From the mid-1530s, Spanish ships linked Peru to the Caribbean via Panama and the overland route to Nombre de Dios. Peru quickly developed a strong coasting trade to exchange local produce within a region that stretched from the centre of modern Chile to Ecuador, along the settled coastal strip to the west of the Andes. By 1600 around a hundred ships were at work, including a handful of royal galleons, taking silver from Callao to Panama; the rest, far smaller, worked the local trade. These ships proved essential to English predators. While the silver fleet attracted attention, and provided the occasional windfall, local ships offered fresh supplies and experienced pilots. The problem for Spain was simple, but insoluble. The flow of silver from Peru to Madrid was critical to the imperial project, but the remaining local trade of the west coast was of no interest. Therefore the Spanish South Seas Armada, the local naval force focused on escorting silver shipments. The defence of local ports was left to soldiers and forts; local trade defence was left to the merchants who owned the ships and cargoes. Losses were acceptable as long as the silver continued to flow. This system worked tolerably well as long as the threat was intermittent and the aggressors weak.1 In the absence of any threat Peru became conspicuously wealthy; ships travelled without cannon, and ports were hardly fortified. This happy situation would not endure.
For English seafarers Spanish South America soon became a mythic promised land of commercial opportunity, and plunder. All they needed was a friendly port. Silver flowed from the fabled mountain mine at Potosi, where a city of 120,000 souls, the size of contemporary Amsterdam, supplied the needs of an industry that chewed up Indian labourers as quickly as the labourers chewed the narcotic coca leaves that got them through working days that combined the dangers of deep mining with an atmosphere so thin that walking was difficult, and temperature shifts of thirty degrees Celsius between the sweaty, sulphurous depths of the mine and the icy winds that ripped round the exposed mountain. Unaware of the human misery it entailed, Europeans adopted Potosi as the ultimate expression of unimaginable riches; ‘the mines of Peru’ fuelled the dreams of avaricious men, and the risky voyages of those who tried to make them real. The silver was shipped as bullion, or minted into pieces of eight at Lima, coins that were accepted across the world, providing liquidity for the first global economy. Without Potosi it is unlikely English seafarers would have troubled to enter the Great South Sea.2
While the Spanish ruled a vast continental empire stretching from California to the Argentine pampas, and operated an extreme mercantilist economic system, designed to direct all trade through Seville, with endless opportunities to impose taxes and fees to fill the Imperial treasury, the Great South Sea would remain mare clausum and mare incognita to legitimate English trade. As foreigners, heretics and eventually enemies Elizabethan seafarers, denied access to Spanish markets, turned to piracy and privateering. After three raids into the ocean, raids that transformed the economics of the Peruvian Viceroyalty, the English finally, rather belatedly, learned that the key to this ocean would be a tiny island off the coast of Chile, discovered and abandoned by the Spanish.
Juan Fernández discovered the island that bears his name while trying to solve a problem. On the west coast of South America the powerful Humboldt current flowed northwards, while the light, contrary coastal winds meant that a voyage south from Panama to Callao, the port of Peru and hub of the regional trading system, was a three-month ordeal. The next leg, from Callao to Valparaiso (the port of Chile), was equally tedious. By contrast, the northbound return voyage was quick and easy. A silver convoy from Callao sailed every year, carrying bullion and mercury to use in the mines of Mexico, but the round trip was so demanding that each ship only sailed biennially.
While on passage south from Callao to Chile, Fernández struck out to sea to avoid the tedious coastal passage, discovering the island on 22 November 1574. His new route cut the voyage south from three months to one, transforming colonial economics by developing internal markets between tropical Ecuador and the temperate wheat fields of Chile. While Fernández went back to the island in 1575, it is not clear if he ever went ashore.3
Some 415 miles due west of Valparaiso, the group consists of the mountainous volcanic remnants Más a Tierra (meaning ‘nearer land’), Más Afuera (‘further away’) and the far smaller Santa Clara off the western end of Más a Tierra. Más a Tierra lies approximately 33°38' south, 78°50' west, it is 15 miles east to west, and less than 5 miles north to south, with a surface area of around 15,000 hectares. The highest point, El Yunque, stands at 3,000 feet above sea level. Much of the coast is vertical and inaccessible. Lying around 110 miles to the west, Más Afuera, the more recent of the two main volcanic islands, is roughly 14 miles long and 3 miles wide, almost conical, deeply scored by ravines, with very little low-lying land, and lacking anything that might serve as a harbour. It was never going to be a suitable location for significant human settlement.
Historians of Pacific exploration have lamented the ‘failure’ of the Spanish to push on beyond Juan Fernández, open the Southern Ocean and find new lands, but this ‘failure’ was entirely logical for a land empire bent on occupying and exploiting a continent. In Spain’s imperial vision oceans were necessary evils, a means of communicating between the different parts of an unfeasibly vast imperial sway, rather than a theatre of dreams and discovery. Such foolishness was the province of eccentric English islanders. For Spain, expansion was a matter of soldiers and territory. Oceanic discovery was fortuitous, and risky. It was no accident that many of the men who pushed Spanish oceanic exploration – Columbus, Magellan, Cabot and Quirós – were foreigners. Once the mainland had been reduced to order offshore islands were a source of anxiety and cost. News of key discoveries was hidden.
The Spanish did not add the islands to their charts, aware that such knowledge posed a serious threat to their wafer thin grip on the ocean. The details were left in the heads of local pilots. Just how valuable silence could be was demonstrated four years after the initial discovery. Francis Drake sailed up the coast of Chile and across the Pacific without finding the islands, or any record of their existence.4 The English began looking for a place to settle in the South Seas by the early 1570s. When Drake attacked Peru, he relied on the latest Portuguese maps, and his ability to acquire pilots and cartographic intelligence. He became only the second mariner to sail from the South Atlantic to the South Pacific, via the Straits of Magellan. While English intelligence gathering efforts facilitated Drake’s voyage, Juan Fernández’s islands remained hidden. Drake refreshed his crew in southern Chile, far from Spanish towns. Coasting northwards in early 1579 he learned nothing of the new island, even at Valparaiso. Instead he took a fabulous prize – the silver galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, which rejoiced in the altogether earthier nickname of Cacafuego (‘shit fire’) – between Callao and Panama, before heading north and then west for the spice markets of Asia. Windfall profits from his voyage paid off the national debt, and prompted the next surge of English overseas expansion, legitimate or otherwise.5 It also excited emulation, for ever held up as the exemplary feat of English enterprise. ‘The World Encompassed’ put the Pacific into the English vision of identity and purpose. Every subsequent English raider was a new Drake, dreaming of similar prize and esteem. Little wonder the Spaniards did not put these islands on the map.
Although the Spanish responded to Drake’s invasion with uncommon urgency, Thomas Cavendish arrived in 1586, before much could be done. Although no more successful in finding Juan Fernández, Cavendish captured a Manila galleon laden with Asian exotics, generating massive profits for his investors. The voyage of Richard Hawkins, the last Elizabethan voyager to enter the South Pacific ended in defeat, captured off the coast of Ecuador in May 1595. Imprisoned at Lima, and lucky not to be executed as a pirate and heretic, Hawkins was detained until the Anglo-Spanish war ended, to deny his local knowledge to other raiders. The first Englishman to mention the islands in print, in 1622, Hawkins noted they were ‘plen
tiful of fish, and good for refreshing’. However he had not visited, only discovering their existence in a Dutch book after he returned to England.6
Hawkins had returned home after the Stuart succession brought peace with Spain, closing the South Pacific theatre of dreams. No English mariners would reach Juan Fernández for another eighty years. Not that the Spanish had any great plans for these isolated rocks: they responded to Drake’s incursion with an insane scheme to build a fortified city inside the Straits of Magellan, one of the least hospitable regions on earth.
Needless to say the settlement was a disaster, most of the settlers died where they had been abandoned. Cavendish picked up a solitary survivor, and brought the story of an abandoned city of dead Spaniards deep inside the Straits of Magellan back to England, where it excited a strikingly odd response: Englishmen wished to emulate the catastrophe.
The madcap settlement had been led by Pedro de Sarmiento de Gamboa, who would later fuel Raleigh’s ‘dreams of El Dorado’, a South American city of gold.7 For all his vanity, ambition and duplicity it was in the brilliant mind of Raleigh that a British seapower empire moved from imagination to reality. Judged by the measure of practical results Raleigh left precious little, beyond heroic failure in Virginia, but his ideas, and above all his captivating words had the power to unsettle the complacent, and inspire the ambitious. Pursuing dreams of gold and paradise into the Orinoco River proved disastrous for the aging Raleigh, but his expansive vision of empire, treasure, profit and glory, expressed in magical Elizabethan prose, would torment the imagination of poets, empire-builders and historians for centuries to come.8 Ultimately those dreams would collide with the very real island of Juan Fernández, turning one small corner of the South Pacific into an English paradise.
Between 1591 and 1599 the Spanish made two attempts to settle the island – without success. Spanish sailors and fishermen continued to visit, the islands provided a useful navigational mark and a rich fishery, but they failed to sustain a settlement. By 1600 a disappointed colonist had given the island to the Jesuits, but even the redoubtable Society of Jesus, a key engine of Spanish imperium, could not make a success of island life. It seems the very idea of offshore existence, living beyond the horizon, did not agree with the Spanish. During these early attempts at colonisation hardy Pyrenean goats, introduced into Chile a few decades before, arrived, along with European food crops.9 Although the colonists soon departed their animals and plants devastated the island’s unique ecosystem, largely the product of seeds and spores borne by wind, wave and visiting birds.10 Having evolved without indigenous land mammals the vegetation remained low crowned and succulent. The only animal population was aquatic: massive breeding herds of elephant seals, sea lions and fur seals covered every inch of accessible beach. Much of this natural world would be annihilated by the two centuries of intermittent human engagement.11
Abandoned Spanish settlements left the islands packed with goats, turnips, cress and other European crops to supplement the astonishing richness of marine life, and the iconic cabbage trees. Finally after forty years of complete silence Spain’s guilty little Pacific secret was uncovered. On 1 March 1616 a Dutch expedition led by Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten sighted the islands of Más a Tierra and Santa Clara, but was unable to anchor, ‘to the very great pain and sorrow of the sick’. Schouten’s crew were suffering from scurvy, the symptoms included loose teeth and self-absorbed nostalgia. A boat went ashore for food and water, noting the abundance of feral livestock and fish, along with evidence of occasional Spanish visits. While the Dutchmen anchored, and fished with great success, they did not manage to get ashore ‘to the great grief of our sicke men, who thereby were clean out of comfort’.12 Suitably refuelled, the expedition passed on, ‘with very great pain for not being able to rest longer in so pleasant an isle’.13 Any ‘pain’ was relative; the sickly crew finally made an insular landfall to the northwest forty distressing days later, but not one man died before the ship reached Djakarta in the Indonesian archipelago several months later.14 Willem Schouten’s narrative appeared in English in 1625, combining a seaman’s guide to the anchorages with an estimate of the vital food and water supplies, and ‘a faire green valley, full of greene trees, pleasant to behold’, which lifted the spirits of the sick.
Schouten’s report of a green and fruitful island, with fresh water, goats, pigs and an immensity of fish, attracted predatory mariners and anxious Spanish officials alike.15 The Dutch mariners needed the islands because they were at war with Spain. The curative powers of fresh food and water for scorbutic mariners, exhausted by the demanding voyage from Europe, had already given the islands a quasi-miraculous identity. Englishmen would reuse Schouten’s language for centuries, demonstrating the enduring utility of Samuel Purchas’s voyage collection. The narrative became common property; men more familiar with ship-handling than literary craft were only too willing to adopt Schouten’s opinions, and even the very words he had used to convey them. Once consigned to print, such descriptions persisted in the seafaring imagination, seamlessly sliding into other narratives. Voyagers arrived expecting to find what they had read and, unless profoundly disappointed, tended to repeat the language of their precursors.16 It also cloaked predatory ambition in curiously repetitive lyrical prose, the pirates unwilling to waste a good line.
Two published accounts of the Dutch voyage transformed European views of the South Sea, putting the island onto the world map; ‘it became thereafter a sought after haven for navigators of all flags who entered the Pacific, but most particularly for those who would not find a welcome in the ports of Spanish America’.17 While Schouten’s text had been read and quoted by Richard Hawkins it was put to more obvious use by another Dutch expedition. The expedition led by Jacques l’Hermite set off to conquer Peru, using Juan Fernández as the fleet rendezvous. Between 5 and 13 April 1624, eleven Dutch ships, carrying 2,600 men (including 1,000 soldiers), assembled in what would become Cumberland Bay. They came for fresh water, fish, meat, fruit and vegetables. Once ashore, discipline began to fragment, the voyage had not been as healthy as Le Maire’s, largely a factor of overcrowding, and now free of the ship the men looked to their own interests. Five were convicted of stealing wine, and sentenced to hang, only to be pardoned. Six sick Dutchmen begged to be left, they were never heard of again. Despite a Dutch naval victory the Spanish had improved their local defences and the expedition achieved little, other than reinforcing the idea of Juan Fernández as the ideal refreshment stop.18
This argument struck a chord with Abel Tasman, the first European to reveal the continental scale of Australia and find New Zealand. In 1642 Tasman recommended establishing a settlement, linked to his other discoveries to secure Dutch control of the South Pacific, expand trade and increase the national pool of ships and seamen, ‘which are the true and natural strength of this country’. It would also ‘extend our naval power, and raise the reputation of this nation; the most distant prospect of which is enough to warm the soul of any man who has the least regard for his country’.19 Ultimately the islands were too small to be economically attractive, and too far from the Dutch Asian settlements to be sustained. The Dutch had problems nearer home, knocked off their naval perch by the fatal combination of a French invasion and an English alliance.
Seventeenth-century Dutch voyagers described the island’s attractions for scorbutic mariners, and mapped their location for the English, who were drawn to a veritable flood of information highlighting the Achilles heel of Habsburg Spain. The maritime culture of the Dutch Republic was at once a subject of envy and admiration; much was borrowed or stolen from Dutch sources in the last forty years of the century.20 Tasman’s spirited prospectus, like the other Dutch voyage narratives, was soon available in English. It reappeared in John Campbell’s great 1744 compendium, where it served to emphasise that eighteenth century England was following in the well-marked track of heroic maritime precursors.
These geographical and piratical borrowings collided wi
th the emergence of a vibrant print culture: the Dutch-led Glorious Revolution of 1688 significantly reduced the impact of government censorship. A growing literate audience existed, and by the 1690s voyage literature had become a major genre, combining travelogue, shipwreck, piracy and wilder flights of geographical and spiritual imagination. Distant, mysterious islands emerged into an expanding mental world, shaped by Plato’s Atlantis (in Timaeus and Critias), More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis. These texts shaped the expectations of voyagers, and audiences at home. If the Dutch failed to exploit their hard-won insight their raids demonstrated Juan Fernández had become a serious problem for the Viceroyalty of Peru. The islands offered an excellent offshore base for hostile shipping, but the Viceroy lacked the manpower or money to sustain a permanent occupation against such a hazy, intermittent menace. As long as the silver kept flowing north to Panama the royal authorities in Spain were prepared to risk an occasional attack, relying on intelligence from Europe to send advance warning to Lima before hostile ships could round Cape Horn. Between 1662 and 1665 the Jesuits occupied the island for a second time, but even they lacked the dedication needed for island life. After that the Viceroy of Peru attempted to destroy the island as a food depot, landing packs of savage dogs to annihilate the goat population in 1675. Although the measure would be repeated many times the goats proved elusive and adaptable, outlasting canine and human predators, and evolving into a distinct genus.
In England a new, more sober literature emerged in the last decades of the seventeenth century. After the fashion of Elizabethan voyage collector Richard Hakluyt and his Stuart successor Samuel Purchas these voyage narratives were used to encourage the expansion of English trade.21 Such voyages resumed under the Commonwealth, a dynamic expansive maritime state that served trade and faith by making war on Catholic Spain. Cromwell showed particular interest in the closed markets of South America, considering a project to attack Chile and Peru. The Lord Protector had studied Hakluyt and Raleigh. Such thoughts proved abortive but the idea, once raised, remained at the heart of English ambition.
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