CHAPTER 2
As the provisions of Bubb’s treaty created new expectations for trade, the South Sea Company’s factors went about the business of establishing themselves in their new cities. Trade depended on finding mutual interests with members of the oppositional empire, and many of the company’s employees wasted little time in identifying Spaniards with whom they could socialize and make deals, based on a mutual interest in science or profit. Despite this enthusiasm among some, the company’s operations faced challenges during the next decade as trade disagreements, smuggling, piracy, and two resulting wars shook the fragile peace between the empires. The wars of the mid-asiento period affirmed the dangers that lay at the heart of the trade. Those Britons who were closest to the Spanish, socially and economically, ran the greatest personal risk when the nations quarreled. At the same time, these individuals, working for their own interests as well as Britain’s, collected a great deal of information on both empires, posing a potential danger to each.
The South Sea Company had established its agents in the port cities of the Spanish empire in the hope that these men would direct all their energies toward benefiting the company and, by extension, the nation’s pocketbook, given the company’s role in assuming the national debt and providing outlets for British manufacturing. Many of the factors, however, entered the company’s service with their own agendas and expectations. Company employees, among them the physician John Burnet, took advantage of their location in the Spanish Americas in order to satisfy their own curiosity about the natural world, and circulated the information that they obtained within the Spanish empire widely. They also collected information about trade, fortifications, and wealth on both sides of the imperial borders. Some engaged in extensive extralegal trade, and others spent a good deal of their leisure time attending to their own interests, economic or intellectual. The interests that brought members of the British and Spanish empires together, including trade and exploration for scientific and other aims, would also lead to just the issues that would disrupt the peace at the highest levels of government. When members of these empires worked together, as in the collection of scientific information and specimens or transporting contraband goods, they could become close. They might, as in the case of Burnet, reject their loyalty to their home empire if the opposing empire offered a more attractive situation. A look at Burnet’s time in the company’s employ reveals the many possibilities for international correspondence and friendship open to servants of the company, as well as the dangers inherent in these interactions for individuals and empires alike.
Burnet completed his training as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh sometime shortly before or during the first years of the asiento. His interest in plants, minerals, and medicines sufficiently impressed the botanist James Petiver that he recommended the young surgeon to the company for employment. Petiver no doubt hoped that Burnet would continue to add to his extensive collection of tropical curiosities if he could travel through these previously largely inaccessible lands.1 By August 1716 he had made enough of an impression on the court of directors that they chose him to be the company’s physician at Portobello.2 Although he came to the South Sea Company as a surgeon, his aspirations went far beyond simply providing medicine and care to those moving through the Spanish American ports. In many of his letters to his contacts in Great Britain, Burnet expressed his desire for more power, including a will to rise within the company and become a factor in his own right. Frustrated with the unresponsiveness of the court of directors to his demands, Burnet often complained that his considerable talents were wasted in his present position. The court would eventually come to recognize Burnet’s value in the asiento trade, but as the trade underwent fluctuations in times of interimperial tension, his deep resentment would in the end prove more powerful than their praise.
Burnet’s years in the company were marked by interimperial turmoil, and the trade proceeded in fits and starts. Though the vagaries of the peace process and the difficulties of transatlantic relocation had created disruptions at the start of the asiento period, Burnet and his fellow employees soon got the trade underway, beginning to fulfill Spanish American port cities’ demands for slaves and illegal merchandise. While merchants on both sides of the imperial divide eagerly pursued the newly opened opportunities, bringing profit to themselves and sometimes their countries, international troubles persisted, and at times flared. During the period from the enactment of Bubb’s 1716 treaty to the late 1720s, interimperial conflict twice put a stop to the asiento trade in the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas. South Sea Company agents faced imprisonment or ejection from their factories, holds full of suddenly undeliverable cargo rotted in idle merchant ships, and British and Spanish goods and crews caught on the wrong side of the line during the war faced seizure and worse. War damaged South Sea Company interests, but the presence of Britons in the Spanish Americas both legally and illegally sometimes sparked the tensions that would lead to a break in the interimperial peace.
Trade Under Bubb’s Treaty
The British and Spanish shared some compelling mutual interests—the Spanish needed slaves imported from Africa to the Spanish Americas and the British wished to profit from the imports—but the trade was more difficult in practice than in theory. Imperial disagreements, driven in part by the trade irregularities and the seizure of ships and cargo in response to contraband trade, as well as piracy, resulted in two inter-imperial wars during the first two decades of the asiento period, wars that temporarily halted trade and made the ultimate fate of the treaty and long-term peace uncertain. Despite these wars, however, as the trade grew and stabilized, British trade networks expanded into new areas of the Spanish Americas, bringing Protestants into contact with more Spanish Catholic subjects, in pursuit of profitable trade. The British were most enthusiastic about the opportunity for shipping merchandise directly to the Spanish. However, the Spanish resisted the South Sea Company’s attempt to take advantage of its newly reiterated rights to an annual permission ship to the fair at Portobello, and complained about the weight of the ships that were sent. The new treaty allowed the company to ship six hundred and fifty tons rather than the former limit of five hundred for a one-decade period, in order to compensate for losses incurred during the first years of the asiento. However, different methods of measurement among the British and Spanish, along with British smuggling, led to Spanish complaints in 1717 that the Royal Prince exceeded this limit by several tons.3 When the same ship returned five years later, it clandestinely brought more than double the five hundred tons initially allowed to the eager Spanish market.4 Furthermore, despite the promises reaffirmed in the 1716 treaty, on the verge of war in June 1718 the court of directors received word from Spain that they should not send cargo to the Portobello fair that year, as plenty of merchandise already crowded warehouses in the Spanish colonies.5 This meant disappointment for some British merchants, though those living in Spanish America were already busy making connections in order to conduct their own illicit trade.
Throughout the asiento period, the Spanish government in Madrid made efforts to curb the irregularities of trade in their American colonies and close gaps into which British merchants could bring their wares, an early iteration of the Bourbon reforms. In particular, the Spanish shifted power over the American trade from Seville to Cádiz in 1717. The king also created the Viceroyalty of New Granada that year, sending a representative, Antonio de Pedrosa y Guerrero, tasked with regulating trade in an area with a deeply corrupt local government. Despite these efforts the first viceroy, Jorge de Villalonga, had a hand firmly in the local contraband trade, even structuring legal trade in order to reduce competition.6 These kinds of self-interested Spanish officials offered an opportunity for South Sea Company agents and independent British traders to move deeply into Spanish American economies and to take advantage of Spanish Americans’ need for goods and slaves, through both legal and illegal markets. When the Italian chief minister of Spain, Giulio Alberoni, began his reforms, the South Sea Company sought to curry friendship with him, sending him a gold watch.7 The sometimes conflicting interests of the Spanish royal government and local imperial governments, as well as the immense physical distance between the metropole and these outposts, led to difficulties in running the empire. Those involved in the monopoly of the company, as well as individuals operating within the significant contraband trade that accompanied this sanctioned contact, were able to make personal profit from the expansion of the British Empire, expand overall British power in the area, meet the needs of some local Spanish concerns, and do damage to Spain’s policies overseas.
While the South Sea Company trade had barely gotten underway when the War of the Quadruple Alliance began, the company already made a significant difference in the commercial activities of one angry British interest group: Jamaican planters. The trade in slaves to the Spanish Americas had, they continued to complain, resulted in a poor quantity and selection of enslaved laborers for those on the British island. Further, the availability of abundant labor for the Spanish allowed the people of Cuba and other areas to expand their sugar production, putting the Spanish in direct competition with Jamaica’s own sugar plantations and mills.8 The inability of Britons to keep peace with the Spanish was also troubling; Britons living in Jamaica worried about their proximity to the Spanish empire as the war progressed. Jamaican resident James Daniel wrote in the Jamaica Courant, the only newspaper in publication on the island at the time, that though he did not have “any advice of an intended invasion directly upon us … we have intelligence that the Spaniards are equipping and arming many ships and vessels … which ought to alarm us so far as to be upon our guard."9 The South Sea Company and its agents grasped at profits, real and potential, at the expense of Jamaican planters and merchants.10 Jamaicans’ early fears about the possible outcomes of the creation of the company’s monopoly had begun to be realized.
Individual instances of contraband trade and attempts at its suppression, while beneficial to some British and Spanish individuals, challenged Anglo-Spanish peace while tensions within Europe reverberated through the American colonies. In 1717 the situation in the West Indies appeared dire. Even the powers’ willingness to compromise in signing the 1716 treaty could not stem the tide of animosity that was rising in the Caribbean and between the powers more generally. In 1718 the brief and rarely studied War of the Quadruple Alliance shook the peace between the nations both in the colonies and on the European continent. The war prevented the South Sea Company from bringing slaves and goods into Spanish American ports until 1722, when peace resumed, and demonstrated the fragility of the agreement between Britain and Spain when tested in the West Indies and the Spanish Main, an area so far from the centers of imperial control and so hotly contested and desired by both nations.
War of the Quadruple Alliance
The Treaty of Utrecht had not solved all the issues of European nations from the War of the Spanish Succession. The Quadruple Alliance of England, France, the Dutch Republic, and Austria wanted additional territorial concessions that Spain was unwilling to provide.11 The resulting war, sparked by this territorial conflict in Europe but with repercussions an ocean away, officially began late in 1718. In early December, the British king ordered reprisals, or seizures of the king of Spain’s subjects and goods as compensation for British losses, permitting Britons with the appropriate paperwork to conduct privateering voyages against Spain and seize Spanish goods in the Americas.12 Declaring war, George I explained that “It would be endless to enumerate the Complaints of Our Subjects relating to the infractions of Treaties, the Breach of ancient and established Privileges, and the unwarrantable Obstructions of their accustomed Trade and Commerce.” Britons complained that the Spanish ignored established treaties, seizing men, goods, and ships in the Spanish Americas in peacetime. Further, King George insisted, his Spanish counterpart began the conflict, having attacked first, leaving Britons in the West Indies safe on neither sea nor land. The king offered some comfort to those Spaniards living within the British Empire, promising that those Spanish subjects who transferred their allegiance would not be harmed, an acknowledgement of the presence of men moving between the empires.13
The tension over trade had been salient from the beginning of the asiento period, and as war became inevitable members of both empires took advantage of the opportunity not only to trade clandestinely in new ways but also to commit acts of violence and robbery against subjects of the opposing crown. Despite the peace they enjoyed at the beginning of the year, in 1718 Britons such as George Shelvocke sailed against the Spanish because of the promise of profit it offered. To avoid difficulties with the British national government, some secured commissions from other European powers such as the Dutch, who did not shy away from authorizing attacks on Spanish vessels.14 An unscrupulous subset of Britons preferred to profit from the Spanish through privateering rather than trade, and thus welcomed conflict. Others, settled in the West Indies, hoped for a quick resolution to the fighting, which endangered their trade, homes, and survival. Each of the many possible forms of empire, at peace or at war, appealed to different groups of Britons and Spaniards depending on their individual economic and social interests. As such, the war provoked a number of responses from those with an interest in empire, including the South Sea Company’s supporters and those who abhorred the monopoly.
The people of Jamaica faced particular difficulties at the beginning of the 1718 war. With crumbling military defenses, and insufficient residents, resources, and preparation, Jamaicans could not hope to repel any sort of concentrated attack on the key trading island. A speech reproduced in the Jamaica Courant warned the local council of the colony’s weakness at the beginning of the war, advising them that “the rock line and the decay’d fort of castle-bay is worthy your immediate consideration.” The orator further encouraged them to consider implementing martial law, though the council ultimately rejected that measure.15 Jamaica’s precarious fortifications and agitated populace caused real concern for the British Empire. The island’s position in the Caribbean made it a crucial location for trade to the wider Americas, and if the Spanish were successful in recapturing their lost prize they might be able to deny the British access to most of the trade to the Caribbean and the American continents.
Jamaica’s merchants inhabited a very vulnerable position within the empire, located geographically close to islands controlled by the Spanish. While this was beneficial in previous times of peace, allowing for a robust if not entirely legal trade to the Spanish Main and surrounding islands, it also meant that they lay immediately next to Spanish shipping lanes. For this reason, Britons trading from Jamaica faced recurring threats from Spanish vessels, some of which had authorization from the Spanish crown to take British ships if the Spanish seized them in the midst of illegal trade. In 1716, Laurence Van Huesslan, a twenty-eight-year-old mariner bound from Jamaica on a ship called Port Royal, testified that he had been aboard a ship taken by the Spanish ship Marquedore, fired upon, and terrorized. The English captain died of wounds incurred while defending the ship. The Spanish captain, according to Van Huesslan, tortured one of the mariners, “claping the Jaws of the Cock of a Firelock upon his Tongue, to make him confess that the said Sloop was bound to Rio de la Hacha,” a trespass that would permit the Spanish to detain the British cargo. The Spanish then brought the crew of the Port Royal to Cartagena as prisoners, where the governor held them for a period of four months and threatened to condemn them. While Van Huesslan lived to return to Jamaica and tell his tale, the goods aboard the Port Royal remained forever lost by the British, who were understandably worried about the security of their shipping.16 Concerns such as this spurred the wave of anti-Spanish feeling throughout the British colonies that would demand an answer in the wars of the decade and a half that followed.
Some on the island took the opportunity of the war to argue for a renewal of the private trade from Jamaica, in wartime and otherwise. From Port Royal, Jamaican collector John Kelly lamented in 1719 that the conflict, far from legally restoring the private trade from Jamaica, as was hoped before the out-break of hostilities, was in fact more damaging to trade than the South Sea Company’s monopoly. Calling for freer trade rather than the restoration of the monopoly, he noted that because of the vastly superior manufacturing capacity of Britain, it was to the empire’s benefit “to have her manufactures exchanged for money which drains the Spaniard, of the sinews of war at the same time that it inriches Great Britain.”17 The larger portion of the trade to the Spanish Americas Britain could command, this suggests, the greater advantage Britain would have over the Spanish and the rest of the European powers in the West Indies. Having been damaged by the new imperial policy that limited the Jamaica trade, Kelly and others in Jamaica urged the restoration of a less regulated British empire in which they could make their own profits.18
While Jamaicans suffered economically and feared for the island’s safety during the war, the South Sea Company and those Britons who lived closest to the Spanish in their cities were at greatest individual risk when the tenuous peace between Spain and Britain temporarily broke. Burnet and his fellow company agents living in the Spanish Americas soon felt the impact. In response to the declaration of war, in March 1719 the governor of Buenos Aires initiated the first wave of retaliations for wartime crimes committed by Britons, called represalias or reprisals by the Spanish, against the company in that city. He ordered that South Sea Company goods be confiscated, with the justification that he had found silver in their possession, contrary to law. He called for anyone with information on the South Sea Company or any Englishmen to report to him. Despite a previous agreement that the company would have eighteen months to settle any affairs before being treated as enemies in times of war, their effects were widely seized in the ports.19 In this as well as later reprisals, South Sea Company agents feared losing their freedom and livelihoods.
Danger certainly loomed for the Spanish as well in American lands. Some Britons with American interests, temporarily released from the need to treat the Spanish as friends and valued trading partners, turned once again to the possibility of dismantling and absorbing the Spanish empire piecemeal. This plotting was greatly supported by the information gathered by Britons before and during the asiento period about the Spanish holdings. In 1719, a Weekly Journal article poked fun at British enthusiasms for land, noting that they expected any day “a most flaming Proposal from the South Sea Company" for creating a colony on terra firma, costing huge amounts of money and providing trade that rivaled that of the Portuguese in Brazil.20 Having allowed British subjects into their lands for extended periods, the Spanish could find crucial information about their empire in British hands and the enthusiasm for this land greatly increased.
Throughout this period, interested Britons could peruse a variety of printed maps that demonstrated the many ways the empire’s merchants, navy, and privateers might take Spanish silver and lands. Whatever Britons hoped to do with their empire—smuggling, taking over land, or simply conducting the legal trade—cartographers provided useful information. Publishers reprinted “A Map of the West Indies,” compiled by cartographer Herman Moll, several times from its original during the asiento period.21 Moll not only detailed the coasts of North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean, but also indicated the routes of the treasure fleets and where ships’ provisions might be had. Alongside the coasts the map includes insets, with smaller drawings of the most important cities and bays in the area. These provided information that might benefit either merchants or an invading army, depending on the circumstances of the day; the inset for Havana included a note about “a high tower where is always watch kept, to see if any ships are coming from sea,” a warning to enterprising smugglers or conquering attackers. Drawing on information from previous cartographers, English sailors, and the increased circulation of knowledge about the Spanish Americas made possible by the presence of South Sea Company factors and ships, Moll created a kind of invitation to the area, one that made the potential for trade, or the possibilities for seizing the land itself, clear to all.
Initial plans to take over Spanish lands focused on those areas in which the British had not only maps, but extensive firsthand experience. Early in the war, forces from Jamaica attempted to seize the Bay of Campeche on the Yucatan peninsula. Kelly praised the Bay as “of the highest importance to the King’s colonies, and to his revenue, if it be considered what great consumption of British manufacture, as well of the produce of ye plantations what a number of men and shipping it will employ which will in a great measure prevent ye further growth of pyracy,” linking his concern for trade with the overall good of the island.22 The English had been engaged in the logwood trade in Campeche and in the Bay of Honduras since the mid-seventeenth century, importing at times £60,000 per year in dyewood, but the Spanish expelled the logwood cutters in 1717. The Jamaica Assembly, already nervous about the limits on trade from the island created by the South Sea Company monopoly, pointed to the South Sea Company as the true reason for the loss of that trade. They observed that the Spanish, who found the British too numerous to remove previously, were pushed into the action by the company as a way to end smuggling by Britons unaffiliated with their business.23 If Campeche could be recaptured by Britain before the peace was reestablished, it would be much easier to claim it in the resulting treaty, and it could be used as both a new market for British goods and products and a place of employment for otherwise idle British sailors and merchants. Though the British national government did not support a push for Spanish American lands until the major war in 1739, the attraction and possibility of taking over these areas continued to appear in correspondence and pamphlets throughout the asiento period, especially in times of interimperial tension.24
Figure 3. Herman Moll, A Map of the West-Indies or the Islands of America in the North Sea, 1708–1720. Moll’s map gives British readers a view of the lands that they could profit from in the West Indies, including insets of several Spanish American ports. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Knowledge of Spanish American lands could be valuable in a number of ways. In wartime, it could lead to smuggling or invasion; in peace, individuals looking out for their own interests could find more creative ways to gain from knowledge of these lands. This included those who were interested in the natural world, and others who found that one country might compensate someone handsomely for information about the other.
Connections and Curiosity Across Empires
Throughout the periods of war and peace, South Sea Company factors needed to determine the best way to live in this new and sometimes hostile area. While trade flourished, men like John Burnet formed friendships with Spanish individuals, which allowed them both a social outlet and the opportunity to trade in their new environment. Some found common areas of interest with their Spanish hosts, especially in the realm of the natural sciences. These affinities to Spanish subjects, lands, and sometimes even institutions made living outside of the areas controlled by their own empire easier for these Britons. But with the opportunity for reward came risk. Between the possibility of being caught up in one of the repeated wars between Britain and Spain and becoming too attached to the Spanish, the South Sea Company’s employees occupied a position that could alternately be dangerous for themselves and for the company. Just as curiosity could facilitate trade and interpersonal connections, in times of war, individuals might use this information against the opposing empire, or even against their own.
Few Britons were more eager to avail themselves of their presence in Spanish America than Burnet. During the wars, the Spanish stripped the factories in represalias, and in concern, those South Sea Company agents who were able retreated to Jamaica or beyond. After the interruption of the War of the Quadruple Alliance, Burnet moved on from his former post in Portobello to the Cartagena factory as the peace resumed.25 As quickly as he was back in the company’s employ, he petitioned to go beyond his official role as an agent of the asiento, taking advantage of his location in a new way. In 1722 he asked to be sent on a journey throughout the Spanish Americas, “making what observation I am capable of both with respect to trade & commerce & with respect to the Naturall History of these Countreys.”26 An eager student of natural science, he hoped to enrich his country and himself through discovery. Denied by the court of directors, he remained at the factory, though his resentment grew. A year later he argued that becoming a factor upon the death of one of his companions at Cartagena was his “due & birthright.” He dismissed arguments that he should not be a factor because he wasn’t “bred to merchants” with a phrase that recurs in his letters: “It does not follow that a man who is born in a stable should be a horse.”27 Burnet continued in his role as factory physician as trade resumed and even flourished between the British and the Spanish Americas.
Though he was at first unsuccessful in his bids to the court of directors to improve his station, Burnet found ample opportunity to distract himself during his time in Cartagena, when not called upon to attend sick slaves or factors. He was interested less in business than in the natural world. He took the opportunity of being in the West Indies to increase his understanding of natural science. As a scientific observer within the Spanish empire, which had previously been largely unexplored by Britons, he provided a particularly valuable resource for naturalists. Burnet corresponded extensively with men of science such as the later president of the Royal Society of London, Hans Sloane.28 Beginning very early in his employment with the company, Burnet appealed to Sloane to intercede on his behalf with the court of directors, complaining that he would not receive any payment until he arrived at Portobello.29 Burnet hoped Sloane could act both as a scientific colleague and a possible ally in dealing with the businessmen in London. In addition to the requests for help in collecting his pay, Burnet sent Sloane astronomical and natural observations and specimens, and asked in return for books and scientific instruments that would help him to better understand and describe the new and different world he was encountering on the Spanish Main. Sloane’s own opinions of Burnet remain unexpressed in his surviving letters.
Colonial travelers from the very edges of the British imperial presence sent home scientific reports that provided a critical basis for much of the work of categorization and classification going on in metropolitan organizations. Members of the Royal Society of London corresponded widely, and the agents of the South Sea Company inhabited a particularly enticing position on the edges (and at times, the interior) of South America, where they had access to new and possibly beneficial plants, heretofore uncollected animals, and unknown diseases. Due to their unusual freedom of movement, many in the South Sea Company made contributions to natural science.30 Major collectors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries like Sloane and Petiver received letters from and made requests of sailors, merchants, and settlers throughout the American colonies. This exchange allowed colonial correspondents the opportunity to expand their knowledge and to stake a claim for their scholarly interest and competence, even far from the salons of London.31
From the factory in Cartagena, Burnet joined the many men of science interested in exploring the lands claimed by Spain. The South Sea Company proved a valuable resource for those Britons who wished to make journeys of scientific discovery, either as company agents or independent movers. As the trustees for the newly formed colony of Georgia began to send out feelers for plants and animals that might bring profit to their investors, South Sea Company agents agreed to assist Dr. Robert Millar, who was sent south in order to collect botanical specimens, planning to travel to Veracruz and beyond in search of cochineal and other natural resources.32 He replaced the deceased Dr. William Houstoun, himself a former South Sea Company surgeon aboard slave ships and an accomplished botanist. The trustees dispatched Millar in an effort to fulfill one of the colony’s original purposes, to supply semitropical goods to Great Britain. Entering the country with official Spanish permission to travel, Millar found that he was unable to travel far at all, being constantly under surveillance. The Spanish impeded his movements, and ultimately sent him to Havana, and eventually on to England.33 He reported to the Georgia trustees that the only possibility for collecting information about the country would be through those South Sea Company agents already allowed residence in the area, making men like Burnet all the more valuable.34
The new world provided much to occupy the time of those interested in scientific pursuits.35 Burnet continued his collection and categorization of natural curiosities throughout his time in the West Indies, gradually growing more adventurous in his attempts to send specimens back home. In 1722 he wrote a long letter to Sloane including information on the medicines available in the area, and alerting him that he intended to send him a previously requested taxidermied sloth.36 Burnet collected knowledge about the natural world that could be useful to the British not only for its own sake, but also as a source of information about areas they might eventually take over for themselves. By sending his observations back to Great Britain, Burnet both hoped to impress the members of the Royal Society and provided, intentionally or not, help to British merchants in gaining greater control over Caribbean lands.37 Knowing the animals and plants (especially plant-based medicaments) available in a given locale would make the choice of potential British targets and exploitation of resources easier, and would in the meantime provide information about the situation of the Spanish in these potentially lucrative places.38
Burnet’s widely ranging interests and connections brought him into conversation with a larger scientific community in the English-speaking world and beyond. He sent observations through his correspondence with Sloane that were intended for Sir Edmond Halley and expected a response from the prominent astronomer. He sent specimens to Petiver, though Petiver’s death in 1718 put and end to that correspondence early in the asiento period. He also met an Italian chemical experimenter living in Cartagena who collected specimens of natural and medically useful curiosities, and asked that Sloane send “moss of mans scull” in order to complete the man’s collection.39 His connection to the wider world of Atlantic medicine also extended to his interest in smallpox inoculation, a controversial topic that was hotly debated in widespread areas of British influence from New England to London to the African coast only recently.40 Burnet observed that a boy who suffered from a local disease called Mal de San Lazaro also contracted smallpox. Observing the amelioration of symptoms following from the comorbidity of the two diseases, he wondered “whither inoculateing the small pox on the Lazarens would not prove a cure?”41
Burnet’s investigations into Spanish American natural history were extremely productive. Beginning on his voyage to the port of Buenos Aires, Burnet collected and gathered information about the flora and fauna of the Spanish empire in America, sending Sloane a “box of gumatous extract” from local trees.42 An inventory of curiosities he sent to Europe suggests the wide and sometimes morbid scope of his interests, as well as the availability of the bodies of slaves as objects of research; “an abortive Negroe; three polipus taken out of the heartts of two negroes. Two fishes … a root called raize rouge said to be good in fluxes; the bill of a fish taken out of a shark’s belly almost dissolved … the shell of an ostrage egg from Buenos Ayres.”43 Any of these might provide new information to curiosity-seekers and thinkers eager to learn about the Americas, their nature, and the best methods of exploiting them. Burnet’s accounts of his collections suggest that he was gleaning at least some of his knowledge of the natural world from African and native informants who had contact with the climate and surroundings of greater duration and in greater depth than an English trader could hope for himself.44
As a member of an international scientific community, as well as out of personal interest, Burnet interacted widely with educated men who were also Spanish subjects, forming close friendships with some. In a 1722 letter to Sloane, he reported that he spoke to “a very ingenious gentleman a Spaniard in this town who is a mathematician & engineer to the King” who promised to share his extensive astronomical observations with Burnet. After the gentleman copied out the observations in Latin, Burnet would send them to Sloane, and request a number of instruments, such as a “Circulo or quadrant with a pendulum And its spy glasses for observing the sun & starrs.”45 He privileged his interest in scientific knowledge over British fears that contact with Catholics would lead to contamination, as he had an extended correspondence with a Franciscan Father at Santa Fe, who, he gushed, “has promised me every thing curious which that country affords, & which I shall transmitt to you as soon as come to hand.”46 Friendliness with the Spanish might lead to individual profit or opportunities otherwise closed to curious Britons.
Burnet’s connections with the Spanish extended beyond his intense interest in science to close daily contact. As a South Sea Company employee, he had ample opportunity to interact with Spanish merchants and officials in the course of his duties. His correspondence suggests that he did not limit his relationships with these Spanish subjects to short or cursory visits in which information and merchandise could be exchanged. In 1724 Burnet reported in a letter to Sloane that “one of the oidores of Charcas lives in the house with me & has introduced me to most of their acquaintances,” though given the man’s high status in Spanish society, this may have been an attempt by Burnet to play up their connection.47 Building relationships with a number of Spanish individuals opened up for Burnet a new group of possible contacts and friends beyond the few British merchants also living in the factory. At the same time, his reach beyond his official company business sometimes threatened the position of the company in the Spanish empire.
Burnet’s refusal to adhere to his employers’ rules nearly led to his dismissal from the company’s service. In 1723, the court of directors complained to the factors at Buenos Aires that they had received reports that Burnet had brought his wife, daughters, and servants to Cartagena, noting that “it is contrary to our intentions and may be the occasion of embarrassing our affairs.”48 Burnet’s transgression not only went against the orders of the company, but violated the terms of the asiento treaty, jeopardizing the agreement between the empires. Despite Burnet’s serious disobedience, in a letter written the following year the directors changed their approach, eager to take advantage of the connections he had built outside of the official trade. They were “pleased to hear there is one among them that has got the Esteem of the Spaniards, we mean Dr. Burnet, who you write as capable of doing the Company a signal service.” Because of his value to the company, he would be allowed to keep his family with him in Cartagena, in the hopes that “this Indulgence will animate + stir him up the more to exert himself for our interest.”49 The court of directors recognized that Burnet’s connections with Spanish merchants and officials could be valuable to the economic pursuits of the company, and smooth the way in the West Indies for continued peaceful trade. A tension arose here even in the interests of the company; they needed factors who could become close to the Spanish in order to facilitate trade, but those who became too close and flouted the rules posed a threat.
Trade and Trouble
A different sort of threat resulted from British and Spanish individuals unaffiliated with the company. As the company continued to develop its trade, pirates of many nations took the opportunity of the interimperial trade and the richly laden ships it produced to make their own fortunes. Pirates from both empires took advantage too of the troubles between the nations, and the chance to place blame for illegal behavior with a sometimes enemy group.
The minor wars that shook New World trade and European politics created gaps in the official importation of enslaved Africans into the Spanish ports, but the numbers brought in during this ten-year period remained significant. During the years 1717 to 1728, according some calculations, the major ports of Spanish America received more than two hundred ships and nearly 28,000 slaves from British South Sea Company vessels in peacetime.50 In addition to these legally imported slaves, a thriving contraband trade continued, with slaves and merchandise being brought to the Spanish empire by British, Spanish, and other merchants in ways that have not been accurately or systematically detailed in the historical record due to the limited accounts kept by those engaged in illegal enterprises.51 Given the hopes with which many Britons entered the asiento trade, these legal trade figures, which fell significantly below projections, disappointed the court of directors and its investors. Coupled with the lucrative illicit trade, though, this treaty was quite profitable for some individual Britons, and the crucial aspects of the treaty, the projection of hope for opportunities to make money from Spanish lands, remained.
Following the 1716 treaty and after the 1718 war, trade in the West Indies slowly became more serious and organized. The enslaved Africans legally brought into the Spanish empire on British ships during the 1717–1728 period entered through a number of Spanish ports, the largest of which were Panama, Portobello, and Cartagena on the northern coast of South America and Buenos Aires on the Atlantic coast far to the south. The company bought slaves where they could, sometimes from West Indian islands, but later moved to attempting to consistently buy slaves directly from the African coasts at the request of the Spanish.52 Factors who had barely established themselves before the war moved back to their factories or into new ones, meeting new Spanish subjects and beginning to form both economic and social relationships.
As the factors flooded back into their homes and warehouses, they restarted a trade that some in Britain expected would create new opportunities for other investors. The Royal African Company, which lost its monopoly on the slave trade on the African coast in 1698, hoped that it might have more success in supplying the Spanish American slave market than it had at the beginning of the asiento period, and began once again to load its ships for Caribbean and South American ports.53 More money poured into the African trade in the excitement of investors caught up in the fervor of the company; in the two years after the peace, the Royal African Company managed to ship a total of over 3,000 slaves to the American coasts, an improvement over their numbers in the previous decade but still far short of the treaty-mandated 4,800 slaves per year.54 Ultimately, the Spanish American trade made little difference to the foundering fortunes of the Royal African Company.
This peace was marred a bit for those in the South Sea Company by the financial disaster caused in London by the bursting stock bubble. The company absorbed large amounts of the national debt, which was converted into stock, its price inflated, in order to make the company a profit. These stocks became incredibly popular for speculators, with prices rising astronomically into 1720, part of a general interest in stock schemes. When this bubble inevitably burst, and the price of the stock dropped, investors, many important figures in British politics among them, faced catastrophic losses. Robert Knight, the company’s treasurer, fled the country after having been questioned by Parliament on his abuses within the company, which included falsifying records, bribery, and illegal sales of stock. Knight, along with many other members of the court of directors, was responsible for flagrant misdeeds by the company during the years before the stock collapse, and his disregard for the needs of the country as compared to himself and, when it benefited him, the company, demonstrated the significant difference that could exist in interests between the court of directors and the crown.55
Despite this financial scandal in Great Britain, in the colonies, the South Sea Company continued to operate. At the same time that trade began to redevelop and company agents moved back into their factories, impediments to trade and other cross-imperial projects became evident. In 1721 Shelvocke, during his voyage around the world, cruised the West Indies. A Spanish governor alerted him that the War of the Quadruple Alliance had come to an end, but the message was delayed because of the language barrier. He wrote to the Spanish governor, “I could not fully understand your letter for want of a sufficient interpreter of the Spanish language; but from a farther consideration, and the best interpretation I can get of it, I understand you to say there is a treaty of peace between their Britannick and Catholick Majesties.”56 He went on to ask for provisions, if the two empires were in fact friends once again. While Shelvocke was eventually able to determine the content of the Spanish governor’s letter, it is clear that any nuance in communication between members of these empires would be largely lost in the absence of more competent translators.
Barriers to peace more insidious than language differences shook the Anglo-Spanish relationship more than once during the following decade. Piracy in various forms interrupted the trade of all European nations in the Americas for half a century, becoming particularly problematic after the empires no longer had consistent work for privateers and released these sailors and captains into the seas on their own accounts. In the later decades of the asiento period, problems with piracy in particular would spark a war that would definitively end the peaceful trade between Britain and Spain. In trying times, Britons who were once crucial to expanding the empire as sailors on privateering, navy, or merchant ships could damage it greatly by pursuing their own interests.
The complaints about both Spanish and British piracy that litter the records of the 1717–1728 period come as no surprise, given historians’ characterization of the period from 1650 to 1730 as the “golden age of piracy.”57 As the Atlantic economy grew and as trading among the various European powers in the New World developed during the peace in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession, piracy became an increasingly attractive option for people coming into the West Indies from throughout the Atlantic world.58 Engaging in piracy could open opportunities for spectacular profits, for revenge against certain empires or legal regimes, and even act as a means to alleviate boredom in times when traditional forms of trading became slow.
Piracy presented a major roadblock to Anglo-Spanish peace and to the conduct of any kind of trade in the Caribbean. The actual identification of individual interactions between ships as acts of piracy is, however, much more complex than it may at first seem, in an area simultaneously being constructed by so many different national, imperial, and extralegal groups. Both privateers and pirates seized ships and cargo in the Caribbean during the asiento period, and sometimes-overzealous guardacostas, the coast guard authorized by the Spanish government, detained suspected smugglers. Guardacosta ships, sometimes official armada vessels but more often ships sourced locally and dispatched by colonial governors, legitimately patrolled in the West Indies, looking for British ships that had ignored the rules of the asiento treaty by carrying illegal goods, though the British suspected that many claimed to be guardacostas while actually acting as independent pirates.59 In 1724 the Spanish king found it necessary to issue orders reinforcing the sections of the treaty that forbade the English ships to carry gold or silver that did not come directly from the slave trade, and from transporting Spanish subjects out of their colonies.60 The nature of any particular seizure of a ship might be contested, depending on the context, in interimperial communications or in courts of law as the British accused some Spaniards of seizing cargoes without cause or authorization, and the outcome of any acts of supposed piracy could have real consequences for relations between these empires.
Pirates arose both among the Spanish and from the ranks of Britain’s own sailors. In 1718 the king sent warships to Jamaica as protection against pirates of undefined origins, who were becoming particularly “numerous and insolent” on the island’s coasts. But piratical threats were internal as well. These British crews were conducting trade among the Spanish, the Jamaicans complained, reducing employment for the island’s sailors: “our seafaring men wanting their usual employ are the easier seduc’d to turn pyrates.”61 Clearly, many Britons were not interested in building an empire that would benefit the metropole at their own expense.
Britons also leveled accusations against the Spanish for driving their sailors to this desperate, illegal activity, claiming that their own mariners became pirates only because they were so put upon by Spanish attacks. One Jamaican pamphleteer insisted that those sailors who were employed as privateers during the War of the Spanish Succession had “chearfully” become merchant seamen after the peace. Only after harassment by Spanish ships, being repeatedly taken and deprived of their goods, did they turn to piracy as a means of supporting their families and taking revenge against the Spanish. The sailors’ willingness to plunder ships of any nation, the author explains, came later, as the result of the governor of Jamaica’s general declaration against pirates, which prompted them to make “no manner of distinction” among nations.62 Piratical attacks on Spanish shipping in a time of official peace, fed by the cycle of smuggling and retribution, repeatedly threatened to destroy the South Sea Company trade by inciting further inter-imperial conflict. The Spanish response, in authorizing guardacostas to harass the British, could lead to further war.
Attempts to suppress piracy disrupted activities in Jamaica and the expenses incurred by trying pirates in court began to put stress on the coffers of the already cash-strapped island.63 The British colonies aggressively pursued pirates, seeking to both punish and dissuade them throughout the English-speaking world, hoping that pirates of British, Spanish, and other various origins would fade away from the Caribbean trade if adequately frightened. Limiting the activity of pirates was crucial if the countries were to maintain good relations in the West Indies.64 In 1720, a court of admiralty held at Jamaica brought charges against thirteen pirates, including John Rackam and the infamous female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, in one two-week period. These men and women faced accusations that their activities on the seas were contrary to British laws created during the reign of William III, and their trial occasioned Parliament’s creation of new and stronger laws against the piracy that so often disrupted the smooth transfer of goods and specie to and from the Spanish empire as well as between Britain’s own American colonies.65
Pirates captured in the Caribbean demonstrated their clear understanding of the political and economic climate in which they committed their crimes, and attempted to use this knowledge to defend themselves from the accusations of the British admiralty. A summary of the Rackam case reprinted in Jamaica the following year reported that the accused, given the opportunity to present their defense, declared “that they had no witnesses, that they had never committed any Acts of Piracy, That their design was against the Spaniards, and other such-like Frivolous and trifling excuses.”66 The disdain for these “excuses” that the printer expressed suggests that few would believe these rationalizations, but the mention of the Spanish in the explanation indicates that the pirates expected some leniency if the court were to accept their claim that they acted solely against the Spanish empire.67 The issue of what allies, if any, accused pirates had was complicated by the claims that the accused made, the flags they flew, and the intense mixing of people of different racial and ethnic groups on board pirate ships. During the Rackam trial, a mariner named Thomas Spenlow testified about the pirate attack on his own schooner in June of 1719. The pirates hoisted a Spanish flag in order to confuse their prey.68 Pirates and other sailors could hope to take advantage of the Caribbean as an area of imperial contact and overlap to exploit the differences between the empires for their own gain, but in this case, the failure of the anti-Spanish explanation had dire consequences for the accused. Over one weekend, the admiralty executed the eleven male pirates. All were hanged, and the bodies of three, including Captain Rackam, were brought to prominent places on the island, and “hung on gibbits in chains, for a publick example, and to terrify others from such-like evil practices.”69 Those ghoulish remains demonstrated that the British government, through local administrators, had much more immediate methods than the passage of legislation to deploy against piracy in the Caribbean colonies.
Pirates captured in the West Indies could capitalize not only on who they claimed to be stealing from, as in the case of the men tried with Rackam at Jamaica, but on confusion about who they might be working for. Officials sometimes found it quite difficult to determine whether crews charged with piracy were acting for their individual interests or with the blessings of their country’s government. The ambiguity made the assignment of blame for piratical depredations a complicated proposition, one open to influence based on the interests of the government and the company, who needed to restrict piracy and contraband in order to maximize profits. In a journal of his expedition to the governor of Havana, a British captain named Dennis gives an account of his conversation with the governor about the problem of piracy in the area. He defends the British approach, assuring the governor that any British subjects who were caught as pirates were hanged, “so that if English pyrates robbed the Spaniards, that’s not to be laid to the account of the nation.”70 Britain could not be held responsible for the illicit actions of its subjects, and pirates should not be seen as acting with the crown’s approval. This distinction was especially important given the tensions that remained between the two empires, and the profits that might be lost by continued violent conflict between them. While some Britons dismissed Rackam’s crew’s claims that they were sailing against the Spanish, it appears that the Spanish government took the problem of British pirates quite seriously. The Spanish took at least outward pains to make sure that in times of peace, those who seized British ships were capturing legitimate prizes that were engaged in smuggling, rather than ships legally trading to the Spanish empire.71 The appearance of legality, regardless of the complaints of those British captains whose ships were seized because of alleged contraband goods, was crucial to maintaining the Spanish empire’s moral position as the wronged party in the eventuality of peace negotiations in the future.
The presence of Spanish guardacostas and the British privateers meant to counteract them had been a problem from the very first years of the asiento. During the period after Bubb’s treaty, on both sides these depredations (or defenses of empire, depending on the side defining them) continued and expanded. The still-disputed author of the General History of the Pyrates complained that after the War of the Quadruple Alliance the Spanish guardacostas had become more active, and that the British merchants who lost profit and goods because of the actions of the guardacostas before and during the war had been unable to collect restitution from the Spanish government.72 Tensions in the West Indies and the wars that raged there until 1713 and then again in 1718 created a glut of unoccupied former soldiers and privateers, many of whom might turn to piracy in times of peace. For a privateer, after all, piracy was essentially “but the same Practice without Commission,” and these men “make very little Distinction betwixt the Lawfulness of one, and the Unlawfulness of the other.”73 Trade built up the number of sailors in the area, and when it was convenient a subset of these men could turn pirate, benefiting from but not supporting the empire.
Accounts of ship seizures reveal the widespread understanding of these imperial conflicts by those involved, as well as their willingness to exploit ambiguities and misunderstandings to their own advantage. In part, the border nature of the area in which both empires were operating meant that out of necessity, otherwise strictly observed divisions among racial and ethnic groups could be rearranged. For instance, during his time sailing in the West Indies, Englishman Woodes Rogers reported having asked the slaves on board his ship to help defend the vessel against any French or Spanish attackers. He gave them guns and ammunition, and made sure those who did not know how to use them would be taught. Rogers placed a free Jamaican man of African ancestry who had deserted from the Spanish in charge of the group, who were now fed and clothed better because of their new position on board. Upon having recruited these new African soldiers to fight on behalf of the ship, Rogers instructed them “they must now look upon themselves as Englishmen, and no more as Negro slaves to the Spaniards,” clearly privileging the security of his vessel and crew over the continued division of those on board between slave and free.74 Arming former Spanish slaves allowed Rogers both to have robbed the Spanish of possible soldiers for their defense and to increase his own forces. In the case of hostility between European empires that otherwise traded enslaved African laborers between them, these slaves might be armed and used against the opposing empire in ways that would not be possible in times of peace.
Britons and Spaniards, and the various subdivisions of these national identities, were far from the only people operating with their own distinct interests in the growing American colonies. Throughout the asiento period, the presence of large populations of African slaves living in the colonies of each empire would complicate attempts at control of land in the area. Transporting slaves into the Spanish empire provided it not only with labor, but with potential soldiers in the event of a conflict; in a similar vein, slaves retained by the British colonies might either be called on to defend the empire or enticed away from it by enemy forces. The contested nature of control over the lands and peoples of the Americas created some room for otherwise legally disadvantaged individuals to take advantage of opportunities for greater freedom and control over their lives. As the slave population increased during the eighteenth century, and as tensions periodically rose between the British and Spanish empires, officials in both empires had to contend with the fact that free settler populations were not the only actors operating in the area.
Despite the troubles in the West Indies, the South Sea Company did make gains in the middle of the decade. In 1725, a letter from Spain indicated that relations between England and Spain in the Americas were looking up. Philip V agreed to allow small groups of company agents to travel to areas outside of their factories to more easily distribute their slaves where their labor was needed. The Buenos Aires factors were even permitted to travel as far as Chile with as many as four hundred enslaved laborers, though they were not allowed to settle permanent factories, and were to present themselves to the governor of Buenos Aires within the year as proof they were not living elsewhere, gathering information about Spanish military power or conducting their own contraband trade. The promise first established in the asiento contract in 1713 that the company could receive “silver, gold, or the product of the country” in exchange for their slaves and goods was reaffirmed.75
Despite these understandings reached by the two empires regarding the trade, the peace did not persist. Some of the Spanish remained wary of the company’s factors, and the British subjects living throughout the West Indies eyed Spanish privateers and officials alike warily. The difficulties each side faced with the conflicting interests of imperial actors, pirates, internal unrest, and contraband trade led to another break less than a decade after the first. This second major conflict between the empires during the course of the asiento contract threatened a trade from which some still expected to profit, individually or nationally.
1727 War and Reprisal
In the years leading up to the 1727 war, Anglo-Spanish tensions boiled over once again, disrupting the lives of merchants and factors who until then lived and traveled in relative peace among the Spanish in America. Distrust had arisen once again of the South Sea Company’s true motivations. In 1725, a Spanish official complained that the company did not take on the asiento to supply slaves, but chiefly as a way of freely accessing Spanish American ports and collecting information about the interior of the country.76 Burnet and his fellow factors once again faced trouble with their position in the Spanish empire, and many left the factories for safer shores. In 1726, the British moved to disrupt Spanish American shipping and support British smuggling with a fleet off the coast, commanded by Admiral Francis Hosier. With the Spanish seizure of the South Sea Company’s Prince Frederick in response, combined with tensions in Europe, the empires faced off anew.77
Spanish wariness of British intentions led to further conflict on the ground in the Americas before this war, though not all levels of the Spanish government responded to the same degree. Matthew Kent, commander of a South Sea Company ship that landed at Buenos Aires in 1726, provided an affidavit outlining the poor treatment that he and his crew faced when docking at the port. He had expected to land his merchandise and come ashore in order to rest and restock, but he was detained, and only after some arguing received permission to remain on shore for a few days. Kent attributed the difficulties he faced not to the maliciousness of the Spanish king, but to the “governors arbitrary will and pleasure,” a danger he thought existed especially within the Spanish system of government. Because of the capricious cruelty of this particular governor, “the English at Buenos Ayres reced very hard usage, and were treated more like criminals, than subjects of so great a prince as the King of Great Britain, contrary to the privileges of the asiento treaty.”78 Kent’s direction of blame toward the local government may have been an attempt to limit conflict with the Spanish king. In any case, the varied policies and reactions of portions of the Spanish empire here gave the British a space in which to make complaints about their treatment without immediately positioning themselves against all aspects of the Spanish government.
As tensions came to a head, the British men who lived in the Spanish Americas faced the very real problems of belonging to what was once again an enemy nation. In October 1726 the court of directors wrote to King George to relate the harrowing story of one of their factors at Panama, Bartholomew Swartz. Swartz was appointed chief factor at Panama and Portobello in September of 1721, just after the previous reprisal against the British.79 In May of 1726 he returned to the factory, just outside the city of Panama, after a tiring journey to Lima. According to Swartz, Panama’s sergeant major, Juan de Aretes, suddenly entered with armed men, and ordered the factor to be on his way to Portobello within four short hours. Swartz, and later the court, insisted that this was contrary to article 15 of the treaty, but he was forced to make the journey. Once in Portobello, he was made a prisoner in the house of one of the supercargoes, soon placed on one of the company’s ships, and accused of sending some damaging letters abroad upon a pirate vessel. The president of Panama resolved to send him out of the colony in a precedent that the directors condemned as counter to the treaty and, distressingly, possibly damaging to company effects and profits. Swartz remained in the West Indies until the company agreed to fund his passage home, and to give him the salary promised before he was forced from the country.80
Swartz’s case demonstrated the dangers of company agents’ alleged actions to their position in the Spanish empire, though that the company found Swartz’s eviction to be unprecedented and objectionable is not to suggest that the factor himself held no blame in the situation in Panama. In 1728 one of his fellow factors, Thomas Blechynden, officially accused Swartz and two other men of having smuggled slaves into Portobello, in front of the court of directors, which had some jurisdiction in issues of law regarding their merchants.81 The agents had taken advantage of their position, Blenchynden alleged, by marking the slaves with the company’s brand, making their subterfuge all the more difficult to detect. The factors present shared in the profits, save what they used to bribe other company employees, including Blechynden himself, to keep them from discovering the contraband to their superiors. Blechynden insisted that he did not mean to harm the company, but was persuaded by the other factors. The testimonies of two free men of African descent, made before the court in Panama, came to the court through Blechynden as well. These men testified that in 1725 they had seen the factors marking the enslaved people at a place they called Guayabal, and heard rumors that the cargo was illegal. The accused merchants countered that they had done nothing illicit, and that the location in which the men accused them of conducting their secret transactions was almost comically highly trafficked for such activity—one claimed that “500 loaded mules pass in a day.” The court of directors ultimately decided that in fact “negroes cannot be introduced and markt clandestinely in or near Guayabal without public knowledge of it,” and with this dismissed the case, acquitted Blechynden, and asked him to pay no restitution. The court’s unwillingness to convict its factors for smuggling in this case despite the testimony of one of its agents suggests some complicity on the part of the company in contraband trade.82 The possibility for profit inherent in illicit trade, combined with the plentiful locations on the Spanish American coast less heavily trafficked than Guayabal, meant that factors did continue to engage in extralegal commerce with Spanish buyers.
Along with the actions of the South Sea Company employees, the desire for and proximity to the opposing empire’s lands and the continued problems with smuggling and piracy caused a rift between the nations that were briefly united in the slave trade. The British complained of the Spanish disrupting their trade, while the Spanish argued that “the English during the whole time they kept on the Coast of Portobello and Bastimentos, protected the Dutch & other ships of their own in the committing of this continual unlawful trade, defrauding the fair of Portobello of above 3 millions.”83 Further, the Spanish accused, the British reloaded ships with cargo against the stipulations provided in the original treaty, and transported the goods of individuals in the annual permission ship, thus preventing the Spanish crown from collecting the relevant taxes.84
Consequences for those moving between empires were once again swift. In January of 1727 the British Journal reported that the previous November, a Captain Bennett of the Bellamont brought slaves to Havana. Unfortunately for Bennett, he made his voyage just as Admiral Hosier was moving his squadron toward Portobello, and officials in Cuba laid an embargo on the company’s “persons and effects” until the British naval threat withdrew.85 The Spanish held Bennett and other British merchants in the area as punishment for British aggression, and as collateral against the taking of Spanish prisoners. This realization of one of the greatest fears of Britons trading to Spanish dominions confirmed the dangers of the tenuous friendship between the empires. Even those only stopping in Spanish territories could be seized and held among a group whose national and confessional identifications threated the safety of their lives, their property, and their souls.
For some Britons, the 1727 conflict again raised the possibility of launching an attempt to seize Spanish lands. In a letter to Lord Townsend, then secretary of state Alexander Spotswood urged British action. Based on his extensive knowledge of the area, gleaned in his time as governor of Virginia, Spotswood noted that the many unsettled men who had gone to the Americas to make their fortune but had not yet found it would be eager to challenge the Spanish; for them, “the very name of an attempt upon the Spaniards settlements in America, will carry the face of a golden adventure.” As for sailors, many harbored a “spirit of vengeance” against the Spaniards because of naval depredations, and Spotswood assured Townsend that the pirates as well were sure to assist in the British designs.86
This relatively minor Anglo-Spanish war temporarily halted trade between the empires and resulted in the company pulling its factors from Spanish lands, in part for their safety. During both wars, the local Spanish government seized the belongings and merchandise of the factors and their factories, sometimes taking a considerable amount of time to return them upon the resumption of the peace.87 The frequent threat of war and possibility of peace kept merchants and travelers in the West Indies guessing about the position of their empire throughout the asiento period. In the midst of the Anglo-Spanish conflict in 1728, Burnet wrote to Sloane from Jamaica that “As to peace or war we are still uncertain.”88 War made many in the West Indies nervous, especially as places like Jamaica were no better fortified in the late 1720s than they had been one or two decades earlier. Echoing complaints from the Jamaican Council at the beginning of the 1718 war, assembly president John Ayscough made a speech to the council and assembly early in 1726, warning that the Jamaican fortifications were in very poor condition, and alerting the king of “your country not being in a condition to make any considerable resistance against the attempt of an enemy” at a time in which “we see several powers of Europe making great Warlike Preparations.”89
Though it allowed for some additional smuggling trade, for many in Britain and its empire, the cost and trouble of the 1727 war was yet more evidence of the negative effects of the South Sea Company on the country. Opposition writers supported the claims of private traders from Jamaica and elsewhere, agreeing that the company ruined a perfectly good business by bringing more regulation to the Anglo-Spanish trade. Further, the company was partially supporting an illicit trade through its factors that was damaging international relations and leading to repeated armed conflict with the Spanish, to the ultimate detriment of the British empire.90 Those in the empire who initially rejected the company continued to insist that the British would be best served by pursuing Spanish profits in some other way.
The British and Spanish brought this war to an end with the Treaty of Seville, signed in that city in southern Spain in November of 1729. The main function of the treaty, besides the affirmation of peace among Britain, Spain, and France, was to reestablish the conditions in the empires first laid out in the 1667 and 1713 treaties, and to readopt the asiento contract as outlined in the 1713 and 1716 treaties.91 While the nations agreed to cease outright hostilities against the other empires involved and to reassume the trade in goods and slaves to the Spanish American ports, they did little to keep the problems faced in 1727 from restarting and again damaging the peace and its profits. Further problems arose from a refusal to honor the treaty in a timely manner.92
Sir Robert Walpole, who had a key role in the negotiations, suggested that the Treaty of Seville was an excellent sign that the Spanish king had resolved to maintain a good relationship with Great Britain. As with other treaties signed between the powers, it specified the return of all the goods and ships that were seized by each power during the hostilities between the empires; the British were particularly eager for the return of the permission ship the Prince Frederick and its cargo.93 Walpole’s comments on the treaty reveal his exasperation with the Britons who continued to engage in extensive contraband trade in the area while expecting the protection of the British government. No ship, he promised the public, would be seized for a small infraction such as having a single Spanish coin on board, as the treaty provided for such eventualities. Any British subject taken by the Spanish would be protected by the king if he or she was acting justly; any transgressions of “the articles of Commerce long establish’d between the two Nations” could not be similarly protected.94 Walpole knew that the disruption of the trade by Spanish officials and pirates could not be blamed for the entirety of the conflict in the West Indies. Given the breadth of visions for an empire that would be profitable, and the reluctance to conform to imperial policy at the expense of personal benefits, Britons could be just as unruly and dangerous to the empire’s economic interests as Spanish guardacostas.
The creation of this peace and its terms deeply concerned the South Sea Company, and they intended to have a hand in it. In 1728 the company moved Burnet from his post in the West Indies in order to assist the British delegation at the Congress of Soissons, where the empires were negotiating the end of the Anglo-Spanish war.95 Throughout the previous decades, Burnet had been collecting specimens, conducting trade, and making connections with Spanish associates. As it turned out, the South Sea Company was perhaps too accommodating of Burnet’s affinity for the Spanish. It was during his stay at Soissons that Burnet made a secret agreement with the Spanish government to provide them with information about the illicit trade being carried out by the South Sea Company and its employees throughout the Spanish empire, especially information that might present a full and accurate set of complaints against the British for their extensive contraband trade. He recommended that the asiento be revoked from the British and given to a Spanish-controlled company, negating the benefit to the British from both legal and contraband trade. In return for all his information, in March 1729 he received a pension from the Spanish government, and was later recommended by the Spanish secretary of state to be appointed as médico de cámara, or physician to the king.96
Burnet provided ample details about the ways in which the British evaded and bribed Spanish officials in order to bring their own goods for sale into Spanish American ports, and even as far as the large mining settlements inland. Along with another informant, Matthew Plowes, Burnet admitted that the company was well aware of the contraband trade it drove, and that it was involved deeply. The South Sea Company’s failure to keep its factors from conducting their own private trade led to a considerable glut of unauthorized merchandise flowing into the Spanish empire and severely damaged the trading opportunities for Spain’s own galleons. He noted that there had been trading ships sent from Jamaica with armed escorts, and that many of the company’s ships would not sail but for the captain’s assuring the crew that they could conduct trade on their own accounts while on the Spanish American coasts. Plowes revealed further that the Chevalier d’Eon, the Spanish representative in the South Sea Company, had been bribed to help conceal the contraband smuggling through the annual permission ship and the slaving ships.97 The men also admitted that the company had a hand in carrying Spanish passengers, and their money, out of the Americas, contrary to Spanish law meant to keep wealth within the empire. Burnet reportedly even instructed his wife travel to the West Indies to send back documents confirming his claims.98 The blame for these breaks from the expectations set out in the asiento contract, according to Plowes, lay with the company rather than the country. The company, in contact with local governors through its agents, broke international agreements repeatedly.99 Spain here had proof of many of the nefarious practices on the part of the British that they had long suspected, and as a result Spain’s ministers were less willing to negotiate with Britain for the restoration of the asiento trade, though an agreement was eventually reached.100
Burnet’s decision to leave his empire, to cut himself off from his home country, and to bring his family to live among the Spanish realized some of the deepest fears that Britons had held for centuries about the implications of sending merchants to live in areas controlled by Spain. If the London clergy had been concerned that the Spanish merchants might have attended the occasional mass in the course of their business, Burnet’s defection indicated that things could be much, much worse on the edges of empire, where specie and people circulated across imperial boundaries and the stakes rose because information, and with it, land and power, could easily change hands. Here it became clear that Britons’ identification with their country of origin could not be relied upon to keep merchants from not only failing to support British interests, but even damaging them. The men who traveled to the edges of their empires faced repeated challenges to their loyalties, and did not always consider the interests of their nation or empire above their own profits or social concerns. Indeed, those British merchants who had in the course of their travels collected so much information about both empires could be boons to peaceful cooperation in trade, or they could help one empire at the expense of the other. The project of building British overseas imperial power with individual Britons meant constant conflict between the interests of Britain and the interests of its subjects and agents on the periphery.
In providing this damning information to the Spanish government during the peace negotiations, Burnet rejected his former loyalty to both the South Sea Company and the wider British economic good. Yet through the next decade Burnet continued his correspondence with Sloane and other Britons. He sent medical and natural observations as well as official diplomatic information from Madrid. His grand hopes continued, and he meant to use his British connections to establish an academy in Spain equivalent to the Royal Society of London. It appears that Burnet lived the rest of his life in Spain, where his position as a man who understood and could negotiate between both empires provided him a comfortable living.101 Any fears that the asiento treaty and the close interaction of peoples that it required might lead to cultural contamination or blurring of loyalties in the West Indies found confirmation in the defection of a former British South Sea Company employee to the service of the Spanish empire.
The wars of the 1710s and 1720s deeply disrupted the peace and trade, but South Sea Company employees continued to live and work in Spanish America among Spanish subjects. Their presence had a deep impact on these individuals and on the empires through which they moved and the knowledge they collected could improve scientific understanding, support legal and illegal trade, and even upset the balance of international politics. At times of imperial disruption the fates of these men could be imperiled and, as imperial concern focused on the Caribbean, the dangers they faced and the depredations they themselves participated in became matters of interimperial and diplomatic concern. The 1730s would witness further breakdown in Anglo-Spanish relations in the West Indies, but the company’s factors, working on the company’s behalf and on their own, would continue to live and form relationships in the Spanish Americas.