The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (78 page)

The nerve center of Spain’s overseas empire was the Casa de la Contratación, “house of trade,” which
Isabella of Castile established at Seville in 1503. The Casa was charged with diverse functions regarding the trade and settlement of the Americas: regulating the flow of emigrants, collecting taxes and duties, licensing pilots, administering commercial law in the colonies, and keeping up-to-date information about new discoveries, especially on the
padrón real,
or master chart. The last was the responsibility of the
piloto mayor,
whose function was to “
make a royal model map of the navigation of all the regions that have so far been discovered that belong to the royal crown” and copies of which were to be issued “only to such persons as the monarch or the Casa de la Contratación may order.” Among those not so favored were the English, Dutch, French, and Portuguese, as well as Spanish
Jews and unconverted Muslims, who had been expelled from Spain in 1492 and 1502, respectively.

Striking out from
Hispaniola and Cuba, Spanish explorers made increasingly bold forays along the coasts of and into North and South America, the most spectacular achievements being
Hernando Cortés’s toppling of the
Aztec Empire with its capital at Tenochtitlán (
Mexico City), and
Francisco Pizarro’s overthrow of the
Inca Empire, which stretched along a thousand miles of the Andes from
Ecuador to
Chile. These defunct states were superseded by the viceroyalties of, respectively,
New Spain (from modern Mexico to the border of
Panama) and Peru. After silver mining began in the 1540s at
Potosí,
Bolivia, and Zacatecas, Mexico, the spectacular cargoes carried by Spanish ships attracted the attention of French, English, and Dutch
corsairs.
To improve security, in 1564 the Casa de la Contratación ordered all transatlantic ships to sail in one of two convoys.
The New Spain fleet sailed for San Juan de Ulúa, an island opposite
Veracruz, Mexico, usually in July, while the
Tierra Firme fleet served
Cartagena,
Colombia, and
Nombre de Dios, Panama, between March and May. Both fleets sailed via the Canaries and the Caribbean islands, usually
Dominica, a crossing of about a month. The Tierra Firme ships reached Cartagena about two weeks later, while those bound for New Spain took another month or more, including a stop in
Puerto Rico for
provisions. The returning fleets sometimes rendezvoused in
Havana, but in any case they aimed to be in the Bahama Channel by August, before the height of the hurricane season.

Pierre Chassereau’s “A New and Correct Plan of the Harbour of Carthagena [Colombia] in America,” the best natural harbor on the Caribbean. This hand-colored copper engraving was published at London in 1741. Courtesy of the Smith Collection, Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine, Portland.

The
Spanish had to found their own
ports in the New World, but because of the seasonal nature of the transatlantic and transpacific trades and the conquistadors’ preoccupation with exploring, consolidating, and exploiting the interior, these tended to be haphazard affairs with small year-round populations and little if any infrastructure. On the Atlantic side, the most important were Havana and
Veracruz. Strategically situated on the north coast of Cuba, Havana became one of the most important Spanish strongholds in the
Americas and the principal rendezvous for convoys returning to Spain. Veracruz was said to have been “founded” in 1519, but a merchant described it the next year as having “
neither house, hut, water nor firewood: only sandy beaches,” and eighty years later it boasted only
four hundred Spanish households. With its ancient Phoenician name transplanted to a new world, Cartagena was situated on a large bay and protected from seaward by the island of Tierrabomba. This combined with its relatively salubrious environment and its proximity to the
Isthmus of Panama made it an ideal homeport for the Tierra Firme fleet.

Spain’s connection to Peru and its silver hinged on the pestilential Isthmus of Panama, and the
ports of Nombre de Dios (replaced by
Portobelo in 1597) on the Caribbean coast and Panama on the Pacific. Their names notwithstanding, these godforsaken places were little more than graveyards that sprang to life only to load and off-load the fleets’ invaluable cargoes—silver eastbound, European goods westbound. In 1546, a visitor wrote “
These two towns are so infested, that of one hundred men who enter, if they remain in it for a month, there aren’t twenty who are spared from sickness, and the majority of those who fall sick die.” En route back to Havana, twenty-six of the author’s shipmates were buried at sea. Panama’s main trading counterpart was
Callao, the port of the viceregal capital at Lima, which was also served by
Valparaíso. The principal shipyard on the Pacific coast was at Guayaquil,
Ecuador, with its easy access to wood and pitch, while south of Callao, Arica (founded in 1545) served the highland mines of
Potosí. The decision to ship silver via the Pacific and Panama was based more on political than logistical considerations. It was vastly cheaper and faster to carry Potosí silver to
Buenos Aires and from there across the Atlantic, but pressure from the viceroyalty of Peru led to the Río Plata port’s official closure in 1594. Trading at Buenos Aires was not legalized until 1776, and port improvements did not begin until the nineteenth century.

Lobbying by the merchants of
Seville likewise prevented the development of a robust Pacific coast trade between Mexico and Peru, and north of Panama there was only a handful of ports. The most important were
Realejo (
Corinto,
Nicaragua), which boasted a shipyard and easy access to the Caribbean via Lakes Manaus and Nicaragua and the San Juan River; Huatulco, until its sack by Thomas Cavendish in 1597; and after Huatulco’s abandonment, Acapulco, the eastern terminus of the
Manila galleon. (Thanks to the
Treaty of Tordesillas, Spanish ships could not sail between
Spain and the
Philippines via the Indian Ocean.) Like Nombre de Dios and Portobelo, Acapulco was a fine harbor on a fetid shore and came alive only when the galleons called. After
five or six months at sea, the crews were invariably weakened by malnutrition or disease and had to recuperate in the town’s rude huts and tents before starting the 450-kilometer trek to
Mexico City. (The westward voyage to the Philippines took only three months.) Apart from the Manila galleon, Acapulco had little purpose. As was true of all Spanish-American ports, it existed for the maintenance of ties between the home country and the viceroyalties; although separated by eight thousand miles of the Pacific, the Philippines were administratively part of
New Spain. Centuries passed before any of these American ports developed the cosmopolitan or commercial identities so striking in the dynamic trading environments of their Eurasian and African counterparts.

Spanish America relied heavily on imported slave labor thanks to royal prohibitions on enslaving indigenous people, the devastation of native populations by Old World diseases, and the survivors’ lack of familiarity with even the rudiments of newly introduced crops (such as wheat and sugarcane), livestock (cattle, pigs, and sheep), and industries (mining and sugar mills). The Treaty of Tordesillas guaranteed the Portuguese exclusive rights to trade in Africa, where they negotiated for a steady supply of slaves with various kingdoms. Among their earliest partners was Congo, whose
King Nzinga embraced Christianity in 1491 (taking the Portuguese name João in the process) and whose Christian successors continued to sell slaves to the Portuguese. In 1540, Congo’s King Afonso proudly wrote to Portugal’s
João III,
“Put all the
Guinea countries [to the north] on one side and only Congo on the other, and you will find that Congo renders more than all the others put together.… No king in all these parts esteems Portuguese goods as much as we do. We favor the trade, sustain it, open markets, roads, and markets [
sic
] where the pieces [prime male slaves] are traded.”

The pace of the
slave trade escalated through the sixteenth century. While they sanitize a vicious human experience, the raw numbers are revealing: twelve thousand slaves were shipped in the first quarter of the century, forty
thousand in the second, and a further sixty thousand between 1550 and 1575. Together with the transoceanic migration of an estimated 240,000 white Europeans over the same period, this was an unprecedented feat of demographic relocation. The first slaves taken directly from Africa to the Americas arrived in 1530, but the sharp increase thereafter was due to the development of sugar plantations in Brazil. Portuguese settlement there began with the establishment of São Vicente, near Santos, in 1532; Salvador da Bahia, colonial Brazil’s first capital and its primary port, was founded in 1549. At least
fifty thousand more Africans were shipped to Brazil in the last quarter of the century, but the deadly conditions of servitude and the environment were such that by 1600 the number of living slaves was no more than fifteen thousand. Nonetheless, the sugar industry boomed and the
number of ships sailing annually between
Recife and
Lisbon grew from 40 in 1584 to 130 in 1618, and the sugar of Brazil was held to be worth more than all the
pepper, spices, and other specialties shipped from the
Estado da India
—“the state of India,” as the Portuguese called their far-flung holdings in the Indian Ocean and beyond.

The absence of any high-seas maritime tradition on the west coast of Africa or in the Americas enabled the
Portuguese and Spanish to spin their own maritime webs, from which they excluded virtually everyone else. The situation in the Monsoon Seas was a different matter altogether, crisscrossed as they were by a fully functioning trading network with myriad participants of far greater linguistic, religious, cultural, and political diversity than anything Europeans had previously encountered. The Portuguese worked with stunning speed to channel the trade in pepper and spices to their advantage, but they quickly grasped that this was not a static system easily susceptible to their designs. The opening of the direct sea route from Europe was new, but Asia’s regional trades were more extensive and the opportunities for profit more diverse than the Portuguese had anticipated, and their presence in the Indian Ocean did not permanently disrupt or distort the traditional patterns and cycles of Asian trade. Within Asia they constituted only one group in a crowded field, but because they worked their way into virtually every major corner of the region, their experience is the most convenient lens through which to view sixteenth-century maritime Asia in a global context.

Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese might have adapted themselves to the generally laissez-faire patterns they found there. Lacking the capital, ships, or manpower to monopolize the spice trade themselves, they relied on a combination of
diplomacy and aggression to demand protection money from Muslim, Hindu, and other maritime merchants and to channel trade through Portuguese-held ports. Ships’ guns were critical to their success in staking claims in often hostile territories, and as rudimentary as shipboard ordnance
was, for most of the 1500s only Europeans had it. The mariners of the Indian Ocean were not acquiescent to Portuguese demands, but they lacked practical experience of naval gunnery, and the Portuguese established their mastery over the key strongholds of the Indian Ocean with only a few heavily armed ships. The establishment of a Portuguese presence in Monsoon Asia began with Dom
Francisco de Almeida, first viceroy and governor of
Portuguese India. With a fleet of twenty-two ships in 1505 he captured
Kilwa and
Mombasa in East
Africa, seized a small island as a forward base against Goa in India, and built a fort at Cannanore (Kannur,
Kerala); additional fortresses on
Sri Lanka and
Socotra and near Melaka followed.

Opinion about which policies would best serve Portugal’s interests was divided. Almeida viewed fortresses as a potential drain on Portuguese resources. As he wrote to
Manoel I, “
the more fortresses Your Highness possesses, the weaker your power will be. All your forces should be on the sea, because if we are not strong there, which the Lord forbid, everything will go against us.… There is no doubt that, so long as you are powerful at sea, India will be yours and that, if you are not, fortresses on land will be of little use to you.” This was not a winning argument and the chief architect of the
Estado da India
was Almeida’s successor,
Afonso de Albuquerque. Possessed of an uncanny strategic sense, a precocious ability to husband meager resources with a ruthless efficiency honed in a decade of fighting in Morocco, and considerable luck, Albuquerque laid the cornerstones of the
Estado
. A critical advantage was that despite the obvious benefits of maritime commerce in the form of revenues and the accessibility of foreign goods, the petty rulers of the Indian Ocean littoral were too weak at sea and preoccupied with internal politics to mount an effectively coordinated resistance to the Portuguese. Despite their meager numbers and distance from home, the Portuguese had several advantages: the full backing of the crown, a singleness of purpose that enabled them to defeat or exploit rivalries among their potential adversaries, and ships with cannon. Such organized resistance as they faced at sea tended to be orchestrated from afar, by states with the clearest understanding of the threat the Portuguese posed to their trade, especially the Ottoman Empire and
Mamluk Egypt.