderate-sized shop in which to sell
their commodities. Owing to
overcrowding, bad sanitation, and an
extremely unhealthy climate, the
place became an open grave, ready to
swallow all who resorted there. In
1637, during the fifteen days that
the galleons remained at Porto
Bello, 500 men died of sickness.
Meanwhile, day by day, the
mule-trains from Panama were winding
their way into the town. Gage in one
day counted 200 mules laden with
wedges of silver, which were
unloaded in the market-place and
permitted to lie about like heaps of
stones in the streets, without
causing any fear or suspicion of
being lost.20
While the treasure of the King of
Spain was being transferred to the
galleons in the harbour, the
merchants were making their trade.
There was little liberty, however,
in commercial transactions, for the
prices were fixed and published
beforehand, and when negotiations
began exchange was purely
mechanical. The fair, which was
supposed to be open for forty days,
was, in later times, generally
completed in ten or twelve. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century
the volume of business transacted was estimated to amount
to thirty or forty million pounds
sterling.21
In view of the prevailing east
wind in these regions, and the maze
of reefs, cays and shoals extending
far out to sea from the Mosquito
Coast, the galleons, in making their
course from Porto Bello to Havana,
first sailed back to Cartagena upon
the eastward coast eddy, so as to
get well to windward of Nicaragua
before attempting the passage
through the Yucatan Channel.22
The fleet anchored at Cartagena a
second time for ten or twelve days,
where it was rejoined by the patache
of Margarita23
and by the merchant ships which had
been sent to trade in Terra-Firma.
From Cartagena, too, the general
sent dispatches to Spain and to
Havana, giving the condition of the
vessels, the state of trade, the day
when he expected to sail, and the
probable time of arrival.24
For when the galleons were in the
Indies all ports were closed by the
Spaniards, for fear that precious
information of the whereabouts of
the fleet and of the value of its
cargo might inconveniently leak out
to their rivals. From Cartagena the
course was north-west past Jamaica
and the Caymans to the Isle of
Pines, and thence round Capes
Corrientes and San Antonio to
Havana. The fleet generally required
about eight days for the journey,
and arrived at Havana late in the
summer. Here the galleons refitted
and revictualled, received tobacco,
sugar, and other Cuban exports, and
if not ordered to return with the
Flota, sailed for Spain no later
than the middle of September. The
course for Spain was from Cuba
through the Bahama Channel,
north-east between the Virginian
Capes and the Bermudas to about 38°,
in order to recover the strong
northerly winds, and then east to
the Azores. In winter the galleons
sometimes ran south of the Bermudas,
and then slowly worked up to the
higher latitude; but in this case
they often either lost some ships on
the Bermuda shoals, or to avoid
these slipped too far south, were
forced back into the West Indies and
missed their voyage altogether.25
At the Azores the general, falling
in with his first intelligence from
Spain, learned where on the coast of
Europe or Africa he was to sight
land; and finally, in the latter
part of October or the beginning of
November, he dropped anchor at San
Lucar or in Cadiz harbour.
The Flota or Mexican fleet,
consisting in the seventeenth
century of two galleons of 800 or
900 tons and from fifteen to twenty
merchantmen, usually left Cadiz
between June and July and wintered
in America; but if it was to return
with the galleons from Havana in
September it sailed for the Indies
as early as April. The course from
Spain to the Indies was the same as
for the fleet of Terra-Firma. From
Deseada or Guadeloupe, however, the
Flota steered north-west, passing
Santa Cruz and Porto Rico on the
north, and sighting the little isles
of Mona and Saona, as far as the Bay
of Neyba in Hispaniola, where the
ships took on fresh wood and water.26
Putting to sea again, and circling
round Beata and Alta Vela, the fleet
sighted in turn Cape Tiburon, Cape
de Cruz, the Isle of Pines, and
Capes Corrientes and San Antonio at
the west end of Cuba.
Meanwhile merchant ships had dropped
away one by one, sailing to San Juan
de Porto Rico, San Domingo, St. Jago
de Cuba and even to Truxillo and
Cavallos in Honduras, to carry
orders from Spain to the governors,
receive cargoes of leather, cocoa,
etc., and rejoin the Flota at
Havana. From Cape San Antonio to
Vera Cruz there was an outside or
winter route and an inside or summer
route. The former lay north-west
between the Alacranes and the
Negrillos to the Mexican coast about
sixteen leagues north of Vera Cruz,
and then down before the wind into
the desired haven. The summer track
was much closer to the shore of
Campeache, the fleet threading its
way among the cays and shoals, and
approaching Vera Cruz by a channel
on the south-east.
If the Flota sailed from Spain in
July it generally arrived at Vera
Cruz in the first fifteen days of
September, and the ships were at
once laid up until March, when the
crews reassembled to careen and
refit them. If the fleet was to
return in the same year, however,
the exports of New Spain and
adjacent provinces, the goods from
China and the Philippines carried
across Mexico from the Pacific port
of Acapulco, and the ten or twelve
millions of treasure for the king,
were at once put on board and the
ships departed to join the galleons
at Havana. Otherwise the fleet
sailed from Vera Cruz in April, and
as it lay dead to the leeward of
Cuba, used the northerly winds to
about 25°, then steered south-east
and reached Havana in eighteen or
twenty days. By the beginning of
June it was ready to sail for Spain,
where it arrived at the end of July,
by the same course as that followed
by the galleons.27
We are accustomed to think of
Spanish commerce with the Indies as being
made solely by great fleets which
sailed yearly from Seville or Cadiz
to Mexico and the Isthmus of Darien.
There were, however, always
exceptions to this rule. When, as
sometimes happened, the Flota did
not sail, two ships of 600 or 700
tons were sent by the King of Spain
to Vera Cruz to carry the
quicksilver necessary for the mines.
The metal was divided between New
Spain and Peru by the viceroy at
Mexico, who sent via
Gautemala the portion intended for
the south. These ships, called
"azogues," carried from 2000 to 2500
quintals28
of silver, and sometimes convoyed
six or seven merchant vessels. From
time to time an isolated ship was
also allowed to sail from Spain to
Caracas with licence from the
Council of the Indies and the
Contratacion, paying the king a
duty of five ducats on the ton. It
was called the "register of
Caracas," took the same route as the
galleons, and returned with one of
the fleets from Havana. Similar
vessels traded at Maracaibo, in
Porto Rico and at San Domingo, at
Havana and Matanzas in Cuba and at
Truxillo and Campeache.29
There was always, moreover, a
special traffic with Buenos Ayres.
This port was opened to a limited
trade in negroes in 1595. In 1602
permission was given to the
inhabitants of La Plata to export
for six years the products of their
lands to other Spanish possessions,
in exchange for goods of which they
had need; and when in 1616 the
colonists demanded an indefinite
renewal of this privilege, the sop
thrown to them was the bare right of
trade to the amount of 100 tons
every three years. Later in the
century the Council of the Indies
extended the period to five
years, so as not to prejudice the
trade of the galleons.30
It was this commerce, which we
have noticed at such length, that
the buccaneers of the West Indies in
the seventeenth century came to
regard as their legitimate prey.
These "corsarios Luteranos," as the
Spaniards sometimes called them,
scouring the coast of the Main from
Venezuela to Cartagena, hovering
about the broad channel between Cuba
and Yucatan, or prowling in the
Florida Straits, became the
nightmare of Spanish seamen. Like a
pack of terriers they hung upon the
skirts of the great unwieldy fleets,
ready to snap up any unfortunate
vessel which a tempest or other
accident had separated from its
fellows. When Thomas Gage was
sailing in the galleons from Porto
Bello to Cartagena in 1637, four
buccaneers hovering near them
carried away two merchant-ships
under cover of darkness. As the same
fleet was departing from Havana,
just outside the harbour two strange
vessels appeared in their midst, and
getting to the windward of them
singled out a Spanish ship which had
strayed a short distance from the
rest, suddenly gave her a broadside
and made her yield. The vessel was
laden with sugar and other goods to
the value of 80,000 crowns. The
Spanish vice-admiral and two other
galleons gave chase, but without
success, for the wind was against
them. The whole action lasted only
half an hour.31
The Spanish ships of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were notoriously clumsy and
unseaworthy. With short keel and
towering poop and forecastle they
were an easy prey for the long, low,
close-sailing sloops and barques of the
buccaneers. But this was not their
only weakness. Although the king
expressly prohibited the loading of
merchandise on the galleons except
on the king's account, this rule was
often broken for the private profit
of the captain, the sailors, and
even of the general. The men-of-war,
indeed, were sometimes so
embarrassed with goods and
passengers that it was scarcely
possible to defend them when
attacked. The galleon which bore the
general's flag had often as many as
700 souls, crew, marines and
passengers, on board, and the same
number were crowded upon those
carrying the vice-admiral and the
pilot. Ship-masters frequently hired
guns, anchors, cables, and stores to
make up the required equipment, and
men to fill up the muster-rolls,
against the time when the
"visitadors" came on board to make
their official inspection, getting
rid of the stores and men
immediately afterward. Merchant
ships were armed with such feeble
crews, owing to the excessive
crowding, that it was all they could
do to withstand the least spell of
bad weather, let alone outmanœuvre a
swift-sailing buccaneer.32
By Spanish law strangers were
forbidden to resort to, or reside
in, the Indies without express
permission of the king. By law,
moreover, they might not trade with
the Indies from Spain, either on
their own account or through the
intermediary of a Spaniard, and they
were forbidden even to associate
with those engaged in such a trade.
Colonists were stringently enjoined
from having anything to do with
them. In 1569 an order was issued
for the seizure of all goods sent to
the colonies on the account of
foreigners, and a royal cedula
of 1614 decreed the penalty of death
and confiscation upon any who
connived at the participation of
foreigners in Spanish colonial
commerce.33
It was impossible, however, to
maintain so complete an exclusion
when the products of Spain fell far
short of supplying the needs of the
colonists. Foreign merchants were
bound to have a hand in this
traffic, and the Spanish government
tried to recompense itself by
imposing on the out-going cargoes
tyrannical exactions called
"indults." The results were fatal.
Foreigners often eluded these
impositions by interloping in the
West Indies and in the South Sea.34
And as the Contratacion, by
fixing each year the nature and
quantity of the goods to be shipped
to the colonies, raised the price of
merchandise at will and reaped
enormous profits, the colonists
welcomed this contraband trade as an
opportunity of enriching themselves
and adding to the comforts and
luxuries of living.
From the beginning of the
seventeenth century as many as 200
ships sailed each year from Portugal
with rich cargoes of silks, cloths
and woollens intended for Spanish
America.35
The Portuguese bought these articles
of the Flemish, English, and French,
loaded them at Lisbon and Oporto,
ran their vessels to Brazil and up
the La Plata as far as navigation
permitted, and then transported the
goods overland through Paraguay and
Tucuman to Potosi and even to Lima.
The Spanish merchants of Peru kept
factors in Brazil as well as in
Spain, and as Portuguese imposts were
not so excessive as those levied at
Cadiz and Seville, the Portuguese
could undersell their Spanish
rivals. The frequent possession of
Assientos by the Portuguese and
Dutch in the first half of the
seventeenth century also facilitated
this contraband, for when carrying
negroes from Africa to Hispaniola,
Cuba and the towns on the Main, they
profited by their opportunities to
sell merchandise also, and generally
without the least obstacle.
Other nations in the seventeenth
century were not slow to follow the
same course; and two circumstances
contributed to make that course
easy. One was the great length of
coast line on both the Atlantic and
Pacific slopes over which a
surveillance had to be exercised,
making it difficult to catch the
interlopers. The other was the venal
connivance of the governors of the
ports, who often tolerated and even
encouraged the traffic on the plea
that the colonists demanded it.36
The subterfuges adopted by the
interlopers were very simple. When a
vessel wished to enter a Spanish
port to trade, the captain,
pretending that provisions had run
low, or that the ship suffered from
a leak or a broken mast, sent a
polite note to the governor
accompanied by a considerable gift.
He generally obtained permission to
enter, unload, and put the ship into a seaworthy condition.
All the formalities were minutely
observed. The unloaded goods were
shut up in a storehouse, and the
doors sealed. But there was always
found another door unsealed, and by
this they abstracted the goods
during the night, and substituted
coin or bars of gold and silver.
When the vessel was repaired to the
captain's satisfaction, it was
reloaded and sailed away.
There was also, especially on the
shores of the Caribbean Sea, a less
elaborate commerce called
"sloop-trade," for it was usually
managed by sloops which hovered near
some secluded spot on the coast,
often at the mouth of a river, and
informed the inhabitants of their
presence in the neighbourhood by
firing a shot from a cannon.
Sometimes a large ship filled with
merchandise was stationed in a bay
close at hand, and by means of these
smaller craft made its trade with
the colonists. The latter, generally
in disguise, came off in canoes by
night. The interlopers, however,
were always on guard against such
dangerous visitors, and never
admitted more than a few at a time;
for when the Spaniards found
themselves stronger than the crew,
and a favourable opportunity
presented itself, they rarely failed
to attempt the vessel.
Thus the Spaniards of the
seventeenth century, by persisting,
both at home and in their colonies,
in an economic policy which was
fatally inconsistent with their
powers and resources, saw their
commerce gradually extinguished by
the ships of the foreign interloper,
and their tropical possessions fall
a prey to marauding bands of
half-piratical buccaneers. Although
struggling under tremendous initial
disabilities in Europe, they had
attempted, upon the slender pleas of
prior discovery and papal
investiture, to reserve half the
world to themselves. Without a
marine, without maritime traditions, they sought to hold a
colonial empire greater than any the
world had yet seen, and comparable
only with the empire of Great
Britain three centuries later. By
discouraging industry in Spain, and
yet enforcing in the colonies an
absolute commercial dependence on
the home-country, by combining in
their rule of distant America a
solicitous paternalism with a
restriction of initiative altogether
disastrous in its consequences, the
Spaniards succeeded in reducing
their colonies to political
impotence. And when, to make their
grip the more firm, they evolved, as
a method of outwitting the foreigner
of his spoils, the system of great
fleets and single ports of call,
they found the very means they had
contrived for their own safety to be
the instrument of commercial
disaster.
II.—THE FREEBOOTERS OF THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
It was the French chronologist,
Scaliger, who in the sixteenth
century asserted, "nulli melius
piraticam exercent quam Angli"; and
although he had no need to cross the
Channel to find men proficient in
this primitive calling, the remark
applies to the England of his time
with a force which we to-day
scarcely realise. Certainly the
inveterate hostility with which the
Englishman learned to regard the
Spaniard in the latter half of the
sixteenth and throughout the
seventeenth centuries found its most
remarkable expression in the
exploits of the Elizabethan
"sea-dogs" and of the buccaneers of
a later period. The religious
differences and political jealousies
which grew out of the turmoil of the
Reformation, and the moral anarchy
incident to the dissolution of
ancient religious institutions, were
the motive causes for an
outburst of piratical activity
comparable only with the
professional piracy of the Barbary
States.
Even as far back as the
thirteenth century, indeed, lawless
sea-rovers, mostly Bretons and
Flemings, had infested the English
Channel and the seas about Great
Britain. In the sixteenth this mode
of livelihood became the refuge for
numerous young Englishmen, Catholic
and Protestant, who, fleeing from
the persecutions of Edward VI. and
of Mary, sought refuge in French
ports or in the recesses of the
Irish coast, and became the leaders
of wild roving bands living chiefly
upon plunder. Among them during
these persecutions were found many
men belonging to the best families
in England, and although with the
accession of Elizabeth most of the
leaders returned to the service of
the State, the pirate crews remained
at their old trade. The contagion
spread, especially in the western
counties, and great numbers of
fishermen who found their old
employment profitless were recruited
into this new calling.37
At the beginning of Elizabeth's
reign we find these Anglo-Irish
pirates venturing farther south,
plundering treasure galleons off the
coast of Spain, and cutting vessels
out of the very ports of the Spanish
king. Such outrages of course
provoked reprisals, and the pirates,
if caught, were sent to the galleys,
rotted in the dungeons of the
Inquisition, or, least of all, were
burnt in the plaza at Valladolid.
These cruelties only added fuel to a
deadly hatred which was kindling
between the two nations, a hatred
which it took one hundred and fifty
years to quench.
The most venturesome of these
sea-rovers, however, were soon attracted to a
larger and more distant sphere of
activity. Spain, as we have seen,
was then endeavouring to reserve to
herself in the western hemisphere an
entire new world; and this at a time
when the great northern maritime
powers, France, England and Holland,
were in the full tide of economic
development, restless with new
thoughts, hopes and ambitions, and
keenly jealous of new commercial and
industrial outlets. The famous Bull
of Alexander VI. had provoked
Francis I. to express a desire "to
see the clause in Adam's will which
entitled his brothers of Castile and
Portugal to divide the New World
between them," and very early the
French corsairs had been encouraged
to test the pretensions of the
Spaniards by the time-honoured
proofs of fire and steel. The
English nation, however, in the
first half of the sixteenth century,
had not disputed with Spain her
exclusive trade and dominion in
those regions. The hardy mariners of
the north were still indifferent to
the wonders of a new continent
awaiting their exploitation, and it
was left to the Spaniards to unfold
before the eyes of Europe the vast
riches of America, and to found
empires on the plateaus of Mexico
and beyond the Andes. During the
reign of Philip II. all this was
changed. English privateers began to
extend their operations westward,
and to sap the very sources of
Spanish wealth and power, while the
wars which absorbed the attention of
the Spaniards in Europe, from the
revolt of the Low Countries to the
Treaty of Westphalia, left the field
clear for these ubiquitous
sea-rovers. The maritime powers,
although obliged by the theory of
colonial exclusion to pretend to
acquiesce in the Spaniard's claim to
tropical America, secretly protected
and supported their mariners who
coursed those western seas. France
and England were now jealous and
fearful of Spanish predominance in
Europe, and kept eyes obstinately
fixed on the inexhaustible streams
of gold and silver by means of which
Spain was enabled to pay her armies
and man her fleets. Queen Elizabeth,
while she publicly excused or
disavowed to Philip II. the outrages
committed by Hawkins and Drake,
blaming the turbulence of the times
and promising to do her utmost to
suppress the disorders, was secretly
one of the principal shareholders in
their enterprises.
The policy of the marauders was
simple. The treasure which oiled the
machinery of Spanish policy came
from the Indies where it was
accumulated; hence there were only
two means of obtaining possession of
it:—bold raids on the ill-protected
American continent, and the capture
of vessels en route.38
The counter policy of the Spaniards
was also two-fold:—on the one hand,
the establishment of commerce by
means of annual fleets protected by
a powerful convoy; on the other, the
removal of the centres of population
from the coasts to the interior of
the country far from danger of
attack.39
The Spaniards in America, however,
proved to be no match for the bold,
intrepid mariners who disputed their
supremacy. The descendants of the
Conquistadores had deteriorated
sadly from the type of their
forbears. Softened by tropical heats
and a crude, uncultured luxury, they
seem to have lost initiative and
power of resistance. The disastrous commercial system of
monopoly and centralization forced
them to vegetate; while the policy
of confining political office to
native-born Spaniards denied any
outlet to creole talent and energy.
Moreover, the productive power and
administrative abilities of the
native-born Spaniards themselves
were gradually being paralyzed and
reduced to impotence under the
crushing obligation of preserving
and defending so unwieldy an empire
and of managing such
disproportionate riches, a task for
which they had neither the aptitude
nor the means.40
Privateering in the West Indies may
indeed be regarded as a challenge to
the Spaniards of America, sunk in
lethargy and living upon the credit
of past glory and achievement, a
challenge to prove their right to
retain their dominion and extend
their civilization and culture over
half the world.41
There were other motives which
lay behind these piratical
aggressions of the French and
English in Spanish America. The
Spaniards, ever since the days of
the Dominican monk and bishop, Las
Casas, had been reprobated as the
heartless oppressors and murderers
of the native Indians. The original
owners of the soil had been
dispossessed and reduced to slavery.
In the West Indies, the great
islands, Cuba and Hispaniola, were
rendered desolate for want of
inhabitants. Two great empires,
Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by
treachery, their kings murdered, and
their people made to suffer a living death in the
mines of Potosi and New Spain. Such
was the Protestant Englishman's
conception, in the sixteenth
century, of the results of Spanish
colonial policy. To avenge the blood
of these innocent victims, and teach
the true religion to the survivors,
was to glorify the Church militant
and strike a blow at Antichrist.
Spain, moreover, in the eyes of the
Puritans, was the lieutenant of
Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the
Apocalypse, who harried and burnt
their Protestant brethren whenever
she could lay hands upon them. That
she was eager to repeat her
ill-starred attempt of 1588 and
introduce into the British Isles the
accursed Inquisition was patent to
everyone. Protestant England,
therefore, filled with the
enthusiasm and intolerance of a new
faith, made no bones of despoiling
the Spaniards, especially as the
service of God was likely to be
repaid with plunder.
A pamphlet written by Dalby
Thomas in 1690 expresses with
tolerable accuracy the attitude of
the average Englishman toward Spain
during the previous century. He
says:—"We will make a short
reflection on the unaccountable
negligence, or rather stupidity, of
this nation, during the reigns of
Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI.
and Queen Mary, who could
contentedly sit still and see the
Spanish rifle, plunder and bring
home undisturbed, all the wealth of
that golden world; and to suffer
them with forts and castles to shut
up the doors and entrances unto all
the rich provinces of America,
having not the least title or
pretence of right beyond any other
nation; except that of being by
accident the first discoverer of
some parts of it; where the
unprecedented cruelties,
exorbitances and barbarities, their
own histories witness, they
practised on a poor, naked and
innocent people, which inhabited the
islands, as well as upon those truly civilized and
mighty empires of Peru and Mexico,
called to all mankind for succour
and relief against their outrageous
avarice and horrid massacres....
(We) slept on until the ambitious
Spaniard, by that inexhaustible
spring of treasure, had corrupted
most of the courts and senates of
Europe, and had set on fire, by
civil broils and discords, all our
neighbour nations, or had subdued
them to his yoke; contriving too to
make us wear his chains and bear a
share in the triumph of universal
monarchy, not only projected but
near accomplished, when Queen
Elizabeth came to the crown ... and
to the divided interests of Philip
II. and Queen Elizabeth, in personal
more than National concerns, we do
owe that start of hers in letting
loose upon him, and encouraging
those daring adventurers, Drake,
Hawkins, Rawleigh, the Lord Clifford
and many other braves that age
produced, who, by their privateering
and bold undertaking (like those the
buccaneers practise) now opened the
way to our discoveries, and
succeeding settlements in America."42
On the 19th of November 1527,
some Spaniards in a caravel loading
cassava at the Isle of Mona, between
Hispaniola and Porto Rico, sighted a
strange vessel of about 250 tons
well-armed with cannon, and
believing it to be a ship from Spain
sent a boat to make inquiries. The
new-comers at the same time were
seen to launch a pinnace carrying
some twenty-five men, all armed with
corselets and bows. As the two boats
approached the Spaniards inquired
the nationality of the strangers and
were told that they were English.
The story given by the English
master was that his ship and another
had been fitted out by the
King of England and had sailed from
London to discover the land of the
Great Khan; that they had been
separated in a great storm; that
this ship afterwards ran into a sea
of ice, and unable to get through,
turned south, touched at Bacallaos
(Newfoundland), where the pilot was
killed by Indians, and sailing 400
leagues along the coast of "terra
nueva" had found her way to this
island of Porto Rico. The Englishmen
offered to show their commission
written in Latin and Romance, which
the Spanish captain could not read;
and after sojourning at the island
for two days, they inquired for the
route to Hispaniola and sailed away.
On the evening of 25th November this
same vessel appeared before the port
of San Domingo, the capital of
Hispaniola, where the master with
ten or twelve sailors went ashore in
a boat to ask leave to enter and
trade. This they obtained, for the
alguazil mayor and two pilots
were sent back with them to bring
the ship into port. But early next
morning, when they approached the
shore, the Spanish alcaide,
Francisco de Tapia, commanded a gun
to be fired at the ship from the
castle; whereupon the English,
seeing the reception accorded them,
sailed back to Porto Rico, there
obtained some provisions in exchange
for pewter and cloth, and departed
for Europe, "where it is believed
that they never arrived, for nothing
is known of them." The alcaide,
says Herrera, was imprisoned by the
oidores, because he did not,
instead of driving the ship away,
allow her to enter the port, whence
she could not have departed without
the permission of the city and the
fort.43
This is the earliest record we
possess of the appearance of an
English ship in the waters of
Spanish America. Others, however,
soon followed. In 1530 William
Hawkins, father of the famous John
Hawkins, ventured in "a tall and
goodly ship ... called the 'Polo of
Plymouth,'" down to the coast of
Guinea, trafficked with the natives
for gold-dust and ivory, and then
crossed the ocean to Brazil, "where
he behaved himself so wisely with
those savage people" that one of the
kings of the country took ship with
him to England and was presented to
Henry VIII. at Whitehall.44
The real occasion, however, for the
appearance of foreign ships in
Spanish-American waters was the new
occupation of carrying negroes from
the African coast to the Spanish
colonies to be sold as slaves. The
rapid depopulation of the Indies,
and the really serious concern of
the Spanish crown for the
preservation of the indigenes, had
compelled the Spanish government to
permit the introduction of negro
slaves from an early period. At
first restricted to Christian slaves
carried from Spain, after 1510
licences to take over a certain
number, subject of course to
governmental imposts, were given to
private individuals; and in August
1518, owing to the incessant clamour
of the colonists for more negroes,
Laurent de Gouvenot, Governor of
Bresa and one of the foreign
favourites of Charles V., obtained the
first regular contract to carry 4000
slaves directly from Africa to the
West Indies.45
With slight modifications the
contract system became permanent,
and with it, as a natural
consequence, came contraband trade.
Cargoes of negroes were frequently
"run" from Africa by Spaniards and
Portuguese, and as early as 1506 an
order was issued to expel all
contraband slaves from Hispaniola.46
The supply never equalled the
demand, however, and this explains
why John Hawkins found it so
profitable to carry ship-loads of
blacks across from the Guinea coast,
and why Spanish colonists could not
resist the temptation to buy them,
notwithstanding the stringent laws
against trading with foreigners.
The first voyage of John Hawkins
was made in 1562-63. In conjunction
with Thomas Hampton he fitted out
three vessels and sailed for Sierra
Leone. There he collected, "partly
by the sword and partly by other
means," some 300 negroes, and with
this valuable human freight crossed
the Atlantic to San Domingo in
Hispaniola. Uncertain as to his
reception, Hawkins on his arrival
pretended that he had been driven in
by foul weather, and was in need of
provisions, but without ready money
to pay for them. He therefore
requested permission to sell
"certain slaves he had with him."
The opportunity was eagerly welcomed
by the planters, and the governor,
not thinking it necessary to
construe his orders from home too
stringently, allowed two-thirds of
the cargo to be sold. As neither
Hawkins nor the Spanish colonists
anticipated any serious displeasure
on the part of Philip II., the
remaining 100 slaves were left as a deposit with the Council
of the island. Hawkins invested the
proceeds in a return cargo of hides,
half of which he sent in Spanish
vessels to Spain under the care of
his partner, while he returned with
the rest to England. The Spanish
Government, however, was not going
to sanction for a moment the
intrusion of the English into the
Indies. On Hampton's arrival at
Cadiz his cargo was confiscated and
he himself narrowly escaped the
Inquisition. The slaves left in San
Domingo were forfeited, and Hawkins,
although he "cursed, threatened and
implored," could not obtain a
farthing for his lost hides and
negroes. The only result of his
demands was the dispatch of a
peremptory order to the West Indies
that no English vessel should be
allowed under any pretext to trade
there.47
The second of the great
Elizabethan sea-captains to beard
the Spanish lion was Hawkins' friend
and pupil, Francis Drake. In 1567 he
accompanied Hawkins on his third
expedition. With six ships, one of
which was lent by the Queen herself,
they sailed from Plymouth in
October, picked up about 450 slaves
on the Guinea coast, sighted
Dominica in the West Indies in
March, and coasted along the
mainland of South America past
Margarita and Cape de la Vela,
carrying on a "tolerable good
trade." Rio de la Hacha they stormed
with 200 men, losing only two in the
encounter; but they were scattered
by a tempest near Cartagena and
driven into the Gulf of Mexico,
where, on 16th September, they
entered the narrow port of S. Juan
d'Ulloa or Vera Cruz. The next day
the fleet of New Spain, consisting
of thirteen large ships, appeared
outside, and after an exchange of
pledges of peace and amity with the
English intruders, entered on
the 20th. On the morning of the
24th, however, a fierce encounter
was begun, and Hawkins and Drake,
stubbornly defending themselves
against tremendous odds, were glad
to escape with two shattered vessels
and the loss of £100,000 treasure.
After a voyage of terrible
suffering, Drake, in the "Judith,"
succeeded in reaching England on
20th January 1569, and Hawkins
followed five days later.48
Within a few years, however, Drake
was away again, this time alone and
with the sole, unblushing purpose of
robbing the Dons. With only two
ships and seventy-three men he
prowled about the waters of the West
Indies for almost a year, capturing
and rifling Spanish vessels,
plundering towns on the Main and
intercepting convoys of treasure
across the Isthmus of Darien. In
1577 he sailed on the voyage which
carried him round the world, a feat
for which he was knighted, promoted
to the rank of admiral, and visited
by the Queen on board his ship, the
"Golden Hind." While Drake was being
feted in London as the hero of the
hour, Philip of Spain from his cell
in the Escorial must have execrated
these English sea-rovers whose
visits brought ruin to his colonies
and menaced the safety of his
treasure galleons.
In the autumn of 1585 Drake was
again in command of a formidable
armament intended against the West
Indies. Supported by 2000 troops
under General Carleill, and by
Martin Frobisher and Francis Knollys
in the fleet, he took and plundered
San Domingo, and after occupying
Cartagena for six weeks ransomed the
city for 110,000 ducats. This
fearless old Elizabethan sailed from
Plymouth on his last voyage in
August 1595. Though under the joint
command of Drake and Hawkins, the expedition seemed doomed
to disaster throughout its course.
One vessel, the "Francis," fell into
the hands of the Spaniards. While
the fleet was passing through the
Virgin Isles, Hawkins fell ill and
died. A desperate attack was made on
S. Juan de Porto Rico, but the
English, after losing forty or fifty
men, were compelled to retire. Drake
then proceeded to the Main, where in
turn he captured and plundered
Rancherias, Rio de la Hacha, Santa
Marta and Nombre de Dios. With 750
soldiers he made a bold attempt to
cross the isthmus to the city of
Panama, but turned back after the
loss of eighty or ninety of his
followers. A few days later, on 15th
January 1596, he too fell ill, died
on the 28th, and was buried in a
leaden coffin off the coast of
Darien.49
Hawkins and Drake, however, were
by no means the only English
privateers of that century in
American waters. Names like Oxenham,
Grenville, Raleigh and Clifford, and
others of lesser fame, such as
Winter, Knollys and Barker, helped
to swell the roll of these
Elizabethan sea-rovers. To many a
gallant sailor the Caribbean Sea was
a happy hunting-ground where he
might indulge at his pleasure any
propensities to lawless adventure.
If in 1588 he had helped to scatter
the Invincible Armada, he now
pillaged treasure ships on the
coasts of the Spanish Main; if he
had been with Drake to flout his
Catholic Majesty at Cadiz, he now
closed with the Spaniards within
their distant cities beyond the
seas. Thus he lined his own pockets
with Spanish doubloons, and
incidentally curbed Philip's power
of invading England. Nor must we
think these mariners the same as the
lawless buccaneers of a later
period. The men of this generation
were of a sterner and more
fanatical mould, men who for their
wildest acts often claimed the
sanction of religious convictions.
Whether they carried off the heathen
from Africa, or plundered the fleets
of Romish Spain, they were but
entering upon "the heritage of the
saints." Judged by the standards of
our own century they were pirates
and freebooters, but in the eyes of
their fellow-countrymen their
attacks upon the Spaniards seemed
fair and honourable.
The last of the great
privateering voyages for which Drake
had set the example was the armament
which Lord George Clifford, Earl of
Cumberland, sent against Porto Rico
in 1598. The ill-starred expeditions
of Raleigh to Guiana in 1595 and
again in 1617 belong rather to the
history of exploration and
colonization. Clifford, "courtier,
gambler and buccaneer," having run
through a great part of his very
considerable fortune, had seized the
opportunity offered him by the
plunder of the Spanish colonies to
re-coup himself; and during a period
of twelve years, from 1586 to 1598,
almost every year fitted out, and
often himself commanded, an
expedition against the Spaniards. In
his last and most ambitious effort,
in 1598, he equipped twenty vessels
entirely at his own cost, sailed
from Plymouth in March, and on 6th
June laid siege to the city of San
Juan, which he proposed to clear of
Spaniards and establish as an
English stronghold. Although the
place was captured, the expedition
proved a fiasco. A violent sickness
broke out among the troops, and as
Clifford had already sailed away
with some of the ships to Flores to
lie in wait for the treasure fleet,
Sir Thomas Berkeley, who was left in
command in Porto Rico, abandoned the
island and returned to rejoin the
Earl.50
The English in the sixteenth
century, however, had no monopoly of
this piratical game. The French did
something in their own way, and the
Dutch were not far behind. Indeed,
the French may claim to have set the
example for the Elizabethan
freebooters, for in the first half
of the sixteenth century privateers
flocked to the Spanish Indies from
Dieppe, Brest and the towns of the
Basque coast. The gleam of the
golden lingots of Peru, and the pale
lights of the emeralds from the
mountains of New Granada, exercised
a hypnotic influence not only on
ordinary seamen but on merchants and
on seigneurs with depleted fortunes.
Names like Jean Terrier, Jacques
Sore and François le Clerc, the
latter popularly called "Pie de
Palo," or "wooden-leg," by the
Spaniards, were as detestable in
Spanish ears as those of the great
English captains. Even before 1500
French corsairs hovered about Cape
St Vincent and among the Azores and
the Canaries; and their prowess and
audacity were so feared that
Columbus, on returning from his
third voyage in 1498, declared that
he had sailed for the island of
Madeira by a new route to avoid
meeting a French fleet which was
awaiting him near St Vincent.51
With the establishment of the system
of armed convoys, however, and the
presence of Spanish fleets on the
coast of Europe, the corsairs
suffered some painful reverses which
impelled them to transfer their
operations to American waters.
Thereafter Spanish records are full
of references to attacks by
Frenchmen on Havana, St. Jago de
Cuba, San Domingo and towns on the mainland of South
and Central America; full of
appeals, too, from the colonies to
the neglectful authorities in Spain,
urging them to send artillery,
cruisers and munitions of war for
their defence.52
A letter dated 8th April 1537,
written by Gonzalo de Guzman to the
Empress, furnishes us with some
interesting details of the exploits
of an anonymous French corsair in
that year. In November 1536 this
Frenchman had seized in the port of
Chagre, on the Isthmus of Darien, a
Spanish vessel laden with horses
from San Domingo, had cast the cargo
into the sea, put the crew on shore
and sailed away with his prize. A
month or two later he appeared off
the coast of Havana and dropped
anchor in a small bay a few leagues
from the city. As there were then
five Spanish ships lying in the
harbour, the inhabitants compelled
the captains to attempt the seizure
of the pirate, promising to pay for
the ships if they were lost. Three
vessels of 200 tons each sailed out
to the attack, and for several days
they fired at the French corsair,
which, being a patache of light
draught, had run up the bay beyond
their reach. Finally one morning the
Frenchmen were seen pressing with
both sail and oar to escape from the
port. A Spanish vessel cut her
cables to follow in pursuit, but
encountering a heavy sea and
contrary winds was abandoned by her
crew, who made for shore in boats.
The other two Spanish ships were
deserted in similar fashion,
whereupon the French, observing this
new turn of affairs, re-entered the
bay and easily recovered the three
drifting vessels. Two of the prizes
they burnt, and arming the third
sailed away to cruise in the Florida straits, in the route of
ships returning from the West Indies
to Spain.53
The corsairs, however, were not
always so uniformly successful. A
band of eighty, who attempted to
plunder the town of St. Jago de
Cuba, were repulsed with some loss
by a certain Diego Perez of Seville,
captain of an armed merchant ship
then in the harbour, who later
petitioned for the grant of a
coat-of-arms in recognition of his
services.54
In October 1544 six French vessels
attacked the town of Santa Maria de
los Remedios, near Cape de la Vela,
but failed to take it in face of the
stubborn resistance of the
inhabitants. Yet the latter a few
months earlier had been unable to
preserve their homes from pillage,
and had been obliged to flee to La
Granjeria de las Perlas on the Rio
de la Hacha.55
There is small wonder, indeed, that
the defenders were so rarely
victorious. The Spanish towns were
ill-provided with forts and guns,
and often entirely without
ammunition or any regular soldiers.
The distance between the settlements
as a rule was great, and the
inhabitants, as soon as informed of
the presence of the enemy, knowing
that they had no means of resistance
and little hope of succour, left
their homes to the mercy of the
freebooters and fled to the hills
and woods with their families and
most precious belongings. Thus when,
in October 1554, another band of
three hundred French privateers
swooped down upon the unfortunate
town of St. Jago de Cuba, they were
able to hold it for thirty days, and
plundered it to the value of 80,000
pieces of eight.56
The following year, however,
witnessed an even more remarkable
action. In July 1555 the celebrated captain, Jacques Sore,
landed two hundred men from a
caravel a half-league from the city
of Havana, and before daybreak
marched on the town and forced the
surrender of the castle. The Spanish
governor had time to retire to the
country, where he gathered a small
force of Spaniards and negroes, and
returned to surprise the French by
night. Fifteen or sixteen of the
latter were killed, and Sore, who
himself was wounded, in a rage gave
orders for the massacre of all the
prisoners. He burned the cathedral
and the hospital, pillaged the
houses and razed most of the city to
the ground. After transferring all
the artillery to his vessel, he made
several forays into the country,
burned a few plantations, and
finally sailed away in the beginning
of August. No record remains of the
amount of the booty, but it must
have been enormous. To fill the cup
of bitterness for the poor
inhabitants, on 4th October there
appeared on the coast another French
ship, which had learned of Sore's
visit and of the helpless state of
the Spaniards. Several hundred men
disembarked, sacked a few
plantations neglected by their
predecessors, tore down or burned
the houses which the Spaniards had
begun to rebuild, and seized a
caravel loaded with leather which
had recently entered the harbour.57
It is true that during these years
there was almost constant war in
Europe between the Emperor and
France; yet this does not entirely
explain the activity of the French
privateers in Spanish America, for
we find them busy there in the years
when peace reigned at home. Once
unleash the sea-dogs and it was
extremely difficult to bring them
again under restraint.
With the seventeenth century
began a new era in the history of
the West Indies. If in the sixteenth
the English, French and
Dutch came to tropical America as
piratical intruders into seas and
countries which belonged to others,
in the following century they came
as permanent colonisers and
settlers. The Spaniards, who had
explored the whole ring of the West
Indian islands before 1500, from the
beginning neglected the lesser for
the larger Antilles—Cuba,
Hispaniola, Porto Rico and
Jamaica—and for those islands like
Trinidad, which lie close to the
mainland. And when in 1519 Cortez
sailed from Cuba for the conquest of
Mexico, and twelve years later
Pizarro entered Peru, the emigrants
who left Spain to seek their
fortunes in the New World flocked to
the vast territories which the
Conquistadores and their
lieutenants had subdued on the
Continent. It was consequently to
the smaller islands which compose
the Leeward and Windward groups that
the English, French and Dutch first
resorted as colonists. Small, and
therefore "easy to settle, easy to
depopulate and to re-people,
attractive not only on account of
their own wealth, but also as a
starting-point for the vast and rich
continent off which they lie," these
islands became the pawns in a game
of diplomacy and colonization which
continued for 150 years.
In the seventeenth century,
moreover, the Spanish monarchy was
declining rapidly both in power and
prestige, and its empire, though
still formidable, no longer
overshadowed the other nations of
Europe as in the days of Charles V.
and Philip II. France, with the
Bourbons on the throne, was entering
upon an era of rapid expansion at
home and abroad, while the Dutch, by
the truce of 1609, virtually
obtained the freedom for which they
had struggled so long. In England
Queen Elizabeth had died in 1603,
and her Stuart successor exchanged
her policy of dalliance, of balance between
France and Spain, for one of peace
and conciliation. The aristocratic
free-booters who had enriched
themselves by harassing the Spanish
Indies were succeeded by a less
romantic but more business-like
generation, which devoted itself to
trade and planting. Abortive
attempts at colonization had been
made in the sixteenth century. The
Dutch, who were trading in the West
Indies as early as 1542, by 1580
seem to have gained some foothold in
Guiana;58
and the French Huguenots, under the
patronage of the Admiral de Coligny,
made three unsuccessful efforts to
form settlements on the American
continent, one in Brazil in 1555,
another near Port Royal in South
Carolina in 1562, and two years
later a third on the St. John's
River in Florida. The only English
effort in the sixteenth century was
the vain attempt of Sir Walter
Raleigh between 1585 and 1590 to
plant a colony on Roanoke Island, on
the coast of what is now North
Carolina. It was not till 1607 that
the first permanent English
settlement in America was made at
Jamestown in Virginia. Between 1609
and 1619 numerous stations were
established by English, Dutch and
French in Guiana between the mouth
of the Orinoco and that of the
Amazon. In 1621 the Dutch West India
Company was incorporated, and a few
years later proposals for a similar
company were broached in England.
Among the West Indian Islands, St.
Kitts received its first English
settlers in 1623; and two years
later the island was formally
divided with the French, thus
becoming the earliest nucleus of
English and French colonization in
those regions. Barbadoes was
colonized in 1624-25. In 1628
English settlers from St. Kitts
spread to Nevis and Barbuda, and within
another four years to Antigua and
Montserrat; while as early as 1625
English and Dutch took joint
possession of Santa Cruz. The
founders of the French settlement on
St. Kitts induced Richelieu to
incorporate a French West India
Company with the title, "The Company
of the Isles of America," and under
its auspices Guadeloupe, Martinique
and other islands of the Windward
group were colonized in 1635 and
succeeding years. Meanwhile between
1632 and 1634 the Dutch had
established trading stations on St.
Eustatius in the north, and on
Tobago and Curaçao in the south near
the Spanish mainland.
While these centres of trade and
population were being formed in the
very heart of the Spanish seas, the
privateers were not altogether idle.
To the treaty of Vervins between
France and Spain in 1598 had been
added a secret restrictive article
whereby it was agreed that the peace
should not hold good south of the
Tropic of Cancer and west of the
meridian of the Azores. Beyond these
two lines (called "les lignes de
l'enclos des Amitiés") French and
Spanish ships might attack each
other and take fair prize as in open
war. The ministers of Henry IV.
communicated this restriction
verbally to the merchants of the
ports, and soon private men-of-war
from Dieppe, Havre and St. Malo
flocked to the western seas.59
Ships loaded with contraband goods
no longer sailed for the Indies
unless armed ready to engage all
comers, and many ship-captains
renounced trade altogether for the
more profitable and exciting
occupation of privateering. In the
early years of the seventeenth
century, moreover, Dutch fleets
harassed the coasts of Chile and
Peru,60
while in Brazil61
and the West Indies a second "Pie de
Palo," this time the Dutch admiral,
Piet Heyn, was proving a scourge to
the Spaniards. Heyn was employed by
the Dutch West India Company, which
from the year 1623 onwards, carried
the Spanish war into the transmarine
possessions of Spain and Portugal.
With a fleet composed of twenty-six
ships and 3300 men, of which he was
vice-admiral, he greatly
distinguished himself at the capture
of Bahia, the seat of Portuguese
power in Brazil. Similar expeditions
were sent out annually, and brought
back the rich spoils of the South
American colonies. Within two years
the extraordinary number of eighty
ships, with 1500 cannon and over
9000 sailors and soldiers, were
despatched to American seas, and
although Bahia was soon retaken, the
Dutch for a time occupied
Pernambuco, as well as San Juan de
Porto Rico in the West Indies.62
In 1628 Piet Heyn was in command of
a squadron designed to intercept the
plate fleet which sailed every year
from Vera Cruz to Spain. With
thirty-one ships, 700 cannon and
nearly 3000 men he cruised along the
northern coast of Cuba, and on 8th
September fell in with his quarry
near Cape San Antonio. The Spaniards
made a running fight along the coast
until they reached the Matanzas
River near Havana, into which they
turned with the object of running
the great-bellied galleons aground
and escaping with what treasure they
could. The Dutch followed, however,
and most of the rich cargo was
diverted into the coffers of the
Dutch West India Company. The gold,
silver, indigo, sugar and logwood
were sold in the Netherlands for
fifteen million guilders, and the company was
enabled to distribute to its
shareholders the unprecedented
dividend of 50 per cent. It was an
exploit which two generations of
English mariners had attempted in
vain, and the unfortunate Spanish
general, Don Juan de Benavides, on
his return to Spain was imprisoned
for his defeat and later beheaded.63
In 1639 we find the Spanish
Council of War for the Indies
conferring with the King on measures
to be taken against English
piratical ships in the Caribbean;64
and in 1642 Captain William Jackson,
provided with an ample commission
from the Earl of Warwick65
and duplicates under the Great Seal,
made a raid in which he emulated the
exploits of Sir Francis Drake and
his contemporaries. Starting out
with three ships and about 1100 men,
mostly picked up in St. Kitts and
Barbadoes, he cruised along the Main
from Caracas to Honduras and
plundered the towns of Maracaibo and
Truxillo. On 25th March 1643 he
dropped anchor in what is now
Kingston Harbour in Jamaica, landed
about 500 men, and after some sharp
fighting and the loss of forty of
his followers, entered the town of
St. Jago de la Vega, which he
ransomed for 200 beeves, 10,000 lbs.
of cassava bread and 7000 pieces of
eight. Many of the English were so
captivated by the beauty and
fertility of the island that
twenty-three deserted in one night
to the Spaniards.66
The first two Stuart Kings, like
the great Queen who preceded them,
and in spite of the presence of a powerful Spanish faction
at the English Court, looked upon
the Indies with envious eyes, as a
source of perennial wealth to
whichever nation could secure them.
James I., to be sure, was a man of
peace, and soon after his accession
patched up a treaty with the
Spaniards; but he had no intention
of giving up any English claims,
however shadowy they might be, to
America. Cornwallis, the new
ambassador at Madrid, from a vantage
ground where he could easily see the
financial and administrative
confusion into which Spain, in spite
of her colonial wealth, had fallen,
was most dissatisfied with the
treaty. In a letter to Cranborne,
dated 2nd July 1605, he suggested
that England never lost so great an
opportunity of winning honour and
wealth as by relinquishing the war
with Spain, and that Philip and his
kingdom "were reduced to such a
state as they could not in all
likelihood have endured for the
space of two years more."67
This opinion we find repeated in his
letters in the following years, with
covert hints that an attack upon the
Indies might after all be the most
profitable and politic thing to do.
When, in October 1607, Zuniga, the
Spanish ambassador in London,
complained to James of the
establishment of the new colony in
Virginia, James replied that
Virginia was land discovered by the
English and therefore not within the
jurisdiction of Philip; and a week
later Salisbury, while confiding to
Zuniga that he thought the English
might not justly go to Virginia,
still refused to prohibit their
going or command their return, for
it would be an acknowledgment, he
said, that the King of Spain was
lord of all the Indies.68
In 1609, in the truce concluded
between Spain and the Netherlands,
one of the stipulations provided
that for nine years the Dutch were
to be free to trade in all places in
the East and West Indies except
those in actual possession of the
Spaniards on the date of cessation
of hostilities; and thereafter the
English and French governments
endeavoured with all the more
persistence to obtain a similar
privilege. Attorney-General Heath,
in 1625, presented a memorial to the
Crown on the advantages derived by
the Spaniards and Dutch in the West
Indies, maintaining that it was
neither safe nor profitable for them
to be absolute lords of those
regions; and he suggested that his
Majesty openly interpose or permit
it to be done underhand.69
In September 1637 proposals were
renewed in England for a West India
Company as the only method of
obtaining a share in the wealth of
America. It was suggested that some
convenient port be seized as a safe
retreat from which to plunder
Spanish trade on land and sea, and
that the officers of the company be
empowered to conquer and occupy any
part of the West Indies, build
ships, levy soldiers and munitions
of war, and make reprisals.70
The temper of Englishmen at this
time was again illustrated in 1640
when the Spanish ambassador, Alonzo
de Cardenas, protested to Charles I.
against certain ships which the
Earls of Warwick and Marlborough
were sending to the West Indies with
the intention, Cardenas declared, of
committing hostilities against the
Spaniards. The Earl of Warwick, it
seems, pretended to have received
great injuries from the latter and
threatened to recoup his losses at
their expense. He procured from the
king a broad commission which gave him the right to trade
in the West Indies, and to "offend"
such as opposed him. Under shelter
of this commission the Earl of
Marlborough was now going to sea
with three or four armed ships, and
Cardenas prayed the king to restrain
him until he gave security not to
commit any acts of violence against
the Spanish nation. The petition was
referred to a committee of the
Lords, who concluded that as the
peace had never been strictly
observed by either nation in the
Indies they would not demand any
security of the Earl. "Whether the
Spaniards will think this reasonable
or not," concludes Secretary
Windebank in his letter to Sir
Arthur Hopton, "is no great matter."71
During this century and a half
between 1500 and 1650, the Spaniards
were by no means passive or
indifferent to the attacks made upon
their authority and prestige in the
New World. The hostility of the
mariners from the north they repaid
with interest, and woe to the
foreign interloper or privateer who
fell into their clutches. When Henry
II. of France in 1557 issued an
order that Spanish prisoners be
condemned to the galleys, the
Spanish government retaliated by
commanding its sea-captains to mete
out the same treatment to their
French captives, except that
captains, masters and officers taken
in the navigation of the Indies were
to be hung or cast into the sea.72
In December 1600 the governor of
Cumana had suggested to the King, as
a means of keeping Dutch and English
ships from the salt mines of Araya,
the ingenious scheme of poisoning
the salt. This advice, it seems, was
not followed, but a few years later,
in 1605, a Spanish fleet of fourteen galleons
sent from Lisbon surprised and burnt
nineteen Dutch vessels found loading
salt at Araya, and murdered most of
the prisoners.73
In December 1604 the Venetian
ambassador in London wrote of "news
that the Spanish in the West Indies
captured two English vessels, cut
off the hands, feet, noses and ears
of the crews and smeared them with
honey and tied them to trees to be
tortured by flies and other insects.
The Spanish here plead," he
continued, "that they were pirates,
not merchants, and that they did not
know of the peace. But the barbarity
makes people here cry out."74
On 22nd June 1606, Edmondes, the
English Ambassador at Brussels, in a
letter to Cornwallis, speaks of a
London ship which was sent to trade
in Virginia, and putting into a
river in Florida to obtain water,
was surprised there by Spanish
vessels from Havana, the men
ill-treated and the cargo
confiscated.75
And it was but shortly after that
Captain Chaloner's ship on its way
to Virginia was seized by the
Spaniards in the West Indies, and
the crew sent to languish in the
dungeons of Seville or condemned to
the galleys.
By attacks upon some of the
English settlements, too, the
Spaniards gave their threats a more
effective form. Frequent raids were
made upon the English and Dutch
plantations in Guiana;76
and on 8th-18th September 1629 a
Spanish fleet of over thirty sail,
commanded by Don Federico de Toledo,
nearly annihilated the joint French
and English colony on St. Kitts.
Nine English ships were captured and
the settlements burnt. The French
inhabitants temporarily evacuated
the island and sailed for Antigua; but of the
English some 550 were carried to
Cartagena and Havana, whence they
were shipped to England, and all the
rest fled to the mountains and
woods.77
Within three months' time, however,
after the departure of the
Spaniards, the scattered settlers
had returned and re-established the
colony. Providence Island and its
neighbour, Henrietta, being situated
near the Mosquito Coast, were
peculiarly exposed to Spanish
attack;78
while near the north shore of
Hispaniola the island of Tortuga,
which was colonized by the same
English company, suffered repeatedly
from the assaults of its hostile
neighbours. In July 1635 a Spanish
fleet from the Main assailed the
island of Providence, but unable to
land among the rocks, was after five
days beaten off "considerably torn"
by the shot from the fort.79
On the strength of these injuries
received and of others anticipated,
the Providence Company obtained from
the king the liberty "to right
themselves" by making reprisals, and
during the next six years kept
numerous vessels preying upon
Spanish commerce in those waters.
King Philip was therefore all the
more intent upon destroying the
plantation.80
He bided his time, however, until
the early summer of 1641, when the
general of the galleons, Don
Francisco Diaz Pimienta, with twelve
sail and 2000 men, fell upon the
colony, razed the forts and carried
off all the English, about 770 in
number, together with forty cannon
and half a million of plunder.81
It was just ten years later that a force of 800 men from
Porto Rico invaded Santa Cruz,
whence the Dutch had been expelled
by the English in 1646, killed the
English governor and more than 100
settlers, seized two ships in the
harbour and burnt and pillaged most
of the plantations. The rest of the
inhabitants escaped to the woods,
and after the departure of the
Spaniards deserted the colony for
St. Kitts and other islands.82 |