The Temptations of Trade. Adrian Finucane
of several English ships in the area of Trinidad and Cuba, “their majestys subjects here in the Indies seem to be at open war … whilst there is so perfect a union and good understanding at home which must certainly reflect on their respective governours to avoid which I wish your excellency would take such measures as [will] put a stop to all such illegal proceedings hereafter.”125 Any “understanding” on paper did not translate seamlessly into “understanding” among groups in the West Indies. In many ways, the Peace of Utrecht created a convenient fiction that the subjects of Britain and Spain were sudden friends, an attempt to overcome the years of conflict and continuing theft of goods and ships through agreements made in Europe. Despite these attempts, enmity persisted between these two groups.
The stuttering progress of the trade—the movement of slaves through Jamaica and Barbados en route to the Spanish settlements, yet the persistent interruption of this traffic—brought complaints from the free inhabitants of those islands. Certainly the unreliability of shipping caused problems for both the supply of the island and the merchants and investors who lived there. Jamaican residents observed that the move to crack down on piracy caused a panic among the sailors, many of whom, Jamaican Thomas Onslow explained, felt pushed into the illegal activity. Complaints sprang too from the effects that the legal portions of this trade had on the Jamaican economy. The price of slaves went up due to the company’s control of large portions of the trade, and the movement of goods from Jamaica to New Spain had “ruin’d all commerce” in the eyes of many Jamaican planters and traders. While smuggling might certainly continue from the Jamaican coast, the South Sea Company trade opened up the possibility of shipping goods directly from Britain, removing Jamaica from the equation altogether. Previously, the French, Portuguese, and Spanish asiento holders had relied heavily on Jamaica for slaves and supplies, but with a direct link to the metropole, the company was not so dependent on the island. Many of the planters and sailors who lived in Jamaica were leaving. They contributed much of the money made on the island to the economy of Great Britain in the form of remittances, and they needed security. As the Spanish periodically became more aggressive toward Jamaica, the dangerous conditions in the West Indies kept many from engaging in their normal trade; indeed, Onslow informed the secretary, “The Spaniards &c watch us so, that there is no stirring in safety out of the island.”126 The increased interaction with the Spanish, instigated by the establishment of the asiento, created considerable discomfort among many of the British colonists and merchants in the region and made the treaty widely unpopular in Jamaica.
The Jamaican case illuminates the large variety of hopes and expectations for empire among British subjects, and makes clear the ways in which shifts in the organization of empire could leave some who profited from previous iterations without opportunity. Various groups held interests, sometimes in harmony but often competing, in the establishment of empire, and in the asiento project. These groups included the crowns of Britain and Spain, the South Sea Company, merchants and planters in Jamaica, merchants in Liver-pool, Bristol, and London, local Spanish American officials, South Sea Company factors, and Spanish colonists among others.127 The wealth of some Jamaican merchants during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century arose from the proximity of a massive rival empire, the Spanish, to which they could trade clandestinely or at times legally. Their success arose from their access to the goods and ships of the English empire, which the Spanish could not directly tap into. Once the British Empire became stronger in the area and exercised its right to monopoly, however, the benefits of being British diminished for those who had long engaged in the interimperial trade. As empire became more efficient, it also became less useful to certain interest groups. At the same time, this very opportunity to hold a monopoly on what they largely intended to be a new trade stood at the center of the South Sea Company and its agents’ excitement in moving into the area. Once factors had spent significant time in the Spanish Americas, they would form their own ideas of how their position within the British and Spanish empires could benefit their own interests. As with the Jamaica merchants, these interests would not always be in line with larger imperial hopes for expansion in trade, land, and population.
Renegotiating the Asiento
In response to the difficulties of the early trade, the Spanish and British crowns agreed to negotiate once again. George Bubb Doddington, the envoy to Spain from the British court, laid before the Spanish ministers the many difficulties that the company and its agents had faced during the early years of the trade, and secured some concessions in a new treaty signed May 27, 1716. This agreement maintained many of the stipulations established by the original asiento treaty of 1713. Bubb’s main concerns, addressed in the 1716 revisions, were the chronological terms of the treaty, the variability of the annual fairs, and the sometimes inevitable transfer of excess goods to the West Indies. Bubb himself had not supported the original treaty, and resented having to do the company’s bidding in bettering their position, especially given the frustrations of working in Philip V’s court. He complained repeatedly to Stanhope, then secretary of state, that he had always considered “the assiento as an affair that we cou’d never be gainers by” and that “the Assiento business puts me entirely beyond all temper.”128 Even with these misgivings, Bubb successfully renegotiated the treaty, taking into account the difficulties of the early trade.
The British South Sea Company had gotten off to a slow start with the late departures of the factors to Veracruz, Cartagena, and Panama. Concerned that this delay would not allow them to enjoy the entire thirty-year term of the asiento, the company appealed to the Spanish king, who agreed that both the payments due from the company to the crown and the first permission to send both slaves and an annual ship could be shifted to the first of May, 1714.129 Philip V required the company to pay the fees that accumulated for the first two years in 1716 in return for this extension of the treaty. With the assurance that they would be able to take full advantage of the trade, the factors could go about establishing themselves in Spanish America more firmly.
The original asiento treaty had granted the British the sudden and exciting ability to trade their manufactured goods and the products of their empire directly to the Spanish American market. The annual permission ships of five hundred tons were to travel to the trade fair at Portobello each year, carrying merchandise that would supply the colonies of South and Central America and fill the purses of British merchants. The British almost immediately encountered problems with this arrangement, however; the “annual” trade fair was far from being a yearly event, and often the British vessel had no indication of when or if the fair would happen before departing London. Recognizing this difficulty, the Spanish king agreed that a fair would be held each year in his American domains, and that he would advise the company annually as to when the Spanish galleons, or flota, planned to depart from Cádiz for the relevant port. If the Spanish ships had not left by June, the British would be allowed to sail alone, but would be required to wait in the Spanish American port for up to four months. When the Spanish galleons arrived, or when four months had passed, the British were permitted to sell their goods to the Spanish American traders who flocked from as far away as present-day Peru and Mexico in order to purchase European goods.130
The more frequent trade in slaves conducted by the South Sea Company posed its own problems for the exact fulfillment of the 1713 version of the asiento treaty. This early iteration of the agreement prohibited the British from bringing any trade goods into the Spanish Americas apart from those transported on the annual permission ship. The vicissitudes of the slave trade, subject to supply and demand, made this particularly difficult, according to the company’s merchants. Company or private ships traveled to the coast of Africa, carrying goods to trade in exchange for slaves; however, the rates of exchange were not constant, and the ships could easily leave the African coast with some of the trade goods they had originally expected to need in purchasing enslaved laborers. The company’s supercargoes argued that if they could not bring these goods with them to the Spanish American ports, they would be forced to throw them into the sea at a great loss. Though the Spanish crown insisted that the company not be allowed to sell these excess goods, they were to be allowed to transport this cargo to the Indies and deposit it in the royal storehouses, to be secured by keys held by the royal officials of the port and a representative of the company.131