The Temptations of Trade. Adrian Finucane

      Before the Asiento

      In 1679, a young surgeon named Lionel Wafer left Jamaica, ending a visit to his brother there for more adventurous company. Like many men leaving the island at the time, Wafer had joined the buccaneers. Over the next decade, he would sail through Spanish waters, annoying their ships and settlements, making note of the natural and human resources of that empire, and even living among a native group in modern-day Panama and learning their language. He acted as a surgeon on pirate vessels and spent time in a Jamestown prison. But more than a tale of exploration and misadventure, Wafer’s is a story of empire. After returning to the safety of England, Wafer published a book, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America, encouraging his countrymen in England to move into the Americas in whatever ways they could in pursuit of glory and profit.¹ Early clandestine exploration into the forbidden territories of the Spanish empire fueled English interest in imperial expansion, and published accounts gave prospective voyagers details about what they might expect to encounter.

      European empires in the Americas grew not only as projects of large-scale thinkers in London or Madrid, or even of the men and women who funded and organized expeditions across the Atlantic to conquer and claim land. Individuals who moved through these areas or lived there permanently, including merchants, seamen, travelers, and settlers, created the empires on the ground, shaping local realities that sometimes conflicted significantly with the hopes of those in the metropole. In this context, empire was not only a project of European nations, but a kind of strategy for some groups of subjects who could take advantage of the places that governments could and could not assert power over land and trade, making their own fortunes by valuing pragmatism over ideology.² Men like Wafer pushed for an expansion of empire through conquest or commerce into places few Englishmen had seen. The vision of success many Britons had for their empire ultimately relied on its ability to access the considerable markets of Spanish America; at the same time, Spanish American subjects could not thrive without a consistent trade such as that provided by the British. In the early eighteenth century, the empires would briefly find a way to benefit from a trade in slaves through the British South Sea Company. However, in the course of fulfilling this mutual need, tensions increased between the empires, making long-term peaceful trade a difficult prospect. In the early eighteenth century, the people who settled in and traded to British and Spanish America would create empires that were intertwined, reliant on one another in important ways, and always blurry at the margins. Imperial agents moving through these empires operated in competition with one another, to be sure, but they contributed to building as well as unmaking each other’s empires. On the ground, the creation of empires was messy, not following any one set of guidelines. Rather than being entirely at odds with one another, empires were interlinked, reliant on one another for trade and settlement in a way that could not ultimately be sustainable.³ Growth inevitably led to friction.

      By the seventeenth century, Englishmen had long traded to Spain, but could not legally travel directly to the Spanish Americas except in very rare circumstances.⁴ Despite these restrictions, or perhaps in part because of them, English merchants and their government developed a strong thirst for knowledge about the Spanish colonies and access to their attendant wealth.⁵ In an attempt to fulfill this need, English travelers and privateers probed the edges of the empire, and circulated information about the little-known interiors of the Spanish territories. Despite the differences in government, religion, and demographic constitution of the British and Spanish empires, ambition was a trait shared by agents of both. Actors in each of these empires hoped to exploit local resources in order to enrich themselves, and when convenient, the metropole. As information accrued about the opportunities available in the Americas, the English government and its subjects turned to acquiring their own piece of the American continents. Wafer was one of a long line of Englishmen who had explored ways to profit from the adjacent Spanish empire, legally or illegally.⁶ While Wafer’s buccaneering was part of a larger trend in piracy in both peace and wartime that raised tensions between the empires, the information he collected also represented an opportunity for English expansion and mutual trade in times of peace.

      This sort of information would be critical in the decades that