PART I—
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

1—
Commerce and Conflict: The First Caracas Elite, 1567–1620

A band of adventurers led by Diego de Losada broke the fierce resistance of the Carib Indians and established in 1567 the town of Santiago de León de Caracas. Caracas evidently either failed to fulfill the ambitions of these men or they had no intention of giving up the conquistador's freebooting lifestyle, for only 18 of the 136 men who accompanied Losada were still present in the town in 1578. At that time there were some 4000 Indian tributaries divided into forty encomiendas, more native labor than was available in any other Venezuelan town at that time, but, significantly, this was only about one-third the number of Indians who had inhabited the region just ten years earlier. With little besides shrinking encomiendas to offer, it is not surprising that Caracas did not excite many imaginations in Spain. To the end of the sixteenth century Venezuela continued to be the least popular destination for Spaniards who crossed the Atlantic.^[1]

Dreams of El Dorado were for many the only tolerable alternative to the poverty of early Caracas. Of course, neither grand illusions nor the bold exploits of those who actually looked for fabled Indian cities in the Guayana jungles would alter the barrenness of this land that seemed to betray the promise of the Indies.^[2] The only practical way for Caraqueños to improve their economic condition to any significant degree was to acquire an encomienda, or, if they were already encomenderos , to add Indian laborers to the one they held. On several occasions the first generation of Caracas vecinos , permanent residents who had not moved on to seek their fortunes elsewhere, sallied out from the town in search of Indians much in the same way that a century earlier their countrymen had gone out to raid Muslim villages from wooden fortalezas on the Barbary and Atlantic coasts of Africa.^[3] From shortly after its foundation in 1567,

Caracas was the permanent residence of the provincial governor, who was responsible for defending and extending the colony's frontiers and, as a consequence, Caraqueños had more opportunities than did vecinos of other towns to participate in these raids. Such slave hunting was illegal, but in Caracas these forays were disguised as defensive expeditions made to protect existing settlements. They were appealing, both for the slaves that could be made of Indians who resisted in such supposedly "just" wars, and for the royal favors that could be claimed, such as the grant of a vacated encomienda, on the basis of military services rendered. These were the motives behind the campaign led by Garci González de Silva against the Cumanagoto Indians of the Tuy River valley in 1579 and 1580, and the venture organized by Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro, which resulted in the establishment of the frontier town of San Sebastián de los Reyes in 1584.^[4] At the same time, the frequent uprisings of the Indians of Nirgua, which were said to have threatened the settlements in the western part of the province and disrupted traffic on the road to New Granada, were suppressed by bands of men sent out by the governor from distant Caracas, and not, as might have been expected if the threat to them had been truly serious, by vecinos from towns much nearer to Nirgua such as Barquisimeto and Valencia.^[5]

In these circumstances the urban functions of Caracas remained little different from the primitive ones of an armed camp. Since fully forty of the settlement's sixty vecinos held at least a small Indian labor grant in 1578, encomendero status was not a primary social distinction or a source of local influence. Rather, for men like Garci González de Silva and Sebastián de Alfaro who held it, power was rooted in the personal charisma and other leadership qualities that made it possible for them to assemble and lead a cabalgada , or Indian raiding party.^[6] The only other possible source of local influence, a position on the town council, the cabildo , was limited to the formation and execution of rules concerning the use of existing or finite wealth, such as the setting of food prices or the provision of meat for the town. Indian raids, on the other hand, held the hope of increasing that wealth, the only such hope for about two decades after 1567. Even so, they did not produce much profit, for there were simply not many Indians available for capture. But the raids were imbued with social meaning retained from

the archaic traditions of frontier wars with Islam, and for twenty years no other economic activity had the appeal of the organized hunt for Indian slaves.

In the late 1580s, a fortuitous combination of climatic, geographic, and economic factors brought Caracas belatedly into Spain's New World empire. The much quicker pace of the commercial world of the sixteenth century brought noticeable changes to the once-rustic, thatch-roofed village. As producers and exporters of wheat grain and flour, newly prosperous Caracas vecinos added tile roofs and second storys to their churches, homes, and community buildings. With new wealth to administer and an increased opportunity to govern, the cabildo replaced the cabalgada as the town's most important political institution. Coming of age as a colonial town created new tensions and conflict, however, and the controversies that emerged at this time of transition provide a revealing look at the social relations of the powerful and not-so-powerful farmers and traders of early Caracas.

The value of Spain's Atlantic shipping more than doubled during the first fifteen years following the foundation of Caracas, and during this time, with the world's richest commercial highway passing just behind the narrow range of mountains to the north, the town's enterprising vecinos discovered profitable alternatives to hit-and-run Indian raids. The best alternatives came as Caracas was drawn into the market network centered on the annual trade fair at Portobelo. Before landing at Portobelo, the Tierra Firme fleet made port at Cartagena, and from there news of its arrival in America was sent south to Peru by way of Panama. Then, while the Portobelo merchants made preparations for their fair and the wealth of Peru was brought up the Pacific Coast, the waiting fleet, secure beneath the walls of the Cartagena fortress, traded for the gold and emeralds of New Granada and for Venezuelan pearls.^[7] The galleons also needed provisions; their sailors, good Spaniards, insisted on wheat bread, and from the early 1580s ships loaded with Caracas wheat grain and flour made the easy, trade-winds assisted sail west along the Caribbean coast to Cartagena.

The transition from raiding to farming could take place because of the particularly mild Caracas climate. Repeated attempts to grow grapes and citrus trees met with little success in the valley, but wheat flourished. Even though the settlement was located near the

equator at about ten degrees north latitude, cereal cultivation was possible in Caracas because its high elevation, about 800 meters in the immediate vicinity of the town, provided moderate temperatures. In addition, although it was never abundant and in time there would be sharp conflicts over rights to its use, during the early years enough water was available to sustain a modest boom in wheat farming and grain milling.

Losada had situated the Caracas plaza in an ideal spot above where the Guaire River makes a wide bend, on the ridge of a broad plain at the base of the high mountains which stood as a barrier between the settlement and the sea. This plain is divided by streams carrying rainwater runoff from the mountains to the Guaire, and the early importance of these streams is made evident by their prominence on the well-known map of the town and environs prepared by Governor Juan Pimentel in 1578 or shortly thereafter (see Map 1). From the text of the detailed report that this sketch accompanied, part of the Relaciones Geográficas ordered by Philip II, it is clear that by this date wheat farming was underway, and that for its cultivation Caracas farmers relied both on rainfall and on irrigation water taken from these streams.^[8]

Within little more than a decade after the Pimentel report an increase in the need for water resources became noticeable in the town council record—petitions to the cabildo, for pastures and for cornfields to sustain the Indian population in the 1570s and 1580s, had given way to requests for water rights and wheat mill sites by the 1590s. Other documents indicate that by then wheat had become an important part of the economic life of the town. Business was particularly brisk during the months of September and October, the principal planting season, during March and early April when the grain was harvested (although the harvest occasionally came as early as mid-February), and again in late May and June when it was ground into flour and sent to La Guaira for shipment to Cartagena and other Caribbean ports. During these periods farmers and traders, both vecinos and forasteros , outsiders, from Spain, the Canary Islands, and other Indies towns, appeared at the Caracas notaries' offices to register their wheat sales, to sign promises to pay for merchandise or labor with the next year's harvest, or to make shipping arrangements.^[9] Business was so good, in fact, that it attracted the English buccaneer Aymas Preston, who raided the

Map 1.
Pimentel Map

town in 1595. Ten years earlier Cartagena residents had paid the huge sum of 110,000 ducats to Francis Drake in ransom for their city and its warehouses full of merchandise, but in modest Caracas it was easier to flee, carrying away the greater part of one's wealth, and leave the town to be sacked and burned, as Preston obligingly did.^[10] The flurry of reconstruction that followed immediately after Preston's attack, also clearly visible in the cabildo and notary records, indicates that by then the town had acquired importance and a strong commitment to permanence.

Although the bishopric see for Venezuela would remain formally until 1637 in the tiny western town of Coro, where the cathedral was a very modest wattle-and-daub edifice ("the best church of straw in the Indies"), Caracas, where the first bishops invested in land and actually spent most of their time, could boast of a stone-walled and tile-roofed church from 1584. In 1595 the pirate Preston burned the timbers of this building and those of a similar chapel then under construction in the Franciscan convent. Eager to reestablish the solid and secure presence in the town that the prosperity generated by wheat had allowed them, the church's agents joined the town's foremost citizens as the first to rebuild after the attack. Within weeks of Preston's departure, Bartolomé de la Canal, church vicar for fifteen years prior to 1595, made arrangements for repairs to his house. The lieutenant governor Juan de Riberos, who was criticized for his absence during the attack, may have expressed a commitment to the future defense of the settlement by trading his straw-roofed house and 350 pesos for one roofed in tile shortly after Preston's destructive visit. So many other residents contracted for construction labor that by 1596 the town's few artisans and the local supply of building materials had been overwhelmed by the rush to rebuild. As a result, the wealthier vecinos and the ecclesiastical establishment sought to outbid one another for the few craftsmen and scarce resources. This indecorous competition, which was ended by a cabildo order in May 1596, is perhaps the best measure of the wheat-driven transition from transience and slave raiding to permanent settlement.^[11]

For Caracas craftsmen the wheat trade meant booming opportunity for employment. Equally important, flour and grain became the principal in-town medium of exchange for transactions of all kinds, and by the turn of the seventeenth century many vecinos

were doing much of their business in wheat and wheat futures. In June 1597, capitán Juan de Guevara agreed to pay mason Francisco Benítez the equivalent of 276 gold pesos in flour and carpenter Juan García Cabeza 130 pesos, also in flour, to construct a second story on the house he had purchased the year before. The following month Benítez was promised 125 pesos, this time in gold coin, to finish the masonry work on the Franciscan chapel, but such transactions in specie were rare.^[12] Negotiations of all kinds were both regulated by the annual rhythms of the wheat harvest and dependent on a successful crop to satisfy outstanding obligations. In February 1599 blacksmith Juan Muñoz pledged to pay Pascual Pérez 69 pesos in wheat for a year's service as his assistant. At the time of the March harvest of that year Manuel Díaz, master shoemaker, advanced 160 arrobas of flour worth 70 pesos to Juan Pérez, who agreed to work for one year as the cobbler's helper. With the September planting of 1599, Díaz, in return for leather work to be done during the following six months, took a promise to pay in wheat flour worth 89 pesos, to be delivered in March of 1600, from Alonso García Pineda, mill owner, slaveholder, and government notary. Some years later, in July of 1605, shoemaker Díaz's widow, María de Medina, married Baltasar García, who had been growing wheat in the valley since 1593 when the cabildo granted him vecino status and twelve fanegadas (one fanegada was equal to about 1.6 acres) of land. The day after their wedding the couple arranged to buy a townhouse and lot from Diego Díaz León, the Portuguese slave factor. They paid 50 pesos in cash and promised to pay the remaining debt of 130 pesos in flour the following March. Juan Césaro, a Sicilian merchant who had lived in Caracas since the early 1590s, signed a contract in October 1605 with Francisco de Medina, master carpenter, who agreed to put a storeroom and living quarters in a second story that was to be built above Césaro's present shop. The value of the entire project was set at 167 gold pesos, payment to be made half in dry goods at the beginning of construction, half in wheat flour after the first harvest following its conclusions.^[13]

While the original significance of Caracas wheat was its export value, perhaps as much as one-half of the wheat grown circulated as an exchange medium and was sooner or later consumed in the town. This ratio can be estimated because the legal exports for the

period 1603 to 1607 are known exactly (see table 1),^[14] and because the cabildo declared after the 1604 harvest that 2500 fanegas of wheat grain then remaining in the town could not be sold for export. Of this quantity 1000 fanegas were needed as seed for the next planting, and 1500 fanegas were needed for local consumption during the coming year. Ground into flour, 2500 fanegas of grain would yield about 15,000 arrobas of flour,^[15] and this amount, which represents the quantity of wheat kept in Caracas every year, is approximately equal to the average annual export of wheat made from Caracas during the short period for which complete data are available (13,644 arrobas, one-fifth of the five-year total of 68,220 arrobas).

During the dry "summer" months from November to March or April, the scant rainfall collected on the mountainsides north of Caracas provided irrigation for the wheat farms of the fortunate few growers who owned land along the streams leading to the Guaire River. Most wheat destined for export was brought to har-

Fig. 1.
Caracas Wheat Flour to Indies Ports by Month and by Destination, 1603–1607

vest at the dry season's end, and the fact that this grain could then be ground into flour in water-powered mills driven by the heavy "winter" rains of May and June made it possible to have Caracas wheat flour in Cartagena well in advance of the flota, which generally departed Spain in August^[16] (fig. 1). This was a climatological–commercial coincidence of singular benefit to Caracas growers, but it is likely that the Caracas wheat trade flourished not so much because of favorable local circumstances, but rather because of agricultural problems in Spain. In his classic study of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel informs us that by 1560 "flour from Andalusia was no longer sufficient to make biscuit for the fleets, and the Spanish crown had to go in search every year, good or bad, for 100,000 fanegas of grain. . . . In 1583 the shortage spread to the whole economy."^[17] As the price of Andalusian wheat skyrocketed, the Caracas-grown grain became an important cash crop, for ships could load in Seville only the biscuit that was needed by their crews for the Atlantic crossing and then buy the rest of their wheat in

American ports such as Cartagena. During the heyday of the trade, from 1580 to about 1620, even after it had been ground into flour the price of Caracas wheat was only about 15 percent more than the average price paid for wheat grain in Andalusia, and in thirteen of the thirty-three years for which we have information Caracas flour was actually cheaper than Andalusian wheat in the kernel.^[18]

Although much of the grain was consumed locally and served an important exchange function in the absence of hard coin, it was as an export commodity that wheat gave life to the Caracas economy. Artisans as well as grower–encomenderos and merchants traded in Caribbean ports with the grain. Wheat exports were often in payment made for merchandise already received in Caracas. Vecino-owned vessels loaded with goods from New Spain and from China by way of New Spain docked in May 1601 and in January 1602. In July 1602 a substantial quantity of Spanish merchandise, several times greater than any other single shipment previously unloaded at La Guaira, was disembarked from the Nuestra Señora del Soccoro , whose master and owner was Sebastián Bengoechea, a Basque merchant. In partial remuneration for his cargo, Bengoechea arranged to have 6000 arrobas of flour, about one-fifth of the rich 1603 wheat harvest, shipped to Cartagena. Promises to pay in wheat flour seem to have increased in amount in accordance with the availability of imported goods to buy; credit for 100 pesos, common in 1595, was given for 600 or 700 pesos in 1605. To secure this merchandise growers were willing to "mortgage the harvest," as the contracts aptly phrased it, not only for the following year's crop, but in some cases for the crop two years distant as well. The Sicilian merchant Césaro granted extended credit of this sort to royal accountant and encomendero Simón Bolívar in November 1605.^[19]

During the early seventeenth century a few merchants, attracted by wheat, invested their commercial capital in farming and became resident growers, millers, and encomenderos. In the late 1590s, before he was twenty years old, Nofre Carrasquer established residence in Caracas as agent to the Sevillian merchant Fernán Pache de Sárate, who was a wholesaler to several Caracas importers. Most of early Caracas's European imports were transshiped from the island of Margarita, the first landfall after the Atlantic crossing,^[20] and in his own name and that of his associate, Carrasquer

traded for such goods there with Caracas foodstuffs, particularly dried fish and wheat flour. To the west along the Caribbean coast his commercial ties and credit extended to Cartagena, where he preferred that all of his debtors make payment, and in the interior his accounts reached as far as the settlement of El Tocuyo, seventy leagues to the southwest of Caracas, where he exchanged European merchandise for lienzo , the rough cotton fabric used, among other things, to make flour bags. By 1610 he had become a vecino and an encomendero privileged with the labor of 120 Indian tributaries in the Baruta Valley near Caracas, but even before he became a wheat grower in his own right he was an important manager of local agricultural produce: in March 1600, as the annual harvest was just beginning, merchant Carrasquer could guarantee delivery of 1000 arrobas of flour within five weeks.^[21]

With the turn from the conquest of the land and its indigenous inhabitants to a more intensive form of colonization and the formation of an agrarian society dependent on seaborne commerce, the exclusive overlordship of the region's remaining conquistadors became diluted and a new, more complex elite was formed. Membership in this elite was expanded from the old soldiers, the first founders and their children, to include several successful merchants who had become vecinos and encomenderos, wheat growers and millers. The authority of the older generation, formerly based on the cabalgada and the heroics of conquest, was now channeled through the municipal law of the cabildo. Most importantly, the rejuvenated cabildo found that its jurisdiction included authority that could directly affect the wheat trade. For the most part town-council policies such as the fixing of bread prices and the work levy assigned to vecinos to upgrade and maintain the road to La Guaira met with no opposition. On other occasions, however, certain powerful wheat growers and traders manipulated the town council, bending its laws to fit their particular needs and private interests.

In an early analysis of Spanish American cabildo politics, Frederick Pike made it clear that social justice was not always the principal objective of town authorities. Pike perceived an agrarian interest in many council decisions. This emphasis was not the outcome of a conscious plot, but rather it was "another manifestation of the glorification of agrarian and rural values over those of trade and manufac-

ture, in short of urban life, which had become an ingrained part of Spanish character as a result of centuries of historical experience."^[22] There was no dichotomy of town versus rural, or of urban entrepreneurial versus landed oligarchy, in early seventeenth-century Caracas, for the same prominent individuals were both traders and owners of agricultural estates. However, a close examination of two cases reveals that powerful trader–farmers in Caracas quite consciously did manipulate municipal law in order to extend and to protect their investments in wheat agriculture and commerce.

The devious maneuvering of Garci González de Silva, who used the town council to deprive weaker opponents of the land and water that he wanted, is indeed a simple example of petty greed, but it is useful because it illustrates both the stress that was created as Caracas responded to the booming demand for wheat and the self-serving use of the cabildo on the part of those with access to its authority. In the second detailed case study, a wheat–grower faction is first identified from among the principal planters and traders. This faction used the cabildo authority to restrict tobacco commerce because it attracted pirates and thus interfered with their own wheat interests. Demonstrated is the effective capacity of local Caracas authority, skewed as it was to favor certain individuals and interests, to influence the regional economy during the earliest years of commercial exports. This was characteristic of Caracas only during the period when wheat was king. Tobacco was first to threaten local influence in commerce; cacao, as will be seen, was far too dynamic an export commodity to be regulated in any way by town authority. Not until the 1760s, after a social rebellion that shook the colony to its foundations, would the cabildo be given a voice in the determination of cacao prices. In the interim, a period of 150 years, the dicta of distant markets and the royal will would determine the nature of the Caracas economy. The 1580 to 1620 period is unique, then, for the strength of local interests in the economic life of the Caracas region.

These examples of self-interest on the part of the elite also serve to correct a misconception about the integrated and harmonious nature of early Caracas society. In an often-cited essay, the first detailed study of the Caracas community during its earliest years, historian Stephanie Blank argued that the men of the Caracas elite, because they held prestige and power as municipal officials, and

because they conducted business in the larger world of Spain's empire, were able to perform an essential integrative role in the community as social brokers and patrons for less-privileged vecinos.^[23] Blank observed that there were a variety of mechanisms, including kinship and ritual kinship, or compadrazgo , that provided links between Caracas residents, and she believed that these links were used for vertical social integration that affected almost everyone in the town. However, her study lacks the all-important evidence of the service actually rendered the clients of the grandees who were dependent on them for protection and advancement. In fact, rather than the tendency toward consensus that Blank observed, the internal history of Caracas during the early commercial period reads best as a series of petty struggles and at times violent, socially disintegrative adjustments to rapid changes. What most often prevailed was the simple will of strong men concerned with the profits to be realized from their wheat crop and the financing of imports with the anticipated return from future harvests. Rather than benign leaders of an integrated social organism, the members of this elite did what they could to advance their own interests as a class, or, perhaps better, as a kin-linked faction, without much concern for those who were neither powerful nor influential. Willing to incur considerable personal risk by defying the governor, placing him under arrest and sending him under guard to Spain, as they did in 1624 to prevent enforcement of the encomienda law,^[24] it was not difficult for them to use the cabildo for their own benefit, even at the expense of poorer vecinos who, in earlier times, had enjoyed the patronage of many of these same Indian raiders now turned wheat traders.

The wheat commerce with Cartagena and other Caribbean ports brought the construction of flour mills on the banks of the Anauco, Catuche, and Chacao streams where they crossed the plain above the town to the north and east. Although their owners' principal income came from the commercial sale of flour, operating these mills was evidently profitable, and their possession was both a privilege and a source of conflict which fell within the dominion of the cabildo to give and to resolve. In 1591 Alonso García Pineda received eight fanegadas of land from the cabildo. The only condition of ownership of this land, which was located on the banks of the Chacao stream, was that García Pineda fence the parcel to keep out the cattle that were still permitted to roam freely in the valley.

By the end of the following year he had obtained two more land grants on the Chacao, and until January 1593 he shared the stream with only one other individual, Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro, a companion of Losada in the foundation of Caracas, an alcalde ordinario in the cabildo, cabalgada leader on occasion, and founder in his own right of the town of San Sebastián de los Reyes. Then, on the same day, capitán Francisco de Olalla and the royal treasurer don Francisco Gomes de Ubierna petitioned for land and water rights along the Chacao. They were followed in May by three other petitioners, including the powerful old soldier Garci González de Silva. The cabildo granted these requests as well, despite García Pineda's claim that his prerogatives were being infringed upon. To protect themselves, in June he and Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro asked for and received guarantees to first water rights to the run-off carried by the stream.^[25]

Rights to water usage of the other streams were quickly granted thereafter; the recipients were most often encomenderos. The normal pattern seems to have been that of the Chacao, where several mills were constructed one below the other by growers who also drew water from the same source to irrigate the wheat that they grew on contiguous land. The mill that the lieutenant governor Juan de Riberos began to build on the Anauco in 1594 was different in that his fields were not close at hand. The Anauco passed near the town and most of the irrigable land on its banks was already owned by Garci González de Silva. Located on municipal or ejido land below González de Silva's wheatfields, Riberos's mill was not a threat to the other's water needs and there was no objection made to its establishment. By 1597 the best wheat land in the Caracas Valley had been allocated and the cabildo had begun to grant mill sites to those who were willing to take title to land parcels located along the Guaire River. In many cases these recipients were encomenderos and were therefore at no significant disadvantage with respect to the labor force which they could put to work in their fields, but notary records and the records of taxes paid on wheat exports indicate that vecinos who grew wheat on the banks of the Guaire were not as successful as those growers who had earlier secured preferred land adjacent to the hillside streams. What is more, there is no evidence that it proved possible to divert water from the Guaire for the purpose of grinding flour.^[26]

There were no more than five or six wheat mills in the Caracas Valley at the beginning of the seventeenth century, their numbers more limited by the shortage of favorable sites than by construction costs. They were not inexpensive, however. Juan de Riberos claimed that the mill he planned to build would be "of great utility for the republica , for there are few mills, so few that the wheat cannot be ground due to the lack of them, which is because they are so expensive to build, each one costing more than three hundred ducats [equal to 412 pesos]."^[27] Yet it may be that Riberos, who could afford the building costs, overstated his case so that the cabildo would be sure to grant him a millsite; we know that encomendero Esteban Marmolejo purchased his mill for only 200 pesos in 1598.^[28]

In any event, the mills were probably profitable, and all the more so if they were limited in number. A rough estimate of milling income is made possible on the basis of a provision of the cabildo which stipulated that millers were to receive in payment for the milling service one almud of wheat for every fanega of grain ground in their mills. In Andalusian measure, the almud was equivalent to the eighth part of one fanega,^[29] and if each fanega produced six arrobas of flour, then the miller was paid three-fourths of one arroba for every six arrobas ground in his mill. With flour valued in Caracas at seven reales the arroba, the portion that went to millers of the 24,370 arrobas exported and some 6000 arrobas consumed in the town during the boom year of 1603 can be estimated at 3796 arrobas, worth 3321 pesos. If this amount were divided among six mill owners, each would have received 553 pesos or the equivalent value in flour in 1603, some 34 percent more than the total value of Riberos's mill, in that year alone.

The annual flour production in Caracas was much less than that of 1603, however. For the period 1604–1607 the average amount taken in fees by each of six mill owners would have been 230 pesos, about what it would have cost to pay the wages of an overseer and maintenance costs. Thus, as long as the mills remained few in number and wheat harvests and prices remained steady, the cabildo in effect guaranteed that the almud-per-fanega fee would at least pay operating costs. Indeed, this was most likely the intention of the provision, although in a very good year the miller might make a profit that surpassed the purchase price of his mill. Of

course his principal profits, like those of all growers, came from the commercial sale of his flour, either on consignment to his account in Cartagena and other ports, or to forastero merchants and captains of passing ships. The profits from these sales cannot be estimated until price schedules for other Indies ports are available, but we can be sure that before their flour entered the Caribbean market the Caracas millers' had at least one advantage over encomendero–growers without mills: as mill owners they were not obliged to leave one-eighth of their grain at the mill door in order to have the remainder converted to flour. Also, and most importantly, unlike the encomienda, the mill was alienable property and could be sold or inherited without restriction.

While the wheat trade remained active, then, the ownership of a flour mill was desirable and, consequently, a source of competition and conflict. As in other aspects of town life, the sorting out of these problems fell to the cabildo, and here the distinction between public and private interest occasionally blurred. The following account is particularly useful because, although selected by Blank to demonstrate how uncertainty and the potential for violence in the fledgling town were ameliorated by the patron–client relationships between the powerful and the weak,^[30] it is more convincing as an example of the propensity of these social bonds to break when burdened with the pressures of booming commercial agriculture.

During the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth there was no single individual in Caracas who was more influential, and therefore more likely to serve as patron to several clients, than Garci González de Silva. Aided by his early arrival in the region and a fortunate marriage to the daughter of a Caracas conquistador, he successfully combined the qualities of cabalgada leader, encomendero, merchant, and town councilman. Such was his prestige in the community that in 1593 he was commissioned by the cabildo to take testimony from the conquistadors and first settlers who were still in the town so that an official history of the conquest of Caracas might be written.^[31] Already owner of irrigated wheat farms on the Chacao and the Anauco streams as well as other property in the Caracas valley and cattle ranches elsewhere in the province, his desire to build a mill on the Catuche stream north of the town initiated a struggle that shows

clearly that the martial society of the 1560s and 1570s was indeed past history and in need of its historian.

The Caracas community first formally determined the limits of its ejido in 1594. Twenty-five years had passed since the town's founding before this was done, perhaps because there had been land in abundance until the wheat boom made it scarce and valuable. The ejido was land that was to be used communally, for the common pasture of mules and horses, for instance, or rented to individuals for the benefit of the municipal treasury. Juan de Riberos, for example, paid the cabildo twelve pesos annually for the use of the land on which his mill was located. In the same year that the ejido boundaries were defined, the cabildo granted a parcel of land on the Catuche stream north of the town to Manoel Figueredo, the owner of a small shop and a long-time vecino. The property was on the mountainside beyond the newly determined ejido boundary, near the road that climbed north and west out of the valley before descending to sea. Figueredo paid the required composición fee to have his titles confirmed by the crown, and the land was his, at least according to law. Then, in a cabildo session of August 1599, councilman (regidor ) Garci González de Silva petitioned for a mill site and water from the Catuche as it came from the mill that belonged to Esteban Marmolejo. The location of the land in González de Silva's request seems to have been in the same place as Figueredo's holding, but the land was examined by the cabildo's alcaldes ordinarios and González de Silva's petition was granted in November, in disregard for Figueredo's title.^[32]

Figueredo was not an encomendero and not a man of means. In 1598 he paid the royal fifth on 120 pesos of gold, an average sum and the only occasion he registered gold to be smelted by the royal treasury. He had been a member of González de Silva's company in the raids made against the Cumanagoto Indians of Nirgua in 1593, and the respect Figueredo held for his former chief was such that he claimed that he would "always feel as humble toward him as if I had been his own son." What was more, González de Silva had served as godfather at Figueredo's wedding in 1579.^[33] This all mattered for little, however, because wheat farming and milling had become profitable and Figueredo's one-time patron was prepared to do whatever was necessary to secure Figueredo's Catuche land and water for himself.

Late in 1600, in preparation for the grinding that would be done following the spring harvest of 1601, González de Silva sent his sons and a carpenter to begin work on the new mill. When Figueredo turned them away from the site, González de Silva went to the Catuche himself, accompanied by five armed men, to warn Figueredo that the work would proceed in spite of any protest. Figueredo pled justice from Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro and Juan de Guevara, alcaldes ordinarios that year who held first jurisdiction over cases of this sort, but Sebastián Díaz was an important wheat farmer in his own right, and he had served as guarantor for the 1200 pesos González de Silva was obliged to pay for the office of provincial attorney (depositor general ) which he had purchased in 1595. Juan de Guevara, for his part, was married to González de Silva's wife's niece, and he would soon be father-in-law to both of González de Silva's sons. He was also a frequent shipper of large quantities of wheat.^[34] Perhaps the cabildo intended to compensate for this apparent conflict of interest by sending regidores Rodrigo de León, Nicolás de Peñalosa, and Martín de Gámez to examine Figueredo's claim again, but they too determined that the boundary should be set to suit González de Silva. To no avail, Figueredo complained about the disadvantages of disputing the will of a regidor and a rich man with the rest of the cabildo's officers as judges. With González de Silva's mill under construction the case disappears from the record, to emerge in a somewhat different context several years later.^[35]

Sometime before April 1608 Leonardo Ferigo, a cleric, purchased Manoel Figueredo's town property and his disputed Catuche claim. Ferigo renewed litigation with the cabildo, noting that Figueredo, "a poor and miserable man," could not afford the appeal that he was now willing to make to the Audiencia in Santo Domingo. Although he had sold his mill to one Antonio Ortíz, Garci González de Silva responded to padre Ferigo with a series of legal arguments that would end the continuing conflict in a definitive manner. In a counterstatement to the cabildo he first disputed Ferigo's claim in a direct fashion, arguing that his grant had been legally made in 1599, that the mill had been built on land that, in the opinion of both alcaldes and regidores, did not belong to Figueredo. Then, to bring both municipal and royal interests into alignment with his own, and thus to block any appeal that might

be presented by Ferigo to the Audiencia in Santo Domingo, González de Silva offered a new and effective proposal.

The Figueredo-Ferigo land was close to the town in a very favorable location "within a musket shot" of the place most of the mules used in haulage to and from the wharf at La Guaira were pastured. Mules and horses were dying from lack of pasture, he claimed, and the grant of this valuable land to Figueredo fifteen years earlier was an error and an injustice to the king who had been deceived about its value. He did not mention that he, as regidor, had signed the 1594 ejido act that failed to include the Figueredo property. But far from recognizing that the Figueredo claim included the mill which the new owner Ferigo insisted belong to him, González de Silva now argued that Ferigo should be denied all the property, which must be returned "to your majesty or to this city."^[36] Royal cédulas of 1589 and 1591 ordered governors and viceroys to revoke cabildo grants if recipients did not pay fees, but there was neither legal provision nor precedent for the restructuring of the ejido on the simple initiative of the cabildo, and much less so when the action would cause legitimate titles to be vacated and land to be expropriated.^[37]

In any event, in April 1608, some months after Ferigo made known his intention to take his cause to the Audiencia, members of the cabildo rode east from Caracas with the lieutenant governor to reclaim land for the town by evicting those whose property was located within the newly expanded ejido boundaries. On the second day the committee, which included González de Silva in his capacity as regidor, came to the Catuche land of padre Ferigo. Ignoring his pleas, the town attorney opened and closed the doors of his house, threw out some of his furniture, and pulled up handfuls of grass in execution of the symbols of eviction. The unfortunate cleric was able to afford litigation for a time, and the town attorney took favorable testimony on his behalf from a dozen vecinos, but his property had become too valuable to be left unworked and his claims threatened a powerful man who succeeded in defeating Ferigo by arranging for his land to be transferred to the public domain.^[38]

Garci González de Silva was eager to plant wheat and grind flour in 1594 because the trade had become more profitable than in previous years. The force and legal chicanery he used to get his way in

the Figueredo-Ferigo case was intended to maximize his gains in the context of the limited water resources in the Caracas Valley where wheat cultivation was possible. However, even the most powerful and ruthless vecinos could not dominate the weather or the increasingly strong competition from regions with climate and other natural conditions superior to those of Caracas for wheat farming. The Caracas wheat boom lasted long enough for trade patterns and partnerships to be formed and for commercial activity to change the identity of the town, but it was disappointingly short-lived.

Rainfall in the Caracas Valley could be harshly capricious. Cereal cultivation was always a gamble against rain that could not be counted on to fall when the grain needed it most. The first notice of the difficulties of farming wheat in a tropical rainfall system comes in 1592: Juan de Riberos lost his second consecutive harvest that year because, as he complained to the cabildo, "the weather in this province isn't natural for the harvesting of wheat because it is so variable [mudable ]." Shortages in 1607 following the bad harvest of 1606 caused the local price of bread to go up by 200 percent. In 1609 the cabildo recorded that there had been but little rainfall for several years past, and 1610 brought new prohibitions against hoarding and a ban on all exports, with a guard placed on the La Guaira road to prevent clandestine night traffic. The year 1611 was described as sterile, and in 1619 the mills were idled by the lack of rainwater needed to turn the heavy millstones.^[39]

In addition to the crop failures, revived and redoubled competition from the wheat producing towns of the northern Andes may have reduced more distant Caracas's share of the Cartagena market. Since the 1570s these highland settlements had sent their annual harvests by mule train to the village of Gibraltar on the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo, and from there the flour was ferried to the port town of Nueva Zamora de Maracaibo for shipment to Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and, especially, Cartagena. Only a few days by sea from this latter market, Maracaibo was recognized by contemporaries as the best harbor and most active port on the Venezuelan coast.^[40] In 1608 a long hiatus in the Maracaibo wheat trade ended when more than fifteen years of intermittent Indian wars in the lake region were finally brought to an end by an expeditionary force assembled from neighboring towns, but not from

Caracas, as would have been customary thirty years earlier. The messages of gratitude sent to the king by the cabildos of the Andean towns of La Grita, Pamplona, Tunja, and Mérida, and by Cartagena, attest to the importance of Maracaibo as an essential point of embarkation for the Andean wheat trade with the Caribbean.^[41] What is suggestive for the Caracas case is that it was precisely during the closure of the Maracaibo outlet that Caracas wheat began to enter the Caribbean market in unprecedented quantities. The first year of the Maracaibo Indian revolts, 1594, was also the year that Garci González de Silva began in earnest to expand his holdings in wheat farmland. Caracas enjoyed more than a decade as the principal wheat supplier on the Tierra Firme coast, but this fortunate situation had passed by the time González de Silva arranged for the Figueredo-Ferigo land to become part of the town ejido.

There is no direct proof that either the problems of growing grain in a tropical rainfall system or the reopening of the port at Maracaibo caused the collapse of the Caracas wheat trade. Of undoubtedly great importance is the leveling of wheat prices in Spain, which, in terms of the amount of wheat that could be purchased with a given quantity of silver, reached their highest point and began to decline in the 1590s. Presumably too, as the silver production at Potosí fell and the Atlantic trade of Seville leveled off, the demand for wheat at Cartagena was reduced.^[42] Cultivation did not stop altogether. In 1684 there were some 500 fanegadas (about 800 acres) in the immediate vicinity of Caracas that were planted in wheat, but this was all consumed locally.^[43]

Tobacco and cacao, crops more suited than wheat to the climate and water resources of the central Venezuelan coast and the interior valleys that run parallel to it, were much sought in seventeenth-century Indies and European markets, and it was not long before they became the region's primary exports. At the very beginning of this transition, however, before the substantial profits to be made from cacao had become evident and wheat had not yet disappeared as a trade item, the Caracas political elite demonstrated but little interest in the promotion of commerce in these tropical crops. In part this was because the cultivation of tobacco and cacao took place in distant regions far from the town, and the cabildo's zone of effective influence could not be stretched to include remote haciendas located

along an expansive, difficult-to-patrol coastline. To a limited extent, wheat production and commerce could be influenced by the town council, but only the province-wide authority of the governor could apply adequately to the far-flung agriculture of tobacco and cacao. More importantly, the cabildo's members were personally committed to the wheat trade, they were among its principal beneficiaries, and the town council would not readily relinquish the influence it had over wheat in favor of some other product that could not be subjected to municipal authority. Not surprisingly from this perspective, the cabildo's initial reaction to tobacco, the first of the alternative crops to challenge wheat, was firmly negative.

Caracas tobacco exports began to surpass wheat exports just at the time when wheat exports began to decline. Suddenly, in a surprising move, the cabildo and the governor decided to prohibit not only tobacco exports but its cultivation as well. In December 1604, the cabildo sent its regidores to take account of the tobacco crop in the fields, and then it asked the governor to impose a general ban on tobacco agriculture. The following August, in response to the governor's request, the Audiencia in Santo Domingo prohibited the planting of tobacco in Venezuela for a period of ten years, except by license to be granted by the governor.^[44]

The official explanation for this drastic action was given by the governor, Sancho de Alquiza, who claimed that all other attempts to keep the king's subjects from trading tobacco with smugglers had failed. Wheat did not attract pirates, but for tobacco these "enemies of our Catholic faith" offered goods that were "cheaper than if they had been bought in Spain," and given the poverty of the province it was understandable that otherwise loyal subjects would return to the illicit trade after the most severe punishment. Sancho de Alquiza had even hung a few pirates as a warning, but to no avail.^[45] His reasoning may have been the authorities' only motivation behind the prohibition, yet the cure does seem to have been worse than the disease. Among Venezuelan historians, Tomás Polanco Martínez suggests that tobacco probably continued to be sent from Caracas and that the absolute ban was only an ultimatum needed to enforce compliance with the licensing aspect of the decree. Eduardo Arcila Farías views it as an attack on local Portuguese farmers, which, he argues, would have been consistent with prevailing prejudices and is plausible because Portuguese vecinos were not represented in the

cabildo and their tobacco farms were often located beyond the easy vigilance of Caracas authorities.^[46]

The tobacco ban, described as "disconcerting" and "mad" by these modern historians because it evidently offered no benefit to what was one of the poorest of Spain's colonies, is the more unusual for the full participation of the cabildo, in Caracas on other occasions and elsewhere usually the vociferous defender of local interests against restrictive royal economic policy. Cabildos could lead the residents of a region in armed rebellion when the crown sought to stop contraband by eliminating their only lucrative trade item, as happened in Tenerife in 1655.^[47] That this reaction did not occur in Caracas suggests that the political elite of the town was either not trade-minded, as Pike had supposed, or was committed to the commercial exchange of some other product. In light of the importance of the wheat trade, which was still very active in 1606 and 1607, this latter possibility seems to be the more plausible.

An examination of the existing almojarifazgo (customs duty) records, which for the brief period 1603 to 1607 registered all of Caracas's legal trade,^[48] allows a test of the hypothesis that a long-standing commitment to the wheat trade led the cabildo to seek to limit, perhaps even to eliminate, commerce in tobacco. The almojarifazgo registry lists every individual who imported and exported at La Guaira. To determine which of these traders were Caracas vecinos a variety of sources was most carefully surveyed. Of exceptional utility were the parish baptismal and marriage registries and a 1603 road-tax assessment made of all vecinos by the cabildo. Also invaluable was a document listing all non-Hispanic vecinos, including Portuguese, who were resident in Caracas in 1607.^[49] So comprehensive are these sources for this short period of time that it is highly likely that every vecino who paid the almojarifazgo tax on his agricultural exports from 1603 to 1607 has been identified as a vecino, either Hispanic or foreign (including Portuguese in the foreigner category). Those traders who paid the tax but have not been located in the Caracas sources, with very little likelihood of error, are therefore considered forasteros , or non-vecinos.

Most of the wheat exported from Caracas, some 84 percent, was shipped during the months from May to August. Both vecinos and non-vecinos did most of their wheat business during this season (fig. 2). The major difference between the wheat commerce of

Fig. 2.
Caracas Wheat Flour to Indies Ports Vecinos and Non-Vecinos, 1603–1607
Vecinos and non-vecinos traded wheat during the same season, principally 
May to August, but they shipped to different destinations, vecinos 
preferring Cartagena and non-vecinos other ports (fig. 3).

vecinos and that of non-vecinos was the destinations of shipments. Vecinos preferred Cartagena, where they sent their grain in May and June, while non-vecinos did business in other Caribbean ports, returning to Cartagena in July and August after the vecinos had already made their sales there (fig. 3). The tobacco trade, like the flour trade, boomed in May and continued active for several months thereafter. Again like flour, once the season ended virtually nothing was traded until the following spring. For the four years for which complete data are available, 1604 through 1607, 88.8 percent of all Caracas tobacco exports (7954 arrobas) were made during the months from May to September (fig. 4a ). Of this quantity, Caracas Hispanic vecinos shipped 51 percent (4062 arrobas), foreign vecinos 15 percent (1219 arrobas), and non-vecinos 34 percent (2673 arrobas). The August 1605 ban does not seem to have had much impact on the foreign vecinos of Caracas, most of

Fig. 3
Caracas Wheat to Indies Ports, May to August, 1603–1607
May-August Totals: 57,618 arrobas, 84.4% of all wheat shipped 1603–1607;
26,066 arrobas by vecinos, 84.7% of all vecino wheat; 31,552 arrobas by non-vecinos,
84.2% of all non-vecino wheat. 31,940 arrobas to Cartagena, 46.8% of all wheat shipped 1603–1607;
15,016 arrobas by vecinos to Cartagena, 48.8% of all vecino wheat;
16,924 arrobas by non-vecinos to Cartagena, 45.1% of all non-vecino wheat.

whom were Portuguese; they shipped 7 percent of the total quantity of tobacco exported in 1605, 18 percent of the 1606 exports (the first full year of the prohibition), and, in 1607, foreign vecinos again exported 18 percent of the total.^[50] As with wheat, vecinos traded a month or so earlier than did outsiders, exporting substantial quantities of tobacco in June. Non-vecinos, who may have had to sell merchandise in Caracas before they could buy wheat or tobacco, exported twice as much tobacco in July as in any other month (fig. 4b ).

Much the greater part of the tobacco exports from Caracas went

Fig. 4a
Caracas Tobacco Exports, 1604–1607, Totals

Fig. 4b
Caracas Tobacco Exports, 1604–1607, Hispanic Vecinos, Foreign Vecinos, 
and Non-Vecinos

to Seville—86 percent (6826 arrobas) of the May to September four-year total. The remainder was sent to Cartagena, and most of the Cartagena-bound tobacco was shipped by Hispanic vecinos. Indeed, foreign vecinos and non-vecinos only loaded tobacco for Cartagena in minimal quantities and only in June, usually to take advantage of the wheat boats that departed La Guaira then to meet the flota. Hispanic vecinos also preferred to sell tobacco in the Seville market, sending twice as much there as they did to Cartagena (fig. 5).

Fig. 5
Tobacco to Seville and to Cartagena, May to September

Identifying by name the principal tobacco traders (table 2) reveals that, of those who exported 200 arrobas or more, only one, Garci González de Silva, sent tobacco to ports other than Seville. The other three Hispanic vecinos who were major tobacco traders, Pedro Blanco de Ponte, Alonso Rodríguez Santos, and Juan de Aguirre, were newcomers in Caracas and they traded exclusively

with Spain. By contrast, most of the Hispanic vecinos who were principal wheat traders (table 3) had been in Caracas for decades prior to 1603–1607. As a group the Hispanic vecino wheat traders were, as their counterparts who exported tobacco were not, both closely aligned with the Cartagena market and holders of cabildo posts and other administrative positions in Caracas. Excepting Garci González de Silva, who was involved in nearly every available business enterprise, this Caracas political elite only dabbled in the tobacco trade in a marginal way, as a minor supplement to their wheat business in Cartagena.

Several of these principal wheat traders had more in common with one another than merely their political prominence and their Cartagena interests. Of the ten most active wheat traders who were also Caracas vecinos (Hispanic and foreign), six were aligned with one another by one or more social or kinship obligations. Nofre Carrasquer, Juan de Guevara, and Diego Vásquez de Escovedo were brothers-in-law. Two of Garci González de Silva's sons mar-

ried two Guevara daughters. González de Silva was godfather to Diego de Villanueva's first child, born to fourteen-year-old Catalina Mejía some months after their marriage in 1602. Diego Vásquez de Escovedo accepted the same responsibility for the son of Antonio Rodríguez Jaramillo, master tailor and wheat trader. With the exception of Rodríguez Jaramillo, these men had all served as alcaldes ordinarios of the cabildo on at least one occasion; Diego de Villanueva, Diego Vásquez de Escovedo, Juan de Guevara, and Garci González de Silva were regidores perpetuos ; and Juan de Guevara had served as lieutenant governor. Some members of this group also made exports of tobacco—Garci González de Silva (922 arrobas), Deigo de Villanueva (68 arrobas), Diego Vásquez de Escovedo (40 arrobas)—but they sent it exclusively with their wheat to the Cartagena market.

The remaining four of the ten most active vecino wheat traders had no visible relationship to one another, nor were they holders of prestigious and powerful office. Francisco de Caravajal and Diego León were Portuguese; Diaz León was the town's slave factor. Juan de Aguirre lived in a house in 1605 that was rented to traders who were in Caracas only for the season to secure cargoes, and Alonso Rodríguez Santos, a merchant from Extremadura who would become the patriarch of an important Caracas family, was first elected to political office and began to acquire community influence only after his marriage in 1607 to Melchora de Vera Ibargoyen, the daughter of a Caracas founder.^[51]

The four unrelated Hispanic vecinos were more interested in the tobacco trade to Seville than they were in the wheat trade to Cartagena. Without local influence and authority, they were unable to prevent the restrictions placed on tobacco by men with more power and different commercial interests. However, as the next chapter makes clear, it will be these less-powerful tobacco traders, together with other vecinos of marginal status, such as the Portuguese encomendero Diego de Ovalle, and immigrants not yet resident in Caracas in 1607, who first discover the substantial profits to be realized from cacao and African slavery. For all their authority at the turn of the seventeenth century, few members of the interrelated wheat group successfully made the transition from encomienda labor, wheat, and the Cartagena market to slavery, cacao, and the Mexican market.

All this suggests the existence in Caracas during the first decade of the seventeenth century of what might be best called a faction, a group of men unified by possession of local political power and by kinship, who had little direct interest in the tobacco trade. They were therefore free to be rigorous about controlling this trade, even to the point of threatening to eliminate tobacco planting altogether. By securing the license policy and ban on exports they did not intend to permanently jeopardize the profits that might be realized from the cultivation of tobacco, in fact, to prevent competition the cabildo refused to allow tobacco seeds to be taken to Spain in 1605.^[52] Rather, they sought to protect the established shipping on which they had come to depend. Committed as they had been for more than two decades to the Cartagena market and the outfitting

of the flota there, it was in the interest of these individuals to control tobacco closely and to reduce the attraction to enemy corsairs that it represented. The eager participation in this of Sancho de Alquiza, governor of Venezuela from 1606 to 1611, lends credence to the idea that there was more to the 1606 ban than zeal to comply with royal directives against smuggling and a prevailing prejudice against Portuguese tobacco farmers. Alquiza had served as captain of ocean galleons, and he knew the Indies trade well. As son-in-law of Martín de las Alas, governor in Cartagena, he was no doubt familiar with the commercial interests in that port, and the fact that during his residence in Caracas he served as godfather only to officials of the crown and to Cartagena-faction families, the González de Silva, the Guevara, and the Carrasquer, may be taken as further proof that a preference for continued commercial relations with Cartagena, and the wheat business there in particular, shaped the strict tobacco policies of the Caracas elite.^[53]

The effort of a few powerful men to gain a greater portion of the wheat and flour production in Caracas and to favor their established ties with Cartagena was to a large extent what determined the cabildo decisions to change the ejido boundaries in 1608 and to closely circumscribe tobacco cultivation and commerce after 1605. The institutional authority of the cabildo was a useful means to the achievement of these objectives, but only in a limited, short-term sense, for there was nothing to be done about the restricted land and water resources in the Caracas Valley or the resurgence of effective competition from Andean wheat farmers who traded from Maracaibo. In addition, Indian labor was always in short supply in Caracas, and only a few of the more successful vecinos, those like Nofre Carrasquer and Alonso Rodríguez Santos who were successful merchants first and encomenderos and wheat farmers afterwards, were able to purchase African slaves in quantity to augment their modest encomiendas. Wheat profits were sufficient to create a radical reorientation of the economic structure of Caracas, and in this context of change certain individuals collaborated and conspired to form policies that would assure them of an increasing share of such profits, but by the second decade of the seventeenth century wheat agriculture and trade had reached its natural and commercial limits in Caracas. Town politics could do nothing to

extend these limits. Brought to importance by the wheat trade, the cabildo would not be able to control in any significant way the commercialization of the next export crop, cacao, whose dominance in the Caracas regional economy began, with most interesting consequences for the composition of the local society, at just the time when wheat could be developed no further.

2—
Cacao in the Seventeenth Century: The First Boom

A report to the king by the royal treasurer don Diego de Villanueva indicates that by 1607 Caracas had developed a modest trade in a variety of agricultural items, hides, and crude cotton cloth (see table 4). For the most part, the hides went with the tobacco and sarsaparilla to Spain, while wheat and the other items found markets in Cartagena and other Caribbean ports. On the other side of the ledger, imports to Caracas consisted principally of Spanish dry goods, Canarian and Andalusian wines and olive oil, and a few African slaves. Only rarely were import duties paid on luxury merchandise, a bolt of Chinese silk or silver tableware for instance, and these goods were usually brought to the colony only by those few Caraqueños who exported tobacco, wheat, or hides in quantity. Equally rare in the royal tax register is the record of imported slaves. An occasional notation mentions several slaves bought in a lot from a supposed "forced entry" ship, and these were also purchased by men identified as major exporters.^[1] By 1607 the more common of these imported goods had reached—in small amounts, to be sure—as far as the San Sebastián cattle district, thirty leagues south of Caracas. They were paid for there with hides, tobacco, cotton, and "some cacao," the only reference in the Villanueva report to the tropical plant that would shortly revolutionize the Caracas economy.^[2]

The origins of cacao cultivation in this part of the New World are obscure. The plant is not mentioned in the relaciones geográficas of the sixteenth century or in any other official documents from the Caracas area before 1607. Most likely for this reason it is commonly assumed that the first cacao trees on the Venezuelan coast were planted there by native and African laborers at the command of Europeans. And yet, from only 0.5 percent of the total value of

Caracas's exports in 1607, cacao became the region's foremost item of trade before 1650. It seems unlikely that this boom could have been created from newly planted trees, especially given the difficult labor situation of the colony. In fact, the earliest inventories of coastal cacao groves indicate that the first trees to be harvested were native to the region. Labeled árboles viejos de la tierra , or simply de la tierra , in the documents, these were almost certainly indigenous plants, both because the phrase itself, "of the land," virtually means as much, and because the estimated ages of the inventoried trees show that many of them were already standing when Hispanic commercialization of cacao began.

A family of Basque immigrants named Liendo was among the very first to ship Caracas cacao beans to Mexico; their first lot was sent to Veracruz in 1628. A quarter of a century later, in 1653, an inventory of the Liendo estate in the coastal valley of Cepi showed a total of 12,382 trees. Only 1165 had been planted during the previous twenty-five years, and the ages of these trees, labeled árboles de Trujillo , were known exactly. The remainder, 11,217 árboles de la tierra , were dated only as "more than twenty-five years old," which certainly means that the Liendo family found them standing in the valley when they arrived at Cepi in the late 1620s.

The best proof that cacao was native to the Caracas region, however, is a firsthand observation to that effect. In 1618, Juan de Ibarra, a Basque merchant, sent Portuguese encomendero Deigo de Ovalle cloth, wheat, wine, pepper, cinnamon, and copper worth 17,099 reales. According to their contract, these items were to be paid for with cacao gathered from the trees that grew wild on Ovalle's Choroní estate. Two years later, in a legal suit brought before the bishop, Ibarra complained that since no one had been much interested in the cacao trade in 1618, he had done Ovalle a favor by offering to take his cacao in exchange for merchandise and spices. But Ovalle, pointing out that the contract did not designate who should be responsible for shipping the cacao, had refused to pay to have Ibarra's beans taken to La Guaira. Months passed while the two men argued, and the market value of the beans fell by half. In his deposition, Ibarra gave evidence that leaves no doubt about the origins of cacao cultivation and commerce:

Since I am a merchant, there will be no question [when I say] that in this city there was no cacao trade when the said capitán Diego de Ovalle bought my goods and sold me his cacao. [Only] because there came news that cacao was valuable did the vecinos get together and plant it; in other words, when the [Ovalle] sale was made, there was only wild cacao.^[3]

Whether the first large quantities of cacao to be exported from Caracas were harvested from indigenous stands or from groves planted by laborers under the direction of Europeans is a question of more than academic importance. Murdo MacLeod is certain that the traditional source of cacao beans in the New Spain market, the Central American groves of Soconusco and Izalcos, were replaced in the 1620s by Caracas and Guayaquil.^[4] Evidently the South American beans were preferred for their flavor, but even with taste in their favor, it is doubtful that in such a short time Caracas growers, located so much farther from Mexico than their Central American counterparts and with no important labor advantage, could have planted enough trees to capture a significant share of the New Spain cacao trade.

A related problem has to do with the very success of this commerce. Once begun, the export of cacao from Caracas expanded at a remarkable rate. The aggregate data compiled by Eduardo Arcila Farías, even though deficient because they do not include the ex-

ports of tax-exempt Caracas vecinos, still indicate a threefold increase in cacao shipped between the early 1630s and the late 1650s.^[5] This expansion can be accounted for in part by new groves planted during these years; we know that much of the work of clearing and irrigating the land was done by African slaves who, in all probability, had been purchased with profits made in the 1620s and 1630s. These profits would have come as the result of very cheap encomienda labor at work in virgin cacao arboledas . That Caracas growers were able both to sell their beans at a competitive price in the Mexican market and purchase hundreds of slaves with the income from these sales would seem to have depended on the existence of substantial groves of indigenous cacao trees.

One clue to this process comes from the record of the Mexican Inquisition. Many of the prosperous Portuguese traders who were accused of being Jews by the Inquisition in the late 1630s and early 1640s had been active in the slave trade and the Caracas-to-Mexico cacao trade.^[6] This fact suggests the following hypothesis: Caracas vecinos exchanged cacao for Africans at a rate that allowed the Portuguese slave traders-cacao merchants to undersell the Central American cacao dealers in New Spain. Eager to sell their fragile human cargoes as soon after the Atlantic crossing as possible, the slavers needed no large margin of profit in Caracas because they stood to make substantial gains in Mexico on the cacao that they took in return for slaves. In this way, Caraqueños both obtained slaves at a moderate price and found an outlet for their cacao.^[7]

Concrete evidence shows that during the infant years of the cacao trade the initial advantage went to a small number of encomenderos with grants located along the Caribbean coast. Seventeenth-century Caracas encomiendas were of the archaic, servicio personal type. Rather than collect a fixed sum, or tributo , from their Indians, encomenderos expropriated their labor directly: that is, Indians were put to work gathering beans, planting new groves, or carrying on any other activity considered profitable or useful by the encomendero. Caracas encomenderos insisted that their Indians could not produce anything of value to be used as tribute, and by claiming abject poverty they resisted until the end of the century every attempt by the crown to eliminate servicio personal .^[8] A royal order demanding conversion to tribute collection was received in Caracas in 1621, but it was not acted upon by

Governor Juan de Tribiño Guillamas. When his successor Gil de la Sierpe attempted to execute the king's will, he was arrested by order of the cabildo and sent under guard to Spain.^[9] In 1633, in response to this act of lese majesty, the crown called for a new study of the Caracas encomiendas. The data compiled in compliance with this decree provide several clues to the relationship between encomienda labor and cacao cultivation at the very beginning of the trade with Mexico.

This document, written in about 1635, presents four series of facts: the names of the encomenderos and the titles of social distinction (don or donña, maestre de campo, capitán , and so forth) of those who were so identified; the geographical location of the encomiendas; the number of Indian tributaries in each grant; and a specific value in pesos defined only as the renta of each encomienda.^[10] That this value represents the annual income of each grant is confirmed by an existing fragment of the church tithe record. Diezmos collected for the region described in treasury documents as "costa del mar y caraballeda " totaled 2600 pesos and 2979 pesos for the years 1632 and 1634 respectively.^[11] These amounts correspond very closely to what would have been the Church's 10-percent share of the 27,450 pesos of total renta for the twenty-five encomiendas located along the "costa del mar de la jurisdicción de Caracas ," according to the 1635 list (Region 1 in table 5 and Map 2).

At that time, 3310 Indian tributaries were to be found divided unevenly among 100 encomiendas held by vecinos of three Spanish towns: Santiago de León de Caracas, Nueva Valencia del Rey, and San Sebastián de los Reyes. The surveyed area, comprising the legal jurisdictions of this triangle of towns, can be divided into four zones of agricultural production. Region 1, designated Coastal Caracas, includes all the narrow Venezuelan coastline from present-day Chuspa to Puerto Cabello. Here the conditions are good for cacao cultivation. Prevailing winds release moisture accumulated during the Atlantic crossing as they collide with coastal mountains, providing a moderate but constant supply of water to the hot, cloud-covered valleys that rise steeply from the edge of the sea. One-fourth of the encomiendas counted in 1635 were located in Region 1. In Region 2, Interior Caracas, a few Indians worked in isolated sugar trapiches on the banks of the Guarenas and Guaire Rivers, but the majority of native laborers in this region were second- and third-

Map 2.
Encomiendas, 1635

generation wheat farm and flour mill workers. Since the 1580s their toil had served a steady Spanish demand for bread, and in 1635 there were more encomiendas (thirty-three) in this temperate climate zone than in any other. Region 3, Interior Valencia, is the long, broad valley west of Caracas that forms at the inland base of the coastal mountains. In this area, described by archaeologist Cornelius Osgood as "probably the most hospitable site for a hungry population,"^[12] the densest preconquest Indian population in central Venezuela had been divided into the province's largest encomiendas a decade before the foundation of Caracas. Thus concentrated, Valencia Indians survived as an ethnic group to become sharecroppers in that area in the nineteenth century.

By contrast, many of the Indians of the poor and distant San Sebastián district, Region 4, would be removed from their homeland during the early 1600s. Too few and too thinly scattered to be organized into encomiendas, in many cases the most profitable use of the San Sebastián natives was their capture and sale to Spaniards whose agricultural enterprises were more directly integrated with the marketplace. Slave raids were still formally organized and carried out in this frontier zone in the 1640s.^[13] The few small encomiendas in San Sebastián in 1635 were employed exclusively in cattle ranching.

The most profitable encomiendas in 1635 were the large grants located in Region 3, the Valencia—Aragua Valley. Three hundred and fifty tributaries, the largest native labor force in the province, worked a sugar trapiche at Turmero and produced an annual renta of 4000 pesos for their encomendero, don Juan Martínez de Villegas. However, it was only because their grants held more tributaries that the Valencia encomenderos received relatively more income. Indians at labor on the coastal cacao haciendas and in the wheat fields north and east of Caracas returned a greater per-capita renta to their encomenderos. In terms of the value of each tributary's labor, average income from Region 3 encomiendas (23.1 pesos per tributary per annum) amounted to only two-thirds that of the coast (36.6 pesos) and three-fourths that of the immediate Caracas hinterland (30.7 pesos) (see table 5).

One of the several possible reasons for the lower labor profitability of these larger encomiendas was the high cost of transport from the fertile but landlocked Valencia—Aragua zone. Regular com-

merce across the coastal mountains was difficult except at Caracas, where a break in the range provided relatively easy access to the sea. To reach Caracas from the west, agricultural produce was carried along the banks of first the Aragua and then the Guaire rivers. Except during the dry summer months from March to May, travel along these rivers was frequently interrupted by floods and was therefore difficult and expensive. Even as late as 1841, carriage costs from the Aragua River to port at La Guaira were equal to shipping charges paid to transport the same commodities from La Guaira to Liverpool.^[14]

By 1635 encomienda labor was clearly most profitable in the coastal cacao zone. Coastal encomiendas produced an annual renta of about six pesos more per tributary than encomiendas in the traditionally profitable wheat-farming areas (36.6 pesos per annum in Region 1; 30.7 pesos in Region 2). With a similar population norm of twenty-nine or thirty tributaries, the annual income from a coastal grant was therefore about 200 pesos, or 20 percent, more than a year's earnings from a typical encomienda near Caracas. In itself, this difference, something less than the value of one African slave, does not adequately reflect the impact that the bonanza Mexican market for cacao had already had on Caracas society by the 1630s. More revealing is the cabildo's lament in 1626 that the lure of greater profits from coastal cacao arboledas was drawing Hispanic labradores from the wheat farms. Without their labradores—overseers who

were willing to administer Indian labor in return for a share of the harvest—wheat farm encomenderos feared that they would be unable to bring a worthwhile crop to market.^[15]

Cacao created fluidity at more than one level of early seventeenth-century Caracas society. Evidence from the 1635 document indicates that most of the richest coastal Indian grants were in the hands of recent immigrants to Caracas. Of twenty-three encomiendas with an annual renta of 1500 pesos or more, incomes comparable to those of the most profitable cacao encomiendas in Central America at the middle of the sixteenth century,^[16] eight were located in the Valencia–Aragua region, eight near the town of Caracas, and seven on the coast. A measure of the local social standing of the holders of these high-income grants can be derived from the document compiler's recognition of some of them as "don" or "doña."^[17] In the long-established regions of Valencia and Caracas, nearly two-thirds (ten of sixteen) of the encomiendas valued at 1500 pesos or more renta belonged to a "don" or "doña" in 1635, but only one of the seven holders of high-renta coastal encomiendas was distinguished by this suggestion of hidalguía (see table 6). Who were these seventeenth-century parvenus with profitable encomiendas on the inhospitable coastal fringe of Caracas society?

Enough biographical data can be gathered on four of the seven

to allow for a composite rendering of these first important cacao producers, the very first of the grandes cacaos , as they would be called by subsequent generations. One was Portuguese. There were several Portuguese among the poorer encomenderos, but Diego de Ovalle was the only individual of this nationality whose grant was valued at 1500 pesos or more annual income. Alejandro Blanco Ponte was a Canary Islander: his father was from Tenerife, his mother from Flanders. His brother Pedro Blanco Ponte had been in Caracas since at least 1619 when he declared himself a vecino "without estancia or land" and asked the cabildo for a plot near the La Guaira road where he could pasture his pack mules. Alejandro did not leave Tenerife until after 1627, the year when the Casa de la Contratación formally prohibited direct trade between the Canaries and the Indies.^[18] A third encomendero was Pedro de Liendo, a Vizcayan and the nephew of a retired admiral of the galleon fleet. Pedro and his brothers Santiago and Domingo de Liendo (they were not encomenderos) were perhaps Caracas's most ambitious cacao planters during the first half of the seventeenth century. The fourth grantholder for whom biographical information has been found, don José Rengifo Pimentel, was born in Santo Domingo, where his father was captain of the port and his grandfather had been a royal treasury accountant. The only encomendero on the coast whose rights to Indian labor earned him 1500 pesos or more annually and who was also classified as a "don" on the 1635 list, Rengifo Pimentel had in fact four encomiendas (which was illegal), three on the coast and one on the Guarenas River, east of Caracas. With a total of two hundred tributaries and an annual income from them of 6250 pesos, don José was Caracas's foremost encomendero.^[19]

The first of these men to settle in Caracas was Diego de Ovalle. In 1602 he married the youngest daughter of don Juan Vásquez de Rojas, a descendant of Caracas conquistadors in both maternal and paternal lines, and received an encomienda at Choroní as part of his wife's dowry. Ovalle was born in the Vila do Mojadoiro on the upper Douro River in the Portuguese province of Tras-os-Montes. There his family had vineyards and fruit orchards, the produce of which had been sent traditionally to Medina del Campo and Valladolid. With central Spain in depression at the end of the sixteenth century, Tras-os-Montes became part of the burgeoning economic system of

Seville, and there Ovalle established commercial relations that he maintained throughout his life. These connections, and those he evidently had with the Portuguese slavers who monopolized the supply of African labor to the Caribbean, were no doubt of some interest in Caracas. In 1607, the slave factor and six of the town's encomenderos, including Ovalle, were from Portugal.^[20]

He was also a shrewd trader. In 1618 Ovalle sold one of the first lots of cacao ever to leave the Caracas coast to the Basque merchant Juan de Ibarra. Ibarra sent wheat flour, spices, and dry goods to Choroní and waited for his cacao to arrive at the La Guaira wharf. These were the infant years of cacao commerce, however, and this was Ibarra's first purchase. In the future, contracts would specify the location of delivery, either "puesto puerto La Guayra" or "puesto costa del mar," but on this occasion Ovalle, who had not made arrangements to do so, refused to ship the beans at his cost to La Guaira. Ibarra, having already given merchandise for the much-wanted cacao, had no choice but to send for it and to pay the transportation charges himself.^[21]

Ovalle made a good deal of money selling cacao, and he used his wealth to protect himself from problems that might arise, both because he was Portuguese and because the cacao business was in its unsettled infancy. An appeal for funds by the crown or the cabildo would find him by far the most generous contributor.^[22] However, unlike others of his economic position, he did not acquire municipal office, and neither he nor his wife owned town property. They were permanent residents at Choroní, and it was there that they made their principal investment: African slaves. This was an investment against any misfortune and one that those who survived the prolonged depression of the 1650s and 1660s seemed to have made freely while cacao sales were brisk and highly profitable. By 1626 Ovalle had added fifty slaves to his 1602 encomienda work force of thirty-six Indian tributaries. This number had risen to eighty-four African and creole bondsmen in 1644, and by 1650, the year of his death, Ovalle was master of ninety-four slaves.^[23]

The inventory of Ovalle's Choroní estate provides a glimpse at the material life constructed from Indian and African labor and fifty years of vigorous trading. Although primitive by Mexico City or Cartagena standards, the principal house at Choroní was compara-

ble to any Caracas dwelling at that time. It was a simply furnished, two-story stone structure with a tile roof. Two gilded mirrors, a cedar table and chairs, and a silver service for six were the items of greatest value. A dozen books, including Antonio de Herrera's Historia de las Indias , occupied a shelf.^[24] The upstairs rooms contained just the touch of luxury in a style already common to Caracas cacao exporters: two carved cedar chests imported from New Spain and a four-poster bed covered with a Mexican quilt and pillows of Chinese silk reflected the importance of the market where Ovalle had made his modest fortune.^[25]

Close by were the other buildings used for maintaining the estate and preparing cacao for shipment. A substantial wooden storehouse doubled in the upper loft as a drying shed. Carpentry tools and a forge, both used by African artisans, were kept in a second structure. The slaves' quarters, because they represented no value to Ovalle, were not included in the inventory of his holdings, but the livestock and agricultural implements used to produce the food to feed them were counted: seven milk cows, a hundred head of cattle, six teams of oxen with harnesses, several plows, hoes, and a variety of other tools filled out the list. The absence of expensive consumer goods may well have been the consequence of Ovalle's considerable investment in slaves. At 1650s prices, the Choroní blacks were worth no less than 24,000 pesos.^[26]

Less is known about the agricultural estates and business activities of the three Spaniards who have been identified as being among the first of the Caracas cacao encomenderos. The last will and testament of Pedro de Liendo has survived. Like Ovalle, Liendo's principal expenditure was for African slaves. In 1635, his encomienda at Chuao was made up of thirty-five tributaries. In 1659, in addition to the estate house and tools, he owned a warehouse and two stores in La Guaira, a sloop to carry his cacao there, and 106 slaves.^[27] For their part, the Blanco Ponte brothers participated directly in the slave trade; as buyers and brokers their credit was respected from Lisbon to Loanda to Cartagena. In May 1640, Pedro Blanco Ponte bought forty-eight slaves from Francisco Arias de Aquilena, a vecino of Cartagena and agent to don Francisco de Vasconcelos de Acuña, governor of Angola, on credit at the bargain price of 160 pesos each (the current Caracas price was about 250 pesos).^[28] There is no will for don Rengifo Pimentel and no record of slaves held or sold by him.

The major significance for Caracas of this group of men, a Portuguese, a Basque, a Canary Islander, and a creole born in Santo Domingo, may lie in the fact that they were all men of seaborne and commercial experience. At the same time, they were not dependent on Seville or Cartagena and the traditional flota system, then in decline, which had provided a demand for Caracas wheat since the 1580s. Their entrepreneurial talents and their trading contracts in new regions, Africa, the Canaries, and Caribbean ports, made them first welcome in Caracas and then part of its propertied elite. They all married well in that soon after their marriages they obtained encomiendas on the basis of the station and merits of their Caracas-born wives' families.

Don Rengifo Pimentel married the Caracas cattle heiress doña Francisca Gámez and in her name and his held the four encomiendas already mentioned, including two on the coast worth 1000 and 3000 pesos per annum. Pedro de Liendo's wife was the wealthy doña Catalina Mexía. The granddaughter of Mérida (Venezuela) governor Suárez del Castillo, at her death—having outlived Liendo and two subsequent husbands—doña Catalina founded an obra pía on the encominenda and cacao groves at Chuao. While the encomienda was worth about 1600 pesos annually during the period of Liendo's possession, in time this estate became the most valuable ecclesiastical property in colonial Caracas. Alejandro Blanco Ponte's marriage to doña Francisca Infante, the granddaughter of town founders, brought him an encomienda at Caraballeda worth 1500 pesos per annum. In 1632, the year of his sister's wedding, don Francisco Infante transferred a debt to the royal treasury of 5403 pesos to his new brother-in-law, Alejandro Blanco Ponte, who immediately paid one-third of the outstanding amount in cash. In 1634, having already replaced Infante as encomendero at Caraballeda, Blanco Ponte received a 1000-peso loan in Caracas guaranteed by 5000 cacao trees in that coastal valley.^[29] Perhaps entry into the Caracas elite in the 1630s required nothing more than one or two thousand pesos in gold coin. However, for the established families that provided these ambitious immigrants with wives, the major attraction of men like Ovalle, Liendo, and Blanco Ponte was undoubtedly their ability to convert cacao beans into large numbers of African slaves. As an investment that could very well multiply from one generation to the next regardless of the colonial economy, the acquisition of

slaves made the future more certain for families whose wealth had been established on wheat, hides, and encomienda labor.

Cacao encomenderos were not alone in their desire to bring Africans to Caracas. From early in the century, before the cacao boom, some encomenderos had invested in slaves. Already in the 1620s the encomendero-merchant Alonso Rodríguez Santos had forty-seven slaves who farmed his wheat and herded his cattle. During the same decade, Francisco Castillo, encomendero and local tax collector for the Cartagena-based Inquisition court, directed a mixed-labor enterprise that was a variation on the common theme: the wheat grown by 50 African slaves in the Caracas Valley was shipped to Cartagena in cotton bags woven by the Indians of his Valencia encomienda.^[30] In the 1630s and 1640s, cacao sales gave a significant boost to the quantity of slaves that Caraqueños could purchase, and although the cacao encomenderos' Indians afforded them the means to obtain the largest slave holdings, other ways were found to form a slave gang. A considerable variety of cases of non-encomenderos who acquired slaves could be cited, but two examples will suffice. Baltasar de Escovedo came from Granada to Caracas expecting to inherit his uncle's estate, but when the elder Escovedo decided that there was much to be gained by the marriage of his daughter to the powerful Juan Rodríguez Santos, what Baltasar had hoped would be his became his cousin's dowry instead. He turned to making bricks and tiles for the houses of those more directly favored by cacao, and in time he was able to accumulate, in addition to the brick works, a respectable town house, a dozen slaves, and considerable quantity of Mexican silver in coin. The Portuguese Agustín Pereira came to Caracas with a few slaves that he sold to buy two houses in the center of town. With this property as collateral, Pereira worked as a middleman, buying cacao with borrowed money guaranteed by Caracas real estate and selling it for a profit at La Guaira.^[31]

The slave trade and these secondary economic activities depended increasingly on cacao sales that most often took place at the hacienda gate or wharf. Until about 1650 profits from these sales came easily, for the greater part of the beans was collected from the virgin (indigenous) trees known as árboles de la tierra . The difficult tasks of clearing the land, providing irrigation, and planting banana plants for shade for the young trees was not yet necessary,

and there was no need to wait the five years or more after planting that it took for cacao trees to reach fruit-bearing maturity. A rather precise idea of the profitability of these groves is provided by accounts kept for the estate of Domingo de Liendo, brother of encomendero Pedro de Liendo.

More than 90 percent of Liendo's cacao in the coastal valley of Cepi was de la tierra . Since about 1640, his African slaves had planted some cacao trees in the valley, but in 1653 only 1165 trees of a total of more than 12,000 were not indigenous to the area. More than half of all the trees were then stricken with a blight known as alhorra , but the Cepi groves had an average annual yield of more than 200 fanegas (a fanega of cacao weighed about 110 pounds) for the seven years before 1653. Although harvests varied somewhat from one year to the next, and prices were falling steadily, Liendo's gross income averaged 3540 pesos per year during the period 1645–1652 (fig. 6).^[32]

That fishhooks were imported to Cepi and small amounts of maize were exported from the valley suggests that food costs were low or nil and that the hacienda was largely self-sufficient. Since cacao beans were loaded directly from the groves onto ships that entered Cepi Bay, there were no freight or transportation costs. The value of the Cepi land in 1650 is unknown, but the half of the valley not owned by Liendo was sold for 1000 pesos in 1630 by someone who had no slaves to someone who did. The thirty-three slaves who formed the Cepi work force were worth a total of 8550 pesos in 1658.^[33]

Thus the cacao groves and slaves at Cepi represented an investment of probably no more than 10,000 pesos, and, therefore, it seems reasonable that in an average year Liendo's gross income equaled about 35 percent of the value of his invested capital, with each adult slave annually earning, on the average, about 40 percent of his or her market value. Considering in addition that many groves were first harvested by "cheap" encomienda Indian labor and not by slaves, and that sales were made at high prices from the late 1620s until about 1650, the dynamic profitability of Caracas's first cacao bonanza becomes clear.^[34]

At midcentury there coincided at Caracas several events that brought this period of remarkable prosperity to an abrupt end. The problems of supply at this critical juncture are much more evident

Fig. 6
Plantation Cepi: Cacao Prices, Harvests, and Income, 1646–1652

Fig. 7
Cacao Prices in Caracas, 1634–1655.

than those that caused the price paid for cacao in Caracas to drop to one-fifth of its customary level (fig. 7). A principal factor in the crisis was the alhorra blight. Beginning in the mid-1630s on the haciendas upwind of La Guaira, within a decade the alhorra had destroyed more than half of all the cacao trees on the coast, leaving many groves without a single fruit-bearing plant. Newly planted trees would begin to reach maturity by 1660, but the coastal groves would not recover their original productivity until the eighteenth century.^[35] A second disaster took the form of a surprisingly destructive earthquake, which reduced modest Caracas to rubble in 1641. At one blow much of the urban property that had been used to finance purchases of slaves and cacao was eliminated. The ecclesiastical establishment, its temples and convents in ruins and the mortgages it held rendered worthless by the destruction, suffered the most. Exacerbated by the truculence of Bishop Mauro de Tovar, who refused the vecinos' request to move the town (his approval would have nullified all claims held by the Church against the owners of the destroyed property), these reverses initiated a rancorous epoch marked by spectacular quarrels between the bishop and many of Caracas's first citizens.^[36]

The third and most important reason for the end of the first Caracas cacao boom is also the least understood. As yet there is no clear explanation why cacao prices, at twenty and thirty pesos the fanega until 1647, collapsed to five pesos by 1654. The answer will come from a fuller understanding of the Mexican market than is

possible from the vantage point of Caracas. MacLeod documents falling prices for cacao in Santiago de Guatemala after 1651 and attributes the decline to successful competition in the New Spain market from Guayaquil and Venezuela: "In all the price history of cacao in Middle America, the main factor seems to have been the question of supply."^[37] If this was indeed the case, the high prices paid for cacao in New Spain and elsewhere (including Caracas) until the late 1640s may have been due in part to the declining supply of beans because of the alhorra blight. The price collapse in Caracas at that time could then be linked to the rapidly increasing production of cacao in Guayaquil during the 1640s.^[38] Thus it seems probable that the diseased Caracas industry, rather than contributing to the seventeenth-century crisis of the Central American cacao economy, was like it overwhelmed, if only temporarily, by competition from Guayaquil.

Undoubtedly much impressed by the combined disasters of earthquake and crop blight, Caraqueños appealed to divine providence for assistance. A festival with the Virgin Mary as patroness was held annually from 1638 to 1670 to plead for relief from the alhorra.^[39] On the other hand, while the documents abound with laments about these acts of nature, a thorough search uncovered no comment whatsoever about the low prices paid for cacao. The little evidence pertaining to Caracas's commercial woes suggests that cacao growers did not understand their economic problems in terms of competition from other suppliers. A related problem had to do with a decrease in hard currency; with silver production in decline, and with trade exclusively dependent on the Mexican peso as a result of the crown's decision to devalue debased Peruvian coins, would-be buyers in New Spain may have preferred to hoard their sound coins or to keep them in local circulation rather than let them go out to distant markets such as Venezuela from whence they might not return. From 1650 to the 1670s a general crisis in the supply of currency choked trade in the Spanish Caribbean.^[40]

To aggravate matters further, from 1620 to 1650 the Mexican Inquisition tried more than two hundred Portuguese for practicing Judaism, and many of the accused were cacao traders who had been the primary buyers of Caracas cacao.^[41] By eliminating these middlemen and thereby restricting their opportunity to barter cacao for Africans, most Caracas growers were forced to depend on

cash sales to Mexican merchants who were reluctant to make such purchases. There is evidence of the direct effect in Caracas of the currency shortage: Santiago de Liendo paid the priest at Cepi in 1649 in devalued copper coins, the unwanted vellón , because "there was nothing else." And there is evidence that at the same time few traders were interested in buying Caracas cacao beans: in 1654, even as the price dropped to five pesos the fanega, cacao had to be brought at Liendo's cost from Cepi to La Guaira, an unprecedented necessity, "to sell it and give it a market because there was none at Cepi and the cacao was about to be lost, rotting in the storehouse."^[42] There is no indication, however, that Caracas planters recognized any relationship between the currency shortage and declining cacao sales.

At midcentury few Caracas vecinos owned cargo-carrying ships capable of making trans-Caribbean or Atlantic voyages, and this was one further reason why the cacao trade was severely restricted without Mexican cash and credit. The following case illustrates well the vital importance of both the African slave trade and the Mexican exchange for the Caracas economy. May, June, and July were the principal months for harvesting cacao on coastal haciendas, and in August of 1653 the frigate Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción , owned by capitán Juan Rodríguez Quintanilla, stood loaded with cacao at La Guaira, its crew hired and ready to sail for Veracruz. However, it was then possible to depart only because Juan de Almeyda, a Canary Islander slave trader and cacao merchant who was on the occasion present in Caracas, had agreed in July to advance wages to the crew and to finance a new foremast for the ship. To make the needed repairs, Rodríguez Quintanilla, who was a vecino of San Antonio de Gibraltar on Lake Maracaibo, had been obliged to borrow in Caracas, and, "because he had no money in this town," he turned to Almeyda for credit. The loan, for 1820 pesos, did not introduce this same quantity of much-needed specie into Caracas circulation. In June and July, Almeyda sold five slaves for a total of 1870 pesos cash to Caracas vecinos, and he in turn loaned Rodríguez Quintanilla from this sum what was needed to pay the La Guaira shipwrights and sailors. Again, although this time in a rather round-about fashion, it was the slave trade that made it possible for Caracas cacao to reach the Mexican market. As it was already customary for loans made in Caracas to

be canceled in New Spain, Almeyda was to be paid in "plata mexicana " within twenty-four hours of the arrival of Rodríguez Quintanilla's ship at Veracruz.^[43]

Hispanic traders such as Almeyda were infrequently present in Caracas after 1650, and it is reasonable to suppose that the opportunistic Dutch, then the Atlantic's leading merchants, provided planters with an alternative, if illicit, outlet for their cacao during these years of sluggish legal commerce. Caraqueños were evidently willing to overlook matters of religion and empire when it came to the Dutchmen. Indeed, fewer than half of all the men designated for the Caracas militia, encomenderos and planters among them, responded in 1639 when an expedition was formed to dislodge the Hollanders from the nearby island of Curaçao.^[44] What took place along the miles of open coast is as difficult to account for now as it was to control then, but the Dutch were no doubt quite willing to replace the Portuguese in the lucrative slaves-for-cacao exchange. By 1671 the role of Curaçao in the supply of slaves was so commonplace that the Caracas cabildo issued a matter-of-fact warning that slaves afflicted with the "Dutch evil" (mal 'olanda ) were entering from the island.^[45] Yet it may be that Curaçao did not immediately become "little more than a gigantic slave pen" after the Dutch occupation of the island, as one historian recently suggested.^[46]

Between 1659 and 1671, the slave population on the coastal hacienda at Chuao underwent changes in demographic composition that suggest that few, if any, African slaves had been introduced to that valley. The overall population declined from 110 to 100 individuals, and of those who can be identified by place of birth with certainty (76 percent in 1659; 79 percent in 1671), the number of African-born dropped from 36 to 26. A sharp decrease in the number of single men, from 30 to 11, and a significant rise in married or widowed men and women, from 20 to 27 men and from 26 to 34 women, are further indicators of adjustment to a reduced slave supply. More conjugal pairs and a greater sexual balance in 1671 occurred as single men found creole wives. At least in the Chuao case, the immediate presence of Dutch traders was unimportant and, from the point of view of the slave community, the stagnant African trade had beneficial social effects (see table 7) The evidence from Chuao suggests that even during these depressed decades a simple cacao-for-slaves exchange with the Dutch, without the

added incentive of an eventual payoff in silver pesos that animated the trade with New Spain, could not replace the traditional (and legal) market for Caracas cacao in Mexico.

For the Hispanic population of the region, this combination of economic and natural events changed the focus and pace of social life. Urban functions and services came to a standstill as Caracas residents withdrew to the countryside; notaries closed their offices for lack of work, and for years the cabildo was without its full

complement of regidores .^[47] Finally, in the 1670s, with a revival of the cacao trade, concern for property and status reappeared and there was a renewed interest in urban life. Plans to construct a new seminary were presented and discussed in the cabildo. Of more dubious benefit, but a clear indication of the reemerging concern for social order, the jail, destroyed in the 1641 earthquake, was rebuilt in 1674. Frightened by marauding French corsairs and by raids on Maracaibo by the English buccaneer William Henry Morgan, townsmen expressed faith that Caracas was once again worth protecting and weighed the possibilities of persuading the crown to finance a new fort to be built on the road to La Guaira.^[48]

By the 1680s the Caracas economy was vigorous again. In 1684, the crown ordered a survey of rural property to determine whether noncollection of the alcabala, which had been suspended by royal favor since 1631, was still justified. Acknowledged by contemporaries as the first such census of the town's rural domain, the 1684 padrón is a crucial document for the history of seventeenth-century Caracas.^[49] In 1684 Caraqueños owned 434,850 cacao trees distributed on 167 haciendas, 18 wheat farms, 26 sugar trapiches, and 28 cattle hatos . Comparison of the 1684 padrón with the list of encomenderos dated circa 1635 shows that wealth accumulated during the first years of booming cacao commerce made it possible for the families of many of the first encomendero—slaveholders to survive the decades of economic slump at midcentury. At least half of the 146 individuals who owned cacao haciendas in 1684 were descendants of encomenderos named in 1635, and of the 38 encomenderos who held grants in 1635 of 1000 pesos or more renta, the heirs of at least 28 were growing cacao in 1684.^[50]

The moderate size of many of the cacao groves belonging to children and grandchildren of the first planters, and the location of these haciendas in sites different from those of their ancestors' encomiendas, suggests that the majority of the 1684 groves had been planted since the 1640s. Started during the period of alhorra blight and low prices, this was expansion that already-purchased slaves could execute.^[51] More than 10 percent of the cacao trees counted in 1684 were new plants located at some distance from the coast along the banks of the Tuy River south and east of Caracas. This region was rapidly becoming the most important cacao farming zone in the Caracas province.

Once planted, a cacao arboleda required only a maintenance crew of waterers and weeders during most of the year, and this meant that the established planters could keep a gang of their younger and sturdier slaves at work bringing new land under cultivation. This is perhaps the most salient characteristic of the Caracas economy and society from the 1640s to the 1740s: the ready availability of irrigable cacao land and the mobility of the slave gang encouraged constant expansion. In 1720, before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company in Venezuela, there were more than 2 million cacao trees in the Caracas province, and by 1744 the number of trees had risen to over 5 million. In each case more than half the trees were located in the Tuy River region.

The multitude of haciendas of modest size that resulted, brought together and held in place by a complex system of carefully arranged marriages, kept elite status and profits in the hands of generations of select Caracas families. Even the more humble growers, indigent Canary Islanders for the most part, who came to Caracas in a steady stream after 1680,^[52] could make a bid for gentry status with cacao and the few slaves they were able to buy. Before 1700 these hopeful immigrants had begun to harvest quantities of cacao in the valleys at the remote edge of the province. They also settled in Caracas itself, in the Candelaria parish on the settlement's eastern fringe, which in time became a canario barrio. This was a labor force of a somewhat different order, although as artisans, grocers, vegetable farmers, overseers, and, perhaps more than any other occupation, muleteers who brought the beans from increasingly distant arboledas, they were as closely dependent on the production and sale of cacao as the hacienda owners who bought their wares and hired their services.^[53]

Before 1700 the population structure of the Caracas region had become a racial-class continuum, with white masters and black slaves at opposite poles and canarios, other poor Spaniards, and the mixed-blood pardos and mulattoes scattered in between. In this world that their forced labor had helped to create, Indians seem to have had no clearly defined place. At best, it was an uncertain and unstable order. With a growing slave population and at a time when several decades of economic hardship had ended and a new, poor white class had begun to fill the town and countryside, Caracas seems to have become quite race conscious. The marriage of a

Valencia favorite son to the daughter of an Aragua Valley Indian cacique provoked near hysteria in the Hispanic community.^[54] In an effort to freeze melting social–racial distinctions, Caracas bishop González de Acuña declared that he would no longer ordain anyone who had as much as one-fourth Indian or African ancestry—an explicit challenge to the Church's evangelical mission that was subsequently disallowed by Pope Innocent XI.^[55]

In this tense atmosphere, the crown's decision in 1691 to insist on the termination of the servicio personal encomienda and thereby put an end to more than 150 years of de facto defiance on the part of the Caracas encomenderos met surprisingly little resistance. Definitely not the outcome of easy mestizaje and racial toleration, the encomienda's demise was finally allowed because the immobile, legally circumscribed institution had little place in the dynamic cacao economy now based on African slavery. It was decided that once freed from encomienda service Indians would be required to pay a tax for the religious instruction that they were to continue to receive. Bishop Baños y Sotomayor's Ynforme of 1690, on which the tax was to be based, allows a glimpse at the remnant of Indian society that was then at the margin of Caracas's Hispano-African community.^[56]

The bishop's agents found 7464 Indians divided among sixty-four encomiendas in the jurisdictions of Caracas, Valencia, and San Sebastián.^[57] Of these, the majority, 5278 Indians and thirty-seven encomiendas, were in the possession of Caracas vecinos. Comparison with the agricultural property owned by the encomenderos who held these thirty-seven grants—as the 1684 padrón permits—makes it possible to account for the specific activities that employed Indian labor at the end of the century. More than three-fifths, 3262 Indians, were in nine encomiendas located near sugar mills owned by their encomenderos; 1085 Indians in eleven encomiendas were at work farming wheat; and only 931 were spread thinly among seventeen encomenderos whose grants were located near their coastal cacao groves. The same data is perhaps more revealing when viewed so as to see the portion of all agricultural estates that benefited from encomienda labor; while a third of sugar trapiches and fully two-thirds of the wheat farms were owned by encomenderos, only about one cacao planter in ten was also the holder of an Indian labor grant in 1690.

The bishop's Ynforme also indicates that for some time many encomenderos had allowed their grants to revert to the crown rather than pay fees for the confirmation of their titles. Twenty-four of the province's sixty-four encomiendas were already royal possessions in 1690. Legal rights had been allowed to lapse in both the case of the small coastal encomiendas, now of only minimal value, and in the case of the large, still important grants in the Valencia–Aragua sugar region. Only encomenderos with Indians in the wheat fields near Caracas, in Petare, Baruta, and La Vega, had uniformly paid their taxes and kept their titles in order. Why this was so can be inferred from the demographic composition of the encomiendas as recorded in the Ynforme .

By 1690, cacao cultivation and the forced immigration of black slaves had reduced the coastal Indian communities to fragments of their preconquest form. African men without African women were fortunate if, as occurred in Chuao, they were provided with creole black women; otherwise they found substitutes among the Indian women from the coastal villages. Many of the husbands of the women assigned to the coastal encomiendas at Maiquetía, Caraballeda, and Naiguatá were listed as anonymous negros in the Ynforme, and most of the coastal encomienda-born children were recognized as Afro-Indian zambos .^[58] Since coastal encomienda women were often married to slaves, the wives of the Indian men from these encomiendas often lived elsewhere. Many coastal Indian men were married to women who belonged to populous inland encomiendas near the sugar trapiches at Turmero and Guarenas. These groups were still stable in 1690, sexually balanced, and headed by aged patriarchs, quite unlike the truncated, often caciqueless encomiendas on the coast.^[59]

In the Aragua Valley, where the original population had been dense and indigenous culture was able to survive the seventeenth century more nearly intact than it had in the coast or in Caracas, it may have simply made good tactical sense to allow the encomiendas to return to the crown. In this area, eliminating the encomienda altogether assured access to Indian labor to those whose encomienda privileges had expired. In this way there would be no chance of one's competitors gaining exclusive control of a needed work force. As owners of two of the four trapiches located in the Aragua pueblo of Turmero, the powerful and wealthy Tovar family

had no desire to part with the skilled Indian workers who had made sugar for them for decades. The end of the encomienda also put an end to this possibility, and the Tovar dominion in Aragua continued. In 1710, Turmero Indians complained that Tovar cane-fields were encroaching on their village, and in 1730 these same Indians were still identified as "the people of Don Antonio Tovar," their last encomendero—who had been dead for more than forty years.^[60]

Finally, although now nearly insignificant as a source of income alongside slavery and cacao, the prestige value of the wheat farm encomienda had not diminished during the course of the seventeenth century. Mario Góngora has shown how the encomienda in agrarian Chile was absorbed by a "class of owners" who derived their power from various sources and who were therefore not dependent on Indian tribute for wealth and prestige.^[61] This was all the more true in Caracas, where the monetary value of an encomienda frequently depended on the market skills of the encomendero, and where, especially after 1650, ownership of sizable, mobile gangs of slaves was the decisive factor in the maintenance of aristocratic status. In 1684, all eleven of the encomenderos whose Indians grew wheat near Caracas were also owners of either sugar or cacao properties. Born several generations after the time when wheat exports and Indian labor had determined membership in the local elite, these encomenderos could liken themselves to those earlier holders of Indian grants and thereby call attention to the tenure of their families' importance in Caracas. For a boom-and-bust society of slavers and smugglers, this was a useful symbol of stability and the nobility of their origins, and perhaps for this reason the titles of these encomiendas were nearly all still in order in 1690.

During the half century after 1630, Caracas completed its transformation from a minor supplier of a European food crop to Spanish sailors to a major supplier of a tropical quasi-drug to Indian and European consumers alike. In the process, African slavery rendered the encomienda a nonessential anachronism. The Mexican demand for cacao initiated this transformation, and it would appear that, once committed to cacao and slavery, Caracas continued to be very responsive to shifts in the economy of New Spain.

The Mexican market for cacao first surged in the late 1620s and lasted for about two decades thereafter. New Spain merchants of-

fered considerably less for Caracas cacao from the late 1640s until the late 1660s, a period that corresponds closely to the general depression of Zacatecas silver mining. Silver production then reached new highs from 1675 to 1690 as the supply of mercury was made certain once again,^[62] and it was at this time that cacao exports resumed and Caracas's prosperity returned. To what degree these trends are coincidental must await a study of the New Spain cacao market and its merchants, but such a study might well confirm that the rise of Caracas in the late seventeenth century was closely tied to the simultaneous development of a diversified capitalist economy in Mexico. Increasingly self-sufficient generally, New Spain found it profitable to depend on external suppliers for cacao, and when commercial capital was unavailable, as was the case from about 1650 until about 1670, Mexicans invested their money in local enterprise and probably did without imported cacao beans. For their part, Caracas growers might have taken Dutch slaves and merchandise in exchange for their harvests during these long years, but only after 1670, when "the discriminating customer"^[63] from across the Caribbean was again willing to buy, did Caracas, permanently established as New Spain's cacao colony, enjoy a resurgence of wealth and well-being.

3—
Wheat Farm and Cacao Hacienda: Agricultural Business and Elite Families

Black slavery was the overwhelmingly predominant labor form in the Caracas province from the early seventeenth century until at least the middle of the eighteenth century. The end of the English asiento in 1739 marked the beginning of an extended hiatus in the slave trade, with the result that owners of agricultural estates were increasingly obliged to turn to other sources of labor. Very little is known about this gradual transition, and there have been to date no studies of the reproductive rates of Venezuelan slaves which would give us an idea of how much the institution depended on the trans-Atlantic trade. For agricultural work slavery may well have been preferred over other labor options until emancipation in 1854; and we can be certain that there was no decline in the desirability of slaves for urban domestic service, even while they were in short supply in the countryside. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the resident French merchant Francois Depons, always a sensitive observer of Caracas society, noted that domestic slavery was a most important measure of status in Caracas: "the richness of a house is in proportion to the number of slaves in it." And in her statistical analysis of household censuses Waldron observes that the number of residental slaves proportionate to the rest of the population remained constant through the second half of the eighteenth century. More than one-third (35 percent) of Caracas households had slaves in 1759, with an average of 5.8 slaves per slaveholding household. As late as 1792 the proportion of slaveholding households had declined only slightly (29 percent), as had the mean number of slaves per household (5.5).^[1]

The two case studies presented in this chapter allow us to see many of the particular characteristics of the Caracas slave labor

system in formation. Given the rich detail of the two cases, it might be well to indicate beforehand in what ways the records of these estates help inform the general problem of the nature and significance of hacienda agriculture in colonial Caracas. In economic terms, both the wheat estancia and the cacao hacienda were tied directly to distant markets reached by seaborne commerce. They both generated a discernible profit, primarily from the intensive forced labor of slaves. The cacao hacienda was in fact several groves, arboledas , of trees, and the planting of new groves in different locations often distant from one another was seen, already in the 1650s, as an essential component of the successful cacao enterprise. The transition from wheat to cacao brought about significant economic and social changes. While wheat agriculture employed relatively expensive Spanish labor in several categories, the cacao hacienda needed only a single overseer, whose wages were typically no more than 100 pesos for a year's service. The rise of cacao simplified the colony's occupational hierarchy to include hacienda owners at the top and slaves at the bottom, with very few individuals besides overseers and muleteers in between. Cacao also greatly stretched the physical space of Caracas. The wheat farms all were located in the immediate vicinity of the town. Most cacao haciendas, on the other hand, were distant from Caracas, often requiring several days of travel to reach them. From their Caracas residences, absentee owners of cacao estates were able to convert agricultural profits into urban social status, spending for prestige items even as profits declined. In social terms, the impression of seigneurial status was created and maintained in the Caracas townhouse, and not in the distant and infrequently visited hacienda countryhouse. It would be in error to make too much of the social meaning of domestic slavery solely on the basis of the observed ratio of slaves to whites in Caracas homes (17.5 slaves on the average for less than 7 whites in each of eighty-five elite households in 1759), but by staffing their dwellings with a surfeit of domestic slaves, elites were no doubt able to live out at least some of the images of a seigneurial mentality without actually residing on the hacienda. This link was reinforced by bringing the kin of hacienda slaves to Caracas for domestic labor, and by the practice of bringing ill slaves to the city for treatment.

Although greatly appreciated for their prestige and symbolic

value, the urban residences of many Caracas elites also functioned as administrative centers for the widespread activities of their owners. Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, successful cacao hacendados came to possess several groves located on separate sites (in the earliest pattern, the original hacienda of indigenous trees was located on the coast and new groves were planted to the south along the banks of the Tuy River). The expansion of cacao haciendas into the Tuy frontier had the effect of placing Caracas between the newer production zones and the port at La Guaira, and by the end of the seventeenth century even elite residences doubled as warehouses for cacao beans awaiting shipment. Thus, although each was a distinctive world different and quite distant in space from the other—the productive unit located on a hot and usually remote coast or river site, its population overwhelmingly African or creole black, and the unit of authority and consumption in cool and in many ways more Hispanic Caracas—the cacao hacienda and the townhouse were bound together as part of a single system. For the family that owned and operated it this system was economically capitalist yet socially seigneurial,^[2] with the urban residence the place where the functions of profit, prestige, and patriarchalism were blended into a single mode of behavior, an elite lifestyle.

The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the character of that lifestyle during its period of formation, before 1650. The method used is explained fully in due course, but at this point a comment is in order about the documentary material used in the analysis. In both the cases that follow, the sudden death of two sets of parents left the properties of minor children in the temporary custody of guardians; by custom they were charged with maintaining the agricultural estates (a wheat estancia and a cacao hacienda) and with providing for the orphaned wards. The ledgers kept by these custodians provide the raw material for this chapter. A far cry from neat and orderly bookkeeping practice, the accounts are jumbled chaotically in that the individuals who kept them tended to juxtapose without discrimination entries for harvests, sales, and hacienda expenditures with payments made for dancing lessons and new dresses. These data can be sorted into categories that seem logical and functional to the historian who would analyze them to determine, for example, the annual rate of return on the capital value of

the estates, and this has been done in the pages that follow. Yet to do so is to risk distortion of the historical reality as it was understood by those who lived it, for what the modern eye sees as the chaos of disorganized accounting procedures may in fact be a manifestation of the thorough way in which Caraqueño minds combined the capitalist and the seigneurial elements of their lives. Recognizing this, although the measure of these properties as agricultural businesses is the primary objective here, an effort has been made to not lose sight of the likelihood that to the mentalité of the age the social significance of a wheat estancia or cacao hacienda was not always measured in terms of profits and losses.

The Rodríguez Santos wheat estancia and mill, as detailed in ledgers kept for a few years in the 1630s, represents a form of farming that by then no longer dominated the Caracas economy as it had since the 1580s. In contrast the Liendo cacao hacienda, as it operated for a somewhat longer period of time in the 1640s and 1650s, was one of the first large-scale Caracas cacao estates. The documents used are unusual and of a kind. They are ledgers of crop sales and expenditures for both the operation of the agricultural enterprise and the material needs and wants of the minor children of the estates' former owners. In each case these owners had recently died, and the person responsible for the property and for the care of the young heirs was obliged to keep close account of all goods and all expenditures made on behalf of these surviving children.^[3]

Cash flow, both income and outgo, was recorded in the process, although in an almost incidental manner. It must be sorted out from lists of undifferentiated credits and debits that were made, not to facilitate ongoing business activity (the guardian was not obliged to show a profit), but only to allow for future reckoning of the use and whereabouts of the property of the minor children's inheritance. Expenditures made for the personal needs of the wards, such as clothing, were entered indiscriminately in these ledgers together with expenditures made as part of the operation and maintenance of the agricultural businesses, with amounts paid for tools, salaries, slave purchases, and so forth. Mixed with these items is an assortment of what might be best called social costs, such as expenditures for household needs, education, and religious services of all sorts. Analysis of the data recorded by such

unselective bookkeeping techniques requires, as a minimum, some thoughtful categorization but, once they have been sorted systematically, these guardians' accounts permit a close look at the nature of estate management and the material culture of the families for whom the records were kept. If inventories of an estate with appraised property values are available, as they are in these cases, it is also possible to calculate the annual return on the capital value of the property held in custodianship.

The tutela ended when the wards came of age, married, or entered the convent, so the guardians' accounts encompass periods of only several years at best. Still, these documents do record a period of time equal to the better part of the childhood or adolescence of the individuals on whose behalf they were made, and they do reveal many things about the provisions made for children of the town's elite as they grew older, year by year. In addition, an interval of six or seven years is adequate for the purpose of observing how the estates operated.^[4] The guardians were held accountable to the cabildo for every item of expense and income, and the detail of the entries suggests that every effort was made to give at least the appearance of faithfully reporting the fiscal history of the two estates examined here. For example, Bartolomé de Rivillapuerta, whose custodianship is examined below, declared that during his tutela he had replaced the worn and ragged bedsheets of his wife's younger brothers and sisters, but he had prudently used the old ones as burial shrouds for the slaves of the family's Chacao estancia.

Yet the guardianship was also a special situation. Since the function of the tutela was fundamentally to preserve the property until its rightful heirs could legally receive it, the guardian was circumscribed by law from taking full entrepreneurial advantage of the estate placed in his care. With the appropriate license from the cabildo, property held in tutela could be sold or mortgaged, and both grain and flour from the Rodríguez Santos estancia and cacao from the Liendo hacienda were sold for profit in the marketplace. However, all the wheat and cacao from these estates was sold in Caracas or La Guaira; none of it was merchandised in other ports, as had certainly been the customary practice of both families. Without direct evidence we can only conjecture that the risks of seaborne trade and the convoluted credit networks that characterized high-seas marketing made it difficult to maintain the strict account-

ability that the tutela required, and therefore such commerce was not allowed. We cannot know to what extent selling exclusively in the local market altered either production or the profits made from these estates.

It is also difficult to determine whether these cases were typical of agricultural business in the region as whole. In the first place there is a problem of scale. These enterprises were without doubt large by local standards but, without a census or similar document, just how large in comparison with other estates is impossible to know. In addition, the effect on the management of these properties of such highly variable factors as the exercise of entrepreneurial skill, the availability of investment capital, or the penchant to spend estate income on luxury goods cannot be calculated. Given these limitations, we must be content with the observation that the two families whose seventeenth-century estates are observed here were then in the process of establishing highly respected, powerful lineages that would last until the very end of the colonial period. These case studies are, then, best qualified as examples of successful estate operation, both in the short run as observed in the ledgers and in the long term in the sense that lasting family prestige would stem from these early agricultural ventures.

The Rodríguez Santos Wheat Estancia and Mill

Alonso Rodríguez Santos was one of Caracas's two or three most active merchants during the first decades of the seventeenth century. When he died in 1624 his Caracas estate was appraised at about 50,000 pesos, of which more than 14,000 pesos were in the form of outstanding debts owed him by the town's vecinos.^[5] His worth in other Caribbean ports, which at his death could not be fixed exactly, was believed by his heirs to be considerable. As alcalde ordinario , encomendero, and owner of both cattle hatos and a wheat estancia, this merchant from Extremadura, like many other successful traders who immigrated to the Indies, converted his commercial profits into landed wealth with its accompanying social power and prestige.

Don Alonso had come to Caracas a widower, accompanied by his two adult sons, Juan Rodríguez Santos and Benito Arias

Montano. The eldest son, Juan Rodríguez Santos, like his father from Frenegal de la Sierra, Extremadura, evidently had little interest in the merchant profession. The Real Hacienda records show an occasional entry for shipment of hides to Spain in the name of Juan Rodríguez Santos, and he maintained small accounts with merchants in Seville, but he paid for the merchandise sent to him from Europe with the income from the rent of two houses in Spain, and not with agricultural products exported from Caracas.^[6] He preferred to sell the wheat grain and flour produced on his Caracas estancia in the Caracas market, to other vecinos or to those merchants who would then resell the flour in other ports, especially Cartagena. When Juan died a few years after his father in 1628, he left a large estancia of ninety-two fanegadas de sembradura , about 140 acres, east of the town on the banks of the Chacao stream.^[7] When the inventory and appraisal of this estate was made in 1631 the value of the estancia, including both farm and water-driven mill (but not its slaves, who were counted and evaluated separately), was placed at 6500 pesos.

Juan Rodríguez Santos's wife, Francisca de Escovedo, died in 1630, and the care of their orphaned children and the children's inheritance was briefly the responsibility of Benito Arias Montano, Juan's brother and Alonso Rodríguez Santos's second son from his Extremadura marriage. Arias remained in Caracas long enough to approve the marriage of his eldest niece, who was called María Arias Montano, to Bartolomé de Rivillapuerta. Arias then transferred the tutela to Rivillapuerta, who took charge of his wife's three brothers and two sisters in October 1631. Three of the five were his responsibility until November 1636, when his tutela ended: Juan de los Santos, Alonso Rodríguez Santos, and Paula Rodríguez Santos. These children were six, nine, and ten years old respectively in 1631. A third daughter orphaned by the deaths of Juan Rodríguez Santos and Francisca de Escovedo—called Germana de Rojas after her maternal grandmother—married Domingo de Liendo in April of 1633 and left Rivillapuerta's guardianship at that time. Finally, Diego Vásquez de Escovedo, Juan and Francisca's eldest son, who was named after his maternal grandfather, became eighteen in February of 1636 and left his brother-in-law's care in May of that year.^[8]

Rivillapuerta was also responsible for a second, quite different

group of individuals. The Rodríguez Santos–Escovedo children stood to inherit ninety-four slaves, including nineteen children nine years old and younger. Sixty-five of these slaves lived and worked at the Chacao wheat farm, fourteen provided domestic service in Caracas, and fifteen others labored on the family cattle hato east of the town. Of the ninety-four, thirty were adult women, and of these, fifteen lived at Chacao, each with a husband and most with children. Twelve single women, only one of whom had children, labored as domestics in the Rodríguez Santos townhouse. The remaining three women, one with a husband and all three with young children, were on the cattle hato. Of the forty-five adult men and boys, thirty-seven resided on the wheat estancia, and of these fourteen were married to female slaves belonging to the family (the fifteenth married woman, Phelipa Angola, was married to Antonico, "mulato libre ") and the rest were single. None of the adult male slaves worked in domestic service in Caracas, and the remaining eight men, one who was married and seven who were not, herded cattle on the family hato (see table 8).

The appraised value of these slaves, set in 1631 by the cabildo's alcaldes ordinarios, makes it possible to estimate the total worth of the Rodríguez Santos wheat enterprise. The sixty-five slaves, both adults and children, on the Chacao estancia were appraised at 13,908 pesos (see appendix A). Added to the 6500 pesos given as the value of the farm land and mill, the total worth of the estancia and slaves was slightly more than 20,000 pesos when Rivillapuerta assumed responsibility for its management.

The Chacao estancia slaves brought two wheat crops to harvest every year. The "winter" crop was sown at the beginning of the rainy season in May or June and was grown without need for irrigation and in spite of often excessive rainfall. As a result of wet conditions, the winter grain was of limited quantity and perhaps inferior in quality, but it was evidently important, both to supply the town's needs and to provide seed for the planting of the more bountiful "summer" crop. Sown after the rains had stopped and irrigated during the dry months, summer wheat was the cash crop that first gave the Caracas Valley a role in Spain's commercial empire.

Winter wheat counted only for from 10 to 30 percent of the Rodríguez Santos annual harvest. This wheat was always sold in the grain, never as flour, and its buyers were most often Caracas vecinos. It was never designated by Rivillapuerta as delivered to La Guaira, either "puesto La Guaira " or "puesto la mar ," for export.

By contrast, summer wheat was always sold as flour, except, as happened in 1632 and 1633, when a shortage of cotton bags made it necessary to sell a part of the summer harvest in the grain. The shortage of flour sacks is fortunate: since wheat was sold both as grain and as flour in these two years, the difference in price can be taken as an indication of the added value created by milling wheat into flour. Summer wheat in the grain sold at 24 reales the fanega in 1632 and at an average price of 33.5 reales the fanega in 1633; ground into flour, a fanega of wheat sold for 42 reales in 1632 and for 48 reales in 1633 (see table 9). When he had them, Rivillapuerta supplied cotton sacks, at a cost to him of about 6 reales for every fanega of wheat flour he sold; discounting this, it seems that milled wheat was worth between 20 and 30 percent more than the unprocessed grain.^[9] Besides the mill profits, under Rivillapuerta's direction earnings from the Rodríguez Santos estancia were increased by selling wheat and flour at higher prices to certain customers. Family, friends, and royal and ecclesiastical officials were favored with prices that were close to the cost of production, while out-of-town merchants, ship captains, and small retailers were charged more (see appendix B).

Cacao growers did not have the opportunity to increase the value of their harvests by processing their beans, nor did they have any influence over the price paid for them. Therefore, in order to compare the costs and income of wheat farming with the costs and

income of cacao agriculture it is necessary to calculate the basic value of the wheat as it left the field, both before it was milled and before it was differentially marketed. To do this the value assigned in the Rivillapuerta ledger to the wheat consumed in the Rodríguez Santos household ("gasté en case" ) is taken as a base price. To obtain a price for premilled summer wheat for the years 1634–1636, when all summer wheat was ground and only flour was sold, the value added by milling was estimated at 25 percent (based on the 1632–1633 data), and this percentage was discounted from the price of flour for these years.

Before milling and marketing, the estimated gross income of the wheat harvested on the Rodríguez Santos estancia from 1632 to 1636 is 14,118 pesos. This amount represents what would have been the income from all the winter and summer wheat sold in the grain at the favored-buyer or household price, plus 75 percent of the income from summer wheat flour for the five years, again estimating on the basis of the price given for flour consumed in the Rodríguez Santos household. Counting fifty-three working slaves (those nine years old and older) in the Chacao fields, the return to their masters from the labor of each can be estimated at about fifty pesos per year, only a fraction of what the average return from slaves working in the cacao groves produced per year, as we shall see. However, in the Rodríguez Santos case milling and selective pricing added more than 20 percent to the income on wheat taken from the fields: 17,306 pesos is the total gross income from the estancia reported by Rivillapuerta for the period from 1632 to 1636.

The net return was less. According to Rivillapuerta's ledgers, the cash outlay for wages and operating costs for the six years of his administration came to 4907 pesos (see appendix C). Wheat agriculture provided an income for a variety of Spanish laborers and professionals. The Rodríguez Santos labor bill was always paid in cash, with one exception. Bartolomé Escudero had served the family both as a sharecropper (labrador ) and slave overseer for three decades prior to 1637. For his work he was given a fixed share of the harvest, the grain from 5.5 fanegadas de sembradura (about 6 percent of the estancia total of 92 fanegadas). Perhaps because of his advancing age and loyal service (he was sixty-five years old in 1637), perhaps because the booming market for cacao beans was drawing free labor (both labradores and overseers) from the wheat

farms, Escudero had been given a one-half fanegada increase in 1627.^[10] This arrangement was generous. Escudero's share of the annual harvest is given in table 10; calculated at the price charged by Rivillapuerta in each of these years, Escudero's income from 1632 to 1636 would have been about 280 pesos annually. By contrast, cacao hacienda mayordomos were seldom paid more than 100 pesos per year for their work. In addition, Escudero had the irregular assistance of one and sometimes two Spanish laborers during several months of the year. These men were paid in case by Rivillapuerta at an annual rate of about seventy pesos each. (Presumably they would have been drawn to the higher salaries and other opportunities, such as smuggling, available on coastal cacao haciendas.) The combined earnings of Escudero and his salaried assistants represents from 8 to 10 percent of the gross income of the estancia for the five years for which there are harvest data (see table 10). Thus it seems that while the return from slave labor was lower on this wheat estancia than it was on the Liendo cacao estate, at the same time the cost of overseers and other Hispanic labor on the wheat farm was also much higher. As is demonstrated below, the Liendo would pay only about 4 percent of their gross income for mayordomos' wages.

Other Spanish labor paid for by Rivillapuerta included retainers to lawyers to defend the interests of his wards. For example, don Tomás Gregorio de Mora was given 100 pesos on December 12,

1633, to tend to the family's legal business in the coming year. In all, 796 pesos were spent in six years for legal work. Thirty pesos a year went to physician don Juan Baptista Navarro as a retainer to care for "the sick who suffer in my house, me, my wife, and the remainder of the family." Navarro did not tend to the medical needs of the slave community; another 20 pesos every year were paid to Honorato de Aguillón, a medical practitioner of uncertain status, "to cure the gente of the household and the negros of the estancia." The labor of a surgeon, however, whose craft of bloodletting may have been regarded as less intimate than other aspects of medical practice, did not require the same attention to distinctions of race and class. A third retainer, also for 20 pesos, was given to Francisco Martín Pacheco, surgeon, for his services to both slaves and Spaniards alike. Carpenter Francisco de Medina and mason Diego Rodríguez Carrero were paid 30 and 12 pesos respectively for repair work on the mill in 1636 and 1637. Several different clergymen received a total of 70 pesos for burial masses for slaves said from January 1632 to September 1636. From time to time a mulatto muledriver earned a few pesos hauling merchandise to and from La Guaira. There was occasional need for the services of a blacksmith, who forged the iron tools, particularly plows and hoes, needed in the wheat fields. Finally, on rare occasions, certain Indians were paid from the Rodríguez Santos coffers for a particular task at which they specialized: successful slave catchers were rewarded with a bounty of 6 pesos for the return of the family's fugitive human property. Other expenditures for the slaves were minimal: a total of 220 pesos in six years went to merchants for cloth to be used by slaves, who evidently made their own clothing, and for medicine for their welfare. These costs, much the greater part of which were paid for Hispanic service and labor, came to 4907 pesos for the six years of Rivillapuerta's tutela.

There are no harvest data for 1631, and discounting the costs for that year leaves a total of 4739 pesos in operating expenditures for the five years for which we have calculated 14,118 pesos as the base market value (at prices charged family and friends) of the Rodríguez Santos wheat as it left the fields. Thus, the net income from agriculture for the years 1632 through 1636 would have been the difference between these amounts, or 9379 pesos. To this is added an additional 3198 pesos, the profit obtained by milling and marketing, for an overall net from the estancia of 12,577 pesos for the five-

year period. This sum represents a mean annual net income of some 2515 pesos, and if the total appraised value in 1631 of the estancia land, mill, and slaves was 20,408 pesos (land and mill: 6500 pesos; slaves: 13,908 pesos), then we can estimate the average annual return on the capital value of the Rodríguez Santos estancia at about 12 percent.

This was not the total family income. When Rivillapuerta assumed the tutela in 1631 he took charge of 7077 pesos in outstanding loans made to eight Caracas vecinos, and from 1633 to 1636 he lent an additional 3525 pesos of his wards' cash to seven other town residents. At 5-percent interest, these loans brought the Rodríguez Santos heirs an additional annual income of 530 pesos. Added to the estancia income, this interest brought the total annual profit of the Rodríguez Santos estate to more than 3000 pesos. While not, by any means, on a par with the fabled fortunes of the Indies, this sum was sufficient to keep the young heirs of Juan Rodríguez Santos and Francisca de Escovedo from want.

The expenditures made by Rivillapuerta for the needs and comforts of his wife's brothers and sisters averaged about 1000 pesos per year, more than was spent on the operation of the wheat estancia and mill in four of the six years for which information is available. During this period, while estate operating costs totaled 6543 pesos, 6369 pesos were spent on clothing and education for the five heirs of Juan Rodríguez Santos and Francisca de Escovedo (see appendix C). The eldest child, doña Germana, received the largest share of these funds, some 2355 pesos, of which 300 were spent on her wedding trousseau in 1632. Thereafter her share consisted of dowry payments paid annually to her husband Domingo de Liendo. No other child received goods or services worth 300 pesos in any one year, but the eldest son, Diego Vásquez de Escovedo, who was thirteen years old in 1631, was favored with expenditures that were nearly twice that provided for each of the remaining children (165 pesos annually on the average compared to 89 pesos for Paula, 84 for Juan, and 67 for Alonso). This difference was due to the fact that in 1635 and during the first months of 1636, as the young capitán don Diego was about to turn eighteen and leave Rivillapuerta's tutelage, he was provided with the accouterments considered necessary for a young gentleman and slaveholder: a silk cape, a fine Castilian hat, a gilt-handled sword, and the saddlery befitting his station.

It is significant that while Rivillapuerta spent more on all of the children as they grew older, the wheat harvests of 1635 and 1636 were only slightly more than half as productive as those in 1632 and 1633. That Rivillapuerta continued to lend cash to the town's vecinos and to provide progressively more for his wards while the wheat harvests declined suggests that balancing the family's accounts, at least on an annual or seasonal basis, was not a predominating concern. Probably their numerous slaves offered the Rodríguez Santos a sense of long-term security that lessened their concern for short-term vacillations in grain production. With a substantial investment in slave labor already made, they could be sure that in any year they would be able to reap the maximum harvest the weather would allow. They also had the opportunity to make up for bad harvests by charging more for the wheat they sold. At 1632 prices, the 1635 and 1636 harvests would not have generated enough income to cover operating costs and expenditures for the children but, as the wheat yield declined, Rivillapuerta compensated by raising the sale price of grain and flour. On several occasions the cabildo had admonished the Rodríguez Santos clan for selling wheat bread at a higher price than that set by the municipal council,^[11] but the price of wheat destined for export was not regulated by the council (although it had the authority to forbid exports altogether in times of local need), and the growers had a free hand to charge what they could get for their export crop. Bad harvests and the loss of Hispanic overseers and labradores to the better opportunities offered them on coastal cacao haciendas made wheat a scarce and expensive commodity,^[12] and yet those who continued to grow it, although they may have had to pay a premium for Hispanic labor, were able to compensate by charging higher prices. Rivillapuerta raised the price of milled summer wheat from 42 reales the fanega in 1632 to an average of 66.4 reales in 1635, and then to 73.2 reales in 1636. As a result, the Rodríguez Santos estancia, had its manager cared to make the calculation, would have been able to show a reserve of cash on hand for these years after all costs had been paid (see appendix D).

The Liendo Cacao Hacienda

The heyday of Caracas wheat had been over for some time by 1637. For at least a decade prior to that year a booming market for Cara-

cas cacao in New Spain meant unprecedented profits for the owners of virgin groves of tropical cacao trees that dotted the coastal valleys. In 1637 Bartolomé de Rivillapuerta was pressured by his wife's brothers-in-law, his concuñados , for a division of the Rodríguez Santos estate among the surviving heirs. Domingo de Liendo, who had already received 1949 pesos of Germana de Rojas's (Rodríguez Santos) dowry, was eager for a division so that his wife could have her full share of the inheritance. He also doubted Rivillapuerta's ability to make good on new obligations to his brother, Santiago de Liendo, who married Paula Rodríguez Santos in February 1637. In April 1637, Santiago argued that, given the modest income from the wheat estancia, his wife could not expect the remainder of her dowry, 600 ducats (825 pesos), in the near future. It seems likely that Domingo and Santiago de Liendo were eager to claim the value of their wives' dowries in slaves, whose labor could at that time be put to more profitable use in cacao cultivation, and in fact a number of the same slaves who were listed in the inventory of the Rodríguez Santos estate in 1631 appear on the inventory list of Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas's property taken in 1648. In any event, the cabildo honored the petitions of the Liendo brothers and in 1637 called for an inventory and division of property. At this time Rivillapuerta submitted the accounts he had kept since 1631, and in due course the property was divided among the heirs.^[13]

The Liendo were Vizcayans. Three brothers, Pedro, Domingo, and Santiago, had come to Caracas in the late 1620s with their uncle, Pedro de Origüén. A former admiral in the New Spain flota, Origüén married doña Elena Suárez del Castillo in 1627 and in July 1628 he sent what was probably his first shipment of cacao to Veracruz as a Caracas vecino.^[14] In 1630 doña Elena's niece Catalina Mejía married Origüén's eldest nephew Pedro, who became holder of the most important of the coastal encomiendas, the Chuao grant, in the process.^[15] Domingo and Santiago de Liendo, together with their Rodríguez Santos wives, owned separate cacao haciendas in the neighboring coastal valley of Cepi. Without encomiendas, they depended for labor on black slaves, and in 1637 both Domingo and Santiago were in a hurry to see their wives take their due in inheritance from the abundant Rodríguez Santos pool of African laborers.

Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas died suddenly in 1645. Their five minor children were then cared for in tutela by the childrens' uncles, first Santiago until his death in 1652, and then Pedro until 1657. From September 1645 until December 1657 these men carefully administered Domingo and German's heirs' property. As in the case of the Rodríguez Santos wheat estancia, these accounts provide an exact record of cacao harvests and sales and both hacienda and household expenditures.^[16]

Two inventories, the first made in 1648 by Pedro Matute, then mayordomo at Cepi, and the second a decade later in 1658 by authorities of the cabildo, allow a close look at the slave population that by the middle of the seventeenth century had given the Liendo family wealth and status which they would retain until the very end of the colonial period. In 1658 the orphaned children of Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas stood to inherit sixty-two slaves, of whom only six were children nine years old and younger. More than half (thirty-three) of these slaves lived and worked at the Cepi cacao hacienda (appendix E).

Seventeen of the sixty-two were women and girls ten years and older, and of these eight lived at Cepi, five with their husbands. Three married women and three teenaged girls were in domestic service in Caracas; the three women labored in the Liendo townhouse while the girls served three Liendo-Rodríguez Santos daughters as maids in the Immaculate Conception convent. Three other women, two with husbands and all three with young children, were at work on the new cacao hacienda then being planted at a site called Santa Lucía, south of Caracas on the Guaire River near where it enters the Tuy River. Of the thirty-nine adult men and boys, twenty-five lived on the established coastal cacao hacienda at Cepi, and of these six were married and the rest were single. Six others worked in domestic service in Caracas, and eight had been sent to the new hacienda at Santa Lucía (see table 11).

The thirty-three slaves at Cepi lived in sixteen houses. There were eight households of consanguineous kin, and eight of single, unrelated men. The kin households were of various sorts: four African couples, two with creole children; one creole couple; three old African men with their sons; and one African woman with her two creole children. The eight single, unrelated men at Cepi each lived in a separate dwelling; two of these men were creoles and six

were African. Youthful strength was not a premium in the mature cacao groves at the Cepi hacienda. Many of the Cepi slaves were old and several were infirm. Two men were blind and Mauricio criollo was lame as well. Antón Fajero, at seventy the oldest slave of the Liendo–Rodríguez Santos group, lived at Cepi with his fifteen-year-old son Salvador. The mean age of Cepi slaves was thirty-nine for males and thirty-three for females, but the community was comprised of many older people and youngsters. Fifteen of the eighteen slaves aged forty-five or older owned by the heirs of Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas lived at Cepi, and more than half of the slaves there were forty years old or older.

In the Caracas townhouse there were two slave couples, one widower with five creole children, three of whom were personal servants to the Liendo–Rodríguez Santos children, and two young creole slaves, the children of Cepi parents, one of whom served Francisca de Liendo in the Concepción convent. Mariela malemba, the wife of old Antón Fajero at Cepi, served the household as cook and molendera , grinder of corn. The oldest house slaves, Manuel Sacasaca and his wife Magdalena, had once belonged to Juan Rodríguez Santos and Francisca de Escovedo. On the average, however, the domestic slaves were younger than the other slaves owned by the Liendo–Rodríguez Santos heirs.

During most of the years of Santiago de Liendo's tutela a third group of slaves was at work clearing the land, digging irrigation ditches, and planting cacao at Santa Lucía. Youthful strength predominated here, where the Liendos were to learn the costly vaga-

ries of cacao agriculture. Most of this planting crew was between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and all the adults were African-born: Miguel cacheo , Antonio carabali , Sebastián congo , Nicolás catoto , and others.

The appraisal of the sixty-two slaves in 1658 was set at a total of 17,880 pesos, a mean value of 288 pesos for each man, woman, and child. The Cepi contingent, with a large number of older slaves, was valued at 267 pesos on the average, with the women worth some 30 pesos more than the men. The Caracas domestic slaves were more valuable than the Cepi blacks; their average appraised worth was 318 pesos, and in this case the men were given a cash value of about 50 pesos more than the women. The eleven adults who had been at work opening the ill-fated hacienda at Santa Lucía had a much higher mean assessment of 364 pesos, with men and women valued almost equally. In summary, the Cepi group was older and provided residence for a number of worn-out and infirm slaves, many of them men, who represented little or no market value to their Basque masters. Young, healthy, and very visible symbols of the Liendo's social importance, the Caracas domestic slaves ranked midway in value between the aged harvesters and weeders at Cepi and the younger and stronger field laborers who were engaged in the arduous tasks of clearing and irrigating the land at Santa Lucía (table 12).

Good data exist for cacao sales at the Cepi hacienda for the eighty-six months from October 1645 to November 1652 (table 13). During these years Santiago de Liendo kept a record of monthly harvests and sales from information sent to him by his mayordomo

Pedro Matute. For the years after Matute left Cepi this information is not readily available; no data have been found for the year 1653, but a short series of cacao sales and prices for the years 1654 through 1656 have been assembled from receipts of sale signed by buyers who took delivery of Cepi cacao at the wharf in La Guaira^[17] (see table 14).

The net annual income from Cepi during the Matute years, after the tithe had been discounted, was 3421 pesos. Counting thirty-one Cepi slaves who were neither blind nor lame, the annual income per slave laborer at Cepi was about 110 pesos. This was more than twice the income per slave on the Rodríguez Santos wheat estancia a decade earlier. However, after Matute's departure from service to the Liendo family, which coincided with the widespread currency crisis and the cacao blight (the alhorra, discussed in chapter 2), Cepi profits fell sharply. The blight had afflicted half the cacao trees at Cepi by 1653, but, surprisingly enough, production was not affected (18.25 fanegas/month were sold from 1654–1656, while 17.33 fanegas/month were harvested from 1645–1652). More important, the price of cacao fell steadily to 8 pesos the fanega in 1652 and 10 pesos in 1653, about one-third what it had been ten years earlier, and the gross income

from the hacienda was reduced to an average of 171 pesos per month during the three years 1653–1655, down sharply from the 1645–1652 average of 285 pesos per month. During these last years for which data are available, the annual income per slave laborer was much closer to the Rodríguez Santos estancia average: 62 pesos per slave (2052 pesos per annum for thirty-three Cepi slaves) compared to 52 pesos for wheat laborers.

That cacao cultivation survived these difficulties was due in large part to the fact that, in terms of slave labor, cacao could be brought to market cheaply. Excepting the often strenuous work of planting new arboledas, the elderly and weaker slaves could carry on with all the labor of cacao agriculture and thus maintain the status quo of the haciendas during even extended periods of poor market conditions. This is what happened at the Cepi hacienda. And yet the specter of death, large families, and the obligation to divide the estate equally among all of one's heirs made expansion necessary if the family was to continue prosperous and to maintain its social station into the next generation. For the Liendo brothers, the exploitation of already-standing, virgin cacao groves and the high prices paid for cacao beans during the 1630s and the first years of the 1640s provided income for the purchase of enough slaves to permit them to continue to plant cacao during the several decades after 1650 when prices were very low. Operating costs for the established hacienda at Cepi were minimal, much lower than the costs associated with the Rodríguez Santos wheat farm, but the expenses, and the risks, of planting new groves could be quite high, as the Liendo case illustrates.

Hispanic labor at Cepi was limited to the overseer, and this was typical; in all the colonial documentation there is no evidence of labradores earning a share of the cacao harvest in exchange for directing and controlling the work force. Pedro Matute's annual salary was 128 pesos, only 3 or 4 percent of the gross income from cacao sales (based on the annual gross income from 1645–1652 of 3461 pesos), less than half the ratio of Hispanic labor earnings to gross income on the Rodríguez Santos estancia (table 10). The overseers who followed Matute were paid somewhat less. Clergy costs for religious instruction, marriage, and burial masses for the slaves came to about 50 pesos a year. Lawyers collected 75 to 100 pesos annually. Pruning knives, hoes, fishhooks, and salt were regular

expenditures for the Cepi plantation, but they never amounted to more than 35 to 40 pesos in any one year. Similarly, about 30 pesos a year were spent on medicine, medical care, and midwives for the sick and pregnant slaves who belonged to Domingo and Germana's children. In this host of small payments, which did not differ significantly in amount or kind from those made by Bartolomé de Rivillapuerta on behalf of the Rodríguez Santos heirs, is revealed some of the more obscure threads in the social fabric of colonial Caracas society. In particular, the Liendo's treatment of their slaves when they were ill and of their slave women when they were pregnant, being fundamentally a matter of maintaining and extending the labor force, is especially illustrative of the social meaning of slavery in the Caracas setting.

Skin diseases were quite common among the slaves. Described as gomas, bubas , and llagas ,^[18] these were treated with ointments and infusions made of almond oil and with dietary supplements of honey, sugar, eggs, and chicken. Bloodletting was a common remedy for all sorts of internal ailments, and it was the single most costly slave expenditure made by the Liendo custodians. Town slaves were bled by a surgeon, Alonso de Heredia, who charged a peso each time he provided his services. At Cepi an itinerant barber did the same work for one-fourth the cost. Favored slave women were rewarded for becoming pregnant with a colorful woolen blanket imported from Mexico called a frazada mestiza . Magdalena, washerwoman and cook for the Liendo daughters in the Concepción convent, was given such a blanket in 1654. Pregnant slaves were tended to by Indian midwives who were also curanderas , healers and specialists in herbal medicines. These women were paid two or three pesos if they were able to restore to health a slave who had fallen ill.

Hispanic doctors and medicines were called upon and paid for in special instances. When Catalina returned to Cepi wrapped in a frazada mestiza to ward off her chills, Santiago de Liendo paid the town's doctors, who, after four months of observation, bleedings, and purges, were forced to declare her mysterious disease "yncurable. " The Indian curandera Margarita was given a peso for her efforts to bring Catalina back to health, and the two women went together, otherwise unaccompanied, down to the coastal valley. When the house slave Juliana fell ill during her pregnancy, no cost was spared in the attempt to cure her. She was treated by the

doctor Juan Bautista Osorio, who collected six pesos. Another peso went to the surgeon Heredia. Four pesos were paid for medicine, four reales for honey at the birthing, and two pesos to Bartola, the Indian midwife. All was for naught, however, as Juliana died while giving birth to twins. A creole, described as ladina in the records, she was buried in the cathedral cemetery at a cost of eight pesos, which included priests' charges and candles. The infants, who did not long survive their mother, were buried elsewhere at a total cost of five pesos. The sorry event was duly reported in the Liendo ledger as a total expense of twenty-six pesos.

Disease and death were not the only difficulties presented by the Liendo slaves to their masters. Many did not find that their bondage was much relieved by the woolen blanket and honey treatment, and the Liendo account book is dotted with payments to Indian slave-catchers who tracked down slaves who took advantage of the many opportunities to flee. Habitual runaways could expect special treatment of a different kind: four pesos went to a Caracas blacksmith for the manufacture of an iron bib (braga ) for a slave who fled repeatedly from the planting gang at Santa Lucía. But, for all the trouble they presented, cimarrones were a minor problem and a minor expense compared to the difficulties associated with the new hacienda at Santa Lucía.

In 1647, with cacao selling at a remarkable thirty-two pesos the fanega and the Cepi harvests bountiful, Santiago de Liendo decided to plant cacao trees at Santa Lucía, fourteen leagues south of Caracas (about eighty miles distant) on the banks of the Guaire River. By August 1649, with the cabildo's permission, Santiago had purchased thirteen slaves with capital from his brother Domingo's estate. Francisco Sánchez, compadre to Liendo, agreed to oversee the planting for a salary of fifty pesos a year. From 1649 to 1653 Sánchez directed the planting of 15,000 arboles de cacao as well as maize, plantains, and yuca at the site.

Very few of the cacao trees at Santa Lucía ever bore fruit. First the water level in the Guaire dropped, leaving the newly dug irrigation ditches dry; then 6000 sapling trees succumbed to the alhorra blight; finally, most of the remaining trees were washed away in 1653 by the worst Guaire flood in contemporary memory. In this case it was not the slaves who ran away but rather the overseer Sánchez, and in an unusual reversal of loyalties the black mandador ,

or slave driver, a Carabali slave named Antonio, took it upon himself to save the last 3000 cacao trees. For his efforts Antonio was rewarded with a Mexican blanket for his pregnant wife. In 1656 the Caracas cabildo approved Pedro de Liendo's petition to transfer the slaves from Santa Lucía to Cepi, where he had already received permission in the name of his wards to purchase 1900 trees and a piece of land for them to work. The property sale was completed in September of that year, and by October the Santa Lucía slaves were in La Guaira en route down the coast to Cepi.^[19]

In all, general operating costs for the Liendo estate totaled 14,424 pesos for the 141-month period from October 1645 to December 1656. Annual expenditures average 1228 pesos, about 400 pesos more than was spent by Rivillapuerta in order to maintain the Rodríguez Santos wheat estancia, but much of this difference can be attributed to the Liendo effort to expand cacao production. The Santa Lucía failure, at a cost of some 3500 pesos in slaves purchased and overseers' salaries, accounted for about 25 percent of these expenditures and produced almost no income (the only record of production from the ill-fated hacienda is an entry for 22 January 1656, which notes that 12 reales were spent to bring 3.5 fanegas of cacao beans from Santa Lucía to La Guaira). Totaling the returns from cacao sales for the same 141-month period gives an 11-year, 9-month estimated gross income of 30,871 pesos.^[20] Less costs of 14,424 pesos, the net income for these years was 16,447 pesos, an annual average of 1400 pesos, or about 1100 pesos less per year than the Rodríguez Santos annual wheat farm earnings a decade earlier. Based on the appraised value of the Liendo field laborers, 13,130 pesos, plus the value of 6131 healthy cacao trees (at one peso each^[21] ), the annual return on the capital value of the Liendo cacao estate was about 7 percent. Without the costs of the Santa Lucía fiasco, these earnings would have been 10 percent or better.

The estimate of income for the Rodríguez Santos estancia, including profits from the milling of wheat and the sale of much of it at marked-up prices, was about 12 percent. Was cacao agriculture in the 1640s less profitable than wheat had been in the 1630s? It is important to recall that the Liendo accounts span a period of transition from highly profitable cacao cultivation to the beginnings of a general crisis. The years 1646 and 1647 mark the end of two de-

cades of very high cacao prices. With more than 6000 pesos annual gross income, the net after costs in each of these years, and probably for many years prior to 1646, was at least 5000 pesos. For these years net income would have been about 25 percent on the appraised (1650s) value of slaves and cacao trees, or double that of the Rodríguez Santos wheat farm. These substantial returns, which were probably not unique to the Liendo cacao groves, were used to pay for the great many African slaves who were brought to the Caracas coast in the 1620s and 1630s. With this paid-for labor pool to rely upon, it is likely that the Basque Liendo brothers regarded nature's plagues and the low prices paid for cacao in the marketplace as only momentary problems that did not represent a serious menace to their favorable position in the Caracas community. Even as the alhorra claimed half the Cepi trees, as first drought and then floods ruined the infant Santa Lucía groves, and as the price of cacao fell from thirty to ten pesos the fanega, the comsumption patterns of the Liendo wards in Caracas continued apace, hardly reflecting economic events.

Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas left five young children when they died, victims of an unidentified epidemic in 1645. Their eldest child and only son, Santiago, was then six years old; their youngest, Juana, had been baptized in October 1644. Personal expenditures for these children, including clothing, education, and food for themselves and the domestic slaves who served them, averaged 110 pesos a month for the eighty-seven month period of their uncle Santiago de Liendo's tutela (October 1645–December 1652) (see appendix F, "Children's Total"). Gross monthly income from the Cepi groves averaged 285 pesos during this time (table 13, "Gross Income"), with a net monthly income of 161 pesos after estate operating costs of 124 pesos (appendix F, "Estate Costs") were subtracted. During the years of Pedro de Liendo's tutela (from 1653 to 1657), as the children came of age and entered Caracas society, the cost of their maintenance increased considerably. Pedro de Liendo eliminated the one real per-day food allowance for his wards' seven domestic slaves (27 of the 110 pesos paid monthly by Santiago had been for food for these personal servants), but this did not compensate for the rising cost of providing for his nephew and nieces. In 1657 some 3300 pesos were paid out as eighteen-year-old Santiago was made alcalde of the Santa Hermandad, seventeen-year-old Fran-

cisca married the Vizcayan Francisco Aguirre Villela, and sixteen-year-old Germana took the vows of the Concepción convent.

While expenditures for these children rose from 110 pesos a month to 122, the monthly gross income from the Cepi hacienda declined from 258 pesos during Santiago's tutela to 171 pesos during Pedro de Liendo's wardship. After operating costs were discounted, the net income during the years 1653 to 1657 was only 103 pesos per month, which means that the heirs of Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas consumed about 20 pesos a month more than they received in income from their hacienda during these years. Presumably, when it came to household expenditures, a substantial capital investment in slaves made it possible for families like the Liendo to ignore declining prices or bad harvests, at least in the short term.

In fact, it cost the Liendo children's uncles more than a hundred pesos a month, more than the annual salary of the Cepi overseer, to keep them at the standard of material culture considered appropriate for their social status. The dowry given for Germana's entry into the convent was the largest single nonagricultural debit made against the estate during the two uncles' custodianship, but the most frequent expenditures made on the heirs' behalf were for cloth, clothing, and shoes. The children received a new suit or dress on at least two occasions during the course of every year and a pair of new shoes every month. Santiago was given two or three pairs of new silk stockings every year and a new shirt made from imported cloth every month. During their younger years the expenditure for clothing seldom was more than 40 or 50 pesos a year each for Germana, Francisca, and Antonia, while purchases for Santiago totaled about 100 or 120 pesos annually. The greater part of this expense then went to the tailor who altered the clothing of the children's deceased parents. Later, when clothing costs for the four orphans were about 350 pesos a year, most of the expense was in the form of unworked cloth and only about 10 percent of the total was earned by tailors and shoemakers. Clothing for special occasions, when it would have the greatest visibility and social significance, accounted for something more than half the annual wardrobe expenditure. Francisca's wedding dress, which cost 120 pesos, was the most expensive clothing item, but when thirteen-year-old Santiago rode out to observe the cacao planting at Santa

Lucía, his first opportunity to act the part of lord of the domain and master of slaves, his uncle paid 318 pesos to outfit him completely: a new saddle, silver dagger, silk cape, and broad-brimmed hat complemented a suit trimmed in leather and velvet and knee-length boots.

The other form of personal expenditures for the Liendo children, which continued apace in bad times as well as good, was for education. High culture and learning were exceptional privileges in early colonial Caracas, and the Liendo wards were given what was available of them. Five pesos a year went to Pablo de Ojeda, Santiago's dance teacher, 6 pesos were paid to his grammar tutor, and 1 or 2 pesos were spent on school books. The girls' formal education began when they were five with a hired master who charged 6 pesos a year to teach each of them to read. Before their tenth birthdays the educational responsibility for Francisca, Germana, and Antonia had been transfered to the nuns at the Concepción convent. For 50 pesos a year they received academic and religious training there in the company of the daughters of Caracas's leading families. An additional 100 pesos per year on the average was spent for each girl for food and other incidental items. Some of these things may have served to set the Liendo sisters apart, as part of the new cacao planter elite, in the well-to-do female society of the convent. Mattresses and bordered coverlets brought from New Spain, painted ceramics from Puebla, and colorful, quality clothing woven on Mexican looms for the slave girls who lived with their mistresses behind the convent walls made the Liendo family's New Spain cacao connection evident for all to see.

Cacao would continue to serve them well. Beginning in 1628, when the uncle of Pedro, Santiago, and Domingo sent a small quantity of beans on consignment to Juan de Castro, vecino of Veracruz,^[22] the Liendo family was able to fashion a slave-based agricultural enterprise that would survive the several depressed decades after 1650s to put it among the colony's foremost cacao planters in the eighteenth century. Pedro de Liendo died childless and the encomienda that had been his became the basis of the most important ecclesiastical benefice in Caracas, the obra pía of Chuao. The heirs of Santiago de Liendo, whose ambitions led to the Santa Lucía fiasco, emerged as the wealthier branch of the Liendo clan. In 1684 Santiago's son Juan de Liendo, regidor and maestre de

campo, had 2000 cacao trees at a reestablished Santa Lucía hacienda, 3000 at the original Cepi estate, and 4000 trees as well as a sugar trapiche at San Matheo in the Aragua Valley.^[23] By 1720 the grandchildren of Santiago de Liendo would own 40,000 cacao trees on the coast and in the Tuy River valleys. Finally, the orphaned children of Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas, whose tutelas have provided the data for this analysis, did not fare as well as the cousins with whom they were raised.

Santiago de Liendo, alcalde of the Santa Hermandad, purchased three slaves and twenty-one fanegadas of irrigable land near Chuspa on the upwind coast in 1676. The sale price of 1833 pesos included the copper pans of an unworked trapiche there. In 1684 Santiago was dead, and this trapiche was the only agricultural property claimed by his widow, doña Isabel María Gedler. Their son, Juan Domingo de Liendo, would have 20,000 cacao trees at Chuspa in 1720. Francisca de Liendo, the only daughter of Domingo de Liendo and Germana de Rojas who did not remain in the Concepción convent, owned 3500 árboles de cacao at Cepi in 1684. There is no trace of her children (surname Aguirre Villela Liendo) among the province's cacao hacienda owners in 1720.^[24]

The Liendo tutela accounts record only the last years of the first Caracas cacao boom. High prices from the 1620s through the 1640s, when most of the cacao harvested came from virgin groves, provided planters like the Liendo with annual income of perhaps 25 percent the capital value of their haciendas and slaves. Owners of wheat estancias and mills were able to add to their agricultural profits by raising the price of their grain and by grinding the grain to flour, while cacao profits were entirely dependent on prices set in the distant New Spain market. Nevertheless, the Liendo cacao hacienda during its best years earned for its owners about twice what was made from the Rodríguez Santos wheat estancia and mill, although during years of low prices its earnings were on a par with the wheat estate. In both of these cases the guardians were able to provide their young charges with spouses, a place in the convent, formal education, clothing, and the other material goods deemed appropriate for their social station. In both cases the cost of these things, which is to say the expenditure necessary to meet and maintain the elite standard of material wealth in seventeenth-

century Caracas, was approximately equivalent to the net income from these properties. Probably this balancing of the books was the primary objective of the tutela, and we may suppose that other estates might have had a larger net income or a different ratio of expenditures to income. But these cases illustrate how an annual income of not less than 7 percent and probably often more than 20 percent of the capital value of these estates was spent by elite slaveholding agriculturalists in Caracas at midcentury. The Rodríguez Santos daughters married Liendo immigrants as wheat farming was eclipsed by cacao, and the substantial profits provided by the first cacao boom carried most of the expanding Liendo family through several difficult decades and into the eighteenth century with no significant loss of productive cacao property or social status. Like several other families that had acquired large numbers of slaves and had become well established in the cacao business before 1650, the Liendo emerged in the 1680s with the labor and land needed to take full advantage of the prolonged prosperity that would then continue unabated until the 1740s.