Economies of Ransom: The Many Captivities and Rescates of Francisco García, ca. 1655–1682

Casey Schmitt

doi:10.1017/ahss.2026.10194

Economies of Ransom

The Many Captivities and Rescates of Francisco García, ca. 1655–1682

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2026

Casey Schmitt

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Casey Schmitt*: Affiliation:
Cornell University
*: cs2437@cornell.edu

Article contents

Abstract
Mediterranean Captivity
The Caribbean Economy of Ransom
Rescate and the Pacific
Redemption in the Caribbean
Footnotes
References

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Abstract

Over the course of his maritime career, Francisco García experienced multiple forms of captivity and redemption in North Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. This article analyzes the testimony that García delivered in 1682 before royal officials in Cartagena de Indias. Crucially, in that testimony García used the word rescate to describe not just his redemption in Algiers, but also the interimperial slave trade where he found employment in the Caribbean, the ransoming of Afro-descended captives in Jamaica, and the English raiding and smuggling that he witnessed as a captive of the English pirate Bartholomew Sharp in the Pacific. Rescate, which translates from Spanish as either ransom or redemption, served as a flexible, polysemic term to describe the various contexts in which captivity and cross-confessional trade intersected during García’s life. Those multiple forms of captivity and redemption, however, are not normally discussed together. This essay traces the similarities, differences, and entanglements between the multiple forms of rescate described by García. Through the lens of rescate, this microhistorical analysis of García’s maritime career shows how Mediterranean maritime practices permeated the Caribbean and how those same practices refracted in a Caribbean world shaped by racialized slavery.

Au cours de sa vie de marin, Francisco García fit l’expérience de multiples formes de captivité et de rachat en Afrique du Nord, dans les Caraïbes ainsi que dans le Pacifique. Cet article analyse le témoignage qu’il livra en 1682 devant les officiers royaux de Carthagène des Indes. García y emploie le terme rescate non seulement pour désigner son rachat à Alger, mais aussi les formes de traite interimpériale des esclaves aux Caraïbes, le rachat de captifs d’origine africaine en Jamaïque, ainsi que les actes de piraterie et de contrebande anglaises dont il fut le témoin alors qu’il était prisonnier du pirate anglais Bartholomew Sharp dans le Pacifique. Le terme rescate, que l’on peut traduire de l’espagnol par « rançon » ou « rachat », fonctionnait comme une catégorie souple et polysémique permettant de désigner les différents contextes dans lesquels captivité et échanges interconfessionnels s’imbriquaient au cours de la vie de García. Pourtant, ces multiples formes de captivité et de rachat sont rarement envisagées ensemble. Cet article s’attache à retracer les similitudes, les différences et les intrications entre les diverses formes de rescate décrites par García. À travers cette notion de rescate, l’analyse microhistorique d’une carrière de marin montre comment certaines pratiques méditerranéennes purent pénétrer l’espace caribéen et comment elles furent recomposées dans un monde structuré par l’esclavage racialisé

Information

Type: Itinerary of a Captive
Information: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , June 2026 , pp. e167 - e190

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/ahss.2026.10194 [Opens in a new window]
Creative Commons: This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press or the rights holder must be obtained prior to any commercial use.
Copyright: © The Authors, 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Les Éditions de l’EHESS

Standing before Spanish royal officials on April 24, 1682, a Basque mariner named Francisco García gave an account of his recent captivity at the hands of the English pirate Bartholomew Sharp. His first audience was with the governor of Santa Marta in what is now Colombia, who immediately sent García to Cartagena de Indias to repeat his account for the general of the Spanish Flota, the Marqués de Brenes, on April 28.Footnote ¹ From there, Brenes dispatched copies of García’s detailed testimony to the Council of War in Spain, where officials added it to a larger report on the extralegal rampages of Sharp and other so-called South Sea pirates in the waters of the Pacific.Footnote ² García’s account was recorded and preserved, in other words, in the context of an official inquiry into the acts of piracy and violence committed by Sharp’s crew. The report provided crucial information for Spanish imperial planners about the potential vulnerability of Spain’s Pacific territories to future assaults.Footnote ³ Despite the clear political and strategic purpose in recording what García had witnessed, however, the Basque mariner went slightly off script in front of the royal officials in Cartagena. First, without being prompted, García declared that he was a free man, an oblique reference to his experiences of unfreedom among the English over the previous year. Second, rather than begin his account with his capture by Sharp’s crew, García opened his testimony with another abduction that had happened nearly thirty years earlier and an ocean away.

According to his testimony, García had first been taken captive at sea in 1655 by North African corsairs who then sold him into slavery in Algiers. Five years later, the Trinitarians, a Catholic order based in Madrid, financed García’s redemption and transportation back to Spain.Footnote ⁴ After his return to the Iberian Peninsula, García found employment in the transatlantic slave trade, sailing on a ship that transported captive African women, men, and children to Spanish America. Once in the western hemisphere, he signed onto a vessel engaged in the intra-American slave trade, making multiple voyages between Curaçao, Jamaica, Cartagena, and Portobelo in Panama.Footnote ⁵ He subsequently abandoned the slave trade and found employment in the merchant shipping industry operating out of Panama. In the summer of 1681, however, García was again taken captive at sea, this time by Sharp and his crew. According to his testimony, García’s second redemption came when the English crew arrived back in the Caribbean after four months plundering and raiding along the Peruvian and Chilean coasts.Footnote ⁶

Figure 1.

The World of Francisco García, ca. 1680

Source: Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee.

A map depicting the geographic region relevant to Francisco Garcia around 1680, including parts of South America, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa and Europe.

Over twelve manuscript pages when transcribed, García’s lengthy testimony referenced multiple forms of captivity and redemption that had shaped his maritime career. Although the mobile and sometimes coerced nature of his maritime employment would not have been that unusual among early modern sailors, García’s experiences provide a particularly interesting case study due to the myriad ways in which he described the practice of rescate. In the account that he gave in Cartagena in 1682, García used the word “rescate” to describe not just his redemption in Algiers, but also the interimperial slave trade in the Caribbean, the ransoming of African-descended captives from Spanish America in Jamaica, and the English raiding and smuggling that he witnessed as a captive of Sharp in the Pacific. Rescate, which translates from Spanish as either “ransom” or “redemption,” served García as an adaptable, polysemic term for various economies of ransom in which captivity and cross-confessional trade intersected.Footnote ⁷ A close reading of those contexts—from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and Pacific—reveals surprising and often overlooked parallels across practices of captive-taking, ransoming, and trade in the seventeenth century. At the center of these varying economies of ransom is the way in which captive-taking facilitated cross-confessional trade across political borders.

Despite García’s use of the single term to describe situations across disparate geographies, rescate as a practice tends to be defined differently by scholars of the Mediterranean and those of the Atlantic world. For historians of the Mediterranean, rescate refers to the price paid for the redemption of Christians held captive in North Africa. As captive-taking accelerated in the early modern Mediterranean from the late fifteenth century onwards, a variety of institutions and individuals engaged in efforts to redeem their coreligionists. Scholars have studied rescate and redemption in the Mediterranean world from the vantage point of Catholic orders like the Mercedarians and the Trinitarians, emphasizing the work of mobilizing commercial and political resources for the redemption of captives alongside individual experiences of captivity, redemption, and reintegration back into European society.Footnote ⁸ From an institutional perspective, the redemption of captives, according to Gillian Weiss, served a state-building role through the performance of loyalty and Christianity on the part of the recently redeemed subject.Footnote ⁹ In addition to more specialized institutions, furthermore, merchants and intermediaries played a decisive role in redeeming captives. Daniel Hershenzon has also shown that redemption was not the only business conducted by those representatives of Catholic orders or individual merchants who traversed religious and political divides in the early modern Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁰ Recent scholarship has highlighted how the redemption of captives facilitated trade and communication, creating what Wolfgang Kaiser has called an “economy of ransom” across confessional and political boundaries.Footnote ¹¹ In that economy of ransom, the redemption of captives opened possibilities for other kinds of commerce, linking rescate with trade across the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean.

For historians of the Atlantic world, on the other hand, rescate is defined in numerous ways. Scholars of European imperial and commercial competition in the Atlantic world have used the term to describe extralegal trade between Spanish American residents and non-Iberian, unlicensed merchants. An earlier generation of scholars, such as Irene A. Wright, emphasized that this sense of rescate implied the use of some kind of force, describing the ways in which Spain’s European competitors threatened violence if Spanish American officials refused to permit trade.Footnote ¹² European mariners from England, the United Provinces, and France in particular would essentially ransom people, ships, and even entire towns in order to force Spanish American residents to engage in technically illegal, trans-confessional trade. The threat of violence, however, was not always necessary to induce trade in Spanish America. As authors such as Luis Rafael Burset Flores and Jennifer Wolff have shown, the commercial monopoly held by merchants based in Seville disadvantaged numerous Spanish American communities, who responded by embracing mutually beneficial commercial relations with foreign merchants, a practice that they also referred to as rescate. Rescate in the sense of interimperial trade in the Americas, then, could mean either forced barter through ransom or simply unregulated trade across imperial lines.Footnote ¹³

For scholars of Indigenous slavery in the Americas, rescate has yet another meaning, one with deeper connections to Mediterranean practices of raiding, captivity, and religious redemption. More specifically, historians have shown how Spanish merchants in the Caribbean described the purchase of Indigenous war captives from their Indigenous captors as rescate. Rescate, in this sense, implied salvation or redemption—Indigenous captives were supposedly rescued from violence or so-called idolatry by virtue of having been purchased from Indigenous captors and sold into slavery among Catholics.Footnote ¹⁴ Initially, any cross-cultural bartering between Europeans and Indigenous communities was referred to as rescate. As Molly Warsh argues, however, cross-cultural trade became more coercive as the Spanish sought Indigenous captives for sixteenth-century industries like pearl fishing. As barter turned to raiding, rescate as a form of redemption became a cover for forays carried out against Indigenous communities for the purpose of enslaving captives.Footnote ¹⁵ Legal ambiguity about the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in Spanish America over the sixteenth century reinforced the use of rescate as a justification for enslaving Indigenous captives, as Erin Woodruff Stone has shown.Footnote ¹⁶ At the core of this logic was the concept of so-called “just war,” which provided a legal basis for the enslavement of peoples who resisted Catholicism or who were purchased from non-Catholics.Footnote ¹⁷ As Chloe L. Ireton has demonstrated, rescate was employed as a justification for the enslavement of captives seized by non-Christians in Atlantic Africa as well, especially in illicit or legally ambiguous cases.Footnote ¹⁸

García’s testimony forces a reevaluation of a historiography that tends to analyze Mediterranean and Atlantic economies of ransom either in isolation or through a comparative approach. One scholar has argued, for example, that, compared with the Mediterranean world, the Caribbean lacked “an organized slave and ransom market” for captives in the early modern period.Footnote ¹⁹ García’s experiences, however, show that there was in fact an organized ransom market in 1660s Jamaica and an informal set of practices around ransoming captives in the Pacific in the 1680s, both of which functioned through the logic of rescate. A microhistorical analysis of García’s maritime career based on his testimony thus reveals parallels between different economies of ransom across the seventeenth-century Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds.Footnote ²⁰ By studying practices witnessed or directly experienced by a single mariner, this article shows how rescate drove economies of ransom across oceanic spaces even as racialized slavery in the Americas intersected with older, Mediterranean practices of rescate as redemption. The fact that García used the word rescate to describe various forms of trade, ransoming, and redemption, I argue, underscores his recognition of an essential logic that drove economies of ransom across disparate geographies in the early modern world.

Mediterranean Captivity

Francisco García’s first experience with rescate came in the form of his own redemption, five years after his capture in the waters off Tenerife in 1655. From an early age, García would have understood the vulnerability associated with maritime employment in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, and perhaps he would have considered himself lucky to labor at sea for at least a decade before experiencing captivity himself. In his birth city of San Sebastian, García encountered maritime labor at an early age. The Basque city, hemmed in by medieval walls and backed by the towering Monte Urgell, offered almost no escape from the sea for young boys like García. The combination of batteries, towers, and walls with the lines of warehouses that composed the port in the Bay of Biscay might have imprinted on a young García the intimate entanglements between trade and violence in the early modern world.Footnote ²¹ But he did not have long to dwell on San Sebastian’s defenses. As a young boy, García was shipped out on La Teresa headed for the Canary Islands. His youth would have shaped his experiences since, as a shipboy on the lowest rung of a ship’s hierarchy, he would have taken orders from any of the older crewmembers as they plied waterways haunted by corsairs, privateers, and pirates, all of whom engaged in maritime raiding and captive-taking for profit.Footnote ²² Decades would pass before he returned to his home city.

At the crossroads of Atlantic and Mediterranean trade, the maritime industries of the Canary Islands offered García ample, albeit perilous, opportunities for career advancement. Luck had been on García’s side as a youth laboring in the fisheries and trade networks of the archipelago, even when he signed on to a fishing vessel working the banks off the Atlantic coast of North Africa. Those fisheries drew numerous western European vessels, but that maritime traffic also attracted North African corsairs. By the mid-seventeenth century, the waters between the Canary Islands and the Moroccan coast had become particularly hazardous for European sailors. In response to Spain’s growing maritime traffic with the Americas, Muslim corsairs from Salé or Algiers laid in wait in the Atlantic waters off the Moroccan coast in order to raid Christian shipping.Footnote ²³

Captivity was a constant threat for the men whose maritime labor sustained the Canary Islands. Fish, particularly snapper, fed the crews and passengers on the fleets of ships that used the Canaries as a final port of call before the transatlantic passage between Europe and the Americas. By the mid-seventeenth century, European fishermen of all nationalities spent a month at a time fishing along the Atlantic coast of North Africa, from Agadir in modern-day Morocco to Arguin off the western coast of present-day Mauritania.Footnote ²⁴ All other Canary Island industries depended on the fisheries’ provisioning of passing fleets, because those fleets facilitated the islands’ wine trade and the potentially more lucrative business of smuggling northern European textiles to the Americas.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, sailors and fishermen risked captivity at the hands of North African corsairs in order to sustain the maritime industries that served as the lifeblood of the Canaries. García doubtless understood the danger but, for a young man learning the skills of sailing, the benefits of career advancement outweighed the risks. His gamble paid off as he advanced from laboring in the fisheries to positions in commercial shipping, including at least two transatlantic voyages in his early twenties.Footnote ²⁶

The fisheries, however, were not the only industry that left maritime workers like García vulnerable. Since the sixteenth century, a long history of raiding and trading across confessional boundaries between inhabitants of the Canary Islands and the Maghreb had attracted North African corsairs to isolated coves and inlets across the archipelago.Footnote ²⁷ In 1655, at the age of twenty-eight and with extensive experience as a sailor in his own right, García would be caught at the intersection of just that mixture of trade and violence. That year, he signed onto a coasting voyage between Santa Cruz de Tenerife and La Orotava on the north coast of the island. Lightly populated, Tenerife nonetheless struggled to produce sufficient cereal crops and islanders often turned to smuggling, working with North African merchants to meet local demand.Footnote ²⁸ This informal trade meant that the ports, coves, and inlets of Tenerife were familiar spaces for North African corsairs, and that same knowledge facilitated captive-taking raids on the maritime traffic near the island’s coastal settlements.Footnote ²⁹ This was García’s fate when North African corsairs seized him and his shipmates in the waters between Santa Cruz and La Orotava and transported them to the North African port city of Algiers.

Perhaps from a distance the approach to the bustling port of Algiers reminded García of San Sebastian. If he glimpsed the peaks of the Tell Atlas range, which framed the narrow, crowded streets of the city, he might have thought of Mount Urgull and home. If the resemblance struck him, the illusion would likely have been broken as soon as he and his shipmates were marched to the Badistan, the central suq or marketplace, used for the sale of prizes and captives seized by Algerian corsairs.Footnote ³⁰ While the process of commodification in the suq evoked terror and humiliation for all captives, the racial landscape of captivity and enslavement in Algiers meant different things for different groups. Around the moment that García found himself in captivity, the demographic profile of captives in the city was in the process of shifting from a majority of western Europeans to a predominance of Black people from sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ³¹ The latter were not eligible for redemption and, even if freed, continued to reside in the city in dependent relationships with their former enslavers.Footnote ³² Perpetual bondage was not entirely dependent on race and origins, however. Some western European Christians, too, were sold in the Badistan as “cautivos del almacén,” roughly translated as “captives of the council,” which condemned them to a lifetime of slavery without possibility of redemption.Footnote ³³

Whether García understood the consequences of the decisions made by buyers and sellers in the Badistan is unclear from his testimony delivered nearly thirty years later, but his status and experience put him in a relatively privileged position in the marketplace of Algiers. As a sailor and a Christian, he was sold “de rescate,” or as a captive eligible for redemption. García likely found himself in one of the infamous baños of Algiers, where multiethnic groups of captives were kept under lock and key during the night and marched out to labor in public works during the day.Footnote ³⁴ A captive de rescate had various paths out of Mediterranean captivity: escape, conversion to Islam, self-purchase, or redemption by either of the Catholic orders that specialized in the rescate of European captives. As a skilled sailor—especially one with experience in transatlantic navigation—García would likely have been assigned a redemption price higher than that of a common fisherman, perhaps precluding self-purchase. The same year that García arrived in Algiers, for example, a former fisherman negotiated his own purchase price for 500 pesos while, a few decades later, the redemption price for a skilled navigator was as high as 3,000 pesos.Footnote ³⁵ García may have hid his experience and skills from the acquisitive appraisal of buyers in the suq, a common practice among sailors and wealthy captives who sought to keep their redemption prices low.Footnote ³⁶ After all, the inability to come up with the funds for self-purchase extended one’s North African captivity. While the Mercedarian and Trinitarian orders collected alms throughout Europe and the Americas to pay for the redemption of captives, for men of humble means and strong backs, permanent servile labor or conversion to Islam were very real outcomes of Mediterranean captivity.Footnote ³⁷

Fortunately for García, profiting off the perpetual labor of servile captives was not the sole logic that drove the captive economy of the Mediterranean.Footnote ³⁸ Purchasers of captives in North Africa, from the pasha of Algiers to wealthy residents in the city, anticipated reaping financial rewards from the price of redemption rather than through the productive capacity of their bondspeople. Five years after García’s initial captivity, the Trinitarians negotiated his purchase along with 367 others.Footnote ³⁹ Tales of the physical deprivations and spiritual dangers confronted by their coreligionists in North Africa convinced Catholics throughout Europe and the Americas to give alms for the redemption of captives, especially if those held in bondage were members of their community. This generosity, however, only went so far. Upon returning to Madrid, García was given new clothing and a document called a carta de franqueza, which functioned like a passport and granted former captives six months’ grace to find employment. For men like García, failure to find suitable employment within that time would end in vagrancy charges and the risk of being sentenced to row in the royal galleys.Footnote ⁴⁰

As a sailor, however, the rise in maritime traffic throughout the Atlantic world in the 1660s meant that García was at no risk of being charged as a vagrant. His redemption in North Africa in fact intersected with the booming Atlantic economy in which he would soon be employed. Purchasing the redemption of captives involved a considerable amount of negotiation, with a chance of subterfuge on both sides. To facilitate smoother negotiations and safe passage back to European ports, Trinitarian and Mercedarian friars often used American-produced goods to bribe officials and merchants in North Africa. Goods produced in the Americas by enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, such as tobacco, cacao, cochineal, and pearls, in other words, facilitated the redemption of Christian captives in North Africa.Footnote ⁴¹ Commodity and labor markets across the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds thereby entangled through the acts of rescate that ended in the redemption of captives like García.Footnote ⁴² As a sailor who labored on vessels transporting American products to Europe and in the fisheries that provisioned the fleets that crossed the Atlantic, García’s experiences with Mediterranean captivity embody the permeability of these oceanic worlds in the seventeenth century. And, although race intersected with the experiences of captives in North Africa, it did not serve as the sole determinant in whether or not a captive experienced a lifetime of bondage. The similarities and differences between Mediterranean captive slavery and the institution of racialized slavery in the Americas might well have become more apparent to García as he entered his next employment in the intra-Caribbean slave trade.

The Caribbean Economy of Ransom

Following his redemption from Mediterranean captivity, García signed on as a sailor in the intra-Caribbean slave trade.Footnote ⁴³ Despite putting an ocean between himself and his previous experience of captivity, García encountered an economy of ransom in the Caribbean that refracted Mediterranean practices of rescate through the prism of racialized slavery. García’s employers in the Caribbean were the new holders of the asiento de negros, a monopoly contract by which the Spanish crown permitted them to sell enslaved Africans to Spanish America. The new asiento held by Genoese merchants Domingo Grillo (Domenico Grillo) and Ambrosio Lomelín (Ambrogio Lomellino) between 1663 and 1674 brought dramatic changes to the slave trade to Spanish America. Rather than purchase enslaved people from factories along coastal West or West Central Africa, Grillo and Lomelín received permission to subcontract the transatlantic trade to any nation at peace with Spain. Agents employed by the two merchants purchased enslaved women, men, and children on English and Dutch islands in the Caribbean and transported those captive people for sale into slavery in specific Spanish American ports.Footnote ⁴⁴ The new asiento, in other words, permitted interimperial trade between European competitors and spurred a dramatic increase in the intra-Caribbean slave trade. The work of conducting the trade in enslaved Africans from regional entrepôts like Jamaica, Curaçao, or Barbados to Spanish American ports fell to sailors like García.

Over the course of his Caribbean employment, García witnessed two different kinds of rescate. The first was the legal purchase of enslaved Africans from English and Dutch entrepôts in the Caribbean, transactions that Spanish ship captains and asiento factors referred to as rescate. In this sense, Spanish merchants involved in the asiento viewed the purchase of enslaved African women, men, and children from Protestant enslavers and their sale in Spanish America as a kind of redemption. Enslaved Africans, from this perspective, were “redeemed” from so-called heretics into a lifetime of bondage as Catholics.Footnote ⁴⁵ García participated in three intra-Caribbean slave trading voyages in the early 1660s in which the asiento factors involved in negotiating the purchase of enslaved people from English and Dutch merchants referred to the transaction as rescate.Footnote ⁴⁶

The second iteration of Caribbean rescate that García witnessed echoed the kinds of violent maritime predation, captive-taking, and ransoming that he had experienced in North Africa. When García arrived in the Caribbean, northern European ship captains and crews had decades of experience raiding Iberian shipping and Spanish American coastal communities for captives of African and Indigenous descent. Those captives found themselves trafficked by their captors into slavery in nascent English and French colonies or sold in smaller, commercially underserved Spanish American ports, often regardless of their legal status prior to captivity.Footnote ⁴⁷ Following the English invasion in 1655, the Caribbean island of Jamaica emerged as a regular market for the sale of African- and Indigenous-descended captives seized in this way. But when peace negotiations between England and Spain started in the 1660s, Spanish Caribbean residents demanded the restitution of captives held in English Jamaica. The asiento trade created a mechanism for the redemption and restitution of those captives, as agents employed in the intra-Caribbean slave trade negotiated ransoms for people from Spanish America held captive in Jamaica.

As García witnessed during his employment in the intra-Caribbean slave trade, Spanish American residents paid the factors involved in the asiento trade to ransom captives of African descent, both enslaved and free before their captivity, from the English.Footnote ⁴⁸ This Caribbean economy of ransom, in other words, functioned alongside the trans-imperial asiento trade in enslaved Africans. Crucially, asiento factors, ship captains, and Spanish Caribbean officials used the word rescate to describe both the payment itself and the process of purchasing Spanish Caribbean captives from English Jamaica. For García, the parallels between the Mediterranean economy of ransom from which he had been redeemed only a few years earlier and the Caribbean economy of ransom in which he found himself laboring in the early 1660s would have been eerily familiar.

Needing to secure employment following his redemption, García took advantage of the opportunities that this rapidly expanding trade brought to a man of his skill and experience. From Madrid, he returned to San Sebastian, where he joined the crew of one of two asiento ships headed to the Caribbean. As a shipbuilding, fishing, and whaling hub, it is not surprising that merchants involved in the asiento trade advertised for sailors in San Sebastian, especially with the rapidly expanding demand for maritime labor.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1664, García embarked on the Santa Cruz, which sailed for the Americas alongside the San Fortunato, each ship loaded with trade goods and specie for the purchase of enslaved Africans from Dutch and English intermediaries.Footnote ⁵⁰

The opening of the intra-Caribbean slave trade to regional entrepôts increased maritime traffic to places like Curaçao and Jamaica. Prior to the Grillo and Lomelín asiento, for example, Curaçao’s involvement in slave trading networks was sporadic at best. Between 1634 and 1650, not a single transatlantic slave ship sailing from Atlantic Africa listed Curaçao as its destination. Between 1660 and 1670, by contrast, sixty-one documented voyages brought 16,617 African women, men, and children to Curaçao alone.Footnote ⁵¹

The rapid growth of transatlantic and intra-Caribbean trade to places like Curaçao brought opportunity and peril in equal measure for sailors like García. The dangers involved in the forced transportation of enslaved Africans, including shipwreck, disease, hunger, and violence, were notorious for everyone involved.Footnote ⁵² Nor were those the only risks of laboring in this repugnant trade. The increased maritime traffic to regional entrepôts like Jamaica or Curaçao made the waters of the Caribbean popular hunting grounds for ship captains and sailors who made their living through plunder. According to the governor of Curaçao, Matthias Beck, the English and others had an “envy for these places and the incipient trade,” which made the waterways surrounding Curaçao increasingly dangerous in the years leading up to the 1660s.Footnote ⁵³ Much as García had experienced in the waters between Tenerife and North Africa, commercial maritime traffic made busy sea-lanes popular with human traffickers in the Caribbean. In both spaces, a thriving slave and ransom economy drove maritime predation.

Having traversed the Atlantic before his captivity in Algiers, García would have understood the dangers of his new employment. Perhaps he had heard stories of horrific voyages during his time in various ports of the Atlantic world.Footnote ⁵⁴ Once in Caribbean waters, the Santa Cruz and its sister ship, the San Fortunato, purchased enslaved Africans at both Curaçao and Jamaica, making several voyages between those entrepôts and major Spanish American markets at Portobelo and Cartagena de Indias. Although they involved smaller ships with fewer captives chained below decks, these “final passages” sometimes rivaled the Middle Passage in terms of length and suffering for individuals trafficked in this way.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nor did the smaller scale of intra-American voyages mitigate the potential peril for sailors like García. If anything, these lighter ships became easier prey for maritime marauders between Caribbean ports. Individual clashes at sea were the violent manifestations of wider commercial competition sparked by the increased traffic in human captives throughout the Caribbean during the 1660s.

García labored on the Santa Cruz in the context of these dangers.Footnote ⁵⁶ For enslaved captives and the sailors employed on the ships forcibly transporting them, maritime predation proved a constant threat. In 1664, for example, English traffickers attacked an asiento ship, much like García’s Santa Cruz, that had been transporting eleven enslaved Africans to Havana. During the battle between the English and the asiento ship, the latter caught fire. As the crew fled the burning vessel, they saved only four young boys from among the eleven enslaved Africans onboard. Self-preservation and profit drove the decision of the slave ship crew to save some—young boys less capable of rebellion in the midst of the violence—but not all of the captives. Abandoned on a burning ship, the seven West African adults extinguished the flames before the ship’s store of powder caught fire. Their heroics saved their lives, but as soon as the fire subsided, they found themselves captives of the English, who trafficked them into slavery in Jamaica. Grisly tales like this one circulated throughout the Caribbean. As the governor of Santiago de Cuba explained, “in these parts of the Indies the peace is not kept because everyone robs everyone they encounter at sea or tries to rob them.”Footnote ⁵⁷

García did not experience any violent encounters as a sailor on the Santa Cruz, but he would have been well aware of the captive economy that drove maritime predation in the Caribbean. Asiento ships spent considerable periods of time anchored at regional entrepôts as factors negotiated the purchase of enslaved Africans.Footnote ⁵⁸ During those extended anchorages, captains and crewmembers encountered African-descended, Spanish-speaking people laboring as slaves, including in English Port Royal.Footnote ⁵⁹ Some of those individuals might have taken the opportunity to tell sailors about their violent abduction and sale into Jamaica’s captive economy. In this sense, English Jamaica’s participation in the asiento trade brought a chance of redemption for some Spanish American captives. That redemption depended on getting word, via returning sailors, to their former enslavers and community members, who mobilized ransom payments on their behalf. The functioning of this informal economy of ransom, in turn, depended on the asiento factors employed in the intra-Caribbean slave trade, who used the official business of the asiento to engage in the ransoming of captives.

The successive voyages of the Santa Cruz and the San Fortunato can help illuminate the intersection of the interimperial, intra-Caribbean slave trade and the informal economy of ransom that developed in Jamaica during the 1660s. When the two ships first anchored at Port Royal in the summer of 1665, the man employed as the factor on the ships, Francesco Maria Compiano, negotiated the purchase of 811 enslaved women, men, and children.Footnote ⁶⁰ Those individuals, who had survived the Middle Passage from West and West Central Africa, now found themselves forced into the holds of the Santa Cruz and San Fortunato for another maritime voyage, this time into slavery in Portobelo.Footnote ⁶¹ Compiano purchased all 811 enslaved people on credit from the English governor of Jamaica, Thomas Modyford.Footnote ⁶² During the four months that they spent anchored at Port Royal, Compiano and the crew encountered a number of African-descended individuals taken captive from throughout Spanish America and sold into slavery in English Jamaica.Footnote ⁶³ Despite collecting details about their circumstances and connections, Compiano chose not to arrange for the redemption of those African-descended captives on that first voyage to Jamaica. Rather, once the purchase and loading of the enslaved West and West Central Africans was completed, he sailed for Portobelo where he sold the enslaved Africans. He also set to work mobilizing ransom payments for the African-descended, Spanish American captives he had encountered in English Jamaica.

In their role connecting the slave market of English Jamaica with neighboring Spanish American ports like Cartagena and Portobelo, asiento factors, ship captains, and crews conveyed information about captives across confessional and political boundaries. On their arrival from Jamaica, for example, the Santa Cruz and San Fortunato brought news to one Pedro de Aredondo of a man named Francisco, whom he had formerly held as a slave. While laboring on the fortifications of Portobelo, Francisco had been taken captive by English traffickers and sold into slavery in Port Royal. When Aredondo learned of Francisco’s fate, he asked Compiano to redeem him for 120 pesos, a transaction that he referred to as rescate.Footnote ⁶⁴

Francisco’s was not an isolated case. His experience of redemption by a previous enslaver was shared, for example, by three sisters named Antonia, Catalina, and Francisca, who had also been taken captive several years earlier when the English raided Santiago de Cuba.Footnote ⁶⁵ All three women had been sold into slavery in Port Royal and each had borne children during their time among the English; Antonia and Catalina each had three small children when Compiano met them in 1665, while Francisca was nursing an infant. Juliana, an African-descended woman who had been taken captive during an English raid on a ship transporting her from Cartagena to Cuba, had also borne an infant. On learning of her fate, her enslaver, Ignacio Ramos, requested that Compiano redeem both mother and child. Not all of the captives Compiano encountered on this voyage had been enslaved before their captivity, however. Juan from Cartagena de Indias, for example, was laboring as a free man on a frigate captained by Marcos Marin when it was attacked by English traffickers who carried him back to Port Royal.Footnote ⁶⁶ But all of the captives for whom Compiano organized redemption payments were of African descent and labored in unfreedom in English Jamaica.

The Santa Cruz and the San Fortunato returned to Jamaica in late 1665 with over 36,000 pesos. Most of the money onboard was intended to pay off the credit extended to Compiano by Modyford on their first voyage, but the asiento factor allocated nearly 2,000 pesos for the redemption of captives.Footnote ⁶⁷ In this sense, Compiano occupied a role similar to merchants engaged in both commerce and the redemption of captives in the Mediterranean world. His engagement in rescate in Jamaica was motivated by both fiscal and religious concerns. As he testified to officials in Cartagena de Indias, Compiano redeemed the captives, “out of piety and to remove them from slavery among heretics.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, he admitted that the former enslavers of Francisco, Antonia, Catalina, Francisca, and Juliana, all paid him a fee for his efforts. The only member of the redeemed group of captives who had been free before his captivity by English traffickers, Juan, was required to pay back the 107 pesos that Compiano spent on his redemption from slavery.Footnote ⁶⁹

The presence of the Santa Cruz and the San Fortunato in Port Royal offered these captives—some of whom had spent years enslaved by the English—a chance to return to their communities of belonging, even if their redemption by their former enslavers kept them in a condition of bondage. At the same time, removal from Jamaica undoubtedly severed recently formed family and community ties, especially for the women and children redeemed by Compiano. Their feelings about their redemption back into slavery cannot be known. The archival documents that provide a glimpse of the experiences of Juliana, Francisco, Antonia, Catalina, Francisca, or Juan were produced by port officials in Cartagena de Indias in the context of the fiscal reporting for the asiento trade and to account for the money used to pay for their redemption.Footnote ⁷⁰ Those officials recorded nothing about how the African-descended captives felt about their redemption at the hands of Compiano or what they left behind in Jamaica. Laboring on the Santa Cruz as Compiano negotiated the ransoming of captives from Protestant enslavers, García might have seen a refracted image of himself in the experiences of Juan or Francisco. Whether or not he had any empathy for the African-descended captives redeemed by Compiano, he undoubtedly would have recognized the parallels in the Mediterranean and Caribbean economies of ransom that he experienced.

Between the English capture of Jamaica in 1661 and Spain’s recognition of that possession in the 1670 Treaty of Madrid, nearly a decade of trafficking captives from Spanish America into slavery in English Jamaica created an economy of ransom in the Caribbean with striking similarities to its counterpart in the Mediterranean. As in the Mediterranean world, captive-taking created networks of ransoming that entangled trade and redemption in the Caribbean. And, as in the Mediterranean world, rescate in this case served as a method of redeeming coreligionists out of slavery among so-called heretics. These similarities would not have been lost on García, but the Basque mariner would have also noted the clear difference between the two economies of ransom. All of the captives redeemed by Compiano were of African descent, and almost all of them were redeemed by their enslavers in order to return to bondage. Racialized slavery drove the captive economy in Jamaica, shaping who was vulnerable to captivity and who paid for their redemption in the wider Caribbean. Racialized slavery and the intra-Caribbean slave trade shaped possibilities for redemption, too, as asiento factors like Compiano facilitated ransom payments between Spanish American communities and Jamaican enslavers. As García would discover nearly twenty years later, racialized vulnerability would play a role in a very different kind of captive economy in the Pacific world nearly two decades later.

Rescate and the Pacific

García abandoned the Caribbean trade after the Santa Cruz’s voyage of redemption in 1665–1666 and, as he took work on a merchant vessel out of Portobelo, he might have hoped that he had left behind those worlds of vulnerability, violence, and captivity.Footnote ⁷¹ And in some ways, he had. By 1680, García had experienced tremendous professional growth, going from sailor to boatswain to shipmaster while plying the waters of the Pacific between Panama and Peru. At fifty-four years old, García had every reason to believe that he would spend his remaining days in the relatively peaceful employment of merchant shipping on the edges of the so-called Spanish Lake. In July of 1681, he signed onto a merchant ship called the Rosario María as boatswain for a routine voyage between Callao and Paita, in modern-day Peru. At Paita, however, troubling news of piracy in Panama reached the captain of the Rosario María, a man named Juan Lopez. Earlier that year, a company of Englishmen had raided Portobelo and crossed the Isthmus of Panama to arrive at the Pacific. Now the president of Panama had sent warning to Paita that those same men had seized a ship and were raiding along the Pacific coastline of the Viceroyalty of Peru.Footnote ⁷² After two days weighing his options at Paita, Lopez made the fateful decision to continue the voyage north to Panama despite the president’s warning.

The decision put the Rosario María directly in the path of the English pirate Sharp and his company. On August 9, only five days after the ship had left Paita, the English “warmed [the] Decks” of the Rosario María with the armaments from their stolen vessel.Footnote ⁷³ According to García, only Captain Lopez was able to get off a shot in defense of the ship before a ball from an English arquebus killed him. No sooner had he collapsed on the deck than the rest of the crew surrendered. For García, this moment of violence might have brought back memories of being taken captive in the waters between Santa Cruz de Tenerife and La Orotava decades earlier. Unlike his previous experience, however, García found himself isolated from most of the crew of the Rosario María. Sharp and his crew sailed the captured ship to an isolated anchorage along the Peruvian coast where they searched the hold and transferred the goods from their first stolen vessel onto the sturdier Rosario María. They left the other ship scuttled on the shore along with the majority of the surviving crew of the Rosario María. But they kept García and six others: four of whom were of African descent, one Indigenous, and another described by García as “a mestizo Christian.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Sharp kept García because of his navigational skills, while the rest of the racially stigmatized captives would have been seen as a source of income for the English. Sharp and his company, after all, had already profited from trafficking African-descended captives. After crossing the Isthmus of Panama following their raids on Portobelo earlier that summer, the English marauders had seized a number of ships in the harbor at Panama. When the president of Panama refused to pay a rescate for the ships—here meaning a ransom in exchange for the safe return of the vessels—Sharp and his company set at least three of them on fire, but not before stripping them of anything of value, including the cordage, armaments, anchors, sails, wine, flour, fabrics, iron, and silver. The English also took as captives any sailors of African descent who had been working on the ships.Footnote ⁷⁵ Some might have been enslaved sailors employed in the maritime industries of Panama by someone who claimed ownership over them and pocketed their wages, while others might have been considered legally free before their captivity.Footnote ⁷⁶ For Sharp and his company, however, those African-descended captives all became another potential source of profit.

A source of profit, but only if they could be sold for ready money. On the Pacific shore of Panama, Sharp and his company were too far away from the Caribbean markets long accustomed to absorbing captive people and pilfered goods. The English crew left Panama’s harbor and anchored at a small island two or three leagues away to take stock of their situation and plan their next move. If they worried about finding a market for the African-descended captives, the appearance of a merchant vessel several days later alleviated those concerns. Unfurling a white flag as they approached, five Spanish men disembarked from the ship to trade with the English crew. For the stolen wine, the Spanish merchants offered silver to line the Englishmen’s pockets and flour for their long voyage back to the Caribbean. Over three separate trips to conduct trade and carry off ill-gotten goods from Sharp and his company, the Spanish merchants also purchased most of the African-descended captives from Panama. In subsequent reports concerning these illicit, cross-confessional exchanges, the purchase of those African-descended captives was called rescate (les rescató).Footnote ⁷⁷

But the connection between this act of rescate and redemption is less clear. The Spanish merchants conducting business with English pirates violated Spanish law. Tellingly, the report about the activities of Sharp and his crew that was delivered to Spain’s Council of War also included a detailed physical description of the leading Spanish merchant.Footnote ⁷⁸ That physical description was recorded to assist in bringing him to justice for engaging in contraband trade with English pirates. And, although the surviving archival documents do not account for the fate of the African-descended captives seized in the harbor in Panama, those Spanish merchants likely trafficked them into slavery. That this commercial exchange was described as rescate underscores the significant blurring between rescate as contraband trade between enemies and rescate as redemption. In ways that echo the experiences of the African-descended captives in Jamaica, the sailors from Panama were redeemed from captivity among Protestants into what was almost certainly a condition of bondage among Catholics. If they had been free before their captivity at the hands of Sharp and his crew, that act of rescate on the part of the Spanish merchants was also one of enslavement. This would not be the first or the last time that rescate as a form of redemption served as a cover for illicit enslavement.

Redemption in the Caribbean

Despite a long career at sea, little could have prepared García for the haphazard and disorderly voyage around Cape Horn under the authority of Sharp and his English company. The scant flour purchased from Spanish merchants outside Panama did not last long into the four-month journey, as the English sailors raided their way down the coastline and toward the cape. With dwindling food and the sea turning to ice around them, Sharp and his company again resorted to captive-taking to save their voyage. Along the southern coast, the English crew captured an Indigenous boy and forced him to guide them to his village. The inhabitants fled before the English arrived and Sharp and his men plundered their homes, taking all of the dried meat that they could find. This small booty did not prevent the crew from eventually slaughtering the dogs they had onboard or from periodically hunting and eating penguins as their ship rounded Cape Horn and sailed back to the Caribbean.Footnote ⁷⁹

The English and their captives, now numbering nearly twenty, first arrived at Barbados in January 1682. Anchored in the wide harbor of Bridgetown, four vessels of the Royal Navy thwarted Sharp’s plans of negotiating with the royal governor, Richard Dutton. Rather than attempt to explain their acts of piracy in the Pacific, Sharp and his crew sailed further north to the smaller island of Antigua. According to subsequent accounts published by Sharp’s crew and reports from Antigua’s governor, Valentine Russell, Sharp anchored at the island and sent a flattering letter and numerous jewels to Russell’s wife. In the popular narratives of Sharp’s exploits that were printed and reprinted in England, this moment takes on a picaresque quality. Sharp seeks to bribe the governor by appealing to an Englishwoman’s vanity but is turned down by Russell, who demands that his wife return the shiny baubles delivered to her from the South Sea.Footnote ⁸⁰ Denied the possibility of bribing their way to freedom, Sharp and his crew disband, with each crewmember taking their share of the loot. Written to entertain and to celebrate the exploits of these plucky heroes—some of whom were taken prisoner and charged with piracy and murder on their return to England—the printed accounts of Sharp’s voyage make no mention of the captives of African and Indigenous descent shackled onboard the ship during this failed bribery attempt.Footnote ⁸¹

Sharp did not need to take advantage of an elite Englishwoman’s desire for beautiful things to trade at Antigua. Instead, the much uglier business of human trafficking brought merchants from the small island to the deck of Sharp’s ship. The day after the English company weighed anchor at St. John’s, a small boat rowed by an enslaved African man carried five English merchants out to Sharp’s vessel. Two days of negotiating, a process that included drinking and dining onboard the ship, ended when the Antiguan merchants purchased not just the goods seized along the Spanish American coastline but also at least ten of the captives of African and Indigenous descent.Footnote ⁸² After surviving violent captivity and a harrowing journey at the bottom of the world, the captives seized by Sharp and his crew found themselves sold into slavery on an island just beginning to take advantage of the sugar plantation complex. It is hard to imagine that the young, unnamed Indigenous boy seized from his canoe along the rugged coastline of the Southern Cone survived long in the relentlessly brutal environment of a tropical sugar plantation.

Not all of the captives were sold into slavery at Antigua, however. As Sharp and his crew divided their spoils, three of the Englishmen from Sharp’s crew claimed African-descended Spanish American captives as so-called loot and carried them back to England, where the fate of the captives became entangled with the Admiralty trial of Sharp and those three crewmembers. Only García and a man of African descent were released. Perhaps their redemption echoed Mediterranean practices of turning renegade in exchange for freedom. García certainly provided Sharp and his crew with information during the South American voyage.Footnote ⁸³ Either way, and not for the first time in his life, García received a passport to return to Spanish society—this time a document from the English governor of Antigua promising him safe transport to Spanish American territory. Forced to travel on merchant vessels, García went first to Jamaica, where he waited for several weeks before finding a spot on a ship headed to the Spanish Main. In his testimony to Spanish officials in Cartagena in April 1682, García would recount his experiences of captivity and redemption, weaving an intricate tale of force and coercion to explain his role in providing information to Sharp and his crew. His full testimony of Sharp’s activities provided the Spanish ambassador in England with enough information to demand that the members of Sharp’s crew be put on trial back in London.Footnote ⁸⁴

In these moments of multiple captivities, Mediterranean versions of captive slavery and ransoming overlapped with Atlantic practices of racialized slavery. That diverse and variegated forms of unfreedom transected the aqueous worlds of the Mediterranean and Caribbean during the mid-seventeenth century is hardly surprising, especially for scholars of global slavery. Unfreedom was, after all, ubiquitous in the early modern world. What, then, should one make of the lived experiences of García as he moved through “seemingly endless and variegated traditions of coerced and unfree forced labor” across oceanic spaces?Footnote ⁸⁵ From a certain angle, his experiences confirm much of what is already known about the regions through which he passed. From his captivity at the hands of North African corsairs to his time with Sharp, García traversed different forms of unfreedom and coercion that have been well studied by scholars. Less obvious and worth sustained attention, however, are the various iterations of the practice of rescate and their intersection with race that become clear through tracing García’s movements and perspective over the course of his career.

Read closely and with a focus on rescate, García’s account of his experiences reveals multiple seventeenth-century economies of ransom. At the center of each were captives whose release underscores how trade, violence, and religion intersected. Rescate, in each case, represented the redemption of captives across confessional boundaries by intermediaries who mobilized resources to pay for their ransom, often in conjunction with other forms of trade. For all of the similarities witnessed by García across the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Pacific, however, those economies of ransom were not mirror images of one another. Vulnerability to captivity and the trajectories of captives after their redemptions were uniquely racialized in each case. As a former captive in North Africa, García would have understood how the Mediterranean economy of ransom democratized the vulnerability to captivity across racial and ethnic backgrounds. The same was not true in the Americas in the second half of the seventeenth century. Nor did the Catholic redemption of African-descended captives from Protestant captors mean an escape from bondage for those individuals.Footnote ⁸⁶ A close analysis of the many captivities and rescates of Francisco García reveals the contours of these multiple economies of ransom across the seventeenth-century world that he traversed both by choice and by coercion.

Footnotes

This article was originally published in French as “Les économies de la rançon. Les multiples captivités et rescates de Francisco García (vers 1655-1682),” Annales HSS 81, no. 2 (2026): 243–267, doi: 10.1017/ahss.2026.10185. It was edited by Chloe Morgan.

I would like to thank Michelle McKinley, Lauren Benton, Brett Rushforth, and Dirk Hartog for organizing the “Freedom Suits and Legal Regimes of Bondage across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Iberian, and Indian Ocean Worlds” symposium and for all of the thoughtful comments and suggestions from Daniel Hershenzon, Mariana Candido, Rômulo Ehalt, Stuart McManus, Adriana Chira, John C. Marquez, Tatiana Seijas, Mariana Dias Paes, Hannah Barker, and Joshua White. I am especially grateful to Guillaume Calafat for his insightful suggestions and careful reading.

References

1. Seville, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter “AGI”), Panamá 96, “Declaración de Francisco García,” Cartagena de Indias, April 24, 1682. For a brief mention of this source, see Peter T. Bradley, The Lure of Peru: Maritime Intrusion into the South Sea, 1598–1701 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 222, note 35.

2. The full report on Bartholomew Sharp’s piracy can be found in AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Piratas en las Costas de Barlovento,” various locations, 1681–1684. For Francisco García’s testimony within this larger inquiry, see AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García sobre noticias de los piratas de la Mar del Sur,” Cartagena, April 28, 1682, fols. 1r–12v. For more on foreign interlopers in the South Sea, which encompassed the waters between Asia and Central and South America, see Tamara J. Walker, “‘They Proved to Be Very Good Sailors’: Slavery and Freedom in the South Sea,” The Americas 78 no. 3 (2021): 439–65, here p. 441.

3. For more on the Spanish and English imperial context surrounding Sharp’s voyage, see Peter Gerhard, Pirates on the West Coast of New Spain, 1575–1742 (California: Arthur H. Clark, 1960): 152–54; Bradley, The Lure of Peru, 103–27; Mark G. Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015): 156–78; Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500–1750, 2^nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016): 124–31. For more on future assaults, see Walker, “‘They Proved to Be Very Good Sailors,’” 439–65.

4. Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter “AHN”), Codices, L. 139, “Libro de la Redención de Cautivos en Argel,” Madrid, 1662–1663, fols. 91r–91v.

5. AGI, Contaduría 264A and 264B, “Autos sobre el asiento de negros con Domingo Grillo,” Madrid, January 9, 1664, and September 11, 1664. The author is extremely grateful to Pablo F. Gómez for sharing this source.

6. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 1r–12v.

7. Ernesto Mercado-Montero, “Indigenous Raiding, Captive Taking, and the Politics of Maritime Violence in the Long Sixteenth-Century Lesser Antilles,” Hispanic American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2025): 1–4, here p. 7.

8. See, for example, Ellen G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); José Antonio Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles: Vida y rescate de los cautivos cristianos en el Mediterráneo musulmán [siglos xvi - xvii ] (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2004); James William Brodman, “Captives or Prisoners: Society and Obligation in Medieval Iberia,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 20 (2011): 201–19; William D. Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Michele Bosco, “‘Con Lágrimas de Nuestros Corazones’: El Rescate de Cautivos en una Redención Mercedaria del Siglo xviii,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV Historia Moderna 33 (2020): 213–44.

9. Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 26.

10. Daniel Hershenzon, “The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Past & Present 231 (May 2016): 61–95.

11. José Antonio Martínez Torres, “El rescate de cautivos crisitanos en el norte de África (siglos xvi-xvii),” Historia Social 49 (2004): 29–48; Wolfgang Kaiser, ed., Le commerce des captifs. Les intermediaries dans l’echange et le rachat des prisonniers en Méditerranée, xv ^e - xviii ^e siècles (Rome: École française de Rome, 2008); Daniel Hershenzon, “‘[P]ara que Me Saque Cabesa por Cabesa…’: Exchanging Muslim and Christian Slaves Across the Western Mediterranean,” African Economic History 42 (2014): 11–36; Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat, “The Economy of Ransoming in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A form of Cross-Cultural Trade Between Southern Europe and the Maghreb (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” in Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900, ed. Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Catia Antunes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108–30; Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Michele Bosco, “‘Con Lágrimas de Nuestros Corazones’”

12. Irene A. Wright, “Rescates: With Special Reference to Cuba, 1599–1610,” Hispanic American Historical Review 3, no. 3 (1920): 333–61.

13. For examples of rescate as informal trade, see Carlos Esteban Deive, Tangomangos: Contrabando y Piratería en Santo Domingo, 1522-1606 (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1996); Antonio García de León, “Economía y vida cotidiana en el Veracruz del siglo xvii, 1585-1707,” Boletín americanista 48 (1998): 29–45; Luis Rafael Burset Flores, “Contra al exclusivismo imperial: El contrabando en el Caribe entre los siglos xvi y xvii,” Clío 87, no. 196 (2018): 27–53; Manuel F. Fernández Chaves, “El contrato de arrendamiento de ‘los tratos de todos los ríos de Guinea y las islas de Buan’ de 1574-1580. Análisis y edición,” in Los Negocios de la esclavitud: Tratantes y mercados de esclavos en el Atlántico Ibérico, siglos xv - xviii , ed. Rafael M. Pérez García, Manuel Francisco Fernández Chaves, and José Luis Belmonte Postigo (Sevilla: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2018): 93–108; Jennifer Wolff, Isla Atlántica Puerto Rico: Circuitos antillanos de contrabando y la formación del Mundo Atlántico, 1580-1636 (Aranjuez: Ediciones Doce Calles, 2022). For an example of rescate as the ransoming of an entire city, see Kris E. Lane, “Corsarios, piratas y la defensa de Cartagena de Indias en el siglo xvi,” in Cartagena de Indias en el siglo xvi , ed. Haroldo Calvo-Stevenson and Adolfo Meisel-Roca (Colombia: Banco de la República, 2009), 98–121; Joseph H. M. Clark, Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 34.

14. Nance E. van Deusen, “Indigenous Freedom Suits, Epistemological Mobilities, and the Deep Archive,” Slavery & Abolition 44, no. 3 (2023): 19–537, here p. 536, note 50. See also John M. Monteiro, Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America trans. and ed. James Woodward and Barbara Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 22–27.

15. Molly A. Warsh, “A Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 4 (2014): 517–48, here p. 523. For more on the earlier history of rescate as cross-cultural trade with Indigenous communities, see Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, “European Material Culture in Indigenous Sites in Northeastern Cuba,” in Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, ed. Corinne L. Hofman and Floris W. M. Keehnen (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 102–23.

16. Erin Stone, “War and Rescate: The Sixteenth-Century Circum-Caribbean Indigenous Slave Trade,” in The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, ed. Ida Altman and David Wheat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 47–68, here p. 49.

17. For more on the legal justifications for slavery, see Jean Allain, Slavery in International Law: Of Human Exploitation and Trafficking (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 9–55. Raiding and captive-taking were not confined to Europeans enslaving or purchasing enslaved Indigenous captives. The Kalinagos of the Lesser Antilles had raided enemy communities for captives before the arrival of Europeans, and it was a practice that they continued by incorporating Spanish Caribbean residents into their networks of raiding and captive-taking. See Mercado-Montero, “Indigenous Raiding, Captive Taking, and the Politics of Maritime Violence,” 10; Casey Schmitt, Chaps. 1 and 2 in The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025); Schmitt, “‘Betwixt Ye Two Rivers’: Trafficking and Colonization in Early Seventeenth-Century Saint Christopher,” Hispanic American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (2023): 283–312.

18. Chloe L. Ireton, “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” Renaissance Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2020): 1277–1319.

19. Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970), 151.

20. This article builds on Lara Putnam’s observations that microhistory, reducing the scale of observation, challenges widely held ideas about larger processes. See Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 615–30. On this approach, see Bertrand, Romain, and Guillaume Calafat, eds. “Micro-analyse et histoire globale.” Thematic Dossier, Annales. HSS 73, no. 1 (2018); Ghobrial, John-Paul, ed. “Global History and Microhistory.” Supplement, Past and Present 242, no. S14 (2019).

21. Patrick O’Flanagan, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c. 1500–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 257.

22. Germán Santana Pérez and Juan Manuel Santana Pérez, La puerta afortunada: Canarias en relaciones hispano-africanas de los siglos xvii y xviii (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2002), 73.

23. Hershenzon, The Captive Sea, 56; José Martínez Crespo, “After Lepanto: Turkish and Barbary Corsairs on the Coasts of Galicia in the Seventeenth Century,” in “Seeing the Turk after Lepanto. Visions of the Ottomans and Islam in Spain and Italy,” ed. Rosa Margarita Cacheda Barreiro and James Nelson Novoa, special issue, Journal of Iberian & Latin American Studies 24, no. 1 (2018): 53–72.

24. Germán Santana Pérez, El comercio exterior de las canarias orientales durante el reinado del Felipe IV (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Ediciones del Cabildo de Gran Canaria, 2002), 113–26.

25. Santana Pérez, El comercio exterior de las canarias, 150 and 202.

26. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 1v–2r.

27. José Antonio Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles: Vida y rescate de los cautivos cristianos en el Mediterráneo musulmán [siglos xvi - xvii ] (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2004), 36; Santana Pérez and Santana Pérez, La puerta afortunada, 23.

28. Santana Pérez and Santana Pérez, La puerta afortunada, 27 and 42–43; Luis Alberto Anaya Hernández, “Repercusiones del corso berberisco en Canarias durante el siglo xvii: cautivos y renegados canarios,” V Coloquio de Historia Canario-Americana (1985), 125–77, here p. 135.

29. Santana Pérez and Santana Pérez, La puerta afortunada, 49; Anaya Hernández, “Repercusiones del corso berberisco,” 130–33.

30. Fatiha Loualich, “Les esclaves noirs à Alger (fin du xviii ^e-début du xix ^e siècle). De l’esclave à l’affranchi, vers une relation d’allégeance,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen-Âge 115, no. 1 (2003): 513–22, here p. 515.

31. Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles, 51.

32. Loualich, “Les esclaves noirs à Alger,” 516–19.

33. José Antonio Martínez Torres, “Europe y el rescate de cautivos en el Mediterráneo durante la temprana Edad Moderna,” Espacio, Tiempo, y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna 18/19 (2005–2006) : 71–85, here p. 76–77.

34. Laboring conditions for captives in Algiers varied considerably. See Ellen G. Friedman, “Christian Captives at ‘Hard Labor’ in Algiers, 16^th–18th^th Centuries,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 13, no. 4 (1980): 616–32. Scholars have argued that whether a person was eligible for ransom impacted their treatment. See Hershenzon, The Captive Sea, 36.

35. Anaya Hernández, “Repercusiones del corso berberisco,” 168 and 146; Hershenzon, The Captive Sea, 20.

36. Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles, 60; Hershenzon, The Captive Sea, 28.

37. Kaiser and Calafat, “The Economy of Ransoming,” 115.

38. Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles, 60–61.

39. AHN, Codices, L. 139, “Libro de la Redención de Cautivos en Argel,” fols. 91r–91v; Martínez Torres, Prisioneros de los infieles, 42–43.

40. Martínez Torres, “Europa y el rescate de cautivos en el Mediterráneo,” 83. Based on an analysis of data regarding the redemption of prisoners of war in the late sixteenth century, Cecilia Tarruell argues that many redeemed soldiers ended up indebted and served wherever they were needed almost immediately after their release. See Tarruell, “Prisoners of War, Captives or Slaves? The Christian Prisoners of Tunis and La Goleta in 1574,” in Micro-Spatial Histories of Global Labour, ed. Christian G. De Vito and Anne Gerritsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 95–122, here p. 110.

41. Martínez Torres, “Europa y el rescate de cautivos en el Mediterráneo,” 82; Irena Turnau, “La bonneterie en Europe, du xvi ^e au xviii ^e siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 26, no. 5 (1971): 1118–32.

42. Nancy E. van Deusen describes the Mediterranean captive economy as having “a global reach” that extended across the Atlantic. See van Deusen, “Indigenous War Captives and Mobility-Oriented Punishments: An Atlantic-Mediterranean World Perspective,” Atlantic Studies 21, no. 3 (2023): 342–71, here p. 346. Van Deusen’s article draws on other scholars who have traced the connections between captivity and labor coercion between the Atlantic and Mediterranean. See, for example Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), chapter 7; Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 223–24; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012): 143–50. For more on entangled commodity chains, see Bethany Aram, “Caribbean Ginger and Atlantic Trade, 1570–1648,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 3 (2015): 410–30.

43. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 1v–2r.

44. Alejandro García-Montón, Genoese Entrepreneurship and the Asiento Slave Trade, 1650–1700 (New York: Routledge, 2021), 2.

45. For another example of this language, see AGI, Indiferente General 2833, “Autos hechos sobre los prisioneros y presas que trajeron a este Puerto las naos del asiento de negros,” Havana, 1667, unfoliated.

46. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fol. 2r.

47. Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, “‘Cannibal Negroes,’ Atlantic Creoles, and the Identity of England’s Charter Generation,” African Diaspora 4, no. 1 (2011): 76–94; Schmitt, The Predatory Sea, chapters 1–4.

48. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 1v–2r; AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato que vino de la isla de Jamaica en Cartagena,” Madrid, February 16, 1666, fols. 2v–3r.

49. For more on the role of Basque ports and maritime communities in the slave trade, see José Antonio Azpiazu, Esclavos y traficantes: Historia ocultas del País Vasco (Donostia: Ttarttalo 1997).

50. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fol. 2r.

51. Slave Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, accessed August 2024 (https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database).

52. Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

53. “Letter from Matthias Beck, August 23, 1659,” in New Netherland Documents: Volume XVII, Curacao Papers, 1640–1665, trans. and ed. Charles T. Gehring and ed. Jacob Aadrian Schiltkamp (Interlaken: Heart of the Lakes Publishing, 1987), 126.

54. When the St. Jan, for instance, was shipwrecked near Curaçao, the survivors were attacked and taken captive by Dutch traffickers. See “Letter from Matthias Beck, September 10, 1659,” in New Netherland Documents, 128–33.

55. Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014): 8–9.

56. García sailed with a captain named Juan Lizardi, who had made two voyages between Curaçao and Portobelo before the voyage to Jamaica discussed in more detail below, both in 1664 and both in a ship called the Santa Cruz. The first voyage (ID #110339, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database) arrived in Portobelo on September 11, 1664, with 627 enslaved people out of the 637 originally embarked. The second voyage (ID #110679) went to Curaçao and Jamaica to purchase captives, then sold them in both Portobelo and Cartagena, where it arrived on January 9, 1664. It sold 502 of the original 510 captives purchased, 146 at Cartagena and 356 at Portobelo. References to this voyage can also be found in AGI Contaduría 264A and 264B.

57. AGI, Indiferente 2832, “Autos hechos por el castellano don Andres de Magaña, Governador de la Ciudad de Santiago de Cuba,” Santiago de Cuba, 1671, fols. 37r–80r.

58. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fol. 3r.

59. April Lee Hatfield, Boundaries of Belonging: English Jamaica and the Spanish Caribbean, 1655–1715 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), chapter 3; Schmitt, The Predatory Sea, chapter 5.

60. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fols. 13r–14r. For more on Compiano, see García-Montón, Genoese Entrepreneurship, 145–47.

61. Compiano likely purchased these individuals off two different ships that had arrived in Jamaica in 1665, one from West Central Africa and the other from Calabar. See voyage ID #9581 and voyage ID #9620, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database.

62. For more on Modyford’s role in the intra-Caribbean slave trade, see Holly Brewer, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” Law and History Review 39, no. 4 (2021): 765–834, here p. 782.

63. The Santa Cruz and San Fortunato spent around four months in Jamaica awaiting the arrival of a transatlantic slave ship in late 1665, for example. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fol. 3r.

64. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fols. 14r–16r.

65. For more on the attack that led to their captivity, see L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 188.

66. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fols. 13r–14r.

67. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fols. 13v–17r.

68. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fol. 16r.

69. AGI, Contaduría 264A, no. 19, “Entrada del Navio San Fortunato,” fols. 16r–17r.

70. For a discussion of the problem of accessing the experiences of the enslaved in the archive, see Stephanie E. Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 117–32, here p. 127–28. For more on archival silences, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Vincent Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History Through the Archives of Slavery,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015): 134–141; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

71. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 1v–2r.

72. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 2v–3r.

73. Philip Ayres et al., eds., The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharpe and Others, in the South Sea […] (London: Printed by B. W. for R. H. and S. T., 1684), 88.

74. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fol. 2v.

75. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Testimonio de Francisco Vvatras [Frank Waters],” San Marcos de Arica, June 21, 1681, fols. 17r–19r.

76. Walker, “‘They Proved to Be Very Good Sailors,’” 441–42.

77. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Testimonio de Francisco Vvatras [Frank Waters],” fol. 18v.

78. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Testimonio de Francisco Vvatras [Frank Waters],” fol. 18r.

79. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 5r–5v.

80. Ayres et al., The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharpe, 114.

81. Printed versions of Sharp’s voyage include Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, Bucaniers of America, or, A True Account of the Most Remarkable Assaults Committed of Late Years upon the Coasts of the West-Indies (London: Printed for William Crooke, 1684–1685); Ayres et al., The Voyages and Adventures of Capt. Barth. Sharpe; William Dampier, New Voyage Round the World (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1699); William Hack, A Collection of Original Voyages (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1699); and Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, ed. L. E. Elliott Joyce (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934). For a discussion of the print culture surrounding his voyage, see Christopher Lloyd, “Bartholomew Sharp, Buccaneer,” The Mariner’s Mirror 42, no. 4 (1956): 291–301.

82. AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 8r–9r.

83. According to his testimony, García warned Sharp and the English not to attack Paita because of the town’s defenses. See AGI, Indiferente General 2578, “Declaración hecha por Francisco García,” fols. 3r–4v.

84. For a full history of the voyage and the fate of the African-descended captives taken back to London, see Schmitt, Plunder: A Maritime Odyssey of Slavery, Captivity, and Justice (forthcoming).

85. Van Deusen, “Indigenous War Captives,” 342–71, here p. 345.

86. Nor would this be unusual. Roman law stated that a redeemed captive returned to their former status. See Kaiser and Calafat, “The Economy of Ransoming,” 110.

Figure 1. The World of Francisco García, ca. 1680Source: Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee.

Article contents

Economies of Ransom

Abstract

Information

Mediterranean Captivity

The Caribbean Economy of Ransom

Rescate and the Pacific

Redemption in the Caribbean

Footnotes

References

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