Global Space, Sailor Practice, and Bureaucratic Archives in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Maritime Empire
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The Dissertation Committee for Brian Patrick Jones Certifes that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Making the Ocean: Global Space, Sailor Practice, and Bureaucratic Archives in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Maritime Empire Committee: __________________________________ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Supervisor __________________________________ Susan Deans-Smith __________________________________ Bruce Hunt __________________________________ Neil Kamil __________________________________ María M. Portuondo Making the Ocean: Global Space, Sailor Practice, and Bureaucratic Archives in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Maritime Empire by Brian Patrick Jones, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2014 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Jorge Cañizares for his support of this project and for his challenging feedback that has made this project a better project and me a better historian. Thanks also to the other members of my dissertation committee—Susan Deans-Smith, Bruce Hunt, Neil Kamil, and María Portuondo—for sharing their time and insights with me on this project. In addition to those I have already mentioned, I have had the privilege of being exposed to a variety of different perspectives on history in the classroom, including in particular my classes with Abigail Lustig, Robert Olwell, Jim Sidbury, and Ann Twinam. I also appreciate the friendships and intellectual partnerships I have made with my colleagues in the history department at UT. Michael Schmidt has been a stimulating partner in countless conversations regarding far-ranging topics affecting our work and otherwise. This dissertation has largely been an individual effort, but founding The Appendix with my partners Ben Breen, Felipe Cruz, and Chris Heaney was anything but, and I am grateful to them for the opportunity to build the kind of collaborative project I could never achieve on my own. Other colleagues and visiting scholars from whose work, friendship, and insights I have benefited while at UT include Matt Childs, Becca Havens, Kyle Shelton, Cameron Strang, Jim Sweet, and Laurie Wood. My work has been supported by several fellowships for which I am very grateful. I spent a summer on fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA and received a Marie L. and William R. Hartland Fellowship to work at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI. A fellowship from the history department at UT supported a year of research at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. I appreciate financial support, but am also particularly thankful for the help from the staff at each of these institutions in hunting down and collecting materials. I want to thank the staff and fellows at the John Carter Brown Library in particular where the feeling of supportive intellectual community came at a pivotal time for my project. Ralph Bauer, Kaja Cook, iii Jesse Cromwell, Christian Crouch, Susan Danforth, Charlie Foy, Elena Schneider, and Ken Ward shared much appreciated personal expertise, helpful feedback, and camaraderie. Finally, I am thankful to my family for their encouragement and support during this process and particularly to my wife Sarah for joining me on my research and enduring the associated stresses, but more importantly for joining me in laying the groundwork for a hopeful and shared future as this selfish pursuit recedes into past. iv Making the Ocean: Global Space, Sailor Practice, and Bureaucratic Archives in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Maritime Empire Brian Patrick Jones, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra This dissertation is about the long-distance navigators who constructed a global marine world as agents of the sixteenth-century Spanish maritime empire. The hard-won pragmatic and empirical expertise on which they relied developed in an uneasy tension with the priorities of the bureaucracy centered at the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. In the Atlantic, bureaucratic standardization driven by the Casa made commercial ocean travel increasingly routine, while exploratory sailors, particularly in the Pacific, continued to apply their expertise in unknown and unpredictable waters. The quotidian and the pragmatic defined these long-distance mariners’ relationship to their environment. They organized space into networks of knowable pathways that connected places identified by names and markers that communicated the sailors’ experience to future navigators; they interpreted local conditions based on inferences from distant stimuli and ocean-scale systems; and they introduced their natural and human surroundings to metropolitan and colonial scholars and administrators. The resources and instruments developed by the Casa informed these practices, but voyages of discovery always remained outside of direct institutional control from Seville. This relationship—between the local, individual, and contingent on the one hand and the universal, bureaucratic, and synthetic on the other—not only defined the dynamics of intellectual authority governing scientific endeavors under the Spanish monarchy, but also shaped strategies for projecting imperial claims across areas of uneven and limited physical control, whether marine or terrestrial. Reevaluating the balance between marine and terrestrial territorial claims recasts the v Americas as a waypoint into the Pacific and beyond for the globally-aware westward gaze of Spanish imperial ambition. More fundamentally, it highlights the multicentric and networked arrangement of power in the early modern period by refocusing our attention on those islands, whether literal or figurative, of physical Spanish presence surrounded by spaces of hypothetical control. The Spanish empire’s maritime orientation during the sixteenth century developed the intellectual, political, and institutional strategies to balance and resolve these tensions between embodied and archival knowledges, local contingencies and universal frameworks that defined the distribution of power under the Spanish monarchy. vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1. “Con la sonda enal mano”: Building Spanish Empire through Nautical Expertise 33 Chapter 2. Individuals, Institutions, and Networks in the Construction of Marine Knowledge 103 Chapter 3. Oceans as Space 174 Chapter 4. Oceans as Medium 270 Chapter 5. Oceans as Resource 338 Coda. Shrinking the Spanish Lake 405 Appendix 1. Origins of Sailors Seeking Pilot Certifcation, 1559-1650 419 Appendix 2. Geographic Distribution of Pilot Exam Applications, 1559-1650 421 Appendix 3. Table of Locations in the Indies from Gerónimo Girava 425 Appendix 4. Index of Maritime Places of the Indies from Baltasar Vellerino de Villalobos 433 Bibliography 439 vii Introduction This dissertation is about the epistemological consequences of long-distance seafaring on behalf of the Spanish empire in the long sixteenth century. It addresses the role of mariners sailing under the Spanish fag—pilots and navigators in particular—in creating a global world-ocean. These seamen were not only creative contributors in their own right, but the mobile connectors of networks of sailors, scholars, fshermen, and bureaucrats and their ships, boats, texts, instruments, and specimens that collectively defned new notions of global space and systems and moved bodies of knowledge between previously unconnected and little-connected places. To credit the sailors of the Spanish maritime enterprise with globalizing the marine world ofers a challenge to existing chronologies and geographies of globally-aware scientifc projects, a reevaluation of the geographical focus of the historiography of sixteenth-century Spanish empire, a new spatial frame for understanding territorial sovereignty in the early modern Spanish monarchy, and an exploration of the relationship between institutions and individuals in constructing scientifc knowledge.¹ ¹ In referring to ‘globalization’ and ‘global history,’ I am indebted to Miles Ogborn’s approach to the terms in his introduction to Global Lives. Rather than attempting a single explanation for the arrival of a globalized world, I am interested in tracing one of many globalizations—in this case, the construction of the world’s oceans as a coherent set of spaces, places, and systems. My interest in studying the global aspects of this process has been in identifying those moments when historical actors invoked their own notions of the global to explain their actions or when the physical fact of their global interactions produced unintended consequences. I am less interested in applying a contemporary logic of comprehensive globalization or of global comparative perspectives to historical processes. Serge 1 Between the late ffeenth and early seventeenth centuries, European sailors expanded from pursuing the most tenuous exploratory voyages to near-Atlantic islands such as the Canaries and the Azores to performing routine, scheduled commercial voyages across every ocean of the globe. Portuguese navigators made the earliest of these moves, while by the end of the period there were many European imperial and commercial enterprises capable of promoting long-range and even circumnavigatory ocean voyages. The Spanish monarchy quickly ramped up its own maritime activity with voyages of conquest to the Canary Islands and most famously in 1492 with the approval by Ferdinand and