Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century

Alejandro de la Fuente, César García del Pino, Bernardo Iglesias Delgado, C?sar Garc?a del Pino

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807878064
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century. He shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and situates Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic.

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

On the morning of 10 July 1555, the guard at El Morro, an observation post at the entrance of Havana’s bay, raised a flag indicating the approach of a vessel. As was customary in these cases, the commander of the town’s small fortress reproduced the message by placing a flag in the fortress tower, where townspeople could see it. Commander Juan de Lobera also ordered artillery to fire. It was the sign for the eight or nine town residents who guarded the fortress to gather and for the populace to know that there was “a sail in the sea.” The colonial governor arrived a few minutes later, accompanied by several residents on horseback. Nobody seemed to know the vessel or where it was coming from, although some residents suggested that it was the caravel of a merchant from Nombre de Dios, Panama, who paid frequent visits to Havana. To everyone’s surprise, however, the ship did not enter the bay. It continued sailing westward, anchoring in a small inlet a quarter of a league to the west of the town, where two hundred men, with “their flags” and “in perfect order,” landed.¹

Commanding the ship was Jacques de Sorés, no stranger to Cuban waters. A lieutenant of François Le Clerc’s, the French corsair known as Jambe de Bois, Sorés had probably accompanied his boss during the sacking of Santiago de Cuba in 1554. The “most heretic Lutheran,” as local authorities referred to Sorés, had at his service a renegade Portuguese pilot who had lived in Havana for more than a year and who was familiar with the town and its port. Thanks to him, the corsair and his men managed to enter the deserted town undisturbed and to place the small fortress under siege. Inside, Commander Lobera prepared to protect His Catholic Majesty’s artillery and honor with four harquebusiers and ten to fifteen men, including Spaniards, mestizos, and blacks. A few elders, women, and children who had been unable to flee the town were also inside the fort. The governor, Doctor Pérez de Angulo, and most of the residents found refuge in the nearby “Indian” village of Guanabacoa, where they plotted to recover the town.

Sorés’s determined siege of the fort, which he set on fire, was based on false information: he had been told that it kept the treasury of a recent shipwreck. The attack could still be profitable, however. He seized the fortress, captured prisoners, including Lobera, and controlled the town. The corsair demanded a ransom of 30,000 pesos, 200 arrobas (5,000 pounds) of meat, and 100 cargas (5,000 pounds) of “bread” (that is, cassava) to relinquish the town. When the residents tried to bargain by offering 3,000 ducados (4,125 pesos), Sorés laughed at their emissary and replied “that he did not know there were crazies outside France.” Either they paid the ransom or Havana would go up in flames.

Meanwhile, the governor prepared for a counterattack. With a force of 335–220 indigenous men, 80 blacks, and 35 Spaniards—Pérez de Angulo attempted a surprise attack. A lawyer with no military experience, the governor not only proved unable to defeat Sorés but also provoked the corsair’s ire. Most of the prisoners were executed, although Lobera’s life was spared in exchange for 2,200 pesos. Sorés’s men set fire to the town before sailing out on 5 August. “They left this town in such a way, that the Greeks did not leave Troy worse,” reported an observer.²

The attack could not have come at a worse moment. Like the rest of the island, by the 1550s the town of Havana had experienced several decades of stagnation and decline. Originally established by conqueror Diego Velázquez on the southern coast, the town, initially known as San Cristobal, was supposed to serve as an advanced point in the process of conquest and colonization of the lands to the west and south of the island. Like most towns established by the Spaniards in Cuba, it faced the Caribbean, which was at the time the theater of Spanish expansion and trade. The king’s order in 1515 to “ennoble” the settlements of the Cuban southern coast clarified that, in the eyes of the crown, the main function of these settlements was furnishing the expeditions that would continue the conquest and colonization of new lands.³ Unlike the other towns established in Cuba, however, San Cristobal lacked both mineral and demographic resources. Neither gold nor indigenous people, the two factors that defined the organization of the colonial economy between the 1510s and the 1530s, were available in the area. Since its creation, San Cristobal had served mainly as a base to supply the expeditions of exploration and conquest. It was here that Hernando Cortés gathered his provisions before sailing to Mexico in 1519.⁴

By this time, however, the town was already in decline. At least some of its residents had moved to the northern coast, where they established what would eventually become the city of Havana. Neither process, the decline of the original San Cristobal nor the establishment and slow growth of the northern Havana, can be explained without reference to the making of the Spanish empire in the Indies, as the Americas were then called, or the organization of the Spanish Atlantic. Once the expeditions of conquest departed and the new settlements that San Cristobal and other Cuban towns were supposed to supply became organized and self-suffcient, Spanish interest in Cuba gradually declined. An important logistical base in the early 1500s, the island by the 1530s seemed to lack a purpose in the larger scheme of the emerging empire. Spanish residents left with every expedition, lured by the real or imaginary riches of new lands. As a resident of Santiago asserted in 1538, the island had been turned into “the mother to populate New Spain and to supply Tierra Firme.”⁵ In the 1530s, the conquest of Peru (1531–36) and the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida (1538) further contributed to the Spanish depopulation of the island. With the departure of “all the Spaniards,” a contemporary asserted, the colony would be “lost.”⁶

The magnitude of the decline in the Spanish population cannot be established with precision, but it approximated 80 percent between roughly 1520 and 1540. This decline was in turn linked to the demographic catastrophe of the native population. As French historian Pierre Chaunu has noted, the conquistador followed the American Indian and moved to those places where labor was available. As early as 1517, however, there were no “free” natives left on the island to distribute. Meanwhile, the production of gold also collapsed, from 112,000 pesos in 1519 to 8,000 in 1539.⁷

Thus by the 1540s Spain faced the threat of losing, through depopulation and abandonment, control over the colony. The island lacked gold. It lacked indigenous inhabitants. Unlike Santo Domingo, where the gold cycle had generated enough capital to launch the first sugar economy of the Caribbean, Cuba also lacked exports of commercial value. The island could produce large amounts of food supplies, but by the 1530s so did other colonies. That is why Governor Manuel de Rojas lamented the “abundance” of cattle in Mexico in 1534.⁸

Seeking to avert the depopulation of the colony, Spain granted important benefits and concessions to the remaining colonists. For the first time, in 1528 the crown allowed the encomiendas, an institution by which a group of indigenous people was allocated to a conquistador in exchange for religious indoctrination, to be hereditary in the island, a right that did not exclude the illegitimate children of the conquistadores.⁹ More important, however, was the deferment of the application of the Leyes Nuevas (1542) to the colony. The Leyes Nuevas abolished the encomienda system in the Antilles and regulated other forms of exploitation of indigenous labor. But in the case of Cuba, the Council of the Indies advised against the implementation of this law “because the Spaniards are few” and the law would be “detrimental” to the population of the island. It was not until 1553, two years before Sorés landed in Havana, that this law was enforced in Cuba.¹⁰

Spain’s efforts to maintain a presence in the colony were based on the gradual realization that the island would play a key role in the empire’s system of communication and trade. With the organization of the great viceroyalties of Mexico and, later, Peru, the crown’s emphasis shifted from Cuba’s settlements on the southern coast to the Cuban northwest, particularly the Bay of Havana. Since 1519, when pilot Antón de Alaminos sailed from Mexico to Spain through the Straits of Florida taking advantage of the then unknown Gulf Stream, a stop in Havana or its environs became virtually mandatory for vessels returning to Spain. Alaminos himself called to port in the area to purchase cassava bread, meat, and other supplies before crossing the Atlantic.¹¹

Apparently, the residents of the southern town of San Cristobal realized the advantages of the northern bay even before 1519. By the time Alaminos came through the area, he was assisted by some of the residents of the southern town who had moved north and established the town that would come to be known as San Cristobal de la Habana. Owing to the availability of fresh water from the Almendares River, the town was initially established west of the harbor of Carenas, as Havana’s bay was initially known. But soon the residents realized that their future was linked to the magnificent harbor of Carenas, which could easily accommodate hundreds of ships and had a narrow mouth that could be easily defended. Fresh water would have to be brought to the new town, not the other way around.

Some sixteenth-century maps reflect this process of settlement by identifying two towns in western Cuba: San Cristobal in the south and Havana in the north. However, by the second half of the century the San Cristobal of the south began to disappear from maps and geographic accounts and was mentioned only in maps and descriptions that were clearly dated.

The strategic importance of Havana’s port became evident to the crown and its enemies gradually, as the routes of oceanic shipping were being defined. To the royal officials of Cuba it was evident as early as 1532, when they described Havana as “a very good port where many ships from Castile and Yucatan come every year and disembark merchandise and trade.” Conquistador Diego Velázquez had apparently realized the potential of the port, for in the 1520s he had appointed a lieutenant in the town, which he described as a “sea port” at “the end” of the island.¹² By midcentury the wonders of the port were becoming public knowledge, as European geographic and travel accounts began to mention Havana as an important maritime center in the New World. Some of these accounts were clearly distorted. In 1546 Martín Fernández de Enciso, for instance, included the “famous port of Havana” among the “most important and famous cities in the world,” but writers like him reflected the initial knowledge that seamen and merchants were producing about the shipping routes of the Spanish Atlantic.¹³

Ultimately, it was foreign threats and attacks that made the crown fully realize the need to organize the Atlantic trade system and to protect its most important ports, such as Havana. Sorés’s attack was not the first endured by the inhabitants of the town. A French corsair had sacked Havana earlier, in 1538, prompting the king to order the construction of a fortress for its protection and for “the ships that go and come from the Indies.” This fortress proved useful to defiend the harbor but failed to repel an attack by land, as the forces commanded by Jacques de Sorés demonstrated.¹⁴

Yet Sorés’s attack also demonstrated that Havana’s defense was not just a matter of proper fortifications. It was a demographic question as well, a point that local authorities had repeatedly made to the king.¹⁵ Havana lacked the demographic resources needed to protect the town and its harbor. Governor Pérez de Angulo had been able to gather more than three hundred men in his failed attempt to expel the French, but only 10 percent of those men were characterized as Spaniards. Havana’s defense rested primarily on its African and American Indian populations. Nor was the existing population capable of producing the supplies and rendering the services required by the growing number of ships, seamen, soldiers, merchants, priests, and travelers that came through town each year. Fleet commanders complained that they could not wait in the port for favorable weather because of the lack of supplies to sustain “so many people.”¹⁶

The destruction of Havana by Sorés underscored the need to reconstruct and fortify the town. This reconstruction would proceed on new bases, however. As early as 1553 the king had ordered the governor of the colony to reside in Havana (as opposed to Santiago, then the capital of the colony), and after 1555 governors were always military men. Construction of the old Havana had depended mainly on indigenous labor. The new town would be built mostly by African slaves. Whereas the old Havana had relied mainly on its own meager resources for defense, the new Havana would rely increasingly on imperial moneys and garrisons. Within a few decades the town was transformed into a city protected by three capable forts staffied by a permanent garrison of at least 450. A new church was built. The old hospital, destroyed by Sorés, was rebuilt and a new one constructed. Three religious orders established monasteries in Havana. One of the most important shipyards in the Atlantic began operations. The population grew, making Havana the fastest-growing city in the Americas at the time.¹⁷

Changes were extensive, and studying this process of transformation is the main purpose of this book. In 1550, when our study begins, Havana was a sleepy town inhabited by a few hundred “Indians,” Africans, and some forty vecinos (heads of households) of mostly Spanish descent. By 1610 it had become an impregnable port city and one of the most important shipping and trading entre-pôts of the Spanish Atlantic with a permanent population of about six hundred vecinos, a garrison, several thousand slaves, and a sizable transient population that literally overflowed the city during the stay of the fleets.

The making of this Atlantic port city has been poorly studied, despite the growing attention that scholars have given to the creation and functions of port cities in the Americas and elsewhere.¹⁸ Attention to port cities is not without merit. Historically, these settlements have displayed a great potential for growth, a process that is frequently associated with their pivotal role in colonial empires and in the making of the modern world economy, however defined. It is, of course, impossible to understand the European colonial expansion without reference to the great maritime centers of Europe, just as it is not possible to understand what Fernand Braudel called the Atlantic economy without reference to the port cities established by the Europeans in the Americas.¹⁹

These port cities linked colonial hinterlands with European metropolises and with other ports in the colonies. Indeed, some of these cities developed areas of influence that went well beyond the artifcial boundaries fabricated by European geopolitical rivalries or administrative needs. Not only did they link local producers and entrepreneurs with distant merchant and credit houses in Europe, but they also linked peoples of dissimilar origins and cultural backgrounds through trade, services, consumption, and various labor arrangements. And they became centers of military innovation, as protecting shipping cargoes and sea routes became one of their main functions. Yet these attributes also turned them into visible targets, for people excluded from the emerging Atlantic trade were determined to participate in it either violently or surreptitiously. Conceived as fortified bastions of exclusion, colonial port cities represented in fact a pe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations, Tables, and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO The Port: Shipping and Trade
• CHAPTER THREE The Fleets and the Service Economy
• CHAPTER FOUR Urban Growth
• CHAPTER FIVE Production
• CHAPTER SIX Slavery and the Making of a Racial Order
• CHAPTER SEVEN The People of the Land
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index