Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (26 page)

The natural laws governing navigation in the age of sail carried with them certain ineluctable consequences, prescribing ideal times, routes and seasons for sailing, and giving preference to certain points of departure at the expense of others. If Andalusia - in effect Seville and its port complex of San Lucar and Cadiz - acquired a monopoly of transatlantic sailings at an early stage of Spain's overseas expansion, this was not simply the result of bureaucratic machinations or human caprice. If sailings had taken place instead from Spain's northern coast, sailing times would have been 20 per cent longer, and the voyage would have cost 25 per cent more.128 The Andalusian monopoly would in time become the object of bitter criticism, but it is a reflection of these unpalatable logistical facts that when in 1529 sailings to the Indies were authorized for a whole string of ports, ranging from Bilbao in the north to Cartagena on the east coast of Spain, little use seems to have been made of the authorization, which became a dead letter long before it was formally revoked in 1573.129

There was therefore a geographical logic to the early selection of Seville as the organizing centre for Spain's Atlantic trade, with the creation in 1503 of the Casa de la Contratacion - the House of Trade - to supervise sailings to the Indies. As an inland port Seville had serious shortcomings, which would become increasingly apparent as the Guadalquivir silted up and river navigation grew hazardous. Yet as a city in the royal domain in an Andalusia pocketed with large seigneurial enclaves, and as the busy metropolis of a rich agricultural hinterland well capable of provisioning the Indies fleets, Seville's case for selection was overwhelming, on both political and economic grounds.

In founding the Casa de la Contratacion Ferdinand and Isabella had in their minds the example of the Casa da India in Lisbon, with which the Portuguese crown sought to regulate and control Portugal's lucrative Asian trade. In the circumstances of the early sixteenth century such a regulatory approach appeared entirely logical, on grounds both of national security and narrower state interests. The secrets of transatlantic navigation had to be guarded, and foreigners excluded from trade with, and emigration to, the Indies, if Castile's new overseas possessions were not to fall into the hands of its rivals and the fruits of its enterprise be lost. After its long struggle to uphold its own prerogatives at home the crown was also extremely anxious that its authority, and with it the possibility of potentially great financial benefits, should not be unnecessarily jeopardized by allowing uncontrolled access of its own subjects to its transatlantic possessions. Those benefits soon became apparent. As increasing quantities of American gold and silver began to be shipped home, there was clearly an unanswerable case for channelling shipments from the Indies through a single port of entry where bullion could be properly registered and the remittances for the crown be set aside under lock and key.

Seville's monopoly, therefore, born of logic and convenience, and responding well to the political and international needs of the early sixteenth century, was very quickly reinforced by the security requirements of a transatlantic trade in which silver was so overwhelmingly the most valuable commodity shipped back from the Indies. These same requirements, too, came to determine the distinctive structure of the Indies trade - the Carrera de Indias - as it developed over the course of the sixteenth century. To counter the growing threat from privateers, armed escorts had to be provided. Isolated sailings were too expensive to protect and too vulnerable to attack, and an incipient convoy system attained its definitive form in 1564 when two separate fleets were organized - the flota, leaving in April or May for Vera Cruz in New Spain, and the galeones sailing in August for the isthmus of Panama, with the combined fleets returning to Spain the following autumn, after meeting up in Havana. This would become the annual pattern for Spanish transatlantic crossings.

Unless periodically pruned back, however, monopolies tend to grow. In 1543 the merchants of Seville were incorporated into a Consulado, or Merchant Guild, which came to exercise a growing dominance over the Indies trade as the century progressed. By the end of the century the trade was enveloped in a closely meshed web of commercial and financial interests linking a dominant group of merchants in the Consulado with royal bankers, officials of the Casa de la Contratacion, and ministers and officials of the Council of the Indies. These various interest groups, enjoying the support of the municipal authorities of Seville, would fight tenaciously to preserve the monopoly, and resist any initiative that might threaten to subvert it.13o

While the perpetuation of the monopoly introduced rigidities that would make it difficult for the Spanish transatlantic system to adapt to the evolving requirements of the colonial societies, the Sevillian mercantile-financial complex never possessed a complete stranglehold over the colonial trade. Foreign merchants, beginning with the Genoese, found innumerable ways of infiltrating the system; smuggling and contraband became endemic; and the slave trade, even if channelled through Seville, was in the hands of Portuguese merchants, who had their own separate networks, and exploited the system for their own private ends.131 Members of Sevillian mercantile families, like the Almonte,132 moving to and fro between Spain and America, would share business with local merchants in New Spain, Panama or Peru. By the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries this new breed of American merchants was becoming rich and powerful enough for its members to act as independent participants in the Spanish Atlantic trading system, and influence Seville in their turn.133

The business houses of Seville were anyhow overstretched, and large areas of commercial activity in the New World lay beyond their reach. While European imports into the Americas fell within Seville's monopoly and had to be consumed in the province to which they were consigned, there was, as a rule, no restriction on inter-regional trades in colonial produce. Venezuela, for instance, enjoyed a lively trade with neighbouring regions, and from the 1620s was exporting large consignments of cacao to Mexico.134 Throughout the sixteenth century there was also an unrestricted trade between the Pacific coast ports of New Spain and Peru. This was finally ended by the crown in 1631, in a bid to curb the consequences of a trans-Pacific trade that had developed in the 1570s between the Mexican port of Acapulco and Manila in the Philippines, and was draining off to China large quantities of American silver that had been destined for Seville.13'

The regulation of trade in the name of national interest and through the mechanism of privilege and monopoly rights was a standard weapon in the armoury of Early Modern European states, which operated in an environment where the correlation of bullion, prosperity and power was regarded as axiomatic. Considerations of profit and power were as dominant in the formulation of economic policy in Tudor and Stuart England as they were in that of Habsburg Spain, with mercantile interests looking to the crown to devise strategies for the protection and enhancement of trade, and the crown in turn looking to the merchant community to provide it with a continuous flow of revenue from its overseas activities. It was on the basis of just such a mutual accommodation that Seville acquired and preserved its monopoly, while the crown collected its dues.

Such a tight system of control, however, would have been difficult, if not impossible, to introduce into the trading activities of the English Atlantic world, especially in the early stages of transatlantic colonization. The North Atlantic maritime routes moved to a different rhythm from that of the Spanish Atlantic, and the products shipped home imposed different imperatives. The first routes were navigated high up in northern waters as English, French and Basque fishermen arrived to exploit the international fishing grounds off the Newfoundland coast. The English Atlantic was at its narrowest between the British Isles and Newfoundland, but the inhospitable nature of the country was not conducive to extensive settlement, while the nature of the trade - conducted from English outports in the most perishable of commodities - hardly lent itself to close regula- tion.136 Further north, in the remote and icy region of Hudson Bay, settlement was an even less attractive prospect, but furs, unlike fish, were a staple that lent itself to company exploitation, and in the late seventeenth century, as the trade expanded, were to provide the basis for the lucrative monopoly granted by Charles II to Hudson's Bay Company.

Two main routes existed for trade and communication between the British Isles and the principal colonies of British settlement, running from New England to the Caribbean. The more northerly of the two, cold and foggy, involved a fiveweek westward crossing and a three-week return crossing by way of the Newfoundland Banks. The more southerly route, hot and humid, went by way of Madeira, the Azores and Barbados, eight weeks' sailing time to and from England; but more direct passages, avoiding the need for a West Indies landfall, were sought and found as the tobacco trade with the Chesapeake developed. 117 The variety of routes, leading to a variety of settlements yielding a very diverse range of produce, made it difficult to think in terms of a Spanish-style system of fixed annual sailings in convoy. But, as the staple trades developed, so also did the need to reduce the risks of potentially heavy losses at the hand of pirates or enemy vessels. It was the French wars of the later seventeenth century which forced the English to follow the Spanish example, at least in part. During the years of war, regular sailing dates had to be arranged for the sugar and tobacco fleets, so that they could proceed in armed convoy with protection provided by the state. In determining these dates, the interests of London merchants prevailed over those of the outports.138

To achieve such a Spanish-style level of organization and defence, however, required a combination of circumstance, capacity and commitment which simply did not exist during the first half-century of English overseas settlement. Although Charles I cherished a vision of a well-ordered empire with all its component parts moving in majestic unison,139 the process of overseas colonization during his reign remained obstinately haphazard. While Virginia was transformed in 1625 into a colony under direct royal government, the granting elsewhere of colonial charters to corporate and individual proprietors for the planting of new settlements ruled out the possibility of establishing uniform royal control. Similarly, Charles might announce his intention to take over the tobacco trade,140 but he had no means of enforcing his wishes. The state simply lacked the resources and apparatus to impose firm central direction on overseas trading and colonizing ventures that were characterized by fierce competition between rival interest groups in London and the outports, and an overwhelming urge for shortterm gain at the expense of long-term planning. But the state's failure may well have been the essential precondition for the eventual success of England's overseas enterprise, which depended on the mobilization of the widest possible range of financial and human resources - a mobilization that would have been very difficult to achieve through royal directives. The very inability of Charles's government to impose such directives left room for the free play of enterprise. This in turn made it possible to experiment with differing forms of `improvement' in settlements that resembled each other only in the absence of the three elements - precious metals, an adequate supply of local labour, and immediately accessible staple commodities of uncontested importance to the national economy - of which one at least was commonly regarded by mercantilist thinkers as essential for their long-term survival.

Although publicists made the case for English overseas colonization in terms of draining off surplus population and opening new markets for home manufactures, the apparent inability of the settlements to produce local commodities that would complement the weaknesses of the home economy made it difficult to devise a coherent economic strategy for them along sound mercantilist lines. One or two tropical islands and a scattering of coastal settlements offering what seemed very limited possibilities of advantage to the mother country hardly looked like the foundations of a British empire in America comparable in value to that of Spain. By the middle years of the seventeenth century, however, Barbados sugar and Virginia tobacco were beginning to suggest that these remote American outposts might after all be turned to good account. Yet Cromwell's Western Design of 1655, with Hispaniola as its target, testified to the continuing hold exercised over the English imagination by the Spanish silver empire.

While the Western Design proved a disappointment for which the acquisition of Jamaica appeared to offer little by way of compensation, it was at once a testimony to recent achievements and a portent of things to come. This was the first time that the British state had organized a transatlantic military operation in pursuit of imperial interests.141 As such, it was evidence both of the resurgence of state power under Cromwellian rule, and of a new determination on the part of the state to use that power for the promotion of economic as well as strategic ends. The Western Design can be seen as part of a larger national design, in which the state sought to realize the nation's potential, and that of its overseas settlements, in order to maximize power in its great international struggle against England's rivals - the Spanish, the French and the Dutch.

The construction of a powerful navy after 1649 was critical to the success of this grand design, as also was the Navigation Act of 1651, which was equally intended to strengthen the nation's power at sea.142 The unexpected success of the English fleet in the first Anglo-Dutch war of 1652-4 demonstrated beyond a doubt that England now possessed a formidable capacity for maritime and colonial expansion.141 It would be for the restored monarchy of Charles II, in the years after 1660, to build on the foundations laid by the Republic by introducing its own Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, and setting up in 1660 a Council for Trade and Plantations.