View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Hull Institutional Repository THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL ‘A Sure Defence against the Foe’? Maritime Predation & British Commercial Policy during the Spanish American Wars of Independence, 1810-1830 being a Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of PhD History in the University of Hull by Matthew John McCarthy, MA, BA February 2011 Acknowledgements This thesis is the product of a four-year doctoral project which has been fully funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I would like to express my thanks to the AHRC for providing this financial support. Thanks are also due to the staff at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull, for their advice, assistance and encouragement. In particular I would like to thank my supervisors, David J. Starkey and Richard Gorski, for their invaluable input at every stage of my research, and Fabio López Lázaro for his insightful feedback prior to my embarking on the final write-up of the following study. Contents Introduction 1 One Placed Between Two Fires 17 Two Traders’ Ghastly Wounds 45 Three A Delicate Question of a Political Nature 72 Four Discretion & Sound Judgement 99 Five Forbearance & Retaliation 135 Six Great & Almost Insuperable Difficulties 178 Seven The Fable of the Frog & the Ox 207 Conclusion ‘A Sure Defence against the Foe’? 236 Appendix 1 The Commerce-Raiding Database 249 Appendix 2 The Anglo-Spanish Convention of 12 March 1823 256 Bibliography 259 List of Figures 2.1: Annual Number of Prize Actions Involving British Vessels, 1813-1829 46 2.2: Annual Number of British Vessels Seized, Plundered and Interrupted 47 by Spanish American Predators, 1813-1829. 2.3: Annual Number of British Vessels Seized by Spanish Predators, 1813-1829 58 1 Introduction What! Shall vile robbers say, that Britain now No longer rules o’er Western India’s wave? Shall she, who govern’d ocean, e’er allow Her sons to perish in a blood-stain’d grave? Nay, worse, without demerit feel, And unrevenged, the pirate steel? Oh, Albion! Where is now that spirit fled, That spurn’d, of yore, presumptuous foes disdain? Which once thy sons with noble ardour led, To sweep the bloody pirates from the main? And caus’d thy dreaded flag to flow, A sure defence against the foe? ‘The Pirates of 1822’, Kingston, 28 June 1822.1 The verses of the above song, written by an anonymous composer in Jamaica, appeared in the Liverpool Mercury in September 1822. The lyric was printed ‘not on account of its poetic merits’, the newspaper stressed, but in order to illuminate how ‘very notorious’ piracy must have become in the West Indies ‘to have been selected as the burden of such a piece’. Moreover, the song’s emphasis on the neglect shown by the British government struck a particular chord with the editor of the Liverpool Mercury, who claimed to have ‘repeatedly called the attention of the public to the infatuated and unpardonable indifference evinced by … ministers towards the commercial interests of Great Britain’. The following study investigates the British government’s response to commerce-raiding activity in the early nineteenth century and evaluates whether the measures implemented to protect British traders constituted ‘a sure defence against the foe’. 1 Liverpool Mercury, 20 Sept 1822. 2 The predatory activity complained of in ‘The Pirates of 1822’ was a feature of the Spanish American Wars of Independence, fought between Spain and her American colonies in the early nineteenth century. This armed conflict was born out of a debate within the Spanish world over the nature of sovereignty.2 In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain, deposed King Ferdinand VII, and crowned his brother Joseph Bonaparte as head of state. Spain was thus left without a government of generally accepted legitimacy. Regional juntas were formed in Spain to govern individual provinces and were later amalgamated into the Junta Central, which organised resistance against the French occupation and claimed sovereignty over Spain until King Ferdinand’s return. Local governing juntas were also established in Spanish America after 1808, but unlike in Spain, this development was complicated by a power struggle involving peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) and criollos (American-born descendents of Spaniards). By 1810 it was widely held in America that the French would triumph in the Iberian Peninsula and home- rule movements began to gather steam. On 19 April 1810 the Captain General of Venezuela was unseated by those who feared he might recognise the legitimacy of Joseph Bonaparte’s regime. The same occurred in Buenos Aires in May 1810, while later in the year parts of Chile and Mexico also flared into revolt. Although the local juntas only intended to rule provisionally until the day that Ferdinand VII was restored to the Spanish throne, it was not long before they declared outright independence from Spain, sparking violence, civil war and terror that would last for many years. In 1815, a major Spanish expeditionary force arrived in New Granada and succeeded in restoring royalist control to parts of the Spanish American empire. But the forces unleashed during the Napoleonic Wars were too strong to be contained for long and under the leadership of revolutionaries such as Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, the insurgent forces gradually overpowered the Spanish armies and by the end of the 1820s the Wars of Independence were effectively over.3 As the dust settled in Central and South 2 Following paragraph based on Jaime E. Rodriguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp.36-159. 3 For more on the political developments and military campaigns in Spanish America see, David Bushnell, ‘The Independence of Spanish America’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.) The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) pp.95-156; John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808-1826 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973). 3 America the emerging map of the world had changed significantly. Not only had several independent nations replaced the sprawling Spanish American empire, Brazil had also declared its independence from Portugal. The Iberian empires that had ruled the New World for the previous 300 years were no more. Wars of independence were quickly superseded by wars of consolidation as several new Latin American states turned upon each other in their attempts to consolidate or expand their territorial boundaries and carve out their own commercial niches.4 Maritime violence was integral to the Spanish American Wars of Independence. Naval forces deployed by Spain and the revolutionaries fought some important engagements, raised and enforced blockades, and acted as auxiliaries to the armies fighting on land.5 However, this naval activity was eclipsed in both its scale and significance by privateering. A strong desire to prosecute their revolutionary struggles at sea, coupled with a shortage of resources, compelled several independent Spanish American governments to grant commissions to private individuals to arm their vessels and take to the seas to prey upon Spanish trade and shipping. Collectively, these privateers became known as los corsarios insurgentes (the insurgent privateers).6 It soon became apparent that the Spanish navy was ill-equipped to meet this insurgent challenge at sea. Following heavy defeats at the battles of Cape St Vincent in 1797 and Trafalgar in 1805, the Armada Real was left in a 4 One of the first and most significant of these conflicts was the Argentina-Brazil War (1825-1828). This conflict assumed a distinct maritime dimension that is the subject of Brian Vale’s A War Betwixt Englishmen: Brazil against Argentina on the River Plate, 1825-1830 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). However, the current study focuses only on predatory activity accompanying the wars between Spain and the Spanish American colonies. 5 For naval histories of some of the countries involved in the Spanish American Wars of Independence see, Fernando de Bordeje y Morencos, ‘La Marina durante la Primera Mitad del Siglo xix’, in, La España Marítima del Siglo xix, 2 vols. (Madrid: Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, 1989) pp.7-32; Ángel Justiniano Carranza, Campañas Navales de la República Argentina: Cuadros Históricos, 4 vols. (Buenos Aires: Departamiento de Estudios Históricos Navales, 1962); Brian Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific: Fortune and Freedom in Spanish America (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Elmer W. Flaccus, ‘Commodore Porter and the Mexican Navy’, Hispanic American Historical Rreview, 34: 3 (August, 1954) pp.365-373. NB: All quotations from Spanish language sources are my own. 6 Although ‘insurgent’ is a loaded term it is used throughout this thesis due to the frequency with which it was used by contemporaries to denote those Spanish Americans seeking independence. 4 state of extreme weakness.7 So much so that one historian argues that after 1814 the Spanish navy ‘to all intents … no longer existed’.8 In its efforts to restore order to the Spanish American empire, the Spanish government therefore resorted to granting commissions to private individuals to wage war at sea under its flag. In addition to these privately-owned, legally-commissioned maritime predators, a second type of private maritime assailant emerged during the Spanish American Wars of Independence. Pirates, acting with no legal authority whatsoever, took advantage of the political turmoil to plunder the trade and shipping of all nations. In the words of one historian, this combination of legal and illegal predatory activity, which was evident throughout the period 1810-1830, amounted to ‘maritime mayhem’.9 Although commerce-raiding has generated a vast literature, little is known of this early nineteenth-century upsurge in maritime predation.