Seaborne commerce, communication, and transportation to a great extent defined and enabled the Spanish enterprise in the Caribbean from the time Europeans first arrived in the islands. With the exception of a minority of towns such as Concepción de la Vega in Española that were established in the interiors of the islands to provide access to gold mines and the indigenous labor to exploit them, the majority of new towns and cities were located on the coasts. Although Santo Domingo, San Juan, and eventually Havana emerged as the principal ports and administrative capitals of the large islands of the northern Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, many secondary and small port towns played essential roles in the rapid development of systems of local and regional exchange, indigenous slave raiding, and transatlantic commerce that linked the islands to Seville, the Canaries and other islands of the Atlantic and the southern Caribbean. Allowing island residents to take advantage of waterborne transportation often via indigenous-built canoes, linking the islands to one another and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and serving as staging grounds for slave-raiding and other expeditions that radiated out from the islands, these towns helped to forge a diverse and dynamic region that was closely tied both to Spain and later to the developing societies of Spanish America.Footnote 1
This study focuses on the port towns and cities of Española, Cuba, and Puerto Rico (with a glance at Jamaica) to around 1550, emphasizing the ways in which they reflected the distinctive context of the islands and their multiethnic milieus as they participated in an increasingly complex Atlantic system. Very little scholarly attention has been paid to Caribbean ports of the early years, especially the smaller port towns which both participated in the rapid growth of early systems of exchange and transportation and reflected the ambitions and hopes of officials and island residents.Footnote 2 Looking at these ports shows us much about the range of opportunities and possibilities that Europeans perceived in the Caribbean, as well as their understandings of the challenges posed by distance, scarcity, and environmental and human threats for which they sought solutions. The decades considered here were a time of accelerating experimentation fueled not only by novelty, risk, and ambition but also by the rapid demographic and socioeconomic changes that the arrival and establishment of Europeans in the region fostered. The island ports, whether large or small, witnessed, facilitated and reflected these changes and challenges and were integral to the Spaniards’ quest to address and assimilate them and to mitigate their impact.
Beginnings: Española, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica
Most of the port towns of the islands were founded early, within the first decade of European occupation, and underwent a variety of changes—growing, shrinking, relocating, acquiring new names, or even disappearing. Perhaps the best-known example of rapid construction and swift abandonment was Isabela, the first functioning European settlement in the Caribbean, located on the north coast of Española.
When Columbus returned on his second transatlantic voyage to discover the destruction of the fort of Navidad and the deaths of the men he had left behind, he decided to build a new town at the mouth of the Río Bahabonico in January 1494. His choice to found Isabela in an area where the indigenous population was sparse proved not to be the norm for Spanish settlements in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas; Spaniards quickly came to prefer to build their towns in proximity to indigenous communities. Nonetheless, the common assumption that the site of Isabela was not viable no longer seems sustainable; indeed contemporary observers noted the fertility of the land and availability of fish as well as the town's access to rivers and good building materials, advantages that have been borne out by extensive archaeological work at the site.Footnote 3
Columbus initiated an ambitious program of construction at Isabela following a grueling voyage that left many of the people who traveled with him exhausted and weak. He forced nearly all the colonists to participate in the construction of a fortified tower, storehouse, and church, as well as a house for himself, all built of stone. They surrounded the town with earthen walls. The problems that doomed Isabela were as much social and political as they were natural, although the latter certainly played a part. Supplies arrived irregularly, hurricanes (a perennial island scourge, as Europeans soon discovered) destroyed ships, agriculture failed to take hold in the first couple of years, and the local inhabitants fled or died. Suffering from illness and privation, the colonists deeply resented Columbus's harsh rule, and many returned to Spain. More important, however, Isabela's site was impractical in terms of European objectives in the island. It was too far from sources of gold and substantial indigenous communities to function effectively as a center from which to oversee and protect gold mines and control native labor.Footnote 4 By 1496 Columbus's brother Bartolomé had initiated the process of relocating Española's future capital and main port city to the island's southern coast on a large harbor close to rivers, but even the final site of Santo Domingo was the result of trial and error. Following a major hurricane and a plague of ants, the newly arrived royal governor, Frey Nicolás de Ovando, in 1502 ordered Santo Domingo to be moved from the left to the right side of the Ozama River and initiated an intensive building campaign.
In Puerto Rico both the island's towns, which were also its principal ports, changed site because of the extensive conflict with indigenous residents that engulfed the island during the early years of Spanish occupation. After the first Spanish settlement of Caparra burned in 1513, the Europeans built a new capital (today's San Juan) ten miles away on the coast and then moved it again to its present site.Footnote 5 Another town, San Germán, was founded in 1512 on the western end of the island, near another settlement, Sotomayor, named for the man who had received the royal license to settle the southern part of the island and was killed during the first indigenous revolt. With the destruction of Caparra, San Germán emerged as the island's leading settlement and port, but within a decade it had lost considerable ground to its rival in the northeast.
The rise of Havana to preeminence in Cuba took place over a longer period of time. Santiago de Cuba was the island's principal port and capital during most of the years considered here, founded on the southeastern coast as an administrative center by the first governor, Diego Velázquez.Footnote 6 It had access to good agricultural land but, unlike most of Cuba's other towns, it was not close to gold mines.Footnote 7 By the 1530s residents were complaining that maritime traffic had diminished sharply, for which they most often blamed a lack of fortifications and artillery that could protect Santiago and the ships that used its harbor from marauding French corsairs. By the end of the decade the crown apparently had begun to favor Havana, which by then had moved to Cuba's northern coast, over Santiago. Hernando de Soto came to Cuba as its new governor in 1538 with orders to undertake the construction of a fortress at Havana, and only as an apparent afterthought did the crown order that some armaments be sent to Santiago as well.Footnote 8 Although Soto's departure on the expedition to Florida ensured that the construction of the fortress would not be a high priority for his governorship (during most of which his wife, doña Isabel de Bobadilla, acted in his absence), the decision to invest substantial royal funds in fortifications for Havana signaled the transition from Santiago to Havana as Cuba's premier city and port.
Lacking gold, Jamaica had remained a backwater. Spanish residents there decided in 1534 that the town of Sevilla would be better situated on the southern than the northern coast.Footnote 9 Advocates for moving the town argued that its unfavorable site had resulted in the sharp diminution of its small Spanish population from a high of about 80 vecinos (heads of household, citizens) to just 20. The rest, according to treasurer Pedro de Mazuelo, “have died from diseases and pestilences caused by the site of the said pueblo because it is near to the port and between the port and the pueblo there are swamps and marshes.” He went on to explain that the sea breezes would pass over them and carry unhealthful air that was then trapped by the mountains. Mazuelo was a principal proponent of the move, since he wished to build a sugar estate near the site proposed for the new town. He argued that the new town would be healthier and located near fertile land and good ports. The town hoped to secure royal permission to bring 30 married Portuguese men, “farmers and working people,” to settle there.Footnote 10
Early Spanish Caribbean Ports in the Atlantic World
With the exception of Santo Domingo and perhaps San Juan, the early sixteenth-century ports of the Spanish Caribbean were modest places, open to external attack from the French and the Caribs and internal threats from Indians and Africans who escaped or evaded Spanish control and vulnerable to hurricanes and fires. At the same time they lay at the crossroads of rapidly growing transatlantic and Caribbean mercantile networks, served as headquarters for economic enterprises, and quickly became home to diverse populations of Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, moriscos, native islanders, indigenous slaves brought from elsewhere in the region, and Africans, both slave and free, ladino and bozal.Footnote 11
Thus Caribbean ports had a dual character, provincial in their humble appearance, limited development, and lack of wealth and the trappings of European culture, but also part of a much larger context that fostered novel connections and brought together people from all over the Atlantic world. The sheer volume and increasing complexity of commercial activity kept officials like royal accountant Diego Caballero in Santo Domingo constantly busy as he saw to an ever increasing burden of routine work and handled new problems that arose. In a deposition that Caballero prepared in 1534 in which he requested a raise in salary he stated that his duties included not only assessing the value of all merchandise sent to Española and maintaining registries for the ships that arrived and departed from the island (including those headed for “Tierra Firme and other parts and islands near this one”) but also the oversight of the semiannual smelting of gold (when the crown's share was calculated) and the disbursement of salaries to royal officials.Footnote 12 He also pointed out that it was he who paid the minor officials who oversaw mercantile operations in other ports, including places like “the pueblos of La Yaguana and Puerto Real and Puerto de Plata which are 60 and 80 leagues from this city [Santo Domingo] because some ships from Castile come to them and they have people who assess the merchandise and other things that they have in them and he does this ordinarily every day regardless of other specific things that come up.”
Such “other specific things” could include dealing with Portuguese captains and pilots who arrived with slaves and wanted to carry goods and passengers on their return transatlantic voyage but lacked the proper licenses to take them to Spain. In a late 1535 letter to the king Caballero wrote that a ship had arrived at Puerto de Plata on the northern coast from the Cape Verde islands in September, carrying merchandise and 80 African slaves. Also on board was “a married Portuguese who apparently was in those islands because of a certain crime and he brought ten slaves in order to settle and become a citizen of this island” but had no license for the slaves. Caballero discussed the situation with the president and judges of the audiencia, and they agreed that if he paid the necessary fees and taxes, he would be welcome to settle in Española.Footnote 13
Officials also addressed such situations as how to deal with passengers who disembarked before reaching their final destinations or the arrival of ships bringing foodstuffs from the Canaries that were not properly registered because they had not passed through Seville.Footnote 14 Such instances are a reminder of the volume and diversity of commercial activity and products that passed through ports large and small in the islands: cheese and flour from the Canaries to Santiago and Santo Domingo, pearls from Cubagua to San Germán, Indian slaves from Venezuela or Yucatan and elsewhere, and African slaves headed for the large islands. They in turn sent horses and cattle to New Spain, cassava and corn to Tierra Firme, and sugar and hides and, of course, gold and pearls to Spain.
The Caribbean ports varied considerably in size, accessibility, and level of activity. San Juan's harbor was protected, while San Germán's was open, both an advantage and disadvantage. A petition and deposition prepared by San Germán's town council in 1549 stated that in the preceding 20 years the town had been robbed and burned three times by French corsairs, for which reason they had moved it a couple of miles inland to be out of the range of gunfire from their ships.Footnote 15 The council argued that San Germán provided the best stopping place for ships arriving from Spain and the Canaries and that it was preferable to San Juan, which was a “closed port.” They claimed that San Germán was not only the “first of the Indies”—frequently the first port of call for ships continuing on to Panama, New Spain, Honduras and elsewhere—but also that it was well situated to warn Santo Domingo and the rest of Española as well as Tierra Firme of threats from the French. Shipmaster Gonzalo Rodríguez testified that because San Germán was an open port, ships “enter more securely and without danger to take on water and firewood and salt and bread and cassava and whatever they need because it has more than can be found in any of the other ports. . .. The said port of San Germán is the key to all the . . . ports of the Indies.” Unfortunately it frequently was risky to enter there, as the same port that offered a convenient stopping place for ships running low on provisions also attracted French marauders. In addition to San Germán and San Juan, Puerto Rico had two small ports on the southern coast, Aguada and Guanica. Although neither was a town, the first, situated between the two main ports, apparently had some trade and was sometimes used by ships to make repairs.Footnote 16
The constant movement of goods and people among the islands meant that ports, large and small, served different purposes and areas. In Española the western port of La Yaguana was important for the island's internal trade and for protection of the royal road, as noted by Dr. Infante, one of the oidores of the high court (audiencia) in Santo Domingo.Footnote 17 Another oidor, Licenciado Vadillo, who went to Cuba in 1532 to conduct a residencia of the lieutenant governor, noted that La Yaguana was the closest port in Española to Cuba and offered easy passage to Santiago, a port he described as “so hidden” that only those who had been there many times could find the entrance. Lacking an effective signal “many ships that come to the port pass it and then only with great difficulty are they able to return to it, and others don't come to the island because of the difficulty of the port.” Vadillo ordered the construction of a tower at the entrance to Santiago's harbor so that ship pilots could find it. He contended that apart from the wharf that a fellow oidor had ordered to be built (during the 1520s) there had been no improvements made to the port that, along with the problem of finding and entering it, presented the additional impediments of abundant mangroves and seaweed.Footnote 18 Residents of Santiago in 1538, however, seemed convinced that the port's only real drawback was its lack of artillery.Footnote 19
For Trinidad on Cuba's south central coast, however, Vadillo had only praise, noting that since it had been moved to the Río de Arimao the port was more secure and had extensive fisheries, although it now was located at some distance from the town itself. Notwithstanding, he ranked Havana as the second leading town in Cuba, even though it was a considerable distance (roughly 225 miles) from Santiago. Havana was also very difficult to reach overland, making it “necessary to travel part of the way by sea in canoes.”Footnote 20 Vadillo also emphasized the importance of maintaining and settling as many ports of call as feasible, given the high volume of traffic. He noted that the port of Matanzas was “the best port for those who come from New Spain, and if there is no one settled there they have to go around to Havana, from which they receive harm. He added that it is beneficial that “as many ports as possible be settled because navigators find aid which is very necessary in these parts, because if they are depopulated many times they perish from hunger.”Footnote 21
Indeed, small ports came in handy when a pilot missed his destination. In August 1531 Bernardino Vásquez de Tapia wrote to the king recounting the misadventures of his voyage from Seville to Santo Domingo. First, contrary winds caused a two-month wait downriver in Sanlúcar de Barrameda and then bad weather forced the ship back to Gibraltar, where they spent another eight days. Eight days of sailing took them to Gomera in the Canaries whence they made a speedy departure, around June 7. On July 1 the ship was set to enter Santo Domingo's ’s harbor, “but because of the carelessness of the pilot we passed ahead and stopped 20 leagues beyond Santo Domingo at a port named Puerto Hermoso which is near a town called Azua, from where it was as much work for the ship to return to Santo Domingo as it had been [to sail] from Castile to there.” Vásquez de Tapia traveled overland from Puerto Hermoso to Santo Domingo, arriving there four days later.Footnote 22
In the early years ports both large and small were instrumental in expanding the focus of Spanish activity from Española to other islands of the Caribbean and the nearby mainland, providing men and supplies. Juan Ponce de León organized his 1508 expedition to Puerto Rico in Salvaleón de Higüey, which he had helped to establish in 1503 on the eastern tip of Española and where he had lived for some time. During the extensive military campaigns of 1503–04 in Española after Nicolás de Ovando became royal governor, Diego Velásquez's forces went to the southwestern part of the island and founded Salvatierra de la Sabana, where he later recruited some 300 men for his expedition to Cuba in early 1511.
Cuba's ports subsequently became launching grounds for expeditions to Mexico and Florida. Hernando Cortés sailed from Santiago de Cuba but stopped at a number of points along the southern coast to pick up more men before departing for Mexico in 1519.Footnote 23 The 1528 expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez to Florida acquired supplies in Trinidad (Cuba), where the ships were battered by a hurricane, and Hernando de Soto's 1539 expedition to Florida departed from Havana. These major expeditions, of course, constituted only a very small percentage of the maritime traffic that constantly crisscrossed and circulated around the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean in these years. Francisco de Garay sent ships from Jamaica to Pánuco on the coast of Mexico north of Veracruz, expeditions to Santa Marta and Curaçao were organized in Española in the 1520s, and everywhere in the islands people outfitted ships for the burgeoning Indian slave trade. One of the justifications that Spaniards in Jamaica offered for moving its only substantial town, Sevilla, to the southern coast of the island was that it would be better located for trade with Santa Marta, Tierra Firme, Peru, and Honduras.Footnote 24
Life and Society in the Early Port Towns
As outposts of the Spanish crown's first empire in the Indies, the islands’ principal ports were centers for institutions of church and state, so royal officials and high-ranking ecclesiastics figured prominently in local society in those cities, while smaller port towns at times lacked even a full-time cleric. Although within twenty years or so of their establishment most port towns had their own local officials and town councils, in the major ports local officials were overshadowed by the crown's representatives, especially because royal officials (treasurer, accountant, inspector) often held dual office, with positions on town councils in addition to their royal appointments. With the active participation of probably most royal officials, including the judges of the audiencia in Santo Domingo, in the major enterprises of the islands (transatlantic trade, gold mining, sugar production, pearl fishing, and the trade in captive Indians) the roles, activities, and interests of crown officials, local officials, and entrepreneurs blurred considerably.
In most ports the pace of institutionalization was slow, and many of them lacked elements typically associated with Iberian urban life. Insufficient funds slowed institutionalization as well as construction. In contrast to municipalities in Castile, which usually owned properties (propios) generating revenue that could be used for public works or other construction, towns in the islands lacked such sources of income. Licenciado Vadillo complained that most towns in Cuba lacked notaries, who did not get enough business in these small places to earn a living. As late as 1529 Santiago apparently lacked a physician, and only in 1533 did its town council spend a hundred pesos to build a wooden house with a tile roof to serve as both town hall and jail.Footnote 25 When the lieutenant governor of Cuba, Manuel de Rojas, visited Trinidad in 1534 he found that the “town had no church other than a small bohío that had belonged to a vecino,” although there was a hospital. Trinidad did not have a council, so Rojas convened the residents to have them elect two regidores (councilmen) and then an alcalde (magistrate).Footnote 26 Much of the wealth that enterprises in the Caribbean produced passed through the port towns, but little of it remained there. Probably the same could be said for the cosmopolitan mix of people and cultures that passed through as well.
Despite the traffic they handled small port towns, especially on the larger islands where distances were substantial, were quite isolated. In late January 1533 lieutenant governor Manuel de Rojas left Santiago for a tour of inspection of Cuba's towns, arriving on February 1 in San Salvador de Bayamo. There he ordered the construction of a large canoe to go by sea to visit the towns of Trinidad and Sancti Spíritus. On March 2 Rojas embarked in the canoe, along with a notary, four Spanish retainers, a priest, and another Spaniard, as well as a male and a female African slave and four indigenous servants, all belonging to Rojas. Also on board were a page and a dozen free Indians—in all, a sort of floating microcosm of early Cuban society. With a small canoe to accompany the large one, they took nearly two weeks to reach Trinidad. After spending a little over two weeks there, on May 1 they arrived in nearby Sancti Spíritus. From there the party faced a difficult overland journey of 115 miles to Santa María del Puerto (today Camagüey). The town residents said they were too poor to clear the roads, so Rojas provided ten Indians and a Spaniard, and the town's vecinos contributed some additional indigenous laborers and another Spaniard for the work. Rojas's party then traveled on to Puerto de Príncipe, where they arrived in late May.Footnote 27
The isolation or unfavorable location of some small port towns could make them highly unappealing. In 1544 Bachiller Juan Díaz, a cleric, declared that he had spent ten years in the Canaries followed by another ten in Española, where he had served as parish priest, vicar, and visitor in the town of Salvaleón de Higüey, the port established by Juan Ponce de León. He had moved from there to Santo Domingo, about 50 miles away, in hopes of securing a position; he did so, he wrote, “for lack of conversation and dearth of supplies and because the land is very sickly.” He emphasized the difficulty of obtaining basic staples like bread and wine and how costly they were. A man named Arias Vuelta testified that “because of the lack in that town of everything mentioned this witness fell ill and was at the point of death,” and as a result he too left. Other witnesses who were vecinos of Salvaleón noted that prices there were half again as high as they were in Santo Domingo.Footnote 28
Although port towns had much in common with towns in the interior, they of course differed in their orientation to the sea and in hosting a significant, if often transient, population that was directly involved in commercial and maritime activity. Shipmasters, captains, and pilots gained considerable familiarity with island ports, even if they were not full-time residents. One witness in a deposition prepared in 1549 on behalf of the town of San Germán, Marcos Falcón, was a 50-year-old vecino of Seville who testified that he had regularly passed in and out of the port of San Germán in his ships, by day and by night, for the past 25 years. Gonzalo Rodríguez, a shipmaster in his sixties who was a vecino of Triana (across the river from Seville), reported that he had been in San Germán many times over the course of 40 years. Martín Sánchez, also a vecino of Seville, stated that he had been and lived in San Germán many times during more than 20 years and had entered and left the port with his ships when it was difficult to land in San Juan.Footnote 29 These men's familiarity with the port made them credible witnesses for the town's claim to importance.
Although Indians and Africans presumably performed the heavy work of loading and unloading ships, there were other jobs that had to be filled to keep the ports functioning. In 1536 officials in Santiago debated whether it would be preferable to have two guardas de la mar rather than one. The current guard, Juan Cerero, was a shoemaker who practiced his trade and also had a business selling wine and prepared foods. It was hardly surprising that he needed additional sources of income; his position as guard paid an annual salary of only 30 pesos for supervising the unloading of incoming ships. The royal factor Hernando de Castro proposed that the port should have two “sufficient and able” guards and should hire his estanciero Tristán de Trueba in addition to Cerero. The officials agreed that one of the men could deal with the ships and the other would work in the house of trade.Footnote 30
Building the Port Towns
In the early sixteenth-century Caribbean Santo Domingo offered the closest approximation to a full-fledged Spanish city. In 1532 two of the oidores called it “the key to these parts.”Footnote 31 In the first decade of the century, governor Ovando oversaw the construction in stone of a fortress and the hospital of San Nicolás and initiated work on a house of trade (casa de contratación). He and several other leading citizens built themselves stone houses. By the 1530s the city had a cathedral and monasteries, and in 1545 the city council voted to establish a convent for women with the aid of a bequest from the archdeacon Álvaro de Castro, who donated his stone house and other urban property for the purpose.Footnote 32 Other private residences built of stone, or a combination of stone and brick, also had appeared in the urban landscape. In the late 1520s Benito de Astorga, a man of fairly humble origins (he first worked as a shopkeeper) who apparently had forged some useful connections in island society and eventually became owner of a substantial sugar estate with 60 African slaves, was ordered by the audiencia to bring his wife from Spain to live in Española. In anticipation of her arrival he bought or had built a stone house that he furnished with curtains, wall hangings, and a bed.Footnote 33
Even in Santo Domingo lack of funds and environmental challenges meant that the progress of construction could be slow. A Franciscan monastery was established there soon after Frey Nicolás de Ovando arrived as governor in 1502 with a contingent of friars. The first church, made of straw (as was typical everywhere), soon was destroyed by a hurricane. Subsequently they built “a small church of stone covered with wood which was the first [one] built of stone in this city. It was made so small because in those times there were great hurricanes and storms in this island, and also because the population was small then, and also it was poorly built because the artisans at that time were not as knowledgeable about masonry as they are now.” In 1508 another hurricane caused much of the main chapel to collapse, killing a man who, ironically, had taken refuge there from the storm. In 1544, when a deposition about the need to build a new church for the monastery was prepared, the city had grown to the point where the existing church did not have enough tombs for those who wished to be buried there and was so small that people failed to attend sermons for lack of space. Furthermore, witnesses stated that even the rebuilt main chapel had become dangerous because the roof had partly rotted.Footnote 34
Work on a new church was begun. It was expected to cost more than 12,000 pesos as it had to be covered by a vault “because wood rots quickly in this country.” Witnesses testified to the excessive cost of both materials and the labor of masons as well to the poverty of the Franciscans, who lacked properties and rents and supported themselves by begging from door to door. When construction of the new church began, they had raised only 600 pesos toward its construction, even though the adelantado Francisco de Garay apparently had paid the cost for the main chapel to ensure a place of burial for himself and his family members.
In most other ports construction in stone lagged even more, either because of lack of materials, wealth, or skilled workers, or because the sites themselves literally could not support such structures.Footnote 35 For a time bricks were sent from Spain to the islands, along with specialists in construction who contracted to work for fixed periods and then returned home.Footnote 36 Residents of San Juan in 1530 stated that the city had the following buildings of stone: the one-story royal house that served as lodging for the royal treasurer and accountant as well as the customs-house and foundry for smelting gold; a two-story hospital that was in ruins following a storm; the bishop's two-story residence; the cathedral; and three private residences, one with two stories and another shared by two married vecinos. The city had an additional 30 houses of wood with tiled roofs and 20 others built of straw. There were also some 30 to 35 small buildings of wood and tile called tiendas that were owned variously by the church, the cofradía de Nuestra Señora, or merchants. Merchants lived in some of these buildings; others were rented out as shops or residences.Footnote 37 The town of San Germán, in contrast, had a church with adobe walls and a tiled roof but no stone buildings, which was typical of most port towns in this period. Like Santo Domingo, San Juan continued to urbanize in succeeding decades, and work on its fortifications finally got underway in 1535. In 1547 a man named Manuel de Yllanes who had lived in San Juan for fifteen 15 years boasted that he had “a very sumptuous house built of stone in the city's center, the best in the city.” He also stabled a horse in the city at what he claimed was considerable expense, so that he would be prepared to fight the French when necessary.Footnote 38 In 1549 Alonso Pérez Martel, a regidor, stated that he had spent more than 2000 pesos to build “a very good house of stone” in San Juan.Footnote 39
Danger and Defense
A recurring theme in the records of the port towns is the inadequacy, or in many cases complete absence, of fortifications and armaments and the lack of funds to build and maintain effective defensive apparatus.Footnote 40 The danger to the ports and their inhabitants was quite real, affecting not only the larger and presumably wealthier ports but smaller ones as well. In 1553, for example, officials in La Yaguana (Española) reported to the audiencia that French corsairs had occupied the town for a month, sacking and burning it, sending many residents fleeing to the mountains with their wives and children. The French seized some men and women, probably as hostages, and “held the wife of captain Pedro Martín with an Indian woman of hers and two servants on their ships for 16 days.” They demanded an outrageous ransom of 10,000 pesos for the hostages but settled for a more modest payment of 1,500 pesos, which was all that could be found after the town was ransacked.Footnote 41 The repeated attacks on San Germán have been mentioned already. In addition to the threat from the French the southern coast of Puerto Rico was subject to attacks from so-called Caribs living on nearby small islands.
Shipping too was vulnerable to attack near harbors and ports. In 1537 a ship carrying gold back to Spain from San Juan stopped at the nearby small island of Mona because it was Ash Wednesday. When most of the Spaniards went ashore to hear mass, a small number of non-Spaniards stayed behind. Taking control of the ship, they threw ten or twelve Africans into the sea and sailed off with more than 4,000 pesos in gold and two married Spanish women who happened to have remained on board.Footnote 42 In another instance, Alonso de Illescas, a resident of Santiago de Cuba, testified that he was on the city's wharf supervising the loading of maize and cassava on a boat he was sending to Tierra Firme when French attackers burned it as he watched.Footnote 43
The loss of Illescas's boat took place during what became a pitched naval battle in Santiago's harbor in April 1538, in which Diego Pérez, captain and owner of the ship La Madalena, succeeded in routing the French corsairs and thereby spared the city itself from direct damage. There was a good deal of serendipity to this outcome, as local residents were all too well aware. Had Pérez not been in the harbor at the time, the scenario could have played out quite differently. The details of this battle are known because Pérez later petitioned the crown for remuneration for his services as well as a coat of arms that would feature “three fleurs- de- lis in memory of the victory he had over the French ship” and a lion “in memory of how he fought like a lion with the said Frenchman.” The border would include fire bombs to invoke those that Pérez ordered to be hurled into the French ship, bringing the Spaniards victory.Footnote 44
The episode began on April 4, when the brigantine of Sebastián Ponblin, a captain who sailed regularly in the Caribbean, ran into a French ship outside Santiago's harbor and tried to escape by returning to port. The French crew managed to stop and board the brigantine, not only stealing the goods and money it carried but also commandeering the vessel. Ponblin and the passengers were put ashore unharmed, at some distance from Santiago. Diego Pérez's intervention probably took the French ship, described as armed for war, flying a red and white flag and sounding trumpets, by surprise. The crews of the two vessels fought throughout the course of a day and night. Several men died, including Pérez's nephew and two others and, on the French side, a priest and another man.
Vecinos of Santiago who testified about the battle, some of whom participated in it, were adamant that without Pérez's intervention the French would have robbed and burned the city. Pérez was able to retrieve Ponblin's by-then empty brigantine, which the French apparently had abandoned, and then, according to one witness, “outfitted his vessel with arms and armaments and people from the land and the sea [and went] in search of the French ship.” Just how Pérez was able to obtain arms and crew so quickly—apparently within a day after Ponblin's brigantine was attacked—is not only unknown and but quite surprising, given that nearly all the witnesses complained about the lack of artillery and munitions. They also pointed out that defense of the city was further crippled because “there are few Spaniards and those that there are do not have the necessary arms.” A man named Pedro de Porras testified that on the occasion of another surprise French attack he saw “that many [residents] came out for it and most of them had nothing more than lances or swords,” arms that clearly were inadequate to defend the city from French guns.
With the exception of Santo Domingo before the 1540s the crown was very slow to finance the construction of fortifications, even at the major ports, apparently having expected them to be constructed by the adelantados, the men charged with founding and settling the islands.Footnote 45 Even in Santo Domingo funds for repairs and maintenance were meager. A particularly bitter and cynical complaint came from a member of the audiencia:
In the ship in which the señor Licenciado Vaca de Castro came there arrived a letter for the president and oidores [of the audiencia] from His Majesty in which it says that he has been informed that the city's fortress is in bad condition and that a tower which was built is completely deteriorated, and orders that it be repaired, about which I have wondered because these señores of the Council of the Indies should have seen and understood that for four or five years here they have written to His Majesty about the fortress. . .. They always have written that this isn't a fortress . . . but rather a house that the comendador mayor [Ovando] had built in the style of those that they build in the pastures of Extremadura. . .. Those señores don't provide anything except when they have a knife to their throats.
The author of the letter, who went on to argue that it would cost at least 20,000 castellanos to make the appropriate repairs and necessary additions, reiterated that “the key to this New World is this city and port.” The letter asked that fortifications be built in La Yaguana as well, if not of stone then of earthworks.Footnote 46
A report and petition written in 1544 by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the well-known chronicler and historian who was serving as the warden or commander (alcaide) of the fortress at Santo Domingo at the time, provides a good deal of detail regarding both the state of the fortifications and about the people who were employed as guards and artillerymen.Footnote 47 He complained that the salaries paid were inadequate to maintain an effective defense and that he had to supplement them with his own funds. He pointed out that “His Majesty does not provide bread, wine, meat, fish, oil, vinegar, or produce, nor any rations at all for the fortress of this city of Santo Domingo, nor does it have any provisions other than a small cistern for rainwater.” According to witnesses to Oviedo's deposition, a man in service usually received a minimum of 30 pesos a year plus provisions, which normally included a carga (several bushels) of cassava each month along with rations of fish, vinegar, and oil. Not surprisingly many of these men worked at other occupations, meaning that their guard duties were at best part time.Footnote 48
Pay was somewhat better during the first war with the French (1534-38), when the crown mandated that guards or gunners receive five pesos a month, but this represented a response to what must have been judged a critical situation and lasted less than a year. During the second war with the French (1542-44), another nine men were hired to keep watch.Footnote 49 They earned four pesos a month but were required to work only at night and thus could ply their trades during the day. It is hardly surprising that it was difficult to attract and retain qualified men to do work that was not only minimally compensated but most of the time must have been quite tedious. An instruction from the king to officials in Cuba in 1539 had specified that guards for the sea and the foundry should be “trustworthy people,” preferably married men, as opposed to the single men of little account that they recently had employed.Footnote 50
Apart from overseeing the shifting and usually poorly paid and under-supplied force of guards and gunners, Fernández de Oviedo was concerned with the physical structure of the fortress itself. He stated that when he became alcaide it was in very poor condition and uninhabitable and that he had worked hard to improve, and equip, and staff it appropriately. By this time in his mid-sixties, Fernández de Oviedo claimed to lead a modest existence there with his wife and daughters. Witness Toribio de Quiros, a notary and vecino of Santo Domingo, testified that when Oviedo became alcaide the fortress was in poor repair. Most of the ramparts facing the sea had fallen down or were close to collapse. These had been repaired with the construction of brick arches below which the artillery was now well placed and adequately guarded. Quiros also noted that Fernández de Oviedo had built additional rooms for lodging and maintained a larger force of guards than had any previous alcaide.
An Unexpected Visit
Ports, as seen, were open to both attack and unexpected arrivals. Late in November 1527 a large, three-masted English ship requested permission to enter Santo Domingo's harbor. The alcaide of the fortress, Francisco de Tapia, had been ill for a month and a half and at the time was bedridden. Uncertain whether to allow the English ship into the harbor, he sent a messenger to ask the officials of the audiencia what he should do. Failing to receive an answer after two or three attempts, he took matters into his own hands and ordered that a warning shot be fired over the prow of the ship. Apparently fearing they were about to come under attack, the Englishmen sailed off.Footnote 51
This episode unfolded over a couple of days, long enough for a good deal of contact between the Englishmen and people on Española to take place. While Tapia waited for direction from the oidores, the English shipmaster along with a number of sailors launched a smaller vessel that took them up the river into the city. There the shipmaster disembarked along with two sailors, leaving another ten or twelve in the boat. He met with two oidores, Licenciados Lebrón and Zuazo, who summoned “most of the most honored citizens of the town” so that together they could decide how to respond to the Englishmen's presence. The two sailors wandered around town and chatted with the locals. Subsequently, two pilots, along with the city's chief constable, were sent to board the ship, where they were courteously received and entertained by the captain. They were there when the shot was fired from the fortress. Although the Spaniards tried to allay their fears, the English captain and crew suspected treachery and hastened to leave, raising the ship's sails and hauling up the anchor.
Witnesses who spoke with one or another member of the English party recounted variations of the same tale: about nine months previously two English ships had been sent by their king on a mission to find a northern passage, somewhere in the area of Labrador or Newfoundland.Footnote 52 Suffering from extreme cold and running short of supplies, several men died, including the ship's pilot, who possibly was killed by local people. Rather than heading back across the Atlantic, they resolved to sail south for warmer climes and reached Santo Domingo. One ship apparently was lost.
Some witnesses doubted this story, given that both the ship and the smaller boat that arrived in the Santo Domingo harbor were heavily armed and that the difficulty of finding the harbor made it unlikely that the English ship could have happened upon it without the aid of a skilled and informed pilot. Several of the vecinos urged the oidores to arrest the captain and detain the ship and its crew since their intentions were unclear. Along with “defensive and offensive” armaments, the ship carried merchandise in the form of cloth. The oidores seemed ready to discuss terms of trade but the cannonball launched on Tapia's orders put an end to any negotiations.
The English party's desperate need for supplies is clear. A few days after leaving Santo Domingo some 30 armed English sailors landed ashore north of the city, commandeering large quantities of poultry, eggs, clothing, and cassava bread from Licenciado Zuazo's estate before going on to rob a fisherman of 150 arrobas (bushels) of fish and other residents, including African and Indian workers, of clothing, blankets, and more poultry. Thus provisioned, the ship finally departed, apparently still lacking the pilot the English had hoped to acquire to guide them home, or perhaps to another destination to trade the merchandise they carried. Very likely the earliest recorded visit of an English ship to the Caribbean, the episode was ambiguous and isolated in its impact but seems, at least initially, to have been a mostly friendly encounter, with no real consequences other than for the people who were robbed. In retrospect and following a reprimand from the king, however, the audiencia officials became increasingly skeptical about the English party's true intentions and blamed Francisco de Tapia for firing the cannonball that scared the English off, since ostensibly they had wanted to seize the ship.Footnote 53
Conclusion
Port towns were a novelty that Europeans imposed on the islands of the Caribbean. While fishing and the seaborne movement of people and goods characterized the region long before Europeans arrived, native canoes did not need piers and wharves, nor did the nature of indigenous conflict necessitate major fortifications for security and defense. After Europeans began to settle in the islands, the volume and type of shipping that developed and the kinds of products that were exported required a substantial infrastructure, officials to oversee operations and extract duties, and varied kinds of labor to ensure that the ports would function.
The port towns ranged from very small to middling places that probably were mainly oriented toward local or at most regional exchange or the repair and resupply of the sailing vessels of all sizes that plied the waters and connected the islands with one another and to the neighboring mainland, to larger cities that served as the headquarters for administration and the most lucrative economic enterprises and maintained a high level of involvement in transatlantic trade. The ports facilitated a great deal of movement of both goods and people—Spanish residents and transients, African slaves, Indians captured for the slave trade—among the islands and between the islands and Spain and the mainland.
Given the sheer number of places where boats could put to shore, especially on the largest islands of Española and Cuba, illicit trade predictably would become endemic in the Caribbean, although in the era that is the focus of this study there is relatively little comment about it in official reports. That silence could suggest that the kind of widespread official and private collusion that was well established by the later sixteenth century already existed, but it also may reflect the more open situation that prevailed before a regulated system for organizing and defending the Spanish maritime and commercial system was put into place. At this time many ports still actively participated in transatlantic trade. The (near) absence of the British and Dutch in the region during this period also probably limited contraband. The French, as seen, in these years came principally to raid rather than to trade. The Portuguese presence generally was accepted and indeed at times encouraged.
The establishment of the fleet system in the 1560s not only concentrated legal trade and maritime traffic in relatively few large ports but its importance perhaps has obscured the role of smaller ports in maintaining the maritime and commercial networks that sustained life and society in the islands and bound them to Seville and the islands of the Atlantic.Footnote 54 I have tried to provide a sense of what the ports were like at a time before many of the patterns that subsequently became associated with the Spanish Caribbean had fully taken shape. Certain developments that from our perspective seem all but inevitable in the early decades of the sixteenth century still lay in the future. Thus through much of this period San Germán aspired to a status equal to that of San Juan, and Santiago overshadowed Havana. By the 1530s many prominent residents of the islands were confident that the establishment of sugar estates would guarantee their financial stability, the continuation of a robust export economy, and a lucrative stake for the islands and their ports in the transatlantic trade. For the most part, however, the sugar economy failed later in the sixteenth century and would not revive until well into the eighteenth.Footnote 55
Nonetheless, many of what would remain fundamental elements of life in Caribbean port towns existed almost from the outset: vulnerability to internal and external attack and environmental hazards (hurricanes, fires, the depredations of insects); the unprecedented mixing of peoples from Europe, Africa, and the Americas; the paradox of provincialism and poverty in places that funneled highly valuable exports of gold, pearls, and later silver to Spain and elsewhere; and, above all, the role they played as the gateway—“the key”—to the Indies, however poorly defended and supplied.
