Entangled Empires: Anglo-Spanish Competition in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Entangled Empires: Anglo-Spanish Competition in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean By Daniel Genkins Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History August 10, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Jane G. Landers, Ph.D. Richard J. M. Blackett, Ph.D. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Ph.D. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Genkins All Rights Reserved ii For Tyrion, who is a good dog. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the immortal words of Yoda, “takes a village to write a dissertation, it does.” That was certainly true in this case – it also took 1.9 A Song of Ice and Fire publishing cycles (based on the current average of 3 2/3 years between books), seven pairs of basketball shoes, and more than 2,000 cups of chai. The village in question was a large one, so apologies to the villagers omitted from the list below due to limited space, faulty memory, or personal vendetta. My interest in the history of colonial Latin America was sparked by Jürgen Buchenau, Jerry Dávila, and Lyman Johnson during my M.A. training at UNC Charlotte. At Vanderbilt, I was introduced to the wider world of the early modern Atlantic and the ways and means of being a professional historian by Bill Caferro, Celso Castilho, Marshall Eakin, Catherine Molineux, and Dan Usner. Through it all and most of all, Jane Landers has continually expanded my bibliographic knowledge, archival expertise, and academic network. Village people who started with fewer letters after their name include, but are not limited to, Fernanda, Courtney, Ti, Steve, Justin, Juliet, Katie, Kara, and Erin as well as the full force of the Anthro/Classics crowd from the Golden Age of Grad School. That leaves a whole separate sentence for Zoe, Dan, and Aileen, former princes of Nashville and future kings of the northeast. Research related to this project was funded by Vanderbilt-affiliated entities and awards including the Center for Latin American Studies and College of Arts & Sciences as well as a Herbert and Blanche Henry Weaver Fellowship. I received external support from the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Last but not least, I’d like to thank my parents for putting up with me for more than three decades, my brother for doing the cooking for the last five years, and my dog for alternately sleeping and staring at me with disturbing intensity while I wrote the dissertation. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION................................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................iv LIST OF FIGURES........................................................................................................................vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.......................................................................................................vii NOTE ON DATES.......................................................................................................................viii INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 Frameworks and Interventions.............................................................................................2 Historical Narrative..............................................................................................................5 Historiographical Review....................................................................................................7 Chapter Outline..................................................................................................................10 Primary Sources.................................................................................................................13 Chapter I. “To Seek New Worlds, for Gold, for Praise, for Glory”: El Dorado and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Guiana....................................................................17 II. “The Island which cannot faile”: Providence Island and the English Caribbean, 1615 – 1636.........................................................51 III. “Oy por mi, mañana por ti”: The Spanish Response to Providence Island, 1636 – 1670...........................................................95 IV. “Disorder, Insubordination, and Conspiracies”: Rediscovering Spanish Jamaica, 1603 – 1651.............................................................................145 V. “Not to pillage, but to plant”: The Western Design and its Aftermath, 1651 – 1670..................................................................182 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................................223 REFERENCES............................................................................................................................236 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 2.1. Mapa de la Ysla de Santa Catalina, situada 80 leguas de Cartagena y 40 de Portobelo.........81 3.1. Plano de la Ysla de Santa Catalina, 1640.............................................................................114 3.2. Mapa de la isla de Santa Catalina.........................................................................................131 3.3. Plano de la Ysla de Santa Catalnia, 1666.............................................................................136 4.1. Ysla de Xamaica...................................................................................................................151 5.1. Planta de las fortificaciones de Jamaica................................................................................201 5.2. Plano del puerto de Santa Ana (Jamaica).............................................................................208 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Archives AGI Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain) CC Casa de la Contratación ES Escribanía GU Gobierno: Audiencia de Guatemala SF Gobierno: Audiencia de Santa Fé SD Gobierno: Audiencia de Santo Domingo IG Indiferente General MP Mapas y planos PR Patronato Real BL British Library (London, England) TNA The National Archives (Kew, England) Citations leg. legajo n. número r. ramo Journals AHR The American Historical Review WMQ The William and Mary Quarterly Published Collections ADB Lovera, José Rafael, ed. Antonio de Berrío: La Obsesión por El Dorado. Caracas, Venezuela: Petróleos de Venezuela, 1991. PIC Kupperman, Karen Ordahl and W. E. Minchinton, eds. Papers Relating to the Providence Island Company, 1630 – 1641. Microform Academic Publishers, 1987. vii NOTE ON DATES Since England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, English dates lagged behind those used in Catholic Europe by approximately ten days during the period that this dissertation analyzes. To add to the confusion, from 1155 until 1752 the English year began on March 25 rather than January 1. To avoid ambiguity when English dates appear in conjunction with Iberian ones, I have done my best to transform all dates to their Gregorian equivalent and all years to the continental standard. viii INTRODUCTION In a seminal article published a decade ago in The American Historical Review, Eliga H. Gould argued that “the history of the Spanish and English-speaking Atlantic worlds is often best approached not from a comparative standpoint, but as a form of interconnected or ‘entangled’ history.” The key difference between traditional comparative studies and Gould’s entangled alternative is a move away from the rote acceptance of historical geographic, political, or social boundaries as fixed or static. This shift lends itself to the creation of histories “concerned with ‘mutual influencing,’ ‘reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions,’ and the intertwined ‘processes of constituting one another.’”1 Gould applies this conceptual framework most directly to his area of expertise, the eighteenth-century English Atlantic. To his credit, he emphasizes that the balance of power between the Atlantic empires of Britain and Spanish tilted strongly to the south into the early years of the Age of Revolution.2 But if the dissolution of Spanish America marks the end of this entangled history, what of its initial stages? This dissertation will examine an earlier chapter in the interconnected colonial endeavors of England and Spain in the New World.3 Between the final decades of the sixteenth century, when the first attempts to establish a permanent English presence in the Americas were made, and 1670, when the Treaty of Madrid signaled Spain’s formal acceptance of this presence, the foundations were laid for a new imperial order in the Atlantic. 1 Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” AHR 112.3 (2007): 764. 2 Ibid., 767 – 772. 3 This is only one dimension of imperial entanglement in the early modern Atlantic. See, for example, Jane Landers, “Franco/Spanish Entanglements in Florida and the Circumatlantic,” Journal of Transnational Studies 8.1 (2017): 1 – 18. 1 “Entangled” histories as formulated by Gould and others quickly generated a robust discussion. An early corrective was offered by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, who asked whether Gould’s notion was simply “borderlands historiography in new clothes.” Cañizares-Esguerra argued that regardless of the framework used to analyze