5—
León's Rebellion

Many Tuy settlers chose to defy royal law rather than accept the consequences of the end of the South Sea Company, the end of African slave imports, and the low prices paid for cacao by the Guipuzcoana Company. The sale of cacao to smugglers was a practice as old as the cacao trade itself, but after 1739 it took on new importance for many first-generation farmers who turned to the contrabandistas as the only alternative to losing their haciendas altogether. Since they were often not limited to the current Caracas price for cacao, but could sell their beans directly to New Spain, mantuano hacendados were much less likely to participate in the illicit trade. Yet the rise of smuggling in the countryside was of serious concern to them too. Many slaves were evidently willing to trade a portion of their masters' cacao for whatever merchandise an enterprising itinerant smuggler might have to offer. Since few mantuanos were willing to give up their permanent residence in Caracas, which was after all a basic privilege of their elite status, control of slaves and of trade in the hacienda districts was left to overseers and the police agents of the governor, who were not, by and large, able to stop the illegal exchanges.

This collusion, slaves who pilfered their absent owners' beans and sold them to Spaniards who peddled them, proved virtually impervious to efforts from Caracas to prevent it. The clearest comments on this subterranean trade were made in the 1770s and 1780s, but its origins as a serious problem date from the end of the English asiento a generation earlier. "Experience proves that a satisfactory overseer can never be found," wrote an absentee planter worried about the harvest from his Caucagua hacienda.^[1] The bishop Mariano Martí visited the Tuy region in 1784, and he reported that "not the third part" of the cacao grown on estates in the Caucagua district ever reached the hacienda storehouses, let alone the point of legal embarkation at La Guaira. According to Martí this was because the

owners rarely visited their estates and because few whites were willing to work as overseers. Free blacks and even slaves acted as estate supervisors, a fact that the bishop deplored because it allowed for rampant thievery of cacao by slaves and overseers alike. The beans were used by slaves to buy "rum, food, and clothing, especially rum," which was concocted in clandestine stills located all along the course of the Tuy.^[2] In a report to the governor prepared in 1775, the teniente de justicia for Ocumare del Tuy gave three reasons why cacao smuggling continued unabated in his district:

Sir: Desiring to fill in every way possible the obligations of the office that Your Lordship has kindly conferred upon me, and meriting among them particular attention to the frequent theft of cacao, I have made inquiry to the source of this crime which is so prejudicial in this district, and the result, Sir, of some careful observation is that I now understand the interesting reasons that we so wanted to learn [as to why and how cacao is stolen].

There are three sources of the vice: the first is the abandoned state in which many hacendados keep their slaves, which keeps them in great poverty and extreme need, from which they redeem themselves with the property of their masters and others who do not watch them carefully; the second, the malice of the peddlers commonly called saddlebag salesmen [vendedores de alforja ]. Finding in the apparent laxness of government sustenance for their avarice, these men sell their goods from hacienda to hacienda, advancing clothing and other merchandise on credit to the slaves with payments arranged to coincide with the harvests. When the harvests are gathered the salesmen appear to collect, and the slaves, who have no property of their own, make payment with that which belongs to others, most obviously, the fruit of the cacao which they cultivate. The third is aguardiente de caña , because, the propensity of the slaves for this beverage being great, they give the mentioned cacao in exchange for it, taking the beans from the haciendas in great excess.^[3]

Elite cacao planters were reluctant to live on their haciendas and they were unwilling or unable to provide efficient estate administration that would have kept the illegal cacao trade at a minimum. They preferred to rely on the rural agents of royal authority, the tenientes de justicia mayor , to keep peace and order on their behalf, to pursue runaway slaves, and to stop smuggling. A teniente held extensive formal authority. His jurisdiction always covered more territory than he could administer effectively alone, and he usually relied on several subordinates, his cabos . The teniente granted operating licenses to all the retail stores, the pulperías , and to all the muleteers who worked in his district. In the countryside a gover-

nor's lieutenant was obliged to provide police service and to act as a judge of first instance in civil and criminal cases, much in the same way that the cabildo's alcaldes ordinarios did in the towns. However, unlike the town alcalde, who was elected annually, the teniente was appointed by the governor from distant Caracas and for an indeterminate period.^[4] In lieu of a salary, the lieutenants and the small band of men they recruited to assist them were allowed a part of the contraband they confiscated, which may have increased the diligence with which they carried out their duties.

As both police officer and justice of the peace, the position of rural sheriff carried both abundant authority and also considerable opportunity for corruption. From the point of view of the colony's administrators the tenientazgo was often difficult to monitor effectively. This was so because, even though the post could be and occasionally was filled by the governor with his own friends and minions, in the time-honored tradition of Habsburg administrative thought it was believed that the best way to keep the teniente from becoming a petty tyrant in his bailiwick was to appoint the most prominent resident in the district. It was assumed that the self-interest of such men would move them to maintain the public order and to protect the legal cacao trade. Further, such men could be counted upon to utilize their extensive networks of kin and clients to help them administer the royal justice. Consistent with this idea, in the Tuy it was customary, before the arrival of the Guipuzcoana Company and the centralizing spirit of the Bourbon regime, for the founders and first planters to be named teniente de justicia mayor .

In the Caracas context, although the tenientes were by law assistants to the governor and subject to his authority, in fact they enjoyed a valued measure of autonomy. In the first place, supervision was complicated by the distance and difficult terrain which separated the governor in Caracas from his subalterns. In addition, in theory the influence of the governor over these rural officials was limited traditionally by the superior authority of the Audiencia in Santo Domingo, where matters pertaining to the execution of law were sent on appeal. The names of tenientes nominated by the governor had to be sent to the audiencia for confirmation, and lieutenants could appeal directly to Santo Domingo in any controversy they might have with the Caracas governors. As with his

appointment, the dismissal of a teniente was subject to approval by audiencia judges.

This tradition was altered in 1738, in the midst of many important changes then taking place in Caracas, when by royal cédula several of the governor's prerogatives were enhanced, including the right to appoint or to dismiss tenientes without approval of the audiencia. This autonomy of appointment was first granted to don Gabriel José de Zuloaga, governor from 1737 to 1747 and a Basque with strong sympathy for the Guipuzcoana Company. Zuloaga requested greater independence in the matter of these appointments, arguing that closer control over the naming and replacement of lieutenants would give the governor greater control over smuggling. In 1739, when the province was transferred for a second time to the jurisdiction of the reestablished viceroyalty of New Granada, Zuloaga petitioned to defend his newly acquired privilege to name or replace tenientes without judicial review, citing the four hundred leagues of very poor roads between Caracas and Bogotá as a major obstacle to the swift execution of justice. He argued that the inevitable delays due to this distance and the war with England would reverse the recent progress made by gubernatorial diligence and the Guipuzcoana Company's coast guard in the effort to halt illegal cacao trading. Smugglers would be encouraged in their activities if they knew that an ineffective or corrupt teniente would remain in office until his replacement were approved by the viceroy in New Granada. With the assistance of pressure brought on the Council of the Indies by the Guipuzcoana Company, its agents agreeing that prosperity in Venezuela depended on the ability of the governor to react swiftly and decisively to contraband, the crown approved Zuloaga's request in 1742. To this end, although in other respects Venezuela remained subordinate to the viceroyalty of New Granada, the Caracas governor was to retain complete authority to "name the tenientes de justicia mayor for the towns and villas and places where they are needed, without requiring confirmation for those named."^[5]

Rebellion

The governor's right to appoint or remove a teniente from his post became the catalyst for revolt in 1749. Before that date colonists

suspected collusion between Basque governors and Basque Guipuzcoana monopolists, and in the 1740s they came to believe that royal justice was being subverted so that Company ships would have full cargoes of cheaply purchased cacao beans. Tensions peaked as prices dropped to record low levels. As early as 1745 governor Zuloaga was certain that a conspiracy had been formed to demand the expulsion of the Guipuzcoana Company;

I was told secretly by several different ecclesiastics, both seculars and regulars, that a plot has been formed here by the Conde [de San Javier] and Don Alejandro [Blanco Uribe] and their partisans, and as a part of it they have made an alliance with the majority of the many Isleños from the Canary Islands who live in this city and in the different areas adjacent to it. Although the Conde and Don Francisco de Ponte, his cousin, plan to travel to the Court to present their case, they and many others intend to begin something here; to be better able to do it they have elected Alcaldes and a Procurador General favorable to the thoughts of the Conde and Don Alejandro Blanco, and they have gone so far as to propose violence. If I do not agree with them or defer to them they will rebel against me, arrest me if necessary, and arrest the agents of the Guipuzcoana Company so that they can do away with it altogether.^[6]

But no uprising took place in 1745, and, although it is unlikely that Juan Francisco de León would have led a march on the city without the support of some influential mantuanos, when he and the isleños and other Tuy settlers did take their protest to Caracas there would be very little concrete proof to link them and the colony's elites.^[7]

In any event, the occurrence which precipitated León's rebellion had nothing to do with the Caracas elite. Governor Luis Castellanos decided to favor the request of Company factor Juan Manuel Goizueta and send an employee of the Company to control the cacao trade leaving the valleys of Panaquire and Caucagua. Martín de Echeverría, Vizcayan, first met with Juan Francisco de León in Panaquire on March 27, 1749. Together with his patrol of a dozen men, Echeverría, who was mistakenly thought to be León's replacement as teniente de justicia mayor , was immediately forced to leave Panaquire, because, as León wrote to governor Castellanos a week later, "the Vecinos in this Valley refused to allow me to recognize a Vizcayan Teniente or Vizcayan soldiers, afraid as they are of the hostilities that are suffered in the places where there are such

Tenientes and patrols."^[8] Castellanos held León in enough respect to write him a letter of explanation, in which he insisted that Echeverría had a legitimate commission in the Tuy, and that it was within the rights of the Guipuzcoana Company to place officers and soldiers wherever they saw a need in order to stop smuggling and to keep cacao from being shipped to La Guaira by sea. As governor, Castellanos was obliged to assist the Company in this effort and he claimed that he could not overrule the Company if its agent was qualified. What was more, León misunderstood the nature of Echeverría's mission, for he had been sent only as a cabo de guerra y juez de comisos , with authority only to halt contraband, and not as a replacement teniente de justicia .

Under the circumstances, the difference between cabo and teniente was too fine a point for León and his followers, who, to profit from their cacao, had come to depend on the illegal sea trade by way of the Tuy. They were fed up with the Company, its low prices and other policies. Particularly aggravating to them was the complete prohibition, ordered by governor Martín de Lardizábal in 1735, of all commercial activity along the coast east of La Guaira. Only the owners of a handful of haciendas that were located along this coast were allowed to bring their harvests by sea to La Guaira, and this was permitted because, blocked by the mountains that rose steeply from behind their estates, there was no other way for them to get their beans to market. Otherwise, even off-shore fishing was prohibited, as the crown supported the view of local royal authorities that such activity attracted and served as a cover for smuggling.

Therefore, since the only authorized route to La Guaira for cacao from Tuy Valley haciendas was overland by way of Caracas, when the price of cacao fell sharply in the 1740s, the cost of transport over as many as forty leagues of difficult mulepath made the cacao business unprofitable in the Tuy. Despite many appeals to rescind the prohibition, Zuloaga remained steadfast in support of the policy of his predecessor Lardizábal, rejecting in 1744 and 1745 requests to allow the owners of haciendas in the remote valleys of Curiepe, Caucagua, Panaquire, Mamporal, Capaya, and others to ship their cacao to La Guaira by way of the Tuy River and the Caribbean. We may suppose that the policy probably provoked as much smuggling as it prevented, and when the Basque cabo

Echeverría was named for the Panaquire post no cacao had reached Caracas by the legal routes from some of the lower Tuy haciendas for more than two years.^[9]

To protest general conditions and Echeverría's appointment, a march to Caracas was decided upon during the first weeks of April 1749. Several years later, as he was about to surrender to the royal authorities, an anxious Juan Francisco de León claimed that he had not been alone in the organization of the march. They had planned only a simple protest, which the government, not León, had turned into a rebellion. The canario leader emphasized that while those who accompanied him on the march were bold enough to openly challenge the royally licensed Company to the beat of drums with flags flying and arms in hand, there had been many others, in particular several Caracas mantuanos, who had given their encouragement but were careful to protect their anonymity. León later remembered that during this time he had "received a great many letters from all over the Province, but none of them signed."^[10]

Much to the disgust of the king's investigators, the matter of clandestine support would never be made clear, primarily because León refused to name those elites who had called on him to lead the protest. But in 1749 there was no doubt about who actually marched on Caracas. Those who came from the Tuy with León to manifest their opposition to the Company were modest and even humble men from the middling and lower ranks of rural provincial society. Many were isleños, others were free blacks, a few were runaway slaves, and yet others Indians. Most joined the band as it passed by the large cacao haciendas located along the the Caucagua stream, but others had traveled a considerable distance, from the Aragua Valley sixty leagues to the west and from San Sebastián to the south, to participate.

On April 19, several hundred armed men made camp with León at Tócome, about an hour east of Caracas. Upon hearing of the arrival of León there, Manuel de Goizueta, the principal factor of the Guipuzcoana Company, and a number of other Company employees, including the would-be cabo Martín de Echeverría, fled the city straightaway for the safety of the fortress at La Guaira, taking with them only what they could carry. That afternoon the Caracas cabildo met in hurried session and resolved to go as a body

to meet with León, bringing with them don Lorenzo de Ponte y Villegas and the Marqués de Mijares, respectively the oldest and the most prestigious of the town's mantuano men. At the request of governor Castellanos a delegation of leading churchmen was organized to accompany the councilmen, and two officials of the Real Hacienda were sent as the governor's personal delegates with a letter for León.^[11]

As they reached the Tócome encampment this contingent of elites was greeted with shouts of "Long live the King and Death to the Vizcayans." León refused to read the governor's letter, insisting that he was interested only in the departure of the "Vizcayans." He told the emissaries that, although he had no intention of harming anyone, he was determined to accomplish his objective and more than 3000 men were on their way to join him in Caracas. The councilmen informed León that they had never heard rumors calling for the expulsion of the Company, that not even the Conde de San Javier, their spokesman at court, had asked for the removal of the Company. León replied that they were wrong, that the Conde had gone to court exactly for that purpose, but, once in Madrid the king's agents "had tricked him, taking him to dances and parties so that he might enjoy himself."^[12]

Once they determined that there was to be no break in León's resolve to go to Caracas in order to bring a halt to the operations of the Guipuzcoana Company and to force its agents to leave the province, the negotiators returned to the city. The next morning the governor sent Manuel de Sosa Betancourt, archdeacon of the cathedral and an isleño, who succeeded in persuading León not to enter the city with all of his men. León agreed to bring them only as far as the plaza of the Candelaria church in the canario barrio on the eastern fringe of Caracas, but he reiterated to Sosa that his reason for coming to Caracas was to insist on the total destruction of the Guipuzcoana Company. More than that, he told Sosa that he was determined to see that "in all of this Province there does not remain even one person of that [Basque] race; all of them must leave on the first vessel or ship in the bay."^[13]

The arrangement with the archdeacon called for the protesters to arrive at Candelaria the next day, April 21, but when word reached Tócome that Castellanos was about to flee Caracas for La Guaira, León and his men left immediately for the town, and they arrived

in the Candelaria barrio at about three o'clock in the afternoon on April 20, 1749. As events were to prove, this haste was of singular importance. Castellanos's fear for his own safety may have been his primary reason for wanting to go to La Guaira, but as a strategic matter such a move was particularly significant because if it appeared that he, as governor, had been forced to leave Caracas under pressure from León's mob, then the protest against the Guipuzcoana Company could be understood in a much more serious light as an insurrection against the constituted authority of the crown. It was one thing to disobey the governor's orders to detain his march or to keep his men out of Caracas, but it was quite another to be responsible for forcing the king's representative from his post, and, perhaps with this in mind, León had left immediately for Caracas when he heard that Castellanos was preparing to flee.

Ignoring the agreement he had made with Sosa, León entered Caracas with all of his men. To the accompaniment of drumbeats and with banners flying, in a great commotion the band of protesters advanced through the streets of Candelaria and the cathedral parish, stopping only when they reached the Plaza Mayor. Once guards had been placed at the office and warehouse of the Guipuzcoana Company and sentinels stationed at the street corners, a mounted Juan Francisco de León confronted Castellanos, who stood above him on the balcony of the governor's residence. The exchange was strained but polite. Castellanos spoke first: "Your Honor is very welcome señor capitán León. I did not expect Your Honor until tomorrow at noon." León: "That was my intention, but I received three letters today which advised me that Your Highness wanted to go to La Guaira, and for that reason I came more quickly." Castellanos: "I did not have such a plan, and I am here to serve you, Sir."^[14] León then demanded the immediate expulsion of the Company.

With no choice but violence should he refuse, Castellanos issued an order to the purpose. However, unknown to León and those who witnessed the event, earlier Castellanos had signed a secret document discounting anything that he might subsequently agree to do or be coerced into doing.^[15] Believing that they had obtained their initial objective, León and some two thousand men set up camp in the plaza to await the execution of the governor's order. Three-

fourths of them were isleños or other Spaniards, and the rest were Indians, mulattos, and zambos. On the march they had divided themselves into three companies: españoles blancos , blacks and mulattos, and Indians; now the first two groups pitched their tents inside the plaza, the españoles against the walls of the cathedral and the men of color against the royal jail, while the Indian company was divided and placed in appropriate locations on the streets leading into the plaza. León, with permission of the governor, spent the night in the vacant bishop's residence. The poor among the protesters were fed by the vecinos of Caracas, many of whom openly expressed their support for León and his movement.^[16]

The next day León asked Castellanos for an attorney, and a legal counselor was assigned to him.^[17] León also began to receive the advice of elites who were opposed to the Company. It was determined that the governor should give license for an open cabildo, termed by them a junta general , to decide whether the Company had been beneficial or prejudicial to the province during its tenure of nearly two decades. This meeting was of major importance to León and his followers, for a vote against the Company by the town's foremost citizenry meant that they would share responsibility for its expulsion. The procedure would also give much-wanted additional legality to their movement. With alacrity the people of prominence in Caracas came together to denounce the Guipuzcoana Company. Castellanos would write to the king that in the past,

for some Juntas that have taken place, even when the issue was to their advantage, not in two days has it been possible to bring together 20 men, while for this one requested by Juan Francisco de León in less than a half hour 97 people gathered, all of them principales and people of distinction in this town, and in this it is evident that they were involved with León in the planning of the said Junta.^[18]

The decision taken by the assembled town was overwhelmingly in opposition to the Basque monopoly. Among the principal complaints were that it had failed in its obligation to supply the province with clothing and food, it had seriously hindered the cacao trade, it had forced the price of cacao beans down to record low levels, and in these and other particulars it had failed to comply both with many of the terms of its original contract and subsequent royal orders governing its management.^[19]

The Company factor and many of its employees had already disembarked from La Guaira on April 21 when the open cabildo issued its support for expulsion the following day. Not yet satisfied, on April 23 León asked for further guarantees. Among them were two that reflect the perception which the demonstrators had of their own precarious position. First was a request for complete assurance that Castellanos would not leave Caracas, and second was a guarantee of indemnity for León and those who had marched with him. Castellanos agreed to these things as he had to everything else that had been asked of him. To become law these terms had to be announced to the community at large, and for the next three nights on different street corners town criers made the termination of the Company and the indemnity public knowledge. On the third night, beating their drums and firing their arquebuses and shotguns into the air, León led most of his men from the Plaza Mayor down the Calle Real to the Candelaria plaza. Their victory parade was made to the accompaniment of the shouts of thankful Caraqueños. Only a few men were left to guard the governor's residence and to patrol the streets at night, and the anti-Company campaign appeared to have come to a quite successful end.

The character of the León protest changed completely a week later. During the night of May 3, Governor Castellanos, disguised as a priest, repudiated his promise to remain in Caracas and fled to La Guaira. No effort by anyone in Caracas could persuade him to return, and by the end of the month a total collapse of authority, and with it social order, seemed likely. Word of an uprising of slaves in Ocumare del Tuy further frightened an already agitated citizenry, and arrests, torture, and confessions, culminating in the execution of a supposed ringleader, were the result. Some members of the Caracas elite began to try to distance themselves from the León movement by blaming Castellanos for giving in to the protesters and ordering the Guipuzcoana Company out of the province entirely on his own volition, without consulting the municipal authority or anyone else. The cabildo also blamed the governor for the rumored slave uprising, saying that his precipitous flight from the city and his failure to replace the tenientes removed by León from their Tuy Valley posts during the march to Caracas had caused a breakdown of authority and order in the countryside,

which in turn had given slaves the courage to try to claim their freedom.

Anxious that their declared support for León's protest now made them accomplices in rebellion, the town's councilmen told Castellanos that he could not accuse the city of disloyalty, for he had not called on either the cabildo or the militia for assitance before he determined to take refuge in the fortress at La Guaira. For his part León understood perfectly well that the governor's action made him and his mean "traitors and rebels." In frustration and perhaps in an effort to force a direction on events that he felt were carrying him toward open rebellion, he closed the Caracas-La Guaira road in June and refused to allow supplies to be sent to Castellano and the troops in the fortress there. Advised by mantuanos that this would likely lead first to an armed confrontation with the royal and Guipuzcoana Company soldiers stationed at La Guaira and then to a general war when reinforcements arrived from Santo Domingo or Spain, León responded, "then in such case they will kill all of us, for there is no reason why I alone should die in defense of this province."^[20]

The initial support given León by the Caracas elite began to evaporate before the spectre of violence. The possibility of a slave uprising, to come either in direct support of the rebels or simply with the collapse of royal authority in the wake of the flight of the governor, was particularly troubling. Even if it was nothing more than a rumor, this fear was genuinely felt. What had taken place was well understood by the lieutenant governor, Domingo Aguirre y Castillos, a frequent friend of the elite and occasional opponent of Governor Castellanos. In a letter to the king, Aguirre argued that the policies of the Basque governors and the Guipuzcoana Company had created considerable tension in the province. Although his fears of the eventual outcome of the uprising might have clouded his view of León's objectives, he knew very well that the isleño chief had broad popular support:

Juan Francisco de León, until now your Majesty's faithful vassal, has been made over by the Government into a renegade of justice addicted to disobedience; . . . he will be a rebel powerful enough to establish a principality here, a principality whose main strength will consist in the liberty of black slaves and Indians who will come here from the surrounding provinces and from the nearby islands, and even religion and the Catholic faith will be shaken.^[21]

For his part, León decided that his original objective, the expulsion of the Guipuzcoana Company, could now be accomplished only by accepting the role of rebel that Castellanos had cast upon him by leaving Caracas. The intense antagonism felt by León and those who followed him can be seen in a statement made by the reluctant rebel leader in response to the warning that he and his men were about to commit a serious crime of lese majesty by attacking La Guaira. As the lieutenant governor Aguirre recalled in his letter to the king, León had said:

All that was lacking was for us to be accused of treason and rebellion, for His Majesty is ruining the settlers of this Province by giving it over to the Vizcayans [i.e., the Basque Guipuzcoana Company, the Basque governors and their subalterns] as if they were its conquistadors, although in truth there is nothing left to give them but our very wives, for everything else is already theirs, the settlers of the province now work and cultivate the provincial lands for them, lands that we had cleared at our own expense and with our own sweat.^[22]

In late July 1749 León issued a call to his supporters throughout the province to assemble in Caracas in preparation for an attack on La Guaira, which was set for August 1.^[23] In response to this summons to arms at least 5000 isleños and other rural residents of the province converged on Caracas, then a town of about 18,000 people.^[24] Many of the elite traveled the same roads but in the opposite direction, taking refuge on their haciendas in the countryside, while others of similar social station sought sanctuary in the cathedral from what they believed was imminent war. The rebels were deployed on the La Guaira road on August 2, and on the night of August 3 artillery stationed in the plaza of the La Guaira fortress and in the Guipuzcoana Company factory exchanged fire with León's advance troops, which had reached the outskirts of the port town. Neither side suffered casualties however. La Guaira was well defended by several hundred royal and Company troops, who had as reinforcements militiamen from coastal towns and loyal Indians from coastal villages. Although the tension of a seige would have made life difficult there, without a blockade of port, which was probably beyond the military capacity of the rebels, the town could have been supplied by sea for an indefinite period. Rather than attempt a certainly costly assault of uncertain outcome on the fortress, after several days of posturing on the perimeter of

La Guaira and having proved that he was fully committed to his cause, León began negotiations with Castellanos.

The governor made several promises, most of them similar to those he had made earlier in Caracas, and all of them subject to the secret disclaimer he had signed the day before his encounter with León in the Plaza Mayor. The administrative personnel of the Guipuzcoana Company, who had been quietly allowed to return to La Guaira, were again banned from the province and the monopoly was suspended until the king and his ministers heard the colonists' complaints and had resolved the problems surrounding its operation. In the meantime, debts owed by colonists to the Company were recognized as payable and due. For his part, Castellanos promised to return to Caracas in as short a time as possible.

In exchange, León opened the road to Caracas and disbanded his men. Claiming victory, he returned to the isleño barrio of Candelaria to await further developments. The show of force in La Guaira was the limit of the violence exercised against the state by León and his followers. They had given over their protest in favor of armed insurrection, their attack on La Guaira was indeed a serious crime, most certainly an act of treason. Still, no one had died, and both the objective and the general tenor of the event remained one of protest, not rebellion. Perhaps León believed at this point that his behavior would be vindicated now that his complaints about the Guipuzcoana Company and the Basque governors were sure to be heard.

Royal Reaction

The gravity of the situation as it was perceived by royal authorities is reflected in the immediate response it evoked from administrative centers in the Indies and in Spain. The Caracas cabildo had informed the Audiencia of Santo Domingo of events in July 1749, after Castellanos had left the city and the threat of hostilities by León raised the protest to the point of open rebellion. On August 21, three ships arrived at La Guaira with troops sent by the governor and captain-general of Santo Domingo. Accompanying them was don Francisco Galindo Quiñones y Barrientos, oidor of the audiencia, who had been charged by the court to pacify Caracas

and then to hear the complaints of the cabildo and Juan Francisco de León. The actions of León and his compatriots, encouraged and supported as they had been in secret by the Caracas elite, would now be answered by the king's justice. Although this is exactly what they sought in what had become a desperate struggle with the Company, the severe judgment they received offered nothing to the Leonist rebels, and very little satisfaction for the local elite.

The atmosphere in Caracas was one of relief, as the judge Galindo demonstrated both concerned and impartial royal justice. A formal inquiry was begun, and the complaints of all parties were heard. It was not immediately evident, however, that the fundamental purpose of Galindo's mission was to secure the peace while a lasting solution to the problems could be decided upon in Spain. Word of the impending trouble had been dispatched to the Council of the Indies as soon as the frightened Company factor appeared in La Guaira, while León was still camped at Tócome. Months later, when the Council heard that rebels had taken the road to La Guaira and armed confrontation appeared unavoidable, it was decided that a substantial royal force should be sent to the colony, and in late October two warships with twelve hundred men departed Cádiz for the Venezuelan coast. These men were under the command of don Julián de Arriaga, former Chief of Squadron of the Real Armada, whose military mission to return the province to order was coupled with a commission to replace Castellanos as governor.

On November 28 Arriaga's troops disembarked at La Guaira. Galindo left the colony to return to Santo Domingo. In Caracas, rumors ran rampant: the soldiers had been sent by the Guipuzcoana Company without the knowledge of the king; they were royal troops, but they had been sent to forcibly reestablish the Company; they had come to punish, not only León and his mob for rebellion, but the entire Caracas community for disobedience to the royal will. Further, some believed that León intended to use force if necessary to stop the new governor on his way to Caracas. As it turned out, to inspire confidence and to impress the colonists with his valor, Arriaga made the trip from the port to the capital with only a few soldiers of his personal guard, and he reached Caracas without incident on December 6. He called on León to present his case on December 10, and, after hearing him out, Arriaga gener-

ously pardoned the isleño leader and his followers for all that had taken place.

Then, in groups of six and eight, royal soldiers began to arrive in Caracas, ordered there from La Guaira by the new governor. Arriaga addressed an anxious cabildo, informing the elites on the town council that he did not intend to restore the Guipuzcoana Company by force of arms as they feared. But he emphasized the point that continued existence or extermination of the Company was a royal prerogative, and that he was in the province both to restore order and gather information about the Company so that is abuses could be corrected in the event that the crown decided it should be reinstated. Its own worst fears resolved, the cabildo carried its protest of the military presence no further, and Arriaga brought most of his remaining soldiers to Caracas. As they patrolled the streets, the governor's troops had an occasional encounter with small groups of protesters, and they were greeted with shouts of "Viva el Rey y fuera la Compañía " wherever they went, but the peace was maintained.^[25] In the countryside, however, the presence of the royal army in Caracas was understood to mean only one thing—the imminent reestablishment of the Guipuzcoana Company and the Basque domination of both society and economy. Believing that Arriaga's military strength had caused the urban mantuanos to lose their nerve, fearing that Arriaga had tricked them and was waiting for the right moment to invite the Company back, Juan Francisco de León and his lieutenants once again called on their supporters to demonstrate their implacable opposition to the Basque monopoly.

In response to this call, two different groups converged on Caracas in late December 1749. The first to arrive were León and his compatriots from the Tuy region. They met Arriaga's troops on the outskirts of the Candelaria barrio on Christmas eve. They had come to demonstrate, not to fight, but the governor threatened to order his men to fire unless León came forward alone to present his complaints. After prevailing in a heated discussion with his lieutenants, who urged him to withdraw if they could not make their show of strength, León and only his closest aides went to the governor's palace to denounce the Company and to make their appeal for its continued removal from the colony. Face to face with a disciplined armed force, León had in fact backed down. Standing

in the central plaza, surrounded by royal soldiers and the Caracas elite, he claimed that he and his men had come in opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company, not to the crown, and he asked Arriaga to forgive the threatening nature of their demonstration. Arriaga was quick to offer a pardon to everyone involved, but a humiliated León was obliged to kneel before him and ask for it, and to remain on his knees for half an hour while the pardon was read from the four corners of the plaza around him.

The next day a second band of more than three thousand men, residents of the haciendas and settlements along the banks of the Aragua River to the west and south of Caracas, halted its march on the city when word was received that León had conceded to Arriaga and had disbanded his followers after asking forgiveness for the rudeness of their protest. On January 2, 1750, the subdued Aragua men, having also abandoned the idea of a show of force, asked and received permission from the governor to send their representatives to Caracas with written complaints about the Company's misdeeds in the Aragua Valley.

Julián de Arriaga had accomplished the pacification portion of his instructions by the first months of 1750. But it was evident to everyone that peace was possible only as long as the Company remained suspended from exercising its monopoly privileges, and the fear that these privileges would be forcibly restored meant that the potential for renewed insurrection was always present. The suspension remained in effect, and months passed while memorials denouncing the Company and position papers in defense of the actions already taken were prepared by the Caracas cabildo and by the Tuy and Aragua Valley dissidents. These documents lacked the stridence and determination of the petitions and letters sent to Castellanos the previous spring. In place of the demands to dismantle the Company and put its employees aboard the first available ship at the La Guaira wharf there were now requests for reforms of specific Company policies. León studiously addressed problems such as the low price paid for cacao and the harmful impact of the alternativa (see chap. 6) on the Veracruz trade. He denounced Company administrators for failure to comply with the conditions of their royal charter, but no longer did he question the legitimacy of the monopoly itself. His protest made, León turned his attention to Panaquire and his neglected arboledas de cacao .

The Caracas cabildo repeated the view that the Company had caused great damage and discomfort, adding that the many just complaints that had been duly registered with the king's representative in the colony were never heard in Spain because the recent governors of the province, in particular the Basques Lardizábal and Zuloaga, had exercised a despotic rule, suppressing all criticism. But the cabildo was mostly concerned with assuring Arriaga that the council and the town's elite had been consistently loyal, despite the vociferous support they had given León when he first demanded the expulsion of the Company. They were sure that the protest they had supported was in harmony with the royal will in such circumstances, and a royal decree issued by Philip V in 1715 was quoted to the governor to prove their point:

It is my will that . . . the Governments in my Kingdoms not only support me in what is convenient and necessary to maintain complete Christian liberty, but also that they object to my resolutions, that they do so always when (because I have not taken them under consideration with full knowledge of the facts) it is judged that they are contradictory in any way, protesting to me before God that it is not in my best interest to use the authority that God has been served to place in me.^[26]

Arriaga's policy of entertaining the petitions of the Caracas cacao growers successfully diverted the widespread antagonism toward the Company from direct confrontation to a paper war waged by scribes and copyists. In this temporizing, however, the planters remained firm in their insistence that the Company not be restored to its previous status. A stalemate had been reached, at the expense of the Guipuzcoana Company. During the tumultuous year 1749, four Company ships arrived in Spain with more than 22,000 fanegas of cacao, a typical quantity for a single year. Much of this cacao, like the 8302 fanegas brought on the San Joseph to Cádiz in December, were beans that were already in warehouse storage at La Guaira when the troubles began. Thereafter, Company business came to a standstill.^[27] This was a situation that the king could not allow to continue indefinitely, particularly after reports were received from a royal agent in Holland which provided evidence that smuggling between Caracas and the Dutch island of Curaçao had become suddenly vigorous as contrabandistas effectively replaced the Guipuzcoana Company as the colony's primary commercial carrier.^[28]

The first reports from Governor Arriaga in Caracas to the Marqués de la Ensenada, then foremost minister in the government of Ferdinand VI,^[29] were written in January 1750, just after the protests of Tuy and Aragua planters had ended short of armed confrontation. Arriaga classified the rebels' view that they had not challenged the sovereignty of the king in their protests as ignorance or sophistry, but he reported that he had found no proof that the elite of the region had participated directly or indirectly in the December marches on Caracas or in the action against the fortress at La Guaira the previous August. The governor also informed the Council of the Indies that in his opinion many of the complaints of both elites and rebels were justified. In a copy of a letter he had sent to the Company, Arriaga showed the Council that he had pointed out to the directors of the Basque enterprise that the abuse of their monopoly privilege to set prices and their insistence on the alternativa rule (see chap. 6), which meant that every second ship loaded at La Guaira could be a Company ship, had resulted in a critical disruption of the cacao trade. Arriaga believed that planters were understandably reluctant to give up their traditional right to ship on their own account to New Spain and accept the low prices offered by the Company. The logical result was that the Company ship at the head of the alternativa line was loaded very slowly, while other, privately owned, ships were forced to wait until more desperate sellers came forward to do business with the Guipuzcoana agents. This policy constricted trade so much that planters whose storehouses were overflowing with cacao beans "found it necessary to sell their cacao while it was still in flower," for no profit at ruinous low prices. Arriaga tried to make it clear to the directors that, while of great immediate benefit to the Company, by 1749 this squeeze on the cacao producers had reached the point where the province was at the point of being "so ruined that no one would be able to buy from them even a sombrero."^[30]

Repression

From his vantage point in Madrid the Marqués de la Ensenada saw no reason to share Arriaga's balanced view. It is likely that his response to the events in Caracas was colored by his concern with important changes that were taking place in the empire as a whole.

Ten years of war with England, the War of Jenkin's Ear, had come to an end with the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. During the first months of 1750, at the same time as the Arriaga reports from Caracas were placed before him, Ensenada was meeting in the Council of the Indies with ex-colonial ministers, economists, and merchants with experience in the Atlantic trade. Deeply concerned about European competition for the products of their American colonies, these men favored a conservative commercial policy directed from the Council of the Indies, and they argued in support of a return to the traditional fleet system. Firmly opposed to independent trade of the sort carried between Caracas and Veracruz, they were eager to see the resumption of the Guipuzcoana Company. They also favored the permanent elimination of the contract with the English South Sea Company, especially the slave asiento, which had been a source of controversy between Spain and England for decades.^[31] In October 1750, a commercial treaty between the two countries formally terminated the contract.^[32]

For most of Spanish America the end of the agreement with the South Sea Company had exclusively commercial importance. It meant, to the great relief of major export and import merchants, both in Spain and in the colonies, that the "annual ship" that the English had been allowed to send to the Indies would no longer sail.^[33] For Caracas, where the slaving aspect of the contract was more important than its commercial features, the abrogation of the asiento had a profound impact, heretofore entirely overlooked by historians, because there were no Spanish suppliers of slaves able to take the place of the English. More than two hundred slaves were sold by the asiento in Caracas in 1739, the last year before hostilities interrupted the trade, but it would be almost fifty years thereafter, when the English would again be allowed to trade in human cargoes with Spain's dominions, before that many slaves would enter the colony in a single year. The decision to eliminate the English contract meant, in effect, that cacao agriculture would increasingly depend on colony-born slaves and, when slavery proved insufficient, on free labor.

In their high-level deliberations in 1750 the Council of the Indies and the king's ministers most likely did not anticipate the difficulties Spanish traders would have in supplying slaves to the few colonies, like Caracas, which depended on them. Although several

of Ensenada's advisors were familiar with Caracas, there is no evidence that they foresaw the major transformation of the colony's labor base which an end to the English asiento implied.^[34] Similarly, there is nothing in the correspondence between the marqués and his counselors which suggests that they decided to take severe measures against the rebels of Caracas for any reason other than the most obvious one, that the Leonists had presented an armed challenge to the authority of the monarch. Yet it was known in Spain that in the Caracas province there was an abundance, for some an excess, of Canary Islanders, a people often seen as both contentious and lazy when viewed through the distorting filter of ethnic bias common to many peninsular Spaniards. Although it was not an articulated objective of the policies adopted for Caracas in 1750, it is plausible that Ensenada believed that any shortages of African slaves in the Caracas cacao groves caused by the end of the English asiento would be made up by free, especially free isleño, labor. Such an idea would have been doubly appealing, for by ending dependency on trade with the English for slaves, gainful employment would be provided for the colony's abundant Canary Islander immigrant population.

Whether or not this fundamental change in the nature of cacao labor was a conscious goal of the king's ministers in Spain, many of the Canary Islanders in Caracas did indeed view events there as purposefully directed at them. Beginning with the low prices of the 1740s, isleños like Juan Francisco de León and his sons could see their hopes of becoming slaveholders and hacienda owners in their own right diminishing, and they could begin to imagine a future in which they would labor, not on their own cacao arboledas, but as wage earners on the haciendas of the established Caracas elite instead. It was in opposition to this disturbing prospect that they had become willing to carry their protest to the edge of insurrection and beyond. In a letter written in 1751 to convince a canario compatriot of the need to join his father's cause, Nicolás de León wrote that the Basques were "trying to make slaves of all of us." He most likely meant "slaves" quite literally.^[35]

Several of Ensenada's advisors recommended a policy for Caracas that continued the attitude of clemency begun by Arriaga, but in the end those whose counsels he followed argued for a much more forceful course of action.^[36] This hard-line position favored

restoration of the Guipuzcoana Company as well as the arrest and punishment of the rebels and those who had encouraged them in secret. Three of Ensenada's advisors who favored repression had previous administrative experience with Caracas. One was Gabriel de Zuloaga, governor in Caracas from 1737 to 1747. Zuloaga was no friend of the Tuy Valley cacao planters, and during much of his term as governor he had carried on a determined legal battle with the isleños of Panaquire, questioning the legitimacy of their right to establish a church and permanent settlement on the site where they had planted their haciendas. Zuloaga angered mantuano and more modest immigrant hacendados alike with his firm resolve that to prevent seaborne smuggling all cacao harvested in the Tuy had to reach La Guaira by way of Caracas, that is, by muleback over the expensive and sometimes impassable overland routes.

So disliked was this Basque governor that lively rumors circulated early in 1745 to the effect that a conspiracy had been formed to rid the province of both him and the Guipuzcoana Company. After León's rebellion, Zuloaga could see no reason not to use force to put Caracas in its place, and he argued that a temporizing policy would only encourage future uprisings. He suggested that a demonstration of royal authority would impress and subdue his former charges, for the typical Caraqueño, he derisively claimed, was timid and cowardly. Referring to the rumored plot to kill him in 1745, Zuloaga reported that he had taken up the challenge and gone to a designated spot "alone, with a friend and lackey, and never did they dare it." He thought that two hundred soldiers would be enough to control the entire province.^[37]

The second voice in favor of major reforms for Caracas was that of don Sebastián de Eslava, first viceroy of the viceroyalty of New Granada after its resurrection in 1739, and a contemporary of Zuloaga in the Indies service. Eslava, who had served as viceroy for nearly a decade, had been Zuloaga's immediate superior from 1739 to 1742, when Venezuela was part of the New Grandad viceroyalty. During those years Governor Zuloaga had struggled successfully to separate Venezuela from the administrative authority of Santa Fe de Bogotá. In his arguments at the time Zuloaga gave free rein to his limited opinion of the people he governed: given "the genius for intrigue of the natives of the Province of Venezuela," he wrote to the king, if their governor were to have his author-

ity and freedom of action limited by the distant viceroy, it would "encourage them to carry on with even greater freedom their impossible notions."^[38] Whether Eslava accepted Zuloaga's evaluation of Caraqueño attitudes is not known, and he did not have Zuloaga's direct experience with Caracas, but in 1750 Eslava was both a war hero and the most senior colonial administrator with experience on the Spanish Main,^[39] and his opinions therefore held considerable weight with the Marqués de la Ensenada, who solicited them on behalf of the Council of the Indies.

Eslava believed that a demonstration of the king's military strength was needed in Caracas, but his lack of firsthand knowledge of the province spared him the animosity that recent governors held for the Caracas elite, and the objectivity this afforded him may have been the source of Eslava's original and most important contribution to the high-level debate over the problems in the colony. He believed that there was no natural or lasting bond between the first-family planters of the colony and the low-class and contentious isleños, and he argued that it would be possible to gain the loyalty of the elite if the Guipuzcoana Company were made more Caraqueño and less Basque. To a certain extent this could be accomplished by a change in the Company's image, and Eslava suggested that the name of the enterprise be changed from the Real Compañía Guipuzoana de Caracas to simply the Compañía de Caracas . It would also be necessary to alter the structure of the monopoly somewhat, and Eslava proposed to Ensenada that, once the province had been pacified, the principal hacienda owners among the Caracas elite be encouraged to become shareholders and even members of the board of directors of a reformed Company. As a model he suggested the Havana Company, founded in 1740 to handle the export of Cuban tobacco, which had been organized to allow for the investment of Cuban capital, and he noted that Havana planters were satisfied with the commercial profits they received from their tobacco. In due course Eslava's proposal proved to be a successful strategy for Caracas as well.^[40]

The last of Ensenada's advisors who was both personally familiar with Caracas and in favor of a strong royal response to the turmoil there was Antonio José Alvarez y Abreu, Marqués de la Regalia. His first career assignment as a young man brought him to Caracas in 1715, and his activities in 1721 to help enforce the author-

ity of the viceroy of New Granada involved him in Caracas's most important political struggle of the early eighteenth century. Although he was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, Islas Canarias , in 1688, Alvarez y Abreu was no canario commoner. From the convent of San Agustin in Tenerife he went on to graduate as bachiller from Salamanca in 1707, and in 1711 he received the licentiate in Madrid. In 1714, the young letrado was given a commission in a post newly created by order of Philip V, the Alcalde Visitador de la Veeduria General del Comercio entre Castilla y las Indias . The primary responsibilities of this office were to uncover individuals involved in contraband trade and to observe in secret the behavior of royal officials, including the governors. Associated with these duties Alvarez y Abreu was given broad powers to investigate and to arrest those he suspected of smuggling, fraud, or disoyalty to the new Bourbon regime. His authority was superior to that of the governors, and viceroys were required to give him their assistance. He was also commissioned to recommend goods and produce that would be best traded to and from the colonies, and to make suggestions for policy both for the better execution of royal justice and for the increased benefit of the royal treasury.^[41]

Alvarez y Abreu arrived at Caracas in February 1715. Ostensibly there by appointment of the bishop to serve as professor of law in the Colegio Seminario de Santa Rosa de Lima, a post that gave him the distinction of being the first law professor in Caracas (the Colegio de Santa Rosa would become the Universidad de Caracas in 1725), in fact the position was primarily a cover for Alvarez y Abreu's secret mission to observe commerce and the king's administrators. In April 1716 he married a widow, doña Teresa de Bertodano, daughter of the governor of the province, don Alberto Bertodano y Navarra, a decision that no doubt limited Alvarez y Abreu's impartiality as much as it served to protect the interests of his new father-in-law.^[42]

The events of the next several years would thoroughly enmesh the alcalde visitador in local politics and society. Bertodano became governor of Puerto Rico in June 1716 and was replaced in Caracas by don Marcos de Betancourt y Castro, like Alvarez y Abreu a native of the Canary Islands. In 1718, the province of Venezuela was transferred from the executive authority of Santo Domingo to the new viceroyalty of New Granada, and in 1720 two agents of the

viceroy arrived in Caracas from Santa Fe de Bogotá to carry on the war against contraband commerce. These jueces comisionarios , the Basques Pedro Martín de Beato and Pedro José de Olavarriaga, accused governor Betancourt of abetting the smuggling, and in quick response to their recommendation the viceroy in Santa Fe, don Jorge de Villalonga, ordered that Betancourt be imprisoned in the Caracas jail. Alvarez y Abreu was named his temporary replacement, but this caused much resentment among the local elite, for it violated the traditional preogatives of alcaldes ordinarios of the Caracas cabildo to execute the responsibilities of the governor in his absence. Threats of fines and military intervention forced the Caraqueños's compliance, and from March to December 1721 Alvarez y Abreu served a short term as interim governor. He was then replaced by a new, permanent magistrate, Diego Portales y Meneses, who, as was seen earlier, began with the support of most of the Caracas citizenry in what would be a bitter struggle with viceroy Villalonga by jailing Beato and Olavarriaga and expelling the alcalde visitador, Alvarez y Abreu, from the colony.

Upon his return to Spain, Alvarez y Abreu continued what would be an impressive administrative career. In recognition of his legal talent and his efforts in the area of commerce and commercial revenue, he was granted the title of Marqués de la Regalía in 1726. Before the end of the decade he was oidor in the Casa de Contratación in Cádiz. By 1730 he was a minister of the Council of the Indies, and in 1732 he assumed responsibility for the asiento de negros , held by the English, which he had witnessed personally during its initial years in Caracas. At the time of the outbreak of rebellion in Caracas he had risen to the position of dean of the Council of the Indies, and it was in this capacity that he responded to the request of the Marqués de la Ensenada for information about the Guipuzcoana Company and the Caracas tumult: "In all centuries and all nations experience has shown that no insurrection . . . has been pacified by suave means," he wrote. The Caracas cabildo was following a strategy common to insurrectionists, namely to conceal their rebellious objectives with the argument that their just complaints had been kept from the king by corrupt and deceitful ministers. The Prince of Orange had used this tactic until he launched the Revolt of the Netherlands against Philip II in 1581.

The Marqués de la Regalía also argued that it was common for

nobles to urge the plebeians of their dominions to take up arms for causes that were of principal benefit to the nobility. to illustrate this point Alvarez y Abreu used an example from contemporary history, one that was no doubt fresh in the minds of his fellow councilors and their king. The war in Italy had been the major diplomatic interest of Philip V during his last years, and Ensenada himself, as secretary to the king's son the Infante Felipe, had played an active part in the campaigns, especially the conquest of the Duchy of Savoy, which he directed in 1743. In December 1746 the Republic of Genoa, allied with Spain but then occupied by the Austro-Sardinian enemy, rose up against its foreign oppressors in a popular struggle that was understood to have begun when a boy threw a rock at an Austrian soldier. It was also understood that the battle that liberated the Italian republic was inspired by the Genoese elite, but carried out, with considerable loss of life, by the commoners. This was a comparison that Alvarez y Abreu knew Ensenada would appreciate, and he arrogantly wrote that were the Caracas elite "better educated people," he would accuse them of consciously following the example of the Genoese gentry by inciting León and his followers among the provincial rabble to revolt.^[43]

The marquis Ensenada, ex-governor Zuloaga, ex-viceroy Eslava, and ex-governor and minister Alvarez y Abreu were all in agreement on two points: first, force should be used to bring Juan Francisco de León and the visible rebels to obedience, and second, in order to punish the elites who were the surreptitious authors of the uprising, the institutions and symbols of Caracas's prestige and authority, the officer of governor, the bishopric, and the university, should be transferred to Valencia, a much smaller town of markedly inferior status.^[44] There would be second thoughts about stripping Caracas of its provincial importance, but the decision to use force against León was ordered by the Marqués de la Ensenada to proceed without reservation. Precise instructions were written for the man selected by Ensenada to replace Arriaga as governor and to finish the pacification of Caracas, Brigadier General Felipe Ricardos.

Ricardos had served in the Italian dynastic wars of Philip V and had been promoted to brigadier in 1741. His promotion may have been related to his marriage to the daughter of the Duke of Montemar, who led Spain's armies in the reconquest of Orán from

the Moors in 1732, and who became military commander of Spain's Italian army from 1733 until 1742. So brilliant was Montemar's performance that he was given the Order of the Golden Fleece for his actions in North Africa and the title of duke, the status of grandee, and a large pension for his successes in Italy. The accession of Ferdinand VI in 1746 had marked the end of dynastic adventurism abroad, and two years later the nations of Europe sought to resolve their differences in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. In 1748 the young officer Ricardos was named military governor of the island of Málaga. It was from this post, which must have seemed excessively quiet to him, that this veteran of the recent Italian wars, the son-in-law of Spain's most illustrious soldier, was called in 1750 to restore order and the Guipuzcoana Company to Caracas.^[45] His arrival in May 1751 meant the beginning of a royal military presence without precedent in the history of the town and province.

Ricardos was given precise instructions from Ensenada and he carried them out exactly. With regard to the Company, he was to see that it resumed operations in accord with its original charter. In effect this meant that the alternativa system was abandoned and several ships could take on cargo at the same time, which in turn meant that the colony's cacao planters were free to ship all of their beans to Veracruz on ships other than those of the Company. The only limit to the open trade to Mexico was the responsibility given to Ricardos to guarantee that a sufficient quantity of cacao was sent annually to Spain to meet the demand there. The very controversial matter of the price paid for beans was resolved by arranging for the price to be set every year by a committee comprised of the governor, a regidor of the cabildo, and the Guipuzcoana Company factor.

With regard to the rebels and architects of the rebellion, Ricardos was ordered to arrest Juan Francisco de León and his sons and to send them to Spain. This was to take place even if León offered no new resistance to the reestablishment of the Company. Several members of the Caracas gentry who were known to have encouraged the insurrection, Juan Félix Blanco, Miguel Blanco Uribe, and Juan Nicolás Ponte, were arrested and transported to Spain. Other elites to be deported for the same reason, but to no specified location, were the Maestre del Campo Luis Arias Altamirano, his brother Francisco Arias, Pedro Blanco de Ponte, Francisco de Paula

Toro y Istúriz (the second Marqués del Toro), and Francisco Nicolás Mijares y Tovar (the third Marqués de Mijares). Domingo Aguirre del Castillo, lieutenant to governors Castellanos and Arriaga, and Manuel de Sosa Betancourt, isleño archdeacon of the cathedral, were also to be arrested for their support of León. These men were to be apprehended and judgments were to be made against them without any delay or impediment. Finally, the general pardons issued by former governors to everyone involved in the tumult of 1749 were declared to be without effect.^[46]

The easiest part of Ricardos's mission was to secure the submission of Caracas. His troops numbered 600 soldiers and officers, half as many as had come with Arriaga, but many of Arriaga's soldiers had deserted, some of them subsequently joining León's movement.^[47] In contrast, Ricardos's men were experienced veterans of the Italian wars, they were better disciplined and, importantly, better paid. While most of this force was sent in pursuit of León and the other rebels in the valleys of Aragua and the Tuy, Ricardos moved against the elite of Caracas. Within days of his arrival in the town in June 1751 he informed the cabildo that the Guipuzcoana Company was again in operation by royal order.

Charged with fomenting rebellion in Caracas, the Conde de San Javier and Francisco de Ponte, representatives of the town at the royal court, were arrested in Madrid. Then followed the arrests of some of Caracas's foremost citizens. Lieutenant governor Domingo de Aguirre y Castillo, Juan Nicolás de Ponte, and Juan Félix Blanco de Villegas were seized and sent straightaway to Spain. In July Ricardos ordered other heads of gentry households confined to their haciendas in the countryside, a moderate move intended to avoid the backlash that might have occurred had more severe treatment been given them.^[48] As he wrote to Ensenada, Ricardos felt that "by applying themselves to field labor for a time they will improve their estates, help pay for the expenses of the Republic, and forget about the Company and the Province. And then, when things are more stable, there will be no problem in allowing them to return, thus by this prudent means we will prevent complaints and rumors from the younger people (para evitar conversaciones de la juventud )."^[49]

Temporary deportation and imprisonment were the limits of the physical punishment suffered by the Caracas elite. The measures

taken were sufficient for the purpose of reestablishing order, and Ricardos did not want to give the elite further cause to resist the royal authority that he represented. More severe sanctions might have been forthcoming were it not for the fact that it proved impossible to demonstrate direct involvement of prominent individuals in the León protest. Luis Arias Altamirano was the only member of Caracas elite society who was named by witnesses as an active supporter of the insurgency. After his capture Nicolás de León testified that in 1749, when the Vizcayan Martín de Echeverría arrived in Panaquire and challenged his father's authority, Juan Francisco de León had sent him to ask for advice from maestre de campo Arias. On that occasion Arias had counseled Nicolás to tell his father that he should expel Echeverría "and all the Vizcayans who were dominating this land," and that he should march to Caracas and call for the suspension of the Guipuzcoana Company with all the armed men he could gather together.^[50] But Arias, who had been allowed to leave his hacienda and return to his home in Caracas because of a serious illness, died in July 1752, after a year's confinement, and his case was closed by Ricardos, "because he is now being judged by the All Powerful, and in honor of his widow, a señora principal in this city, his many children of tender age, and the honor of his family, which has served the King."

Within a month of the death of Luis Arias Altamirano all of the other elites held under house arrest in Caracas or on their haciendas were freed, for reasons like those given by Ricardos for the release of regidor Pedro Blanco de Ponte: "because no evidence of guilt has been found in his case, . . . and having served a long term in confinement he is in need of rest and recuperation." Those who had been held in Spain were released later, Juan Nicolás de Ponte in September 1752 and the Conde de San Javier and his cousin Francisco de Ponte early in 1753.^[51]

With those of lesser social status Ricardos had no need to use the same moderation. His soldiers hunted Juan Francisco de León for more than six months without success before León and his son, abandoned by supporters both noble and humble and exhausted by the constant pursuit of royal patrols and colonial militiamen, surrendered in January 1752. While León remained a fugitive, Ricardos laid the heavy hand of royal justice on the rebellious province. A dozen men were condemned to death before Ricardos had

been two months in Caracas. The first to die was José Morillo, deserter from the Victoria Regiment of Governor Arriaga and an active León sympathizer, who was captured in Caucagua and summarily executed there by Ricardos's order.

Much more effective for the impression made on public opinion were the executions carried out in Caracas on 3 September 1751. The first sweep through the Tuy in search of León resulted in the arrest of several isleños, blacks, and Indians who had marched with him to Caracas and to La Guaira in 1749. Sent to Ricardos in Caracas, the governor first ordered them to be shot or hanged, and then, deciding that the Indians were "easy to seduce and subject to great imbecility," he reduced their sentence to whipping and eight years of prison. No clemency, however, was shown to Juan "Muchingo," free mulatto; Raimundo Romero, zambo; and Andrés Rodríguez Betancourt, isleño. The Canary Islander met a relatively privileged death before a firing squad and was given an immediate burial, but the two men of color were hung and their severed heads, "as an example and for the embarrassment of the population," were placed on public view, one nailed to the door of the fugitive León's house in the Candelaria barrio, and the other placed on a post along the side of the camino real leading from Caracas to the Tuy.^[52]

Governor Ricardos brought the will of the king before the province's residents with unmistakable clarity. The executions had a shuddering impact on Caracas society; for all the violence that was threatened by the Leonist rebels, no one had died in the demonstrations against the Guipuzcoana Company or in the military action taken against Castellanos and the soldiers of the La Guaira fort. In addition to the house arrest of a dozen elites, scores of other men who had carried arms with León were jailed during 1751. The will to resist the Guipuzcoana, or to protest its presence or even its policies, disappeared from Caracas. Ricardos's only difficulty proved to be the capture of Juan Francisco de León, and this was because, forced to flee with his son and only a few men after a final, desperate attempt to challenge Ricardos and the Company failed, León proved impossible to find in the Tuy region he knew so well. Before he became a fugitive, however, León was obliged to be a rebel one last time.

When Ricardos arrived at La Guaira, León was in Panaquire,

tending his cacao groves. He heard of the arrests and learned that the general pardon given by Arriaga had no validity. He was advised that Ricardos had sent troops from La Guaira by sea to enter the Tuy at its mouth, to proceed upriver, and to take him prisoner. A decision was made to march, as before, to Caracas, and in mid-August about 80 men went from Panaquire to Caucagua, the most populous settlement in the region. Gathering recruits en route from the largest haciendas in the province, some 200 men took possession of Caucagua, disarming the few soldiers stationed there and wounding the teniente de justicia in the process.^[53] In the meantime, the royalist plan to take León by surprise resulted in a surprise for the Spanish force instead. At Boca del Tuy they encountered a Dutch fleet of some seventeen ships which had gathered there to trade in contraband cacao. The Dutch smugglers were operating in close collaboration with Tuy planters and were fully informed about the events in Caracas. Although Holland and Spain were not at war, the Dutch seized and disarmed the Spaniards. Later Ricardos was told that the attitude of the Dutch had gone from hostile to furious (insulting the Spaniards as "Vizcayan dogs" and threatening to throw them into the sea) when it became known that they had come to capture Juan Francisco de León.^[54]

Ricardo's reaction to the news of the Caucagua uprising and the Dutch presence at Boca del Tuy was to prepare for war. All the milita units at his command were ordered to mobilize, all boys and men aged fourteen to sixty were ordered into militia service, requests for additional troops were sent to Havana and Cumaná, and would-be collaborators and accomplices were threatened with capital punishment. The population at large was forbidden "to say or write anything, in either public or private conversation, nor to make any sign or even the most remote form of demonstration against the Royal resolution of His Majesty with regard to the permanence and subsistence of the Company."^[55] When Ricardos's troops reached Caucagua several prisoners were taken, including the isleño González Betancourt and the zambo Raimundo Romero, later executed in Caracas, but León and the other rebels had fled the village before the governor's men arrived.

León's flight took him downriver to the Dutch ships. He stopped first at Panaquire where he gathered money and several of his slaves. All the residents of Panaquire, except one old man and

the priest, fled with León in seven or eight large canoas , arriving at Boca del Tuy on August 24, four days after the rebels had been forced from Caucagua.^[56] One of the Spanish soldiers held captive at Boca del Tuy, a Vizcayan named Martín de Sansinenea, observed the arrival of the flotilla of canoes from Panaquire. He also watched more than thirty canoes move back and forth from the beach to the Dutch ships with hides and cacao, and on August 27 he witnessed six ships with León and his company on board weigh anchor and sail out to sea. Once the insurgents had left, their escape from the Tuy successfully executed according to what he believed was a prearranged plan, Sansinenea and the other Spanish soldiers were released by their Dutch captors and allowed to return to Caracas. Sansinenea told Ricardos that one of the vessels, armed with twelve cannon, was referred to as "León's ship" by the Hollanders because it had been armed and its crew paid for by León.^[57]

León's destination was believed to be Curaçao, the Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela which, together with Bonaire and Aruba, had been held by Holland since the 1630s. Ricardos sent a spy to Curaçao in September, both to look for León and to report on the results of the efforts he was making to stop contraband trading between the Dutch islands and the mainland. Shortly after his arrival in Caracas Ricardos had ordered the destruction of the settlement at the Bay of Chuao, the removal of the huts that had served as homes and a church for the residents, all of whom were believed to be active smugglers. Ricardo's secret agent, one Manuel de Agreda, reported that in Curaçao "the loss of Chuao was sorely felt, because its commerce had been worth thirty to forty thousand pesos in silver a month, [the Dutch] saying that they have lost their Potosí." The agent informed Ricardos that smuggling continued to be active on the islands, that many single- and some double-masted Dutch ships (balanderas and goletas ) manned almost exclusively by Spanish sailors could be observed arriving with Venezuelan cacao, that more than two hundred Spaniards were resident on Bonaire Island, and a similar number made a living by smuggling on Curaçao.^[58] Clearly the suspension of Guipuzcoana Company activities forced by the rebellion of 1749 had not suspended cacao trading altogether, and it is probable that the contraband activity had flourished on the Dutch islands for some time, at least since the early 1740s when the Company began to pay record low prices.

With regard to León, Agreda learned that he had not gone to Curaçao, but rather he had sailed east along the coast from Boca del Tuy and had been put ashore near Píritu, a village near the mouth of the Unare River about seventy-five miles distant from the Tuy.

For the next four months, León and a small band of about thirty men wandered about in the savanna and plains of the Unare Basin, a region designated Píritu by the Franciscan fathers, who had developed a strong presence there. Unlike the Franciscans near Caracas, most of whom were Venezuelan-born creoles who might have had some sympathy for the León cause, the Píritu missionaries were peninsular-born and they rejected the fugitives' request for sustenance, informing instead the authorities who were pursuing them of their whereabouts.^[59] Since Píritu was beyond the jurisdiction of Caracas authorities, belonging to the district of Barcelona, the westernmost part of the Province of Cumaná, Ricardos requested help from the teniente de justicia of Barcelona. Permission was granted by the governor of Cumaná on September 17 and, until the end of 1751, the teniente of Barcelona, Martín de Coronado, searched from hacienda to hacienda and from mission to mission in his district. The trail was always warm. Several rebels and suspected accomplices were arrested, but León was never sighted.^[60]

Three other contingents of soldiers sent on Ricardos's order were equally unsuccessful. Each of the two sent from Caracas, the veteran royal soldiers led by capitán Antonio González and a combined force of Caracas and Aragua militia headed by Sergeant-Major José de Bolívar, was eager to better the other by capturing León, but neither was successful. Equally without result was the effort of Martín de Tovar Blanco, a member of a distinguished Caracas family (he would become the first Conde de Tovar in 1771) and the owner of substantial cattle herds in the region, who was asked by Governor Ricardos to participate in the search.^[61] Then, in December 1751, the manhunt ended as Juan Francisco de León and his son Nicolás decided to surrender and to seek royal clemency.

In a long letter to Ricardos, which he left nailed to the door of the house of the new teniente in Panaquire,^[62] León defended his actions at the same time that he asked the governor to pardon him for them. Nearly everyone in the colony had opposed the Company, he wrote. The people of Panaquire refused to allow him to accept the Company's agent as teniente de justicia there, and he had re-

ceived letters from the entire province asking him to lead the protest against the Guipuzcoana monopoly. In Caracas he had not made any attempt to drive Governor Castellanos from office, and although he had led 8500 men to La Guaira to bring him back, his men had not so much as wounded anyone in the effort. Like everyone else, he had received a general pardon from governor Arriaga, a pardon that was not honored by Ricardos, who arrested even prominent citizens of Caracas. He had determined to march once again in protest to the city when he and his followers were forced from Caucagua by royal soldiers, and he had been running for his life ever since. There was simply no reason, he wrote, "to pursue me like I have been pursued, to have dishonored me, to have taken from me all the fruit of my personal labor, that of my children and my wife, and that of the rest of the poor people of this valley of Panaquire."

He asked Ricardos how he should have attempted to gain redress for the gross injustices of the Basques, "being the Governor vizcayan and tenientes vizcayans and [Guipuzcoana Company] factors vizcayans." León declared that his actions were in resistance to the total and immoral domination that the Basques exercised in Caracas, and he had decided to surrender because he believed Ricardos would not find him guilty of unpardonable crimes. Finally, he declared that he no longer believed that the monopoly had to be removed from the province, it was in fact a good thing, but only if it had no direct hand in the administration of justice in the colony: "And if the Real Compañía is not what they say it is, Your Lordship could reform it, because, if the Company would comply with what it offered our King to do, it would be of benefit to the Province, [but only as long as] none of them are Judges."^[63]

Ricardos had planned to execute León, his son Nicolás, and the other fugitives, "to make the most frightening example of their crimes by hanging them in the public plaza, a punishment and spectacle which would serve as an example to others and reduce everyone to docile obedience." But their voluntary surrender and appeal for mercy made such a demonstration unnecessary.^[64] The governor knew that a public hanging of the repentant isleño caudillo in the plaza had the potentiality of igniting the pacified province into rebellion once again. It may be that León counted on this and saw in surrender a chance to save his life. Regardless,

Ricardos placed León and his son aboard a Guipuzcoana Company ship, the Santa Bárbara , in complete secrecy. The Caracas public had been led to believe that the vessel would sail for Veracruz with a simple shipment of cacao, but in fact it was bound for Spain, its cargo of accused insurrectionaries destined for judgment before the president of the Council of the Indies in Cádiz.^[65]

Governor Ricardos was not content to merely rid the colony of León. He very much wanted to make an example of the popular rebel. On February 5, only days after León turned himself over to the authorities, Ricardos declared that he had requested the king's permission to tear down León's house on the Candelaria plaza, to spread the ruins with salt, and to place a metal plaque denouncing him and his crimes on a post in front of where the house had stood. Permission was granted in July, some months after León had been deported, but the destruction was not carried out until September, after word had reached Caracas of the caudillo's death, reportedly of smallpox, which occurred in August 1752.^[66] A copper placard bearing the following inscription was erected where the house had stood:

This is the Justice of the King our Señor , ordered to be done by the Excellent señor Don Phelipe Ricardos Lieutenant General of the Armies of His Majesty his Governor and Captain General in this Province of Caracas, to Francisco León, owner of this house, for obstinacy, a rebel and traitor to the Royal Crown, and therefore a Criminal. May the destruction and spreading of salt stand to the perpetual memory of his Infamy.^[67]

During the course of the year 1752 Ricardos and Ensenada also determined the fate of the settlement and haciendas at Panaquire. The slaves and cacao property of León, his sons, and others of his followers had been confiscated in August and September of 1751, while the rebels were in Píritu. In his desire to punish and make indelible examples of the potency of the royal will, Ricardos was sympathetic to the king's order, which Ensenada sent to him in September 1752, to destroy Panaquire and to resettle its inhabitants elsewhere in the province. Ricardos waited for more than a year with this order in hand before, in April 1754, he sent the teniente de justicia of Caucagua and a contingent of soldiers to Panaquire to notify the inhabitants that they had to leave the valley. Having gained his basic objective of submission to the royal will, however,

the governor preferred not to enforce execution of the king's command. By 1754 Ricardos had probably decided not to drive the isleños from Panaquire, for at the same time he ordered them to move he also wrote to Ensenada that the destruction of the cacao haciendas would be a serious loss to the royal treasury. In September 1754, on the basis of Ricardos's recommendation, the Council of the Indies advised the king that, except for the payment by landowners of a new composición fee to confirm or reconfirm the titles to their property, Panaquire should be left as it was.^[68]

Postscript

The significance of the León rebellion transcends the events of that insurrection. In the first place, the memory of León's deed remained in the Caraqueño consciousness during the second half of the eighteenth century, and it was still potent enough to be brought forward in revolutionary Caracas as an inspirational symbol of resistance. Independence was declared on July 5, 1811, and in the La Gazeta de Caracas of September, 20, 1811, Rodulfo Vasallo, director of public works in the revolutionary town, issued this executive order:

[T]o demolish with all solemnity the post of ignominy that the system of tyranny and oppression raised a half century ago on the plot where the magnanimous Juan Francisco de León had his house, and which has unjustly stained the memory of this caudillo of those valiant men who at that time tried to shake off the hard mercantile yoke which the avaricious and despotic kings of Spain had used to constrain the commerce of these provinces, using for the purpose the swindling Guipuzcoana Company, whose exclusive privileges made Venezuelans groan for more than forty years.^[69]

Obviously the memory had been sustained by the agents of royal authority who had maintained the "post of ignominy" at the site of León's Caracas residence for more than half-century after the 1749 uprising.

From the perspective of the colonists the warning in the Candelaria plaza had several meanings. It was a constant and probably frightening reminder of the personal grief that an angry monarch could cause his disobedient subjects to suffer. The salt spread on the lot where his house had stood gave León's actions the symbolic

quality of sin; and the destruction of his home meant more than simply the removal of his family from the Caracas community. The post and its plaque evoked another, no less disturbing memory: the nailing of a mulatto's head to the door of León's house in 1751. In this case the meaning of the message was double. A gruesome death awaited people of color who would follow whites in insurrection, and to lead such people would result in the most public humiliation imaginable. The black man's head hanging on the door of León's home made it horrifyingly clear that black obedience to white authority could not be misused to challenge the authority of the king. To people of color this symbol must have had the additional effect of making them question the allegiance owed to lowerclass whites. For Canary Islanders and other such whites, the racial consequence of León's error was the burden of having their authority over blacks placed in doubt by the crown.

The most significant result of León's rebellion was not manifest in the message of the Candelaria post. But with no less clarity the events of 1749 exposed the limits of the social bonds between elites and countryfolk like León. Those who knew the internal history of the uprising knew that it was rooted in the frustrated ambitions of immigrant isleño cacao farmers who had hoped to follow the Caracas tradition and become owners of prosperous haciendas and many slaves. They knew also that in its initial phase the rebellion had received the support of many of those elites whose success as cacao planters in the seventeenth century had established this tradition, and they knew that the same elites had abandoned the movement when it became more than a demonstration of discontent.

They could also recall that the repression engineered by Ricardos had been more harsh for members of the lower orders, who were executed and exiled, than it was for the elite, who were merely confined to their estates. Finally, people knew that during the years following the uprising the foremost families of Caracas established a modus vivendi with the crown and the Guipuzcoana Company that allowed them to maintain their accustomed wealth and status. At the same time, the middle stratum of the colony saw its lifestyle decline from that of having the chance to become hacienda owners on the Tuy frontier to that of choosing between vagabondage or wage labor on the haciendas of others. Those whose social station was similar to that of León before 1749 most likely

looked upon the Caracas elite with some resentment or anger during the subsequent decades. That the split between the mantuanos and these folk had become permanent was reflected in the fact that many isleños and the rural proletariat in general fought on the royalist side in the Caracas insurrection of 1810. From this perspective, the decision of the mantuano revolutionaries in 1811 to destroy the marker at León's residence was indeed designed to evoke the memory of the rebel in the name of independence, but it may have also been a gesture calculated to close the gap between the elite and those of the lower orders which had first become evident half a century earlier. For many of the decendants of León the gesture was a hollow one, and they chose to remain loyal to the king.