Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  After the naval defeat at the Downs, the Spanish empire – it seems reasonable to conclude – for all practical purposes lost control of the oceans on which its very survival had depended. This by no means implied that the Spanish were powerless. The Basques and Cantabrians had established Spain's naval reputation long before the discovery of America, and continued their modest activity throughout subsequent centuries. The activity of the Belgian corsairs also continued to be of vital importance in the north but had a very limited impact within the context of the world empire. Despite some efficiency at a local level, in global terms Spanish naval power evaporated. The French were increasing their naval resources, but the true masters of the oceans in the west were now the English and the Dutch.

  The government's own figures for the year 1630 suggest that it disposed in all of some forty warships, of which ten were the property of the state and the rest under contract.94 It was hardly a basis on which to defend a worldwide empire. Foreign shipyards, moreover, now built the greater part of the ships required by the monarchy. Spain's vessels were constructed in Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen and Gdańsk.95 In the Mediterranean the three principal arsenals for royal galleys were at Naples, Messina and Barcelona. The last of these suspended production for the quarter of a century after the rebellion against Spain, and in 1661 the king was informed that to replace what had been constructed in Barcelona ‘all new galleys have been built in Genoa’.96 The construction of ocean-going ships also decayed. The Basque shipyards were seriously damaged in the French invasion of 1638. Shortage of government finance was, however, the biggest obstacle. In 1648 a project was begun to construct twelve galleons in Vizcaya for the Indies route, but not one of the ships was ever built. Olivares, fully aware of the importance of sea power, resorted to a policy of contracting vessels from other nations. Though Philip IV felt that this was the wrong solution, it proved to be the best way out for acquiring warships. In the 1630s Spain made regular purchases from the Belgian shipyards. In the 1660s, one of the principal tasks occupying the Spanish ambassador in The Hague was the construction by Dutch shipyards of warships for Spain. At that period, all four warships protecting Spain's Atlantic shipping had been built by Spain's former enemy Holland.97

  The southern countries of Europe had always depended to a certain extent on the north, especially the Baltic, for supply of materials such as pitch, canvas and masts. From the seventeenth century Spain found it necessary also to import the experts for shipping and its support industries. In 1617 seventy families of engineers from Liège, employees of the armaments magnate Jean Curtius, were brought in to install the first major ironworks in northern Spain, in the province of Santander. It flourished until the battle of the Downs drastically reduced the demand for armaments. In order to keep up with the technical advances being made by the English and Dutch, the government found it necessary in subsequent years to engage in industrial espionage, purchase ships abroad, and place contracts with foreign companies for war materials.98 It was the only way to cling on to the status of world power. English and Belgian pilots were hired for new vessels, and it was common to recruit sailors among the people of the Southern Netherlands. In the early decades of the seventeenth century no Spanish pilots could be found to guide vessels round Cape Horn into the Pacific, and they had to be brought in from Flanders.99

  Precisely because of its inability to finance a powerful state navy, the Spanish government decided from the 1620s to back private enterprise and license privateers in the North Sea, the Baltic and the Atlantic, directed principally against the Dutch.100 The challenge was taken up with alacrity, principally among the Basques and notably in the port of San Sebastián, which put to sea over four hundred licensed corsair ships in the period between 1622 and 1697.101 In those years the ports on the northern coast of Spain harboured some 740 vessels licensed and armed for private war, operating within a maximum radius of 300 nautical miles. Once again international help was not lacking: foreigners, mainly French and Irish, ran one in eight of the ships based in San Sebastián. The financing in general came from local traders, who hoped to recoup the investment through the captures made. The effort was by no means wasted. It has been estimated that in the last three-quarters of the century the privateers captured at least 2,700 vessels, or around 42 a year.102 At the same time, the private-enterprise corsairs served in other capacities, such as carrying mail between the peninsula and the Netherlands, or giving support to Spanish fishing vessels.

  The impotence of Spain before the naval power of France, demonstrated clearly in the death of De Ruyter, was confirmed at the end of the century in the summer of 1691, during the last war waged by Louis XIV against Spain.103 In July the French fleet based at Toulon appeared off Barcelona and began a bombardment of the effectively defenceless city that lasted for two days. Some eight hundred bombs were used, and over three hundred houses levelled. To the Spaniards it was a barbarous and gratuitous attack on a civilian population, and a thrill of horror ran through the country. The fleet then sailed on to Alicante, where it fired over 3,500 bombs and left only one-tenth of the buildings untouched. It was a new style of war, comparable to the aerial bombing of the twentieth century, and provoked protests of outrage at what the city of Alicante described as ‘barbarous inhumanity’. These were the last days of the Habsburg dynasty, when it was difficult to find allies on whom to depend for military supplies. In Catalonia the army defending the principality against the French consisted largely of Germans, Belgians and Neapolitans. The Spaniards were unable to defend themselves adequately either by land or by sea. The great strength of the French by contrast lay in their naval artillery, which amply demonstrated its abilities in the memorable siege of Barcelona during the summer of 1697, when the city was obliged to surrender. A Barcelona official reported to the government: ‘This siege has witnessed more blood and fire than any seen in our time. The bombs ruined a great part of the city.’

  During all these years of storm and strife in Europe, in the waters of the Pacific the Manila galleon continued to pursue its remarkable career. Spanish officials who travelled from Mexico to the Philippines to take up their turn of office would entertain themselves occasionally by stopping off at islands on their route and formally ‘discovering’ or ‘claiming’ them in the name of the king of Spain. A group of islands that entered European history in this way were the ‘Ladrones’, called such by Magellan during his visit in 1521 as a mordant comment on the thieving character of the inhabitants whenever they boarded his ships. Some 1,500 miles east of the Philippines, the Ladrones are a group of 15 volcanic islands. The Manila galleon and other ships stopped there periodically during the Pacific run; around one hundred vessels called at the islands in the century after Legazpi. The Spaniards, however, made no attempt to settle until a zealous Jesuit, Diego de San Vitores, who had visited the area in 1662, applied to the queen regent of Spain, Mariana, for permission to found a mission. He sailed with his group from Acapulco and reached the largest island, Guam, in June 1668. On his arrival he renamed the archipelago the Marianas in honour of his sponsor. San Vitores was a conscientious missionary who achieved several conversions and composed a grammar and catechism in the language of the Chamorro inhabitants. He was killed in 1672 by a small group of hostile natives, an event that began some ten years of sporadic conflict between the Chamorros and the few Spaniards in the island. By 1685 all organized resistance ended, and the ‘Spaniards’ (mostly Filipinos from Luzon) imposed a presence that lasted to 1898. It was the first substantial appearance of the Spanish empire in the Polynesian Pacific.

  The impact of empire on exotic islands is illustrated to perfection in the case of Guam, whose history was changed as radically as that of the Canary Islands had been a century and a half before. The collision of cultures was merciless. Outsiders came in carrying bacteria that devastated the indigenous population. An estimated population in Guam in 1668 of around twenty-eight thousand declined to less than eight thousand in 1690.104 Little or no part in this
disaster was played by skirmishes between invaders and the natives. The Spaniards had no policy of extermination, and their own casualties in those years did not exceed a hundred and twenty, among them twelve Jesuits. Relentlessly, however, as natives fled and the demographic fertility of those who remained fell, Guam became depopulated. The Spaniards resorted (as they had done in the Caribbean over a century before) to a policy of forced transportation of natives from other islands, which as a consequence became in their turn uninhabited. By 1700 the Chamorro population was almost entirely concentrated only in the three islands of Guam, Rota and Saipan. By the same date the staple products of Guam were (apart from native crops) tobacco and sugar, neither of them known to the islands before the coming of the Spaniards.105

  In 1686 Francisco de Lezcano named another group of islands the Carolinas, in honour of Charles II of Spain; ten years later the islands were formally put under the control of the governor of the Marianas. In reality, none of these occupations of islands in the Pacific was undertaken seriously. The Marianas were useful mainly as a supply post for the trade between the Philippines and Acapulco, and the few Spaniards in residence probably helped contribute to the rapid decline of the native population. By the mid-eighteenth century only the islands of Guam and Rota were inhabited. The Carolinas were even more of a phantom colony. No official steps to settle them were taken until the year 1885. The slow disappearance of the Spanish presence from the Pacific could be seen by the situation of Manila which, despite its rich commerce (now largely controlled by Asians) ‘vegetated in inglorious obscurity’.106 When Portugal separated from Spain it immediately shifted to an alliance with the English, thereby removing the richer of the two partners in the Asiatic trades. The Philippine Islands, with the unique exception of Luzon, were no longer adequately defended and pirates roamed at will among them. The seas around Mindanao and the Visayas were almost completely under the control of the Moros who lived in the area.107

  Spain's continuing loss of security in the oceans could be measured by the activities of two adventurers, one Chinese and one English. The master of the South China Sea in these years was the Chinese admiral Coxinga, a young and dynamic warlord whose fleet by 1655 totalled some two thousand vessels, supported by a hundred thousand soldiers and with the additional help of western cannon and weapons.108 In 1661 Coxinga drove the Dutch out of Taiwan and then turned his attention to Manila. The Spaniards hastily withdrew their small garrisons from Mindanao and from Maluku – to which they never again returned – and prepared for a last-ditch resistance. They were opportunely saved by the death of the admiral, aged only thirty-seven, in June 1662.

  The other scourge of the Spaniards was the English buccaneer William Dampier. Famous later in life for his scientific exploration, Dampier was both intellectual and an adventurer. He was active in buccaneer groups in the Caribbean from 1680 onwards, and spent the second half of the year 1686 with them on the island of Mindanao, where he explored the islands and dreamed of finding a ‘Terra Australis’. After eight years of this roving life he returned to England and published a successful narrative of his voyages. The prestige he obtained from it was such that in 1703 he was supplied with two fighting ships and ordered to look for the Manila galleon, which he encountered at the end of 1704 just off Acapulco but failed to take.109

  Both the Dutch and the British infiltrated the Manila trade. The British first made a direct trading voyage in 1644, from their base at Surat, in India. They then switched to the more discreet policy of trading through third parties. In the 1670s this trade was conducted on behalf of the British by the sultan of Bantam (north Mataram, Indonesia). After 1682, when the British were driven out of Bantam by the Dutch, they traded from Madras, in India, but still through the agency of local Hindu or Muslim traders. Several notable members of the British East India Company also conducted to Manila on their own behalf what has been called a ‘country trade’, that is, a private and unofficial commerce from which the profits went to themselves and not to their Company.110 In 1700 the governor of the East India Company was the personal owner of four vessels that traded on his behalf to Manila. In this way Spain's distant outpost in the Pacific was maintained by the trade of other Europeans who would eventually take an interest in occupying the Philippines. Its commerce, as measured by the income from customs duties, actually expanded after 1680,111 in contrast to Spain's Own crumbling control over the economy of its Pacific empire.

  In North America the missionaries were the main standard-bearers of the Spanish presence, bringing religion, cattle, horses and agricultural methods to the tribes that wished to receive them. By the mid-seventeenth century the frontier was represented by the provinces of New León and New Biscay; further expansion was prevented by the hostility of the Indians in the region beyond the Rio Grande. The significant step of crossing the Rio Grande was made only in 1670, as part of the missionary endeavour of the Franciscan friar Juan Larios. The gradual winning over of reluctant tribes made it possible for the Spaniards in 1674 to found the province of Coahuila, or New Extremadura, which theoretically covered the territory up to the Rio Grande. The following year, 1675, an important reconnaissance was made across the Rio Grande into Indian territory by the Franciscans, who reported back to Mexico that the tribes were keen to receive Christian instruction. It is possible to read between the lines to understand the motives of the tribes. ‘These Indians’, reported friar Fernando del Bosque in 1675, ‘have said that they wished to be Christians, and that all wish it; and they wish that aid be given to each one separately and not together.’112 The permanent quarrels between tribes made them look to the Spaniards for help against each other.

  Contact between Indians and the few Spanish settlers in northern New Spain was sporadic. By contrast the missionaries had made efforts to establish a permanent presence in the area. The several tribes of the Rio Grande valley were known collectively as Pueblos, from the Spanish word for the settlements that the missionaries directed. In reality they included the Hopis (of eastern Arizona), the Zunis (of New Mexico), the Tewas, the Towas and several other peoples. In the twenty years after the founding of the town of Santa Fe in 1610, churches were built in all the villages of the Pueblo Indians. By 1630 there were fifty Franciscans in twenty-five missions, and the priests claimed to have converted sixty thousand Indians.

  These apparent successes were undermined by profound conflicts between settlers and clergy that effectively destabilized the frontier.113 The missionaries objected to settlers and officials levying tribute on the natives, and denounced the continuing use of the encomienda. Officials, on the other hand, claimed that the missions were the chief problem. The clergy, they said, had virtually enslaved the Indians, were monopolizing their labour, treating them brutally and sexually misusing them. Specific evidence to back up the allegations was, obviously, available; the charges reflect a situation to be found in every part of the empire. A notable incident, denounced by the Hopi people, was that of the Franciscan who in 1655, to punish an Indian for ‘idolatry’, whipped him publicly in the public square and inside the church, then covered him in turpentine and set light to him with the inevitable consequence that he died. Clerical violence against ‘idolatry’ eventually proved, for Indians, to be the most intolerable of their burdens. As we have seen from Peru, missionaries termed ‘idolatry’ a broad range of cultural practices that the natives deemed essential to their way of life and quite compatible with the Christian religion. In most New World societies, masks were used by natives during celebrations and rites, and had multiple meanings. Among the Pueblos, masked dances were traditional, but the friars suspected them to be rites of idolatry. In 1661 the Franciscans prohibited all ceremonial masks, collected all they could find and burnt them. In 1675 they rounded up forty-seven Pueblo leaders on the charge of idolatry and had them publicly whipped. The deliberate humiliation proved to be the last straw, provoking local leaders to prepare the great revolt of 1680.

  The revolt, directed principally against th
e Christian religion, brought about an unprecedented unity among the scattered villages and gave them liberty for over a decade. The chief instigator was a medicine man called Popé, who persuaded the chiefs of several villages to unite together against the Spaniards. On the eve of the rebellion there were around 17,000 Indians in the Pueblo communities, with no more than 170 Spanish soldiers to protect the missions. The uprising began on 10 August 1680 and was directed principally against the mission clergy: wherever the rebels went they sought out the priests.114 Twenty-one out of thirty-four missionaries were killed, churches were burnt and all records of Pueblo Christianity were destroyed; the total dead among the settlers was estimated at three hundred and eighty by a local official but the real number may have been much smaller. The small garrison at Santa Fe was unable to cope with the scale of the rising, and all Spaniards, together with those Indians who remained faithful to them, were evacuated to El Paso. The frontier was rolled back for over a decade.

  Many Indians, however, were happy to limit their rebellion simply to the removal of Christianity. They objected to the more radical rebels who attempted to destroy horses, plants, trees and all other evidence of Spanish civilization. In 1683 some tribes invited the Spaniards back, mainly to help them against the Apaches. The expedition that was sent out in response in 1684, under Captain Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, on the excuse of penetrating into the lands of the Tejas Indians, was greeted by a triumphal gathering of thousands of Indians who were counting on Spanish support against their enemies.115 The contrasting situations in which the Spaniards found themselves, of complete rejection on one hand and of eager acclaim on the other, illustrate the constant ambivalence of life on the unstable frontier.