Tuy Cacao Haciendas and the Slave Trade

The gestation period of the Curiepe settlement was particularly long and difficult. Beneath the complex tangle of controversy in Caracas was a more simple cause for the Curiepe problems: the Blanco de Villegas family had clear titles, but they did not have

enough slaves to work their land at the distant fringe of the province. The clamor for land from canario immigrants and morenos libres could not be ignored forever by royal officials who were charged with increasing revenues by promoting agriculture. Consequently, as it became evident that many of the elites who had prior claims did not have the labor resources necessary to plant there, these groups were given the opportunity to begin cacao groves in the valleys of the lower Tuy. Haciendas were established in generally successive fashion, the newest groves located always further from Caracas, downstream to the east. The dates for the foundation of Tuy Valley parishes reflect this pattern (see table 15).^[20]

Comparison of censuses of cacao haciendas taken in 1684, 1720, and 1744 shows that the number of cacao trees in the Caracas province increased at a fairly steady rate of about 75,000 trees per year for the sixty-year period 1684 to 1744 (fig. 8).^[21] A clearer idea of the social significance of the expansion of cacao cultivation into the Tuy can be had if data taken from the 1720 and 1744 censuses are arranged by region and by the social standing (elite or nonelite) of the hacienda owners. In the first place, expansion did not take place on the Caribbean coast. There were not many more cacao trees on coastal haciendas in 1744 than there had been in 1720. In valleys of the Costa Abajo (that is, downwind of La Guaira) the share of the trees belonging to elites declined, perhaps as a result of the sale of old haciendas to immigrants as mantuano planters shifted their interests and their slaves to the Tuy. In the Tuy growth was dynamic. Upper Tuy expansion continued for elites and nonelites alike, from about 1 million trees for both groups combined in 1720 to 1.5 million in 1744. But it was in the Lower Tuy

Fig. 8
Cacao Trees in the Caracas Province, 1684–1744

that planting was most dramatic, with a five-fold increase from about 300,000 trees in 1720 to 1.5 million trees in 1744. Much of this expansion was accomplished in this region by nonelite, first-time planters and settlers like the morenos of Curiepe and the canarios of Panaquire; the number of trees owned by nonelites in the Lower Tuy rose from 150,000 trees in 1720 to about 850,000 trees in 1744, an increase that represents almost half of all the new trees planted during the years from 1720 to 1744 (see figs. 9a and 9b ).

Haciendas on the Lower Tuy operated at several disadvantages in comparison to those located closer to Caracas, and these disadvantages, which became more problematic as the eighteenth century progressed, were felt most acutely by nonelite hacendados. The Tuy was navigable in boats of minimal draft from its mouth to the point where the Caucagua River enters it (hence justification for dividing

Fig. 9a
Cacao Trees in 1720, by Region and Owner Status

Fig. 9b
Cacao Trees in 1744, by Region and Owner Status

the river into Upper and Lower Tuy at this confluence), a distance of about twenty-five leagues. For as long as it remained legal to do so, large canoes, with a carrying capacity of sixty or seventy fanegas of beans, were used regularly to transport cacao from the haciendas in the Caucagua vicinity to the sea.^[22] However, a royal order of 1735, issued in the hope of eliminating the active contraband trading that took place all along the coast but especially where the Tuy enters the Caribbean, required that all cacao be sent to La Guaira by way of the more easily guarded overland route through Caracas.^[23] Thereafter the cheap and efficient transport of cacao by canoe on the Tuy became the clandestine medium of smugglers and the more intrepid or desperate planters.

Above the Caucagua, cacao had always been carried by mule to Caracas, a distance of at most some eighteen to twenty leagues, which could be covered in about three days in dry weather. But this form of conveyance was expensive, especially if the cacao originated on haciendas downstream from Caucagua. In ordinary circumstances, mule transport from Caucagua to Caracas by way of the Guarenas River cost shippers 30 to 50 percent more than loads carried shorter distances from the Upper Tuy along the broad banks and less precipitous inclines of the Guaire River. But during the rainy season, while the prohibited (after 1735) travel by canoe became much easier, the swollen streams often made the mule trails altogether impassable. At best the overland trip then took much longer and was much more expensive.^[24]

A second important distinction between the Upper and the Lower Tuy has to do with the declining availability of African slaves in the colony. Most of the Upper Tuy haciendas were first planted during the last years of the seventeenth century and the first three decades of the eighteenth, a period that corresponds to the first years of the English contract to sell slaves in the Spanish Indies. From 1715 to 1728 the South Sea Company sold a modest average of about 100 slaves in Caracas per year. Thereafter sales increased considerably, and for the eleven years 1729–1739 the yearly average was about 350 slaves sold. The first parish register for Caucagua is dated 1727, which means that much of the planting of cacao in this fertile valley coincided with the South Sea Company's best years in Caracas.

War between England and Spain ended the English asiento in

1739, and thereafter the Guipuzcoana Company proved singularly unable (or perhaps unwilling) to market African slaves in Venezuela. A total of only about 350 slaves were legally sold in the colony from 1739 to 1784, the year when the Company ceased operations.^[25] The majority of haciendas in the Lower Tuy, such as those established by Canary Islanders in the vicinity of Panaquire, were begun in the late 1730s and after, and therefore they were developed for the most part after the trade in imported slaves had collapsed. As a result, from Caucagua upstream labor on Tuy cacao haciendas was predominantly slave labor, while downstream from that point many of the newer and smaller groves were commonly worked by their owners, who only occasionally had the assistance of a small gang of slaves.

Although the constraints of transportation costs and the much diminished supply of African slaves affected elite and nonelite alike, elites were in certain ways more able to take advantage of the natural bounty of the Tuy River valley. Elites were not usually newcomers to the Tuy during the boom years of the 1720s and 1730s. In most cases their families had established cacao haciendas there one or two generations earlier, and the estates belonging to them in 1744 were extensions of haciendas that had been in existence and were already harvesting cacao when the 1720 census was taken. With much of the difficult initial work already completed, such as the digging of the major irrigation networks and the construction of dwellings for overseers and storage facilities, before 1720, elite-owned haciendas were developed more rapidly during the interval of the two censuses than were the new groves planted on virgin soil by pioneers who settled in the Tuy after 1720. Elite haciendas were often located on the best sites, where the land was fertile and irrigation systems easier to set up, and in places located closer to Caracas on more easily traveled and less expensive mulepaths. Most importantly, the work of expanding elite haciendas could be accomplished with the labor of already acquired slaves.

These comparative advantages are reflected in the relative size of Tuy haciendas: on the average, elite-owned haciendas in both the Upper and Lower Tuy were larger by about 2000 cacao trees in 1744 than in 1720. Haciendas owned by nonelites, because many first-time planters had settled in the Tuy during the two decades before

1744, were about 1000 trees smaller on the average in 1744 than in 1720. Expressed somewhat differently, mantuano cacao estates were increasingly larger than nonelite cacao estates on the Tuy frontier; while elite haciendas typically had 20 to 40 percent more trees than nonelite haciendas in 1720, by 1744 this difference had increased to 50 to 70 percent more trees (see figs. 10a and 10b ).

To have had producing haciendas in these decades gave elite planters other advantages as well. Founded in 1728, the Guipuzcoana Company opened up important new markets for Caracas cacao. Beginning in 1715 and ending in 1738, slaves were supplied to the province by the English asiento. Thus for the better part of an extraordinary decade, from 1730, when the first Basque ship arrived in the colony, to 1738, when the English factor stopped selling slaves, the presence in Caracas of these two commercial companies overlapped. Perhaps because they competed with one another to buy the fruits of the colony's haciendas, during this time the price paid for Caracas cacao was very high, about 30 percent above the average minimum price paid during the first half of the eighteenth century (see fig. 11). As cacao profits increased, so too did the number of slaves sold to Caracas buyers. During the late 1720s and early 1730s established cacao hacendados found themselves in the fortunate, if not exactly fortuitous, position of receiving more money for their beans just at the time when many more African slaves were made available for purchase by the South Sea Company (fig. 12).

A temporary cessation in the chronic hostilities between England and Spain in 1728 marked the beginning of the South Sea Company's best slave-trading years in Spain's American colonies. During the 1730s the English asiento sold more slaves in Caracas (3683) than it did in Havana (2874), Veracruz (1353), and Campeche (730). All of these ports, including Caracas, were only minor markets for the English slavers in comparison to Cartagena (5043 slaves sold from 1730 through 1736), Buenos Aires (6473 slaves sold from 1730 through 1738), and Portobelo/Panama (9168 slaves sold from 1730 through 1738),^[26] but these major markets served as redistribution centers for the trade, providing slaves for the entire Pacific coast and the Andean highlands in addition to their more immediate hinterlands. From Caracas, by contrast, there was only one destination for the great majority of Africans imported during the

Fig. 10a
Mean Hacienda Size in 1720, by Region and Owner Status

Fig. 10b
Mean Hacienda Size in 1744, by Region and Owner Status

Fig. 11
Minimum Cacao Price, Caracas, 1700–1749

1730s: the burgeoning cacao haciendas then being planted on the banks of the Tuy River and its several tributaries.

In sum, mantuano hacienda owners of several generations' residence in Caracas were more likely to profit in the Tuy than were the ambitious newcomers to the province who settled there in hopes of making their first fortune. Although some families, like the Blanco de Villegas, had far too few slaves to work the extensive land to which they held title, possession of slave labor was an important difference between established elite planters and the aspiring pioneers. As in the case of the Liendo family in the 1650s, Caraqueños who already had slaves sent their overseers with a work gang of young and healthy men out to the Tuy to clear the land and plant cacao while their older and weaker slaves remained on the mature haciendas to carry out the easier tasks of weeding and harvesting. Most of the immigrants who actually settled in the Tuy, the canarios of Panaquire for instance, had few if any slaves and had to depend first on their own labor, and then on the English asiento and the Atlantic slave trade to provide them with African workers. After 1728 the supply of slaves to Caracas in-

Fig. 12.
Slaves Sold in Caracas, 1715–1739

creased as the price paid for cacao beans rose, but this conjuncture, which lasted less than a decade, really favored only growers who then owned fruit-bearing trees and had cacao beans in hand, ready to exchange them for slaves. High cacao prices were not much more than an incentive, although evidently a powerful one, to the Tuy River frontier-folk who could only hope that this concurrence of favorable conditions would continue until they had harvested a cacao crop and were able to buy a slave or two with their profits.