CHAPTER 3
The asiento trade had been interrupted repeatedly by war in its first decade and a half of implementation, but despite these conflicts the governments of Britain and Spain reinstated the treaty and resumed trade after each break. In the 1730s, relations between the nations in the Americas faltered once again, as contraband, ship seizures, and internal disruptions within the colonies made conditions in the West Indies difficult for all. The groups involved in the area—independent traders, company agents, settlers, government officials, and those in London and Madrid with investments in the Americas—each had distinct and conflicting interests that heightened tensions in the area and repeatedly interrupted the trade and peace. Participating in the development of the empires on the ground meant an opportunity for great profit for the agents of the South Sea Company, but also brought with it the possibility of ruin, detention, or disaster for individuals, companies, and empires.1 The company encouraged its agents on the ground to situate themselves firmly in Spanish America to facilitate the trade, but as interaction increased, so too did the potential danger. Through the 1730s, trouble with religious courts, pirates, guardacostas, and Maroon communities, made up of escaped slaves living in the mountainous interior of Jamaica, continued to make the Anglo-Spanish trade a challenge.
South Sea Company agents, such as Jonathan Dennis, living in the West Indies saw the destructive spiral that shook the asiento agreement in the 1730s firsthand, and many experienced the negative consequences for themselves. Dennis, agent to several factories in the Spanish Americas during his long employment with the company, had direct familiarity with the troubles accompanying the decline of the asiento period throughout his tenure in the area. Though in many ways he provides an example of the kind of life that a South Sea Company factor could expect to have during the 1730s, he was not strictly an average case: he endured long years of conflict with the Inquisition courts of Spanish America, a trouble feared, but not experienced, by many of those in the company’s service. Dennis’s exchanges with the Spanish, his encounters with contraband trade and piracy, and his presence in the Caribbean during the First Maroon War illuminate the myriad causes of the 1739 war and demonstrate the impact of the decline of Anglo-Spanish cooperation on the individuals who were at its forefront.
From letters and South Sea Company records, the broad outlines of Dennis’s life can be reconstructed, and a few key events understood in detail. By the time he got to Cuba in 1731, Dennis had already been an employee of the company for nine years. He spent many of those years as chief factor at the Portobello and Panama factories. Upon his transfer to the factory at Santiago de Cuba, Dennis complained to the local Spanish officials of having apprehended an enslaved woman from the Congo who did not bear the South Sea Company’s brand. Investigation into the matter revealed that the woman had been brought to the area by a French ship, and that contrary to the rules of the asiento, the sale was reported to the company’s factory. This was of particular interest to the company, both because of the monopoly it was supposed to have over the market and because of the taxes the company was supposed to pay on imported slaves.2 Dennis continued to face problems with contraband trade throughout his time as the Havana factor, a common difficulty for South Sea Company employees and Spanish officials alike.3 Despite his concerns for his employers’ rights, and also like many company factors, he engaged in this trade on his own account as well.
Connection and Conflict
Through the end of the asiento period the contraband traffic that plagued the early years of the trade continued in full force and sparked complaints from individuals from both empires. Just between 1730 and 1734, twelve South Sea Company ships, and many more private vessels, were seized for contraband activity.4 The problem of smuggling arose from a combination of actions by the company, its agents operating independently, and other traders. In 1723–1724, for example, the company ship the Royal Prince transported considerably more than the allowed five hundred tons of British merchandise into the interiors of Spanish America before eventually receiving word from the crown that they were to be restricted to selling in the ports.5 The extensive trade represented considerable unofficial cooperation among members of numerous empires, including at various times private traders from Jamaica and other British islands, Spanish merchants and officials, and company employees trading on their own accounts. For these groups, the project of empire could often be less about national power and more about the benefits to individuals, who sought profit, adventure, and fluidity of movement. This trade simultaneously enriched and strengthened bonds between individuals and damaged the relationship between the empires by preventing mercantile control and limiting the collection of tariffs. Tensions grew internationally as pressures rose for different officials to protect the profitability of their own empire’s shipping.6
The extensive contraband trade that developed during the asiento period vexed officials in both the British and Spanish empires while actually creating opportunities for increased interaction between the British and Spanish individuals who worked together to move illicit goods through the ports of Spanish America. Through the 1730s the company’s directors worked to reduce the contraband trade coming from Britain and its colonies, which both strained international relations and created competition on top of what they already faced from French and Dutch merchants.7 The company worried for much of the 1730s that the cycle of contraband trade and reprisals by the Spanish would move the countries toward war, which would jeopardize the company’s assets in the Americas.8 During this last decade of officially cooperative relations between the empires, positive individual relationships faltered as the empires geared up for war once again. While growing out of increased interaction and cooperation between members of these empires, this trade and the privateers and pirates who surrounded it actually decreased the possibilities for future peaceful contact between Britons and Spaniards in the Americas.
The company and the Spanish government in Madrid sought to restrict contraband trade, which damaged the official trade and made collecting taxes on slaves and goods more difficult. After the 1729 peace, trade between the nations resumed, but by 1733 even the court of directors was willing to admit that it likely would never be able to import the 4,800 slaves per year required in the asiento contract because of the glutted markets in their permitted ports, which had been supplied illegally by smugglers. They pushed for a wider legal trade. Without permission to send additional ships to Campeche, Trujillo, Maracaibo, and other parts of the coast where supplies were low, they argued in a letter to the British secretary of state, the duke of Newcastle, they could hardly be expected to reach their quota.9 Despite the company’s failures, when private traders outfitted slave ships for voyages to the Spanish American coasts, the court of directors would respond by asking the Spanish governors to intercept the interlopers, and either soldiers or guardacostas would be sent to keep them from the trade.10
In part, this outward restriction of contraband trade on the part of the court of directors served as a way for the company to display to the Spanish government their intolerance for breaches in the terms established by the treaties of 1713 and 1716. Actions against contraband trade might also benefit the court and its stockholders, as it allowed the company’s ships and merchandise to officially dominate the majority of the market in goods to Spanish America with their own legal or illegal trade. The company’s trade in slaves to the Spanish Main faced direct competition from illegal private commerce coming out of the British colonies. The Jamaican factor John Merewether complained that those slaves who were not purchased for sale in the factories because they did not meet the company’s standards would be taken away by private traders and sold in other areas of the Spanish Americas, particularly the South Keys and Hispañola, reducing potential sales for the company by crowding the market and furthering the problems of oversupply of which the court of directors complained.11
The independent merchants who interfered with the company’s trade, many from Jamaica, continued to dislike the restrictions of the treaty, knowing that they could make their own profits on the Spanish American coasts. The company’s position meant a severe reduction in the kinds of trade they had been able to engage in during the pre-1713 period. Some Jamaicans complained that by insisting upon a commercial monopoly the company was being both greedy and unreasonable. Its restriction of the trade had wide-spread ill effects on the economic health of the British Empire, one pamphleteer argued: “How many Thousands in Great-Britain have suffer’d thereby, and been deprived of an industrious and gainful Subsistance! What a many of the Inhabitants of Jamaica have been drove from thence, for want of Employ; besides the Number of Sailors who had their Dependance thereon, and are forced to seek their Bread amongst Foreigners in other Parts of the World!”12 While the court of directors opposed the nonmonopoly trade, some Britons apparently felt it was not active enough. Despite the company’s indirect role in making illicit trade more common for Britons in the West Indies by opening the region to some British shipping, others, particularly those in Jamaica, continued to argue that the company was bad for the country.
While the South Sea Company factors were required by their employers to monitor and report extralegal activity, many privileged their pocketbooks and engaged in individual contraband trade during their time in the Spanish empire, with apparent disregard for the official policies of the company or the British Empire. This was mainly a problem for the nation and the company because despite the increased overall market for British goods, this trade drew protest from Madrid and limited the company’s share of Spanish American profits. Both local officials and company employees profited from the bribery that pervaded Spanish American ports.13 Local Spanish subjects profited also from the access to a thriving contraband market that was crucial to keeping the area supplied; in places like Buenos Aires, this market brought the city into contact with the wider world in a way that would not have otherwise been possible.14
One of the most common ways to bring contraband goods into the Spanish colonies was on board the annual permission ship. The goods could be added after the ship was officially weighed and left the British port of origin. For example, a sailor who was aboard the Prince William, the permission ship that sailed to Portobello in 1730/1731, reported that the captain, on his way from the Thames where the ship’s weight was certified to the Spanish territories of the New World, anchored at St. Christopher’s to take on contraband. Sailors removed the ship’s guns and stores in order to provide room for private trade, which was forbidden by the asiento treaty.15 The loading of wax, cinnamon, and other goods left the ship considerably heavier than the six hundred and fifty tons allowed by the 1716 treaty. To avoid detection by officials of either empire, those in charge of the ship “distributed amongst the aforesaid Prince William’s Ship’s Company, two hundred Pounds, or thereabouts … being for Hush-Money, in order that they should not inform, confess, or take Notice of anything relating to the aforesaid Private Cargo.”16 Given the inclusion of this story in the pamphlet, it appears that this was insufficient motivation to keep quiet. Factors might also route their contraband through the ships that regularly landed in their ports with cargoes of slaves. While factors were technically allowed to carry supplies and medicine for themselves and in order to feed and clothe slaves before their sale, they were forbidden to sell these goods to the Spanish.17 Factors could easily import goods for sale under cover of the merchandise being for their own use, and sell it secretly for their individual profit.
The South Sea Company explicitly noted the dangers they saw in the persistence of contraband trade by outsiders and their own employees, though they did not always discourage this trade. Illicit goods could drive down the company’s profits, but more troubling, the situation in the West Indies increased Spanish counter-contraband efforts, which interfered with the company’s mostly legal trade. If the Spanish discovered any contraband goods on board a South Sea Company ship, complaints indicated, the whole of the cargo might be seized. Further, the mixing of legal and illegal trade left the entire business open to fraud and embezzlement on the part of the factors processing these imported goods, which also limited company profits. In 1732, an anonymous “Proprietor of the said Company” encouraged the court of directors in print to interrogate both their supercargoes and factors, “sparing no Pains to get at the truth of this black Scene of Villany.” Those who bemoaned the condition of the company abroad were concerned with both profit and the international reputation of the British. A public display needed to be made, the pamphleteer argued, in order for the company to make Britain’s position in the matter clear: “Let us also shew the King of Spain and his Ministers, that we will detect all fraudulent Traders, and will only carry on a fair Trade.”18
The South Sea Company also encountered problems with a kind of contraband trade that they had little opportunity of ever controlling—that of European and non-European individuals outside of their own empire. In 1732 Benjamin Keene, Ambassador to Spain, observed that a significant amount of contraband trade was moving into the Spanish empire from the Portuguese colonies in South America. This trade included enslaved laborers, and the collusion of Portuguese traders and Spanish officials left the British company “vastly prejudiced by them, great numbers [of slaves] being annually clandestinely convey’d to the neighbouring provinces.”19 Along with the Portuguese, the French and Dutch, who had long conducted a trade to the area at various levels of legality, crowded the Spanish markets with goods and slaves from time to time, jeopardizing company profits.
Though the treaty officially protected Britain’s monopoly, the actions of Spanish American governors repeatedly contradicted the policies of Madrid, as New World officials sought to line their own pockets and best manage their own territories. The court of directors complained on numerous occasions of the active participation of Spanish governors in the circumvention of the asiento treaty’s guarantees of monopoly over the trade in slaves to the company. The hostility against the British trade seemed arbitrary: “these Governors open and shut the doors against us where & as often as they think fit, & are in truth the Companys Enemies, & thereby friends to clandestine & illicit introduction of Negroes for their own ends.”20 Though at times the Spanish governors would welcome British shipping, they would spurn the British in favor of their other European rivals when it benefited them, despite the official policy in Madrid.21 To ensure that the company received its fair share of trade, and that the Spanish government received its due portion of these sales, company factors branded enslaved laborers with the company’s sign, and as in Dennis’s 1731 case, sometimes brought the sale of slaves without this brand to official attention.22 The continual difficulty of regulating trade, along with “such perpetual obstructions & embarrassments, such unwarrantable extortion, violent seizures & unjustifiable imprisonments,” led the directors to conclude that “no trade can possibly be carried on to advantage.”23 If conditions in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main did not change, there would be little reason to continue the trade and officially positive relations between the empires.
Under the Bourbon reforming impulse, the Spanish imperial government also complained bitterly of the contraband trade carried out by the British through and outside of the South Sea Company. A set of grievances issued by the king of Spain in 1739 singled out “the illicit unwarrantable trade which the English have for a long time and do still carry on” as a reason for Spain’s refusal to meet some of its financial obligations as established in the asiento treaty.24 Spain characterized this as “a trade that is already grown to too unreasonable an extent, it yielding yearly several millions, as they themselves confess; a trade that is contrary to all laws of justice and equity, prejudicial to the trade allow’d and enjoy’d by other nations, and greatly hurtful and injurious to His Catholick Majesty’s revenues and government.”25 If the British could not be bothered to control their own subjects and prevent contraband trade to the Spanish territories, the Spanish crown saw no reason to fulfill its contractual obligations. From the perspective of some merchants and officials on the Spanish American coasts, these crackdowns were deeply damaging to the interests of Spanish American subjects. In the first decade of the asiento trade, the merchants of Panama complained of the restrictions being undertaken to control the contraband trade, and in response, the seizures of illicit goods stopped for some time.26 Despite the acceptance and even encouragement of illegal trade from merchants and subjects on the ground on the Spanish Main, however, the crown continued their overall policy of sending guardacostas against the British ships, and cracked down on trade moving into the South Sea factories. They were particularly interested in ships that carried specie, the exportation of which was forbidden, and log-wood, a dyewood illegally cut on the Spanish Main by British loggers and carried back to London on British ships. Britons complained that the Spanish would seize ships merely for having some logwood on board, a trespass they deemed too slight to merit the confiscation of their cargo.27
As the 1730s progressed, repeated complaints about the guardacostas and their “unjust Depredations” circulated from British sailors and merchants. For their part, the Spanish insisted that they were the victims of “real piracies, persecutions and Cruelties” perpetrated by British subjects.28 As contraband trade flourished in the West Indies, the legal cover available for privateers created an environment in which piracy in its various forms became quite an attractive option for sailors. For the empires involved, the two problems were closely related, as pirates could claim to be patrolling the seas searching ships for illegal trade, and Spanish guardacostas could be denounced as pirates.29 Although many historians have characterized the late 1720s as the decline of the Golden Age of Piracy, the continued interimperial conflict regarding the seizure of ships indicates that pirates and their legal counterparts were still very much a part of the Caribbean experience through the end of the 1730s.30 Tacit encouragement of piracy was a convenient way to damage enemies, and a source of further emotional and economic ire against the opposing empire, as stories about the depredations of pirates circulated and became a matter of official complaint.31
As far as those trading in the West Indies were concerned, the prevalence of piracy resulted either from neglect or outright hostility on the part of the opposing empire. According to the reports of the British, the Spanish governors would welcome ships that had taken British prizes into their harbors, regardless of the legality of the seizure. The crew of the Exeter claimed that when the Spanish brought their vessel into Cuba, “one of the chief magestrates of the said port of Baracao, did own and confess publickly in the hearing of these opponents, that he had committed many acts of piracy he being accustomed to that way of living.”32 News of this kind indicated to Britons that the Spanish government was making insufficient efforts to keep their international shipping fair and safe. If Britons in the metropole could hope for diplomatic solutions, Britons living in the West Indies could no longer patiently wait for restitution of prizes captured by the Spanish.
British sailors and the public had concerns far beyond the maintenance of profitable commerce. Tales of the violence and disregard for human dignity perpetrated by the Spanish continued to circulate in the English-speaking world as frictions between the two crowns grew. In 1737 Captain Tomas Weir’s ship was taken near Santa Martha, and news traveled back to Great Britain of the “most inhuman murther committed by the Spaniards” thereon.33 Witnesses reported that a Spanish man got onto the British ship under an assumed name. After eating dinner together, the Spanish man, Don Pedro Machado, “in cold blood took a pistol belonging to the SuperCargo, shot him with it, & stabbed him several times till he dyed.” He then killed the captain and his slave, as well as the rest of the crew.34 This account of Spanish depredations against the British recalled a long tradition in Britain of portraying the Spanish as particularly violent and vicious, a view extending back to the Black Legend and anti-Spanish sentiment in the sixteenth century.
The Spanish continued to counter the contraband trade by authorizing guardacostas to patrol the coasts, and Spanish pirates continued to claim that they were acting under these authorizations. The legal and illegal trades that crowded the Caribbean with slaves, goods, and specie made this a particularly rich site for piracy, and the ambiguity in the legality of some of the trade made these thefts easier still. For their part, Britons continued to complain that the Spanish ships were seizing cargo illegally, with little regard for the status or destination of the merchandise. The choice of which ships to detain seemed to the British to be based entirely on military force and financial gain: guardacostas could not capture ships larger than them, “but all they can overcome are adjudged good prize.”35 The Spanish government received reports of illegal seizures by their subjects from the British, but as far as the British could tell, did little to respond to these complaints. Hoping that the British government would back up their ships in any eventual break with Spain, settlers and merchants documented conflicts with the Spanish in great detail, sending narratives of their humiliations and inventories of the goods lost to London. The South Sea Company put particular pressure on the government to ensure the return of the company’s ships seized by guardacostas or as part of the represalias during the minor wars. They also expressed concerns about the English seizure of Spanish vessels, and the general state of tension and mutual wariness that these seizures created. They asked for a cedula from the king putting a stop to these mutual seizures, “or otherwise the Royal Company’s vessells and effects will always be liable to embargoes and embarrassments, and even the annual ship and her cargo may not be exempted.”36 The company had a very real interest in ending the disruption of their trade caused by seizure of their ships, experiencing a tension between a call for government protection and an impulse to avoid war so the trade could continue. The independent traders and Spanish officials who needed to supply their colonies with goods and slaves outside of the legal system wished to keep all these lines of trade open, while pirates and privateers profited from redirecting that illegal trade through their own networks. This clash of interests in the West Indies made the situation unsustainable.
British merchants and colonial officials sometimes complained directly to the local Spanish governments in hopes that governors would value maintaining peace and trade over protecting their wayward subjects. In 1732 the Jamaican governor, Robert Hunter, wrote to the governor of Santiago de Cuba, taking a very diplomatic tone in describing an alleged attack on a British ship. Hunter assured the governor that he did not directly suspect the Spanish or local Cuban government of having any hand in the seizure of the ship: “I did not in the least doubt but it was the act of some pyrate living in defiance of all laws & out of protection of all Christian princes, & could not entertain the least suspicion that the subjects of his Catholick majesty were any way concerned,” given the prohibitions against illegal seizures that were issued by both crowns.37 Hunter combined this placating language with a stern suggestion that the governor command the return of all British goods under his authority, and gave notice that news of the complaint would be sent to the British king as well. Here, recognition of the divisions among the various groups benefiting in sometimes conflicting ways from the existence of the American empires allowed Hunter an opportunity to seek mutual understanding with the Cuban governor, encouraging him to uphold a royal order even while some factions among the Spanish encouraged attacks on British shipping. Despite these pleas, if Madrid had the ability to restrict its subjects in the Americas, it did little to exercise that control.
British merchants and sailors sent home detailed complaints that high-lighted the poor treatment they allegedly received from the Spanish, contrary to the stipulations created by treaties existing between the groups. They often included reports not only of illegal seizure, but also violence and humiliations perpetrated against British sailors. In 1729 Lane Whitehall, commander of the Loyall George, reported that he had news of a British sloop taken near Santo Domingo. In interrogating the crew about other British vessels nearby, the Spanish intimidated the prisoners by burning matches between their fingers. They then put the crew in a small canoe, but it soon overturned, drowning all but the captain. Whitehall had heard also of another ship, taken by a pirate, on which the women on board were stripped naked and whipped, two of them to death.38 Ships were certainly being seized by the Spanish. While the description of extreme violence in this particular event comes only from the British sailors at second hand, and could be subject to exaggeration, it does demonstrate the growing tensions between the empires.
South Sea Company employees, living in the midst of the Spanish Americas, were well-situated to observe this deterioration in cooperation. At the very time that Jonathan Dennis was addressing the problem of slaves being illegally imported into Cuba by traders other than those employed by the South Sea Company, he was writing to his employers about the troubles he saw with pirates in the West Indies. The British subjects living in the West Indies made a particular project of collecting information about the Spanish guardacostas, though they made little distinction between those legally dispatched by the Spanish government and those “pyrates” that sailed the coasts for their own benefit. In 1731 Dennis and Leonard Cocke, who were stationed at the Santiago de Cuba factory, reported to Benjamin Keene, the company’s representative in Madrid, that there were a dozen or more Spanish ships in operation around the island, each carrying about one hundred sailors. The factors included for Keene a list of “those vermin called guarda costas,” including some details of their lives. They appeared to be well acquainted, at least through reputation, with “Diego de Morales (a little man as to size) born in Port St. Mary’s in Spain & marryed to a Negro woman in Portorico, sails in a sloop called the Esperanza with 8 guns and 12 swivels, upwards of 100 men.”39 The other captains on their list had been born throughout the Spanish empire, including in the Canary Islands, Puerto Rico, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba. While authorized by the Spanish government, these privateers did not always have the interests of Madrid in mind, making them more likely to depart from the legal business of patrolling for contraband for the more lucrative but politically dangerous business of stealing from and even injuring Britons.
Separate from their long list, the Cuba factors made a particular point of the danger posed to British shipping by a Spanish pirate named Don Juan de León Fandiño, “a notorious villain, who lies cruzing between Cape Antonio & the mouth of the harbour of Havana.” Fandiño particularly vexed British merchants moving through the Caribbean, and in British eyes he was clearly and damningly affiliated with the Spanish. With his ship of eight guns and his crew of eighty, he would seize vessels and confiscate all their valuable cargo before releasing them.40 Rear Admiral Charles Stewart wrote from Jamaica asking the British government to increase its attempts to end Fandiño’s operations in that sea. While Stewart allowed that “you cannot capitally punish a man without a judicial hearing,” he speculated that failing to end the depredations of a pirate made the government complicit in the continuation of his crimes. He reported that the British king ordered him to “demand restitution of the damages done, or the delivery up of the persons that have committed the facts,” and that failure to comply with this would lead to him taking further, though still legal, measures against the Spanish.41 The empires’ failures to control their own subjects, “pirate” or otherwise, would lead to increasingly tense relations between the Spanish and British throughout the 1730s.
A 1731 encounter between Fandiño and a London mariner, Robert Jenkins, near Havana, would touch off the major Anglo-Spanish war of the asiento period. On Jenkins’s return to London he explained that Fandiño and his men boarded his ship, the Rebecca, claiming to be officers of the king of Spain. He invited them to search his cargo for any contraband, as he insisted he had none on board. At that point fifty men came aboard, searched all the hatches, and found nothing. They beat Jenkins’s servant brutally, hoping the man would admit to the location of a prize. After some time and no confession, Jenkins recounted, the Spanish tortured the servant boy to death. They repeatedly hanged Jenkins, nearly killing him, and finally cut his ear off and nearly scalped him. He reported that “they returned the piece of his ear again, and bid him give it to King George, uttering some scandalous words.”42 It was this ear that Jenkins later ostensibly brought to Parliament, sparking outrage that led to the conflict bearing his name, the War of Jenkins’s Ear.43 In the same year, the privateer Miguel Henriquez carried off Englishmen from the South Sea Company’s factory in Puerto Rico.44 Whether or not these British informants were exaggerating Spanish brutality, their insistence on the details of these depredations demonstrates the kinds of violence that Britons believed the Spanish to be capable of, and the kinds of information that circulated in the English-speaking world about the Spanish. These actions were deemed particularly cruel in the context of a treaty securing peaceful trade between members of these empires. The British were further bothered by Spain’s refusal to punish the privateers. Fandiño continued to hold a guardacosta commission long after this incident, and Englishmen reported encounters with him as late as the 1740s.45
The essential theme throughout complaints by the South Sea Company and others about interactions with guardacostas centered around the British not being treated as equal trading partners, but as criminals. The objectionable treatment of Britons by guardacostas was reported to continue long after the initial seizure of the ship, endangering South Sea Company employees and independent traders alike. In 1737 an anonymous letter writer told of the capture of his ship as it sailed through the Gulf of Florida. Before bringing the ship to Havana, the writer asserted, the Spanish sailors came aboard “armed with guns & cutlasses, plundering and robbing us whatever they could lay their hands on, stripping us naked, not leaving us the second shirt to our back.” Here the crew faced an exercise of force, and indeed of humiliation, far beyond what might reasonably be required in a simple seizure of contraband goods. A further insult, the British were allowed only “jurked beef & magotty bread” while they were held as prisoners aboard the Spanish man-of-war in the Havana harbor. The Spanish bound them in irons, and generally treated them in a manner that the captured Britons characterized as unchristian.46 In another case, a British man accused of carrying illegal goods encountered pirates, whose captain “forc’d me upon the Poope among ye slaves in chains & then went to prayers” before he was eventually questioned.47 He objected to being treated as if he were of lower status than the Spanish “Don.” Some Britons found the Spanish in the Americas to display insufficient respect, as well as a fundamental disregard for the status of the company and its ships guaranteed by the asiento treaty. Madrid could make promises to Britain, but guardacostas and local officials acted with their own concerns in mind, just as with British subjects and company agents who pursued profit with little concern for imperial policies.
The extensive contraband trade and prevalent piracy of the 1730s led to the deterioration of cooperation between these empires and their subjects at multiple levels. The conflict between the interests of individual factors, independent traders, and privateers, and the policies of the empires, had destroyed the possibility of extended positive official relations between Britain and Spain in the West Indies. While some in Britain had supported the Spanish American trade in hopes of increasing the empire’s wealth, in this later period negative depictions of the Spanish reemerged forcefully, and stood as examples of why Spain should not be trusted. The West Indies continued to be a place where individuals at all levels of empire acted on their own interests, given the shifting opportunities presented by interimperial cooperation and conflict.
Living Between Empires
The monopoly that the South Sea Company held on the official trade was slowed and sometimes stopped due to the international conflicts caused by widespread piracy and contraband trade in the area. These tensions, caused by detaining ships, glutting markets, and contributing to wars, were not the only threats faced in the execution of the treaty in the 1730s. As British and Spanish subjects took advantage of the situation in the West Indies to line their own pockets through trade or theft, on land the whims of individual Spanish colonial governors at times made the position of the British agents precarious. The company did what it could to protect its factors in the Americas, but distance and diplomatic issues made this difficult. The asiento trade suffered also because of religious fears on both sides, as the Spanish Catholics objected to the actions of the potentially unruly Protestants in their midst.
The Spanish Catholic religious establishment retained their earlier concerns about the challenge the South Sea Company’s agents might pose to the established religion of the empire. The terms of the asiento bound the factors not to “give offense” to Catholicism, and the officials monitoring Spanish ports kept close watch in order to ensure that this rule was followed. The agents of the Inquisition at Cartagena detained packages sent to the factors living at the port, and examined the many volumes of books in English that were sent from London to factors such as John Burnet.48 More troubling than the written word, the Spanish looked to the souls of their African laborers with a new insistence in 1725 that the slaves imported come directly from the coast of Africa, rather than transported through or born in the British colonies. The court of directors of the South Sea Company claimed that the Spanish clergy preferred slaves from the African coast because of their belief “that the negroes by being brought into British Colonys, are tainted with heresy, which renders it more difficult for the priests to convert them to the Roman Catholick religion.”49 The directors complained that the enforcement of such restrictions would be very damaging, because the factory at Jamaica always kept groups of slaves on the island to fill cargoes sent to the Spanish Americas, which would have to be counted a loss to the company if they were banned from those shores.50
Some British individuals moving through Spanish lands felt similar trepidation about the implications of living among the Spanish. Though the records of the South Sea Company do not contain any accounts of trouble created over the importation of British books, the presence of the Inquisition could create real problems for Britons living within Spanish dominions. Francis Stratford, who was sent to Madrid as an agent for the company at the court there, wrote to the court of directors to express his concern over the possible fate of his goods and heirs if he should die while abroad. He worried that “being a protestant, [he would] be liable to have all his goods & papers seized and confiscated, as well as those which belong to the Company, as what belong to his private affairs & have his family turned into the street, on pretence that there is no legal heir of their religion present.”51
Several sailors who came to the Americas on South Sea Company ships appeared before the Inquisition in Mexico in the 1720s and 1730s. Certain men came before the tribunal somewhat willingly, as a way to regularize their presence in the Spanish empire with at least one of the local institutions or to gain freedom after having been detained. Nicholas Carpenter, for instance, reported in 1721 that he arrived on the Spanish American coast as a sailor with the South Sea Company permission ship the Royal Prince several years earlier, and stayed in the area despite the war that soon erupted between the empires. After a year in prison he begged the Inquisition to allow him to reconcile himself to the Catholic Church.52 Other Britons were accused of more serious crimes than being present in the Spanish Americas as unauthorized non-Catholics. William Lea, a Protestant born in Bermuda, was bringing slaves to Guatemala for the company in 1733 when he was detained by the Inquisition’s court in Mexico City and accused of speaking about religion, contrary to the asiento contract, and possibly damaging the Catholic Church. Further, he had slandered the Irish as thieves, specifically because of their Catholicism, and shown several people in the viceroyalty a heretical book.53 As some expected when the empires signed the treaty, Protestant Britons living in the Spanish empire could never really be safe while the Inquisition operated around them, and as the Spanish suspected, allowing Britons into their lands could lead to disruption. While individual Catholic Spanish subjects may have had little reserve in interacting with and befriending Britons, the church continued to be suspicious of their presence.
The depictions of the Spanish circulating within Great Britain during the later asiento trade suggested a people who could not be trusted, who would damage the British economically and militarily as well as religiously. A 1730 pamphlet published in London provides a particularly vivid example of the imagined connection between the South Sea Company, Anglo-Spanish contacts, and negative outcomes. In The South-Sea Kidnapper, a man identified only as J. B. complained that a Spanish gentleman named Joseph Belliagos who lodged at the author’s home in London had enticed away both his journeyman and apprentice, promising them better conditions in Spain. This was particularly irksome because the author had, with translation assistance from a South Sea Company clerk, helped Belliagos by allowing him to lodge in his home in order to escape from a situation in which he was being “ill used.” When the man next debauched the maid, the author evicted her from the house, but Belliagos brought her back against her master’s wishes, hiding her in his room and bringing her food. Later, this maid aided Belliagos to “enquire after poor artificers, and to encourage them to go abroad,” to the detriment of themselves and Great Britain.54
According to J. B., Belliagos committed several other insults to himself and the well-being of Great Britain during his time in the country. He acquired various tools that he meant to take abroad with him along with the “poor artificers.” Furthermore, he threatened J. B.’s life, though he continued to store his belongings at his home. When Belliagos left, J. B. reported, he stopped at the South Sea House, the company’s headquarters, to pick up the clerk who assisted J. B. in his earlier translations, suggesting some collusion between those who traded to Spanish America and those who would disrupt lives in Britain. Indeed, the presence of the Spanish seemed to encourage all sorts of transgression and debauchery: Belliagos kept an English mistress, “to whom I was told he was married, and had made her a Roman-Catholick.” One witness reported he took her away with him to Spain, and that he “saw her dress’d in Man’s cloathes before she went on Board, and said she look’d very handsome.”55 Therefore, in this tale, Spanish individuals could be expected to encourage not only licentiousness, but conversion, transvestism, and the abandonment of one’s national loyalty. The supposed involvement of a South Sea Company clerk with this Spanish criminal further reinforced earlier questions about the possible destructive nature of sustained contact between British and Spanish subjects. Living among Catholics could be damaging to Britons individually, and whether this occurred in the metropole or on the vulnerable edges of the empire it could damage the interests of the nation and empire as well, the tale communicated.
Catholicism posed a perceived threat from within Britain’s own imperial borders as well as externally. Irish men and women traveled extensively in the West Indies and their presence in the British Empire—and sometimes the Spanish one as well—provided a significant cause for trepidation on the part of many Britons.56 The Irish were troubling figures for many loyal to the British Empire, especially in such a fluid and contested area as the growing European colonies in the Americas. Many Irish soldiers and sailors had been involved with the rebellions against the British, including the 1715 Jacobite uprising and several revolts in the West Indies, and their loyalty to the Catholic Church and related rejection of the state church of Great Britain made their allegiances questionable at best in the eyes of many.57
Jonathan Dennis had extensive firsthand knowledge of the religious conflicts that periodically sparked between these empires, as the Inquisition launched a case against him. The Spanish had substantial reasons to complain of the effects of the close contact between the subjects of the two empires. The Spanish government and the church perceived the significant numbers of British Protestants living in and moving through the empire as agents of the slave trade as a potential threat to the Catholic Church and the souls of its congregants. In 1735, the South Sea Company received news that Dennis, then a factor at the Santiago de Cuba factory, had been accused by the Inquisition of interfering with Catholicism. In response to his position and the interest the Inquisition had in detaining him, the company ordered Dennis to flee Cuba for Jamaica.58 The other Britons working in the area were troubled by Dennis’s case, concerned that the same fate might befall them. Indeed, a report from another company employee recounted the story of a Spanish merchant who was imprisoned by the Inquisition for two decades before being found innocent, suggesting that anyone could fall prey to the institution.59 The company asked the duke of Newcastle to intercede on their behalf with the Spanish ambassador, explaining that they feared that any “misunderstanding” that might occur between company employees and Catholic clergy might lead to imprisonment by the Inquisition and the seizure of company property by the Spanish, perhaps irreversibly.60 Living among the Spanish was a necessity if Britons wished to profit from their extensive trade, but it brought with it very real dangers.
The details of Dennis’s alleged crimes remain murky and contested. He had at that point been in the West Indies for over ten years.61 The Inquisition claimed that Dennis “refused to give up an English Youth who was willing to turn Roman Catholick” during his time in Cuba with the company.62 Dennis countered that the boy was Protestant from birth, and Dennis’s only intervention was to keep him from becoming a Catholic. The controversy forced Dennis to retire out of the Spanish empire to Jamaica for some years.
Dennis was not the only British subject brought before the Inquisition for his alleged insults to the Catholic religion. A year before Dennis faced his own case, South Sea Company factor Samuel Collit was accused of improper behavior. The Spanish prime minister, Joseph Patiño, and the bishop of Caracas complained that Collit committed multiple offenses, including the unnecessarily harsh correction of a slave that resulted in the man’s death, and the detention of a Catholic youth. Collit hotly contested these accusations; he argued that he had been particularly careful not to offend the Inquisition during his time in the West Indies, not even speaking of religion among those who lived with him. He could not be supposed to have spoken against the Church, he suggested, because “English companions I had none,” as his “servants were all Roman Catholicks, and observed strictly with the ordinance of that Church as can be proved whenever your Honrs please.” He speculated that he was being punished for “turning out of the Factory an impudent, thievish and lying Irish boy, who a few days before was converted to the Roman Catholick religion.”63 Regardless of the truth of this statement, he reaffirmed his defense here, that the Spanish were the parties responsible for religious conversion, while he was blameless. This suggested that the Spanish might, at least in British eyes, use the Inquisition court to punish South Sea Company employees who transgressed in some way.
Having fled the Inquisition in Cuba, Dennis arrived in Jamaica to find a troubled island. The inhabitants had been complaining about the presence of Spanish subjects in the waters near them and even on land since the beginning of the treaty. In 1730, a small group of Spanish men were on the island, having been rescued from the Genovesa, a wrecked man-of-war. These men were given liberty to move about the area, but a letter writer complained that despite this kindness, “they cannot help discovering their spleen & resentment to the English nation & even insult us in our own country.”64 In this case, the conflicts between these two empires erupted in a violent and very immediate way. According to the Jamaican correspondent, the Spanish visitors began to terrorize the city of Kingston, driving the British inhabitants out of the streets. The foreigners, with no reported provocation, stabbed to death the keeper of a public house, and knocked down several other residents. Regardless of the veracity of these complaints about unprovoked Spanish violence, the reaction of the British inhabitants of Jamaica is telling. Clearly believing the Spanish to be capable of such transgressions of both international treaty and human decency, local Britons, “publickly talked of arming & taking their revenge.”65 This thirst for retribution was fueled both by the immediate violence of the Spanish soldiers and the fact that some of the townspeople had been prisoners in New Spain, and resented their own treatment at the hands of the Spanish there. Only the close watch of a constant guard kept Kingston from erupting into more violence.
The Jamaican governor moved to confine all the Spanish who had been given freedom to travel the island, though the letter writer expressed a concern that these men might prove dangerous beyond their own ability to commit violence. The soldiers, he feared, had had ample time to observe the land and their fortifications, and to make calculations about the kind of force that might be needed to launch a successful Spanish takeover of the island. A Spanish officer was even reported to have observed that “it was a very fine Island but thinly peopled,” crucial information for any possible military action against the British settlers that paralleled the sort of military intelligence that British travelers were encouraged to collect.66 Already living geographically surrounded by a number of Spanish American holdings, the Jamaicans found themselves in a particularly vulnerable situation, and the invitation of Spanish subjects into their very towns was met with fear and threats that personal conflict could escalate into interimperial war.
Fears that British subjects might be tainted religiously by sustained contact with the Spanish also persisted from well before the asiento period. Regardless of their desire for profit, the British worried that their proximity to the Spanish might, through force or osmosis, lead to conversions of British subjects living in that empire. According to the allegations of a 1735 pamphlet, a Mr. Darroch, the factor whom Jonathan Dennis was meant to replace at Panama some years earlier, married a Peruvian Spanish woman and was a Roman Catholic, though it was unclear whether he converted before or after being hired. Darroch allegedly stole 20,000 dollars from the company.67 Around the same time, the court of directors sent a lengthy letter to Keene concerning the state of their trade abroad, including an example of Spanish hostility against the Protestants in their midst. They reported that the Spanish took a former company carpenter named William Woodin from one of their vessels, only releasing him after he “wrote severall letters promising … to turn Roman Catholick and to instruct the Spanish in building ships.”68 The company complained that the Spanish were taking British subjects off their ships, but perhaps more worrisome was what the Spanish planned to do with those subjects, using them to strike a military and religious blow to one of the main areas of British economic activity. Having sent British subjects into Spanish American cities, the South Sea Company attempted to balance promoting the trade with the peril to British souls.
The religious conflict extended to the question of responsibility for the souls of those enslaved African laborers whom the South Sea Company was bringing into the New World. Since early in the trade, the Spanish expressed concern that enslaved Africans who had previous contact with the British might be particularly difficult to convert to Catholicism.69 The company objected to being asked to pay for the enslaved people’s religious instruction in the West Indies. In 1718 the court of directors noted that the Spanish crown required the factory at Havana to baptize slaves into the Catholic Church and bury those who died before sale accordingly; if the factors could not get around this payment, the court instructed them, they should attempt to avoid it by selling the slaves quickly.70 In 1735 a layman was appointed near Panama “to instruct the negroes in the Christian Faith, baptize them in articulo mortis, and bury them in holy ground.”71 The company balked at paying this man, arguing that this expense should be borne by the Spanish crown. While they could not outright object to the Spanish converting their own slaves, they could avoid directly adding to the number of Catholics in the West Indies. Once an enslaved person had been officially brought into either the Protestant or Catholic religion, imperial interest in their fate grew substantially, particularly for the Spanish. In 1731, the Inquisition attempted to stop the sale of an enslaved Catholic woman whom the company factors at Havana planned to send to the British colonies, as she would be unable to practice her religion there.72 While Catholicism was insufficient to free an enslaved person in most cases, the Spanish crown and church felt that certain protections, including a guarantee of the ability to practice his or her religion, should be afforded to enslaved people who had been baptized.
Individuals moving between these empires could profitably appeal to the tensions between the Catholic and Protestant empires. This was the case with a group of slaves who came before the Cuban court in 1723. Miguel and Gaspar, two men of African descent, told a Cuban court that they were escapees from Jamaica who hoped to live among Catholics, and that in fact their Jamaican owner held them illegally. They fled to the Spanish islands during the war along with others, landing on the Cuban shore where the local people divided them up among the houses. They were actually free, they argued, and should be allowed to stay in the Spanish empire as free subjects. They positioned themselves as anti-British and pro-Catholic, demonstrating a clear strategy that took into account the imperial contexts in which they lived.73 If they could convince the Spanish that they were working against their wartime enemies, these slaves hoped they might secure freedom from the Jamaicans.
Jonathan Dennis found British settlers in Jamaica confronting an even more persistent and local threat than that posed by pirates or Inquisition courts, in the form of escaped slaves. Since the British takeover of the island in 1655, former Spanish slaves and their descendants lived in the dense mountains of the interior, undertaking raids on plantations and encouraging local slaves to run away and join them.74 Armed conflict between the British and these Maroon communities increased significantly in the 1730s, creating panic among the populace and raising the hopes of enslaved African laborers on Jamaican plantations. The presence of the Maroons put white Jamaicans in a particularly vulnerable position, and the imperial tensions and Maroon wars combined to create a difficult situation for the island, which now faced threats from within and without. Dennis left Cuba, where Spanish officials were hostile to his Protestant presence, only to live on an island beset by its own hostilities, violence that arose from the slave trade in which he himself engaged.
The South Sea Company, though it had imported some slaves that remained in Jamaica, did not contribute directly to the problem of the Maroons, but their involvement in the larger slaving business highlights the dangers inherent in transporting enslaved laborers into vulnerable imperial locations. Bringing British merchants into Spanish America was disruptive and damaging to the Spanish imperial system, especially in the eyes of Madrid and the Church. Bringing large numbers of slaves into the Americas was destabilizing as well, for both empires. The presence of large numbers of potentially hostile laborers in the American dominions of the British and Spanish meant that rebellion was perceived as a pervasive threat, and the periodic eruptions of violence between the empires stoked fears that enslaved populations could be used by one nation to deeply damage the other.
The British found the continual presence of the Maroons in the interior troubling enough, but as the asiento period continued and interimperial troubles mounted, the Maroon attacks on British settlements became, or seemed to become, more frequent and dangerous. The Maroons came into British towns and onto plantations in order to gather supplies and to bring enslaved Africans back to their communities. The Jamaica Courant informed readers that recently, despite the efforts of volunteer militiamen and their slaves, “a party of the rebels have fallen upon a settlement to the Windward of Port Antonio, plunder’d and burnt it, and carry’d off a negro woman and her child.” A speech given in the Jamaica Assembly emphasized the dangers faced by the people of the island, and the very real possibility that it could be lost entirely: the incursions of the Maroons had become so troubling “that your frontiers that are no longer in any sort of security must be deserted, and then the danger must spread and come nearer, if not prevented.”75 While explorers and those in London dreamed of incorporating more and more of the Spanish holdings in the British Empire, some on the ground in the West Indies held fewer illusions about these borderlands.
After years of conflict with the Maroons, in 1733 the Jamaican government reported that the pressures of fighting the Maroons had become over-whelming. The fear of violence from the Maroons was, they said, so great that they had “determined several planters to abandon their plantations.”76 Some even worried about a general revolt by the enslaved population. These Jamaican plantations were situated in a particularly dangerous area, and one that was of critical importance to Britain. Trelawny saw this position clearly, writing that Jamaica “is a frontier place surrounded as it were with the settlements of France and Spain,” which was of great “importance to Great Britain (the sugar trade and indeed to the whole trade to the West Indies chiefly depending upon its preservation).”77 The difficult position of Jamaica, simultaneously near the geographical frontier and the economic center of the British Empire, made the fate of the island precarious but of particular interest to the British crown. With the Spanish periodically menacing their holdings from without, the threat from enslaved populations from within posed a particularly troubling threat.
Just as it could be difficult to identify illegal pirates and their ships at sea, so Jamaicans found themselves sometimes unable to distinguish between members of Maroon communities and the slaves moving legally about the island. There was little external to mark these individuals as runaways or rebels, and they might blend unnoticed into the markets of Kingston or Spanish Town if dressed like the overwhelmingly enslaved population of the island.78 The difficulty of identifying Maroons on an island with a large number of slaves made the British Jamaicans all the more uncertain about their ability to contain or counter the threats to the lands they claimed as plantations.
In order to protect their interests on the island, the British government sent troops to Jamaica in the 1730s, recognizing that this was not just a local issue but one that affected the empire at large. White Jamaicans welcomed the soldiers, in no small part because they were largely unsuccessful in raising anything like a useful army on their own. The local colonial government had been organizing small groups of men to defend the plantations against the Maroons and to attack their remote settlements for many years. These groups included not only local planters and their white servants, but also their African slaves. The inclusion of these slaves in expeditions against the “runaways” was troubling but necessary from the perspective of the settlers, who feared they might abandon the group in order to join the Maroons.79 Jamaican officials attempted several times to recruit soldiers locally, promising them money for their time and a bounty on each enemy they killed, as well as land, slaves, and provisions.80 Unfortunately for the white Jamaicans, their small population meant that few men could be counted upon to perform this service, and at times they ignored the orders of their officers, making their efforts ineffectual.81
British troops faced problems beyond their lack of success against the Maroon raids. Soldiers sent from London suffered in large numbers from tropical diseases to which they had no previous resistance. The soldiers were disheartened by a combination of the extreme heat and humidity of the area, the illnesses and insects, and the consistent difficulty that Britons faced in fighting a group much more familiar with the mountains. Colonel Cornwallis put the situation into perspective clearly in a letter to London from Port Royal, noting that “I’m sure there is not an officer here but with pleasure would go to the most desperate siege rather than stay in this damned unwholesome place, for then one should have a chance to gain some credit or die honorably, here no reputation to be gained & no service to be done.”82 Another soldier observed of the regiment that “the climate is too inveterate an enemy for them,” far worse than the “rebel slaves” alone would be.83 These conditions would cause repeated problems during Caribbean warfare against internal and foreign enemies.
Maroon raids in Jamaica were only a small part of the larger wave of rebellions occurring throughout Europe and the Americas in the first half of the eighteenth century, from slaves fleeing British colonies for Spanish Florida to political rebellions in Great Britain. The Spanish empire faced its own problems with slave rebellions throughout their colonies. For instance, at the Cobre mines in Cuba, the slaves rose up and declared themselves free in 1731, and five years earlier slaves on nearby plantations revolted in response to the proximity of British ships, which they hoped would lead to their freedom.84 The Spanish case suggests that enslaved laborers were both aware of and eager to exploit conflicts between the two empires to their own advantage.
The British saw clear and direct connections between their problems with the Maroons and increased conflicts with the Spanish empire over the contraband trade and piratical depredations that so vexed the South Sea Company. Rumors abounded that the Spanish and Maroons were collaborating in their designs against the British control of Jamaica. The settlers did not create these concerns out of whole cloth—the Spanish subjects in the area jumped at the opportunity to stoke British paranoia. From Jamaica, one military official wrote that the arms and ammunition that the rebels possessed was a clear indication they had “a secret correspondence within the island, or from abroad, perhaps both.”85 A British sea captain noted that while on a trading voyage to Cuba, several Spanish men informed him that they would soon be in control of Jamaica, as “the runaway negroes of this island had wrote to the Governor of Cracas that if the King of Spain would send some people to take this island, they would deliver them up possession of it.”86 These Maroon communities would reportedly then “enjoy the same libertys as the rest of [the Spanish King’s] subjects.”87 In 1731, Governor Hunter alerted Newcastle that forces on Jamaica captured a rebel enslaved woman who confirmed that one of the Maroon captains was in contact with the Spanish, giving them information about their position and numbers and offering an alliance against the British. Hunter solemnly noted that this confirmed the old suspicions: “there can remain no doubt of their correspondence with and encouragement from the Spaniards.”88 Other accounts of Spanish boasting about the weakness of Jamaica circulated as early as 1730.89 A 1737 report from Jamaica, relayed to the government in London through an intermediary in Charleston, told of a Spanish plan for a joint attack on Georgia and attempt to “excite an insurrection of the negroes of this province” of South Carolina, suggesting that the problems Jamaicans faced with escaped slaves could easily translate to the mainland.90 The slave trade had been the basis of a close connection between the South Sea Company and the Spanish empire; here, in a time of growing crisis, those Britons living in the West Indies expressed concern that it might lead to an insurmountable crisis. The growing unrest with Spain was partially created by tensions with the company and the disruption that could be caused by slaves that they and private traders brought to both empires. These tensions could erupt into an attack from two fronts, which could lead to the loss of Jamaica and other important colonial holdings.
The British expressed relief when Cudjoe, the leader of one of the biggest Maroon communities in Jamaica, agreed to a peace treaty just before the War of Jenkins’s Ear broke out with Spain.91 If the weakened island was forced to face the Spanish and the Maroon communities at the same time, their resources may well have been exhausted. Following the war, an anonymous Jamaican observed the benefits gained by the timing of the Maroon treaty: “I shall leave every one to conjecture what the condition of Jamaica would have been when threatened with a Foreign invasion surrounded w Enemies and but a small force to defend itt for a long time if than they hade hade such Enemies within their bowels to have excited and supported their slaves in a Rebellion.”92 The settlers and Maroons reached an agreement, signed in March 1739, which allowed them to avoid this condition. Indeed, during the subsequent war with Spain, Cudjoe sent a lieutenant to receive instructions from the governor of Jamaica for how the Maroon troops should be positioned to defend the island in case of a Spanish invasion.93 Despite this easing of tensions in Jamaica, however, rumors of Spanish involvement, as instigators or as a refuge for rebelling slaves, arose in other parts of the British Empire, with possible slave uprisings and well-publicized executions in South Carolina in 1739 and New York City in 1741.94
The disruptions to trade and planting that slave revolts caused within both empires increased interimperial stresses in the region. The slave trade brought together these empires as they sought mutual benefits: the Spanish would take in sufficient labor for their mines, households, and fields, and the British, with their existing foothold on the African coast, could command Spanish specie in return for importing enslaved laborers. The large groups of slaves that were imported as part of the asiento treaty and the larger slave trade had their own ideas about their position in the American colonies, and might, as in the case of the Maroons, organize and fight for their interests. Once these African men and women were brought to the Americas, their potential power as actors became strikingly clear to Europeans living in both empires. The very trade that brought the Spanish and British into cooperation in the Americas introduced another group, with its own agendas, that would also act to shape the colonies. In the late 1730s, the British, especially those with trading interests in the Caribbean and those living on the island of Jamaica, shifted their attention from concern about the actions of internal enemies firmly to the external threat of Spanish conflict.
The Slide Toward War
As tensions between the empires mounted throughout the asiento period, the South Sea Company factors, while often interacting closely with Spanish subjects as fellow traders and sometimes as friends, did come into contact in some ports with Spanish officials who did not embrace their presence. Upon meeting the governor of Puerto Rico and delivering him letters from the governor of Jamaica in 1730, a British lieutenant named Sommerset Master asked to see the “English Factory” and meet the factors living there. In his declaration concerning this interaction, Master reported that the Spanish governor “refused, saying they were not to be trusted.” The governor further expressed concern about the activities unfolding on Jamaica, as he had news of several regiments of British soldiers coming to the island. In addition to the distrust that existed between these two representatives of their empires, their communication was hindered by the language barrier. Master indicated that the governor “could get no other interpreter than a Dutch Negroe who spoke very bad English,” an issue that likely also thwarted attempts at nuanced communication with the factors living on the island.95
Despite the distrust of some Spanish officials, British factors were at times able to get information on their host empire because of their positions. This was especially useful and important as the relationship between the two empires deteriorated. Leonard Cocke, for example, a factor at Santiago de Cuba, reported an interaction he had in late 1736. There was a man in town claiming to be Irish and calling himself by the name Don Miguel Wall. The island’s governor welcomed him. Intrigued by his presence and his purported command of a man-of-war, Cocke invited the man to dine with him at the factory. Plying the man for information, “finding him a free facetious gentleman, & that loved his glass,” Cocke was able to discover that Wall was actually a former English lieutenant, and that his orders from the Spanish crown were to attack the recently formed Georgia settlement with the help of local Indians and runaway slaves.96 Alarmed, the factor urged his British correspondent to alert the officials in Georgia in order to prevent this potential attack.
The South Sea Company complained heartily to the British king during this period, arguing that the situation with the Spanish had reached an impasse, and that they could not be expected to make any profits given the hostility of the Spanish government in Madrid and the New World. The local Spanish governments in the Americas took steps during the 1730s that the court of directors thought contradicted the agreement provided in the 1713 and 1716 treaties. In 1732 the Spanish government required the company’s factors living at Panama to leave for Portobello. Only the chief of the Panama factory was allowed, by special dispensation from the local judge conservator, to remain there and continue to oversee trade.97 In combining the two factories, the Spanish government also insisted that the total number of Britons in the area be reduced.98 The court argued that, in addition to a violation of the guaranteed allowance for a factory at Panama by the Spanish, Portobello had little to recommend it over the nearby city, as Portobello, “being so unhealthy would cause great mortality among the negros & destroy the factors.” The viceroy of Peru further attempted to hurt the South Sea Company’s trade by keeping specie from reaching the city, while the court noted that the company was authorized by Madrid to receive and trans-ship “money, bars of silver & ingots of gold” on their own vessels in return for providing enslaved African laborers.99
The subgovernor of the company complained on the record that these interferences on the part of the local Spanish governments in the Americas were destroying the trade. While “it is certainly in itself a profitable commerce, and in many respects beneficial to the nation,” the trade, and the opportunity some believed it still provided for the nation, was gravely damaged. He speculated that the Spanish wished the trade to fail for their own reasons: “it must be allow’d that the Spanish have not only twice seiz’d & confiscated the company’s effects on pretence of war, but having been made sensible of the great advantages the company and nation might reap from it, have perhaps for that reason too, found frequent means to interrupt the returns, and thereby disappoint the expected gains.”100 The company officially complained to the king several years later, finding its position in the West Indies very precarious. The Spanish, the company claimed, were violating many of the terms of the asiento flagrantly and in full knowledge of the illegality of their actions. The Spanish governors sold slaves they seized, rather than funneling them through the factors as specified. They detained ships, both at sea through guardacostas and within Spanish ports. The Spanish ambassador informed the court that they were no longer to send any goods on the annual permission ship that had not been produced in Great Britain, which the court complained would be “highly injurious” to their profits from those ships. Most salient for the factors living within the Spanish empire, in order to enforce rules made contrary to the treaty, “guards have been put by the Spanish officers on the Factors House and person, and our ships have been detained there till such orders were complied with.”101 As official problems increased, opportunities for interpersonal interaction and cooperation withered.
During this tumultuous time, some Britons held out hope that the trade with the Spanish could be continued and could be profitable. One unnamed correspondent with the company encouraged attention to Caracas, where a factory was finally founded in 1735. Though some argued that there was in-sufficient demand for slaves in the area, the correspondent indicated that private trade was meeting with significant success and that a factory would benefit the company and help to counter Dutch presence in the region.102 Despite this move to expand operations in the West Indies, a major break between the Spanish and British empires seemed inevitable to many, and public sentiment in Britain was largely set against the Spanish.
Even in this later period, religious and secular disputes between the British and Spanish were not always insurmountable when there were profits to be had. Apparently, by 1738 the company felt that Dennis could live among the Spanish without posing a threat either to their property or to his safety. In that year the court of directors decided to place Dennis as first factor at Panama, having reached an agreement with some Spanish officials that he could work for the company as long as he stayed well away from Cuba.103 There was some delay in the implementation of the order, as the president of Panama demanded a cedula from the Spanish king be issued before he allowed Dennis to even land at Portobello.104 Edward Manning and John Merewether, the company’s main factors in Jamaica, expressed their sympathy in a letter to Peter Burrell, sub-governor of the company, bemoaning “poor Mr. Denniss” and “how unfortunate he has been through the whole time of his being in the Compys service.” Given this, Manning wrote, Dennis’s reluctance to go to Panama without assurances that he would be safe was entirely justified: “it would be hard fate to remain the last five years of the Asiento Contract in a Spanish Goal [sic].”105 Multiple orders had to be sent before he could finally be admitted to his post.106
Despite the growing tumult in the West Indies and the high tension between the governments of the British and Spanish empires, Dennis returned to Spanish America. He encountered multiple problems in taking up his new post. Finally, in February of 1739, Dennis reported to Burrell that “notwithstanding the apprehensions I had”—apparently his past experiences with Spanish officials left him a bit shaken—“nothing cou’d be more civil and handsome than the reception I met with” at Portobello and Panama.107 He did not have long to enjoy his reestablishment in the Spanish empire. Shortly after finally being allowed into the Panama factory, on the night of June 18, 1739, Dennis died of an “appoplectick fitt.”108 He did not live to see the ultimate destruction of Anglo-Spanish cooperation, but by the time of his death the crumbling of the alliance was well under way.
The religious conflicts, secular issues such as contraband, and internal pressures created by the presence of slave communities contributed to the deterioration of cooperation in trade in the Americas. The very closeness of empires and individuals made possible by the South Sea Company’s contract with the Spanish, including the situation of Protestant Britons in Spanish American cities, led to pressures on the company agents involved and the empires themselves. As the 1730s came to a close, so did the wealth of opportunities for direct, intensive interaction of the British and Spanish in Spain’s American empire.