A letter dated 8th April 1537, written by Gonzalo de Guzman to the Empress, furnishes us with some interesting details of the exploits of an anonymous French corsair in that year. In November 1536 this Frenchman had seized in the port of Chagre, on the Isthmus of Darien, a Spanish vessel laden with horses from San Domingo, had cast the cargo into the sea, put the crew on shore and sailed away with his prize. A month or two later he appeared off the coast of Havana and dropped anchor in a small bay a few leagues from the city. As there were then five Spanish ships lying in the harbour, the inhabitants compelled the captains to attempt the seizure of the pirate, promising to pay for the ships if they were lost. Three vessels of 200 tons each sailed out to the attack, and for several days they fired at the French corsair, which, being a patache of light draught, had run up the bay beyond their reach. Finally one morning the Frenchmen were seen pressing with both sail and oar to escape from the port. A Spanish vessel cut her cables to follow in pursuit, but encountering a heavy sea and contrary winds was abandoned by her crew, who made for shore in boats. The other two Spanish ships were deserted in similar fashion, whereupon the French, observing this new turn of affairs, re-entered the bay and easily recovered the three drifting vessels. Two of the prizes they burnt, and arming the third sailed away to cruise in the Florida straits, in the route of ships returning from the West Indies to Spain.[53]
The corsairs, however, were not always so uniformly successful. A band of eighty, who attempted to plunder the town of St. Jago de Cuba, were repulsed with some loss by a certain Diego Perez of Seville, captain of an armed merchant ship then in the harbour, who later petitioned for the grant of a coat-of-arms in recognition of his services.[54] In October 1544 six French vessels attacked the town of Santa Maria de los Remedios, near Cape de la Vela, but failed to take it in face of the stubborn resistance of the inhabitants. Yet the latter a few months earlier had been unable to preserve their homes from pillage, and had been obliged to flee to La Granjeria de las Perlas on the Rio de la Hacha.[55] There is small wonder, indeed, that the defenders were so rarely victorious. The Spanish towns were ill-provided with forts and guns, and often entirely without ammunition or any regular soldiers. The distance between the settlements as a rule was great, and the inhabitants, as soon as informed of the presence of the enemy, knowing that they had no means of resistance and little hope of succour, left their homes to the mercy of the freebooters and fled to the hills and woods with their families and most precious belongings. Thus when, in October 1554, another band of three hundred French privateers swooped down upon the unfortunate town of St. Jago de Cuba, they were able to hold it for thirty days, and plundered it to the value of 80,000 pieces of eight.[56] The following year, however, witnessed an even more remarkable action. In July 1555 the celebrated captain, Jacques Sore, landed two hundred men from a caravel a half-league from the city of Havana, and before daybreak marched on the town and forced the surrender of the castle. The Spanish governor had time to retire to the country, where he gathered a small force of Spaniards and negroes, and returned to surprise the French by night. Fifteen or sixteen of the latter were killed, and Sore, who himself was wounded, in a rage gave orders for the massacre of all the prisoners. He burned the cathedral and the hospital, pillaged the houses and razed most of the city to the ground. After transferring all the artillery to his vessel, he made several forays into the country, burned a few plantations, and finally sailed away in the beginning of August. No record remains of the amount of the booty, but it must have been enormous. To fill the cup of bitterness for the poor inhabitants, on 4th October there appeared on the coast another French ship, which had learned of Sore's visit and of the helpless state of the Spaniards. Several hundred men disembarked, sacked a few plantations neglected by their predecessors, tore down or burned the houses which the Spaniards had begun to rebuild, and seized a caravel loaded with leather which had recently entered the harbour.[57] It is true that during these years there was almost constant war in Europe between the Emperor and France; yet this does not entirely explain the activity of the French privateers in Spanish America, for we find them busy there in the years when peace reigned at home. Once unleash the sea-dogs and it was extremely difficult to bring them again under restraint.
With the seventeenth century began a new era in the history of the West Indies. If in the sixteenth the English, French and Dutch came to tropical America as piratical intruders into seas and countries which belonged to others, in the following century they came as permanent colonisers and settlers. The Spaniards, who had explored the whole ring of the West Indian islands before 1500, from the beginning neglected the lesser for the larger Antilles—Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico and Jamaica—and for those islands like Trinidad, which lie close to the mainland. And when in 1519 Cortez sailed from Cuba for the conquest of Mexico, and twelve years later Pizarro entered Peru, the emigrants who left Spain to seek their fortunes in the New World flocked to the vast territories which the Conquistadores and their lieutenants had subdued on the Continent. It was consequently to the smaller islands which compose the Leeward and Windward groups that the English, French and Dutch first resorted as colonists. Small, and therefore "easy to settle, easy to depopulate and to re-people, attractive not only on account of their own wealth, but also as a starting-point for the vast and rich continent off which they lie," these islands became the pawns in a game of diplomacy and colonization which continued for 150 years.
In the seventeenth century, moreover, the Spanish monarchy was declining rapidly both in power and prestige, and its empire, though still formidable, no longer overshadowed the other nations of Europe as in the days of Charles V. and Philip II. France, with the Bourbons on the throne, was entering upon an era of rapid expansion at home and abroad, while the Dutch, by the truce of 1609, virtually obtained the freedom for which they had struggled so long. In England Queen Elizabeth had died in 1603, and her Stuart successor exchanged her policy of dalliance, of balance between France and Spain, for one of peace and conciliation. The aristocratic free-booters who had enriched themselves by harassing the Spanish Indies were succeeded by a less romantic but more business-like generation, which devoted itself to trade and planting. Abortive attempts at colonization had been made in the sixteenth century. The Dutch, who were trading in the West Indies as early as 1542, by 1580 seem to have gained some foothold in Guiana;[58] and the French Huguenots, under the patronage of the Admiral de Coligny, made three unsuccessful efforts to form settlements on the American continent, one in Brazil in 1555, another near Port Royal in South Carolina in 1562, and two years later a third on the St. John's River in Florida. The only English effort in the sixteenth century was the vain attempt of Sir Walter Raleigh between 1585 and 1590 to plant a colony on Roanoke Island, on the coast of what is now North Carolina. It was not till 1607 that the first permanent English settlement in America was made at Jamestown in Virginia. Between 1609 and 1619 numerous stations were established by English, Dutch and French in Guiana between the mouth of the Orinoco and that of the Amazon. In 1621 the Dutch West India Company was incorporated, and a few years later proposals for a similar company were broached in England. Among the West Indian Islands, St. Kitts received its first English settlers in 1623; and two years later the island was formally divided with the French, thus becoming the earliest nucleus of English and French colonization in those regions. Barbadoes was colonized in 1624-25. In 1628 English settlers from St. Kitts spread to Nevis and Barbuda, and within another four years to Antigua and Montserrat; while as early as 1625 English and Dutch took joint possession of Santa Cruz. The founders of the French settlement on St. Kitts induced Richelieu to incorporate a French West India Company with the title, "The Company of the Isles of America," and under its auspices Guadeloupe, Martinique and other islands of the Windward group were colonized in 1635 and succeeding years. Meanwhile between 1632 and 1634 the Dutch had established trading stations on St. Eustatius in the north, and on Tobago and Curaçao in the south near the Spanish mainland.
While these centres of trade and population were being formed in the very heart of the Spanish seas, the privateers were not altogether idle. To the treaty of Vervins between France and Spain in 1598 had been added a secret restrictive article whereby it was agreed that the peace should not hold good south of the Tropic of Cancer and west of the meridian of the Azores. Beyond these two lines (called "les lignes de l'enclos des Amitiés") French and Spanish ships might attack each other and take fair prize as in open war. The ministers of Henry IV. communicated this restriction verbally to the merchants of the ports, and soon private men-of-war from Dieppe, Havre and St. Malo flocked to the western seas.[59] Ships loaded with contraband goods no longer sailed for the Indies unless armed ready to engage all comers, and many ship-captains renounced trade altogether for the more profitable and exciting occupation of privateering. In the early years of the seventeenth century, moreover, Dutch fleets harassed the coasts of Chile and Peru,[60] while in Brazil[61] and the West Indies a second "Pie de Palo," this time the Dutch admiral, Piet Heyn, was proving a scourge to the Spaniards. Heyn was employed by the Dutch West India Company, which from the year 1623 onwards, carried the Spanish war into the transmarine possessions of Spain and Portugal. With a fleet composed of twenty-six ships and 3300 men, of which he was vice-admiral, he greatly distinguished himself at the capture of Bahia, the seat of Portuguese power in Brazil. Similar expeditions were sent out annually, and brought back the rich spoils of the South American colonies. Within two years the extraordinary number of eighty ships, with 1500 cannon and over 9000 sailors and soldiers, were despatched to American seas, and although Bahia was soon retaken, the Dutch for a time occupied Pernambuco, as well as San Juan de Porto Rico in the West Indies.[62] In 1628 Piet Heyn was in command of a squadron designed to intercept the plate fleet which sailed every year from Vera Cruz to Spain. With thirty-one ships, 700 cannon and nearly 3000 men he cruised along the northern coast of Cuba, and on 8th September fell in with his quarry near Cape San Antonio. The Spaniards made a running fight along the coast until they reached the Matanzas River near Havana, into which they turned with the object of running the great-bellied galleons aground and escaping with what treasure they could. The Dutch followed, however, and most of the rich cargo was diverted into the coffers of the Dutch West India Company. The gold, silver, indigo, sugar and logwood were sold in the Netherlands for fifteen million guilders, and the company was enabled to distribute to its shareholders the unprecedented dividend of 50 per cent. It was an exploit which two generations of English mariners had attempted in vain, and the unfortunate Spanish general, Don Juan de Benavides, on his return to Spain was imprisoned for his defeat and later beheaded.[63]
In 1639 we find the Spanish Council of War for the Indies conferring with the King on measures to be taken against English piratical ships in the Caribbean;[64] and in 1642 Captain William Jackson, provided with an ample commission from the Earl of Warwick[65] and duplicates under the Great Seal, made a raid in which he emulated the exploits of Sir Francis Drake and his contemporaries. Starting out with three ships and about 1100 men, mostly picked up in St. Kitts and Barbadoes, he cruised along the Main from Caracas to Honduras and plundered the towns of Maracaibo and Truxillo. On 25th March 1643 he dropped anchor in what is now Kingston Harbour in Jamaica, landed about 500 men, and after some sharp fighting and the loss of forty of his followers, entered the town of St. Jago de la Vega, which he ransomed for 200 beeves, 10,000 lbs. of cassava bread and 7000 pieces of eight. Many of the English were so captivated by the beauty and fertility of the island that twenty-three deserted in one night to the Spaniards.[66]
The first two Stuart Kings, like the great Queen who preceded them, and in spite of the presence of a powerful Spanish faction at the English Court, looked upon the Indies with envious eyes, as a source of perennial wealth to whichever nation could secure them. James I., to be sure, was a man of peace, and soon after his accession patched up a treaty with the Spaniards; but he had no intention of giving up any English claims, however shadowy they might be, to America. Cornwallis, the new ambassador at Madrid, from a vantage ground where he could easily see the financial and administrative confusion into which Spain, in spite of her colonial wealth, had fallen, was most dissatisfied with the treaty. In a letter to Cranborne, dated 2nd July 1605, he suggested that England never lost so great an opportunity of winning honour and wealth as by relinquishing the war with Spain, and that Philip and his kingdom "were reduced to such a state as they could not in all likelihood have endured for the space of two years more."[67] This opinion we find repeated in his letters in the following years, with covert hints that an attack upon the Indies might after all be the most profitable and politic thing to do. When, in October 1607, Zuniga, the Spanish ambassador in London, complained to James of the establishment of the new colony in Virginia, James replied that Virginia was land discovered by the English and therefore not within the jurisdiction of Philip; and a week later Salisbury, while confiding to Zuniga that he thought the English might not justly go to Virginia, still refused to prohibit their going or command their return, for it would be an acknowledgment, he said, that the King of Spain was lord of all the Indies.[68] In 1609, in the truce concluded between Spain and the Netherlands, one of the stipulations provided that for nine years the Dutch were to be free to trade in all places in the East and West Indies except those in actual possession of the Spaniards on the date of cessation of hostilities; and thereafter the English and French governments endeavoured with all the more persistence to obtain a similar privilege. Attorney-General Heath, in 1625, presented a memorial to the Crown on the advantages derived by the Spaniards and Dutch in the West Indies, maintaining that it was neither safe nor profitable for them to be absolute lords of those regions; and he suggested that his Majesty openly interpose or permit it to be done underhand.[69] In September 1637 proposals were renewed in England for a West India Company as the only method of obtaining a share in the wealth of America. It was suggested that some convenient port be seized as a safe retreat from which to plunder Spanish trade on land and sea, and that the officers of the company be empowered to conquer and occupy any part of the West Indies, build ships, levy soldiers and munitions of war, and make reprisals.[70] The temper of Englishmen at this time was again illustrated in 1640 when the Spanish ambassador, Alonzo de Cardenas, protested to Charles I. against certain ships which the Earls of Warwick and Marlborough were sending to the West Indies with the intention, Cardenas declared, of committing hostilities against the Spaniards. The Earl of Warwick, it seems, pretended to have received great injuries from the latter and threatened to recoup his losses at their expense. He procured from the king a broad commission which gave him the right to trade in the West Indies, and to "offend" such as opposed him. Under shelter of this commission the Earl of Marlborough was now going to sea with three or four armed ships, and Cardenas prayed the king to restrain him until he gave security not to commit any acts of violence against the Spanish nation. The petition was referred to a committee of the Lords, who concluded that as the peace had never been strictly observed by either nation in the Indies they would not demand any security of the Earl. "Whether the Spaniards will think this reasonable or not," concludes Secretary Windebank in his letter to Sir Arthur Hopton, "is no great matter."[71]
During this century and a half between 1500 and 1650, the Spaniards were by no means passive or indifferent to the attacks made upon their authority and prestige in the New World. The hostility of the mariners from the north they repaid with interest, and woe to the foreign interloper or privateer who fell into their clutches. When Henry II. of France in 1557 issued an order that Spanish prisoners be condemned to the galleys, the Spanish government retaliated by commanding its sea-captains to mete out the same treatment to their French captives, except that captains, masters and officers taken in the navigation of the Indies were to be hung or cast into the sea.[72] In December 1600 the governor of Cumana had suggested to the King, as a means of keeping Dutch and English ships from the salt mines of Araya, the ingenious scheme of poisoning the salt. This advice, it seems, was not followed, but a few years later, in 1605, a Spanish fleet of fourteen galleons sent from Lisbon surprised and burnt nineteen Dutch vessels found loading salt at Araya, and murdered most of the prisoners.[73] In December 1604 the Venetian ambassador in London wrote of "news that the Spanish in the West Indies captured two English vessels, cut off the hands, feet, noses and ears of the crews and smeared them with honey and tied them to trees to be tortured by flies and other insects. The Spanish here plead," he continued, "that they were pirates, not merchants, and that they did not know of the peace. But the barbarity makes people here cry out."[74] On 22nd June 1606, Edmondes, the English Ambassador at Brussels, in a letter to Cornwallis, speaks of a London ship which was sent to trade in Virginia, and putting into a river in Florida to obtain water, was surprised there by Spanish vessels from Havana, the men ill-treated and the cargo confiscated.[75] And it was but shortly after that Captain Chaloner's ship on its way to Virginia was seized by the Spaniards in the West Indies, and the crew sent to languish in the dungeons of Seville or condemned to the galleys.
By attacks upon some of the English settlements, too, the Spaniards gave their threats a more effective form. Frequent raids were made upon the English and Dutch plantations in Guiana;[76] and on 8th-18th September 1629 a Spanish fleet of over thirty sail, commanded by Don Federico de Toledo, nearly annihilated the joint French and English colony on St. Kitts. Nine English ships were captured and the settlements burnt. The French inhabitants temporarily evacuated the island and sailed for Antigua; but of the English some 550 were carried to Cartagena and Havana, whence they were shipped to England, and all the rest fled to the mountains and woods.[77] Within three months' time, however, after the departure of the Spaniards, the scattered settlers had returned and re-established the colony. Providence Island and its neighbour, Henrietta, being situated near the Mosquito Coast, were peculiarly exposed to Spanish attack;[78] while near the north shore of Hispaniola the island of Tortuga, which was colonized by the same English company, suffered repeatedly from the assaults of its hostile neighbours. In July 1635 a Spanish fleet from the Main assailed the island of Providence, but unable to land among the rocks, was after five days beaten off "considerably torn" by the shot from the fort.[79] On the strength of these injuries received and of others anticipated, the Providence Company obtained from the king the liberty "to right themselves" by making reprisals, and during the next six years kept numerous vessels preying upon Spanish commerce in those waters. King Philip was therefore all the more intent upon destroying the plantation.[80] He bided his time, however, until the early summer of 1641, when the general of the galleons, Don Francisco Diaz Pimienta, with twelve sail and 2000 men, fell upon the colony, razed the forts and carried off all the English, about 770 in number, together with forty cannon and half a million of plunder.[81] It was just ten years later that a force of 800 men from Porto Rico invaded Santa Cruz, whence the Dutch had been expelled by the English in 1646, killed the English governor and more than 100 settlers, seized two ships in the harbour and burnt and pillaged most of the plantations. The rest of the inhabitants escaped to the woods, and after the departure of the Spaniards deserted the colony for St. Kitts and other islands.[82]
Footnote 1: [(return)]
Herrera: Decades II. 1, p. 4, cited in Scelle: la Traite Négrière, I. p. 6. Note 2.