6—
The Protest of the Caracas Elite

Not all Caracas mantuanos were vociferously opposed to the Guipuzcoana Company. This observation stands against the standard view of a monolithic planter class united in opposition to the Company, a view which may have originated in the communitywide support given to León upon his first arrival in Caracas in 1749. Such an image was certainly the one projected by those who wrote protest memorials to the king and the Council of the Indies during the years immediately preceding 1749, and to the indiscriminating eighteenth-century counselor or twentieth-century historian the long list of elite signatures appended to these documents could be taken to mean that virtually everyone of social distinction had spoken out against the Company. The authorities made an effort to identify the leadership of the protest, and the governors identified certain influential individuals with close ties to the New Spain trade as instigators of the agitation. The extent of these leaders' influence, although it was generally taken to be considerable, was never determined precisely. From Madrid, Eslava and other administrators simply perceived a largely undifferentiated elite directorship behind the activities of the Leonist protesters. In the aftermath of the uprising, the preferred treatment given elite activists, so different from the harsh punishments given León and those of more modest social standing, probably reinforced the view in the popular mind of a single, cohesive elite planter class that had first shouted down the Company and surreptitiously supported the plebeian armed protest and then reached a convenient accord with crown and Company. With the exception of certain references given to Ricardos naming individual colonials he might trust,^[1] those mantuanos who might have been Company supporters or sympathizers were not singled out in the eighteenth century, and historians have continued to suppose that all elite Caracas planters worked actively in opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company.

In fact, only certain mantuanos had strong reasons to protest in earnest against the Company, to the point of promoting rebellion if necessary. To distinguish the protesters from the remainder of foremost Caracas citizenry, and then to understand better why they might have been moved to act as they did, is to see that the policies of the Guipuzcoana Company aggravated and accelerated but did not create the critical juncture that these elite planters had reached before 1750. Once the midcentury crisis of the Caracas elite has been identified, both the determined nature of the mantuanos' opposition to the Company and the significance of the benefits they received in the outcome of León's rebellion will become clear.

This chapter is comprised of three sections. The first examines the ways in which the commercial strategies of the Guipuzcoana Company upset the colonials' traditional trade practices. Although there is new material presented here, this perspective reinforces the customary way of seeing these events in that it sets a greedy Company against an oppressed and therefore presumably unified colonial population.^[2] The second section seeks to modify this view and thereby to better understand the complexities of the social setting in which opposition to the Company was formed. To do this it is necessary to distinguish those mantuanos who made visible protest against the Company from those who left no record of their opposition. Protest memorials written during the years immediately preceding the León uprising were signed by only a portion of those who could claim elite status. Identified by their signatures, elite signatories are compared to prominent Caraqueños who did not sign according to the following criteria: size of cacao holdings, length of family tenure in Caracas, Basque parentage, family history of political activism, endebtedness to the Company, and possession of sugar trapiches as an alternative to dependency on cacao. These comparisons lead to the conclusion, illustrated by case studies in the third section, that certain large and expanding, cacao-dependent elite families had reached a critical point in the 1740s. In fact the last years of the decade represent a time of serious crisis for these families, inasmuch as the continuation of their status as elites came to depend on the successful outcome of a desperate, direct confrontation with the Guipuzcoana Company.

The Company and Cacao Commerce

For many years the business of shipping Caracas cacao to Mexico was a simple affair. Anyone with beans could sell them at the current local price to a merchant or directly to a ship's captain or supercargo. An alternative method, preferred by those who could forgo cash payments for their cacao in Caracas, was a practice of shipping by way of what was known as the tercio buque (one-third of the ship's hold). By custom, one-third of the cargo space in every vessel that departed the colony was reserved for the produce of hacienda owners, cosecheros as they are referred to in eighteenth-century documents. A second third was allocated to Caracas merchants for the cacao that they had acquired, and a final component or tercio was reserved for the ship's captain in the name of the owners of the vessel. Once the third part of the hold reserved for them had been filled with cosechero cacao, hacienda owners who still had cacao to ship could sell their beans at current market prices to local merchants or the ship's captain or supercargo. Sales in Caracas provided immediate cash or credit and freed the seller from the risk of losses that could take place on the high seas. But such sales, while more secure, were not nearly as profitable as those made by way of the tercio buque. Caracas cosecheros and merchants shipping by tercio buque had to pay freight charges to the ship's owner or captain and they renounced the right to collect for damages or losses that might occur in transit, but they retained ownership of their cacao until it was sold in Mexico, and this, despite the risks, often meant substantial income.

Within twenty-four hours of the ship's arrival in Veracruz the captain of the vessel was obliged to transfer Caracas-owned cacao to an agent in that port named by the cosechero or merchant. Those who shipped cacao in this fashion had to depend on the reliability of this associate, and often they had to wait for extended periods before the profits from the sale of their beans were returned to them. Frequently, such profits took the form of credits to be drawn on merchants in Mexico or Spain, which meant that many of the elite Caracas cosecheros who utilized the tercio-buque provision functioned much like merchants in that their assets were not always liquid and they were often located outside Caracas. But

the great advantage of shipping cacao in the tercio buque was, of course, that Caraqueños who sold in New Spain could profit from the much higher prices paid for cacao there.^[3]

Until 1721, those who had cacao for export or sale could do business with the agent of any ship that happened to be taking on cargo at La Guaira. In that tumultuous year, to the great disgust of the Caracas citizenry, Antonio José Alvarez y Abreu was named governor pro tem in Caracas by the viceroy of New Granada.^[4] During his short tenure Alvarez y Abreu introduced the alternativa to La Guaira shipping, a system which required that the first ship entering port had to be loaded to capacity before any subsequent vessel could open its hold for cargo. Influential Caraqueños resisted the alternativa, and Andrés de Urbina, owner of more than 50,000 cacao trees and recognized as the mayor cosechero in Caracas, went to Spain to obtain the repeal of the plan. He won his case, and the real cédula issued in favor of his appeal, dated 25 May 1722, would be known to a generation of Caraqueños as the cédula de Urbina .^[5]

The alternativa was intended to attract ships to the carrera de Veracruz by guaranteeing a full cacao cargo for every vessel that might arrive at La Guaira. Although it is not entirely clear what was troublesome about this policy, it could be that it had the effect of retarding rather than expediting shipping. If, for example, Caracas cosecheros wanted to choose their carrier, favoring for instance the Caracas-owned ships of their associates or kinsmen, the alternativa would have obliged them to wait to load their cacao until all ships in line at the La Guaira wharf ahead of the one they preferred had been filled and had cleared port. In any event, thanks to Urbina's efforts, the alternativa was inoperative from 1722 until 1731, when it was reinstated as the rule—but this time it was to serve as a tool in the hands of the powerful Guipuzcoana Company, which was then striving to dominate the colony's cacao trade.

In 1728 a royal license was given to a group of Basque merchants which granted them exclusive rights to bring Caracas cacao to Spain. The Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas , Spain's first royally chartered commercial monopoly company, was created only to provide Spanish markets with cacao, which was to be done by stimulating production and stopping illegal commerce with foreign merchants. In no way whatsoever was the Company to inferfere or

compete with the traditional trade between Caracas and New Spain. This trade therefore remained open as before to anyone who could secure a ship and a cargo. Until 1731 Caracas cosecheros, independent merchants, and shipowners who were not associated with the Guipuzcoana Company continued to ship their own cacao to Veracruz on the basis of direct sales and the traditional tercio buque in vessels that did not belong to the Company. In addition, shortly after the Company's creation, Caraqueños sought to limit its monopoly by arguing that their traditional rights to a third part of the hold of any ship departing La Guaira also included those belonging to the Company. No royal cédula could be found to provide a legal basis for the tercio buque practice, however, and the Company was exempted from granting the customary tercio buque. Caracas residents continued to protest the exception to their traditional right, but as long as there was no infringement on their customary trade with New Spain, most planters and merchants were evidently not much harmed by their exclusion from the transatlantic cacao commerce with Spain.

A serious problem did arise, however, after the alternativa policy was reinstated in 1731. In Caracas the alternativa meant that once a Guipuzcoana Company ship had reached the head of the queue and had opened its hold to take on cargo, cosecheros with beans for market had to either sell their cacao to the monopoly at current prices or wait until others had sold their harvests to the Basques and the Company ship had loaded and departed. Hacienda owners who had traditionally exercised their tercio buque right to transport their harvests to the lucrative New Spain market had no interest in selling to the Company, for by doing so they would forfeit the considerable profit they stood to gain if they sold their beans on their own account in Mexico. As the flow of cacao to New Spain slowed and the resulting shortages in that colony caused Mexican buyers to offer more for Caracas beans,^[6] cosecheros became even less willing to do business with the Guipuzcoana Company. While Company ships stood at the La Guaira wharf taking on but little cargo, with other ships waiting empty behind them, Caracas mantuanos vented their frustration and discontent by making formal objection to royal officials in Madrid. The Caracas cabildo wrote to the crown in 1745 that the time spent waiting to load in La Guaira so slowed the cacao trade to New

Spain that it had become common for a year and a half to pass before a ship could complete the cycle of loading, sailing to Veracruz and back, and passing to the head of the line at La Guaira to be ready to load again. This was true even though the process of loading and unloading could be done in a matter of days and the sailing time from La Guaira to Veracruz was typically less than a month. While the quantity of cacao grown on their haciendas steadily increased, the alternativa very effectively kept the Veracruz trade bottled up in the colony.

A further aggravation came as a result of a policy initiated in 1744 by the Basque governor Zuloaga. In that year a survey was made of all the cacao haciendas in the Caracas province. From this census a checklist was prepared in which each estate was recorded by the name of its owner and by the number of fruit-bearing trees it contained. Zuloaga then determined that each cosechero's portion of all the cacao grown in the province would also be the maximum portion of any (non-Company) ship's tercio buque that the cosechero could fill with cacao. In other words, for example, the Panaquire hacienda of Juan Francisco de León consisted of 15,000 cacao trees in 1744. León thus owned about three-tenths of one percent of the more than 5 million trees counted that year. By Zuloaga's decree León could not load more cacao than three-tenths of one percent of the tercio buque capacity of any ship bound for New Spain. Similarly, the Marqués de Toro, whose 90,000 trees on seven haciendas made him the province's foremost cacao hacendado in 1744, could send a maximum of one and a quarter percent of the tercio buque of any ship carrying cacao to New Spain.^[7]

This policy of allocation, known as the repartimiento por padrón , probably appeared fair on paper, since its ostensible objectives were to give all cosecheros a chance to ship in the tercio buque and to make it impossible for mantuano planters or merchants to buy up all the cacao available, in direct competition with the Guipuzcoana Company, and transport it as their own to New Spain. Yet since in practice the policy made it virtually certain that planters would not be able to ship all of their own cacao in the tercio buque, it was most likely designed to force them to sell some of their beans to interested buyers, in particular to the factors of the Guipuzcoana Company. Since the portions allocated by the repartimiento applied exclusively to the cargo space of each individual vessel, a

cosechero who enjoyed a bountiful harvest might have beans on hand for shipment in La Guaira which exceeded his predetermined share of the tercio buque of any given ship bound for Veracruz. Similarly, if a ship had substantial cargo capacity it could happen that there would be available space remaining in its hold after all interested cosecheros had loaded their portions, but the hacienda owner with beans in excess of his allotment would not be allowed to put them in that vessel's still unfilled tercio buque, and the ship would have to sail only partially loaded. In addition, since the assigned portions could not be accumulated or carried over from one vessel to the next, if a cosechero had too little cacao on hand in La Guaira to fill his portion of the tercio buque on one occasion, he could not expect to make up the difference by receiving an expanded share in a future sailing.

Caraqueños claimed that the repartimiento benefited only the Guipuzcoana Company, and that it was in fact a strategem designed for that purpose by the Basque governor Zuloaga. In 1750 Juan Francisco de León, then in the midst of the full-scale popular movement that had succeeded in temporarily driving the Company from the colony, included the repartimiento in the list of injurious practices that had forced him and his followers to take up arms in protest:

The repartimiento por Padrón , although at first glance it seems to treat all the cosecheros equally, distributing to each one of them a diminutive proportion according to the number of trees that he owns, is actually unfair, because it is certain that there are many [cosecheros] in the province who miss the opportunity to ship cacao [in the tercio buque], either because they are unaware of the opportunity or because they cannot quickly cover the great distance [from their haciendas to La Guaira]. And even those who do ship are not treated fairly by this Padrón , for not everyone is able to send a shipment every time [a vessel is available], and if an opportunity is missed it is impossible to compensate with the next vessel, because on each occasion no one is allowed to load more cacao than his allotted share.^[8]

In the late 1730s and 1740s, the principal opponents of the Guipuzcoana Company and advocates of the customary privileges of the cosecheros were three Caracas noblemen, the Marqués del Toro until his death in 1742, the Conde de San Javier (Juan Jacinto Pacheco y Mijares), and don Francisco de Ponte y Mijares, cousin

to the Conde. These men took their case to Spain, residing at court for several years at a time while they carried on a paper war of major importance for Caracas. Dismissed by attorneys for the Guipuzcoana Company as the self-interested managers of the traditional trade, they nevertheless presented dispassionate arguments that demonstrated for the Council of the Indies the damage done to commerce and cacao agriculture by the Company and the Basque governors who, as its allies, established and enforced the alternativa and the repartimiento por padrón.

The published remonstrances of these mantuanos contain criticisms of the alternativa, the repartimiento, and a third policy that they believed was also designed to redirect the cacao trade away from New Spain and into the hands of the Guipuzcoana Company. They criticized a system of quotas begun in 1734 by governor Martín de Lardizábal in what the governor claimed was an effort to eliminate conflict while retaining the alternativa. Based on an estimated 60,000 fanegas annual cacao production in the province, Lardizábal had determined that 10,000 fanegas should be discounted for local consumption, 20,000 fanegas were then allocated for New Spain and 30,000 fanegas for Spain proper. Once the quota for one destination had been reached, exports were to be directed exclusively to the other market until its quota was achieved. The representatives of the Caracas planters claimed that the quota system was illegal since it in effect deprived them of their right to trade freely with New Spain. Since the Guipuzcoana Company's exclusive right to trade with Spain was always in effect, in practice the quota system meant that once 20,000 fanegas were sent to Mexico, no more cacao could be shipped there until the Company had purchased 30,000 fanegas for shipment to Spain, at whatever price the Company chose to pay. As a further benefit for the Basque monopolists, once both quotas had been filled Lardizábal's system gave the Company permission to sell in the lucrative New Spain market—a direct violation of the Company's charter.

The Conde de San Javier and Francisco de Ponte made their objections to the quota policy in a memorial presented to the Council in January 1746. Rather than accept the quotas and relinquish the benefits of their traditional trade to New Spain, cosecheros simply refused to sell their beans to anyone, preferring to keep them in their warehouses. Far from advancing the productivity and

commerce of the colony, the Company and the Basque governors who favored it had in fact forced stagnation upon the colony. As evidence of this, San Javier and Ponte argued that it was widely accepted in Caracas that annual production had been underestimated at 60,000 fanegas in 1734, and that by 1740 a more accurate figure would have been 90,000 fanegas. Since Lardizábal made his allotments, many new cacao haciendas had been brought to harvest. The entire valleys of Curiepe, Panaquire, and Araguita had begun to produce in the interim, and there had been great expansion in other Tuy valleys such as Capaya, Mamporal, and Caucagua. Yet not once since 1740 had the quota of 20,000 fanegas been sent to New Spain; about 9000 fanegas were sent in 1741, and not even 7000 fanegas went in 1743. Nor had the Atlantic trade to Spain benefited from the system. San Javier and Ponte pointed out that in the decade that had passed since the quotas were established, the Company had been able to fill its allotment only once, in 1740, when 40,000 fanegas were sent to Spain.

According to San Javier and Ponte, the reason why the quotas were not filled, even when there was more cacao in the colony than Lardizábal had estimated, was due directly to the low prices offered by the Guipuzcoana monopoly. San Javier and Ponte offered the council an argument that placed blame entirely on the Company for creating the surfeit of cacao that had accumulated in Caracas, an oversupply of beans that in turn drove prices to record low levels.^[9] Since many cosecheros were unwilling to sell their beans to the Company, the Company ships were filled only very slowly, other ships stood empty at the wharf waiting to load, and the legal export of cacao from the provice came to a virtual standstill. The bottleneck created by the quotas and the alternative caused a dramatic increase in cacao beans planters had stored in their Caracas and La Guaira warehouses, as cosecheros waited for the chance to ship to New Spain. With such an abundance of beans available for sale the local price paid for cacao fell to unprecedented low levels.

There was so much cacao available that many planters had no choice but to sell to the Guipuzcoana Company at ruinous prices. Desperate planters who needed immediate cash for their crop "found themselves obliged to sell their cacao while it was still in flower"^[10] at whatever price they could get for it, which was often as little as seven or eight pesos. This was made all the more disturbing

because in Veracruz, where the demand for beans had come to far exceed the restricted supply coming from Caracas, would-be buyers were offering fifty pesos and more per fanega. In the graphic metaphor of the frustrated cabildo, these constrictive policies had made the legal cacao trade "a throat too small for the vomit of the great stomach that is this province."^[11]

In what was perhaps their most serious criticism, surely designed to attract royal attention to their complaints, San Javier and Ponte hinted that for many colonists in the Caracas province smuggling had become the only viable alternative to this situation. They suggested that it was an ironic, but very disturbing, circumstance that by its avarice the Company had in fact come to foment the illegal trade that it had been created to eliminate. How else except by smuggling, they asked rhetorically, could the great discrepancy between production and exports be explained?

The reduced flow of cacao to New Spain brought other serious problems in its train. New Spain had always been Venezuela's principal source of circulating specie, but with fewer ships arriving with cacao at Veracruz, very little silver coin came back across the Caribbean on their return voyages. Mexican merchants, who had traditionally advanced cash for the purchase of Caracas cacao,^[12] were now reluctant to tie up their investments for as long as two years in a market brought to stagnation. Together the abundance of cacao for sale and the shortage of coin caused prices to come crashing down. San Javier and Ponte pointed out that low prices were ruinous to many other people in addition to cacao planters, especially in Caracas, where the lack of cash made business of all kinds difficult. Even artisans were forced to leave their crafts and take up subsistence agriculture in the countryside. On the haciendas, slaves who ran away or died could not be replaced, and there was no cash to pay wage labor as a substitute. The best that could be done, under the circumstances of torpid trade and low prices, was to "keep the slaves busy, without expecting to get any benefit from them or from one's árboles de cacao ."^[13]

The Guipuzcoana Company made no great effort to counter the specific criticisms directed at it by Toro, San Javier, Ponte, and others. Some resistance to its establishment in Venezuela no doubt had been expected, and perhaps the Company's directors were secure that their royal license guaranteed support. Rather than

answer the colonists' charges directly, Company spokesmen and influential friends of the Company tried to discredit Toro and the other Caraqueño critics by claiming that they argued only on the basis of self-interest. In 1739, an attorney for the Company claimed that the Marqués de Toro and the Conde de San Javier were "the only, or at least the principal merchants, who for themselves, and for their commission agents in Vera Cruz, resist the Company." It was said that these men had dominated the cacao trade for many years and that they denounced the Company for no motive other than the desire to return to a condition in which they had no competitors. In February 1745, the Basque governor Zuloaga questioned the disinterestedness of the Caracas cabildo, which a month earlier had described commerce under the Company and the alternativa as a "throat too small" for the great productivity of the province. Most of the officers elected to the town council in 1745, Zuloaga claimed, were members "of the family Solórzano, which is the family of the Conde [de San Javier]."^[14]

In fact, however, opposition was widespread. Caraqueños of diverse social standing expressed their objections to the alternativa and low prices. The Company's policies and the results of those policies created immediate hardships for many hacienda owners and others whose livelihoods depended on the exchange of cacao for silver coin. These immediate difficulties were all the more intolerable for certain of the colony's oldest and most prestigious families because they threatened to dislodge them from their accustomed positions of privilege in Caracas society.

The Mantuanos' Protest

For several successive generations, in some cases as many as four generations by the 1740s, steadily expanding cacao production had given similarly steadily expanding elite families the means to sustain the level of material wealth and social standing which their ancestors had enjoyed. For these Caraqueños the Tuy River boom of the 1720s and 1730s was only the continuation of a remarkable process of expansion that had gone on without much variation since the 1670s. But there are indications that by the 1740s, especially after the importation of African slaves came to a virtual stop in 1738, the cacao economy could no longer support the expanding

number of people who could claim elite status in the Caracas community by virtue of their illustrious lineage and family name. The fear of downward social mobility does not appear stated explicitly in any of the available sources, but a conspicuous theme in the literature of protest is that the Guipuzcoana Company's policies were harmful to families, and to elite families in particular, especially those that were headed by elderly parents soon to be succeeded by a new generation. The prominent place given to elite widows on many of the petitions drawn up to protest the Company manifests this concern. As bulwarks of the social order, there were no individuals who were more vulnerable or more worthy of royal attention and protection than these women.

In January 1741 the Council of the Indies received a petition protesting the policies of the Guipuzcoana Company signed by "eleven widows, vecinas of Caracas and cosecheras de cacao ." The memorial claimed that the households of these women had haciendas that together produced more than 4000 fanegas of cacao per year, but that they had very little else besides cacao to sell, and that because of the low prices offered by the Company for cacao they had become "indebted and subjugated" to the Basque monopolists. The widows informed the council that the previous years had been ones of great agricultural expansion for the province, that many new haciendas had been created, some of them with credit provided by the ecclesiastical establishment, and that many of these haciendas were now in danger of foreclosure because the price paid for cacao, even at ten pesos the fanega, was not enough to pay what was owed. The Caracas diocese stood to suffer if prices did not rise, for the tithes were reduced and the people had nothing with which to make gifts (limosna ) to the church.

The sale of imported African slaves, so essential to the expansion of cacao agriculture, had become part of the Company monopoly as a result of the war with England and the collapse of the English asiento, but in 1741 there were very few slaves offered for sale and the Company collected "20, 25 and more" fanegas of cacao for each one. Twenty years earlier, the women complained, the same amount of cacao would have purchased as many as three slaves. What was especially galling to the widows was the very different image of itself that the Company projected: "They would make you believe that the Company is the cause of the progress in

the Province, because the people of this city can take advantage of the fact that the Company will buy at a reasonable price all the cacao we can grow, but it is certain that for the most part they do not pay even ten pesos." At this price, the widows' haciendas, despite their productive potential, had become nearly "useless," which was "a great misfortune."^[15]

The price paid for cacao stood at nine pesos the fanega in 1744, and, because it was widely known that the same cacao would bring fifty-two pesos on the Mexican market, the ire of most Caracas hacienda owners reached a critical point. They were angry because they were sure that the alternativa, repartimiento por padrón , and quota policies were designed to allow the Guipuzcoana Company to make excessive profits by keeping the purchase price for cacao far below what it would have been in a free market. In November 1744 many of Caracas's most influential townspeople, describing themselves as "Interested Citizens, both Merchants and Planters," prepared a petition to the king, begging for royal clemency and relief from the Company's exploitative practices. Beginning once more with the town's prominent widows, this memorial bore the signatures of ninety-three people, representatives of most but, significantly, not all of the elite families of Caracas.^[16]

The 1744 memorial is a most useful document, both for the names it provides of those mantuanos who were willing to protest the Company, and for the names of similarly prominent individuals who are conspicuous by their absence from the list (appendix H). Comparison of elite townspeople who protested in 1744 with other mantuanos who did not sign the memorial on the basis of certain pertinent characteristics provides a rather clear idea of the Guipuzcoana Company's impact in Caracas. In the following pages the signatories are first identified by family and the quantity of cacao owned by them is determined. Then three possible reasons for their opposition to the Company, none directly related to the economy or cacao agriculture, are considered: they were members of families with longer tenure in the colony than those who did not sign; their origins were not identifiably Basque; and they were members of families with considerable political influence in Caracas, measured by town council activism, while those who did not sign did not have this activist tradition in their family backgrounds. Next, two factors of an economic sort, debts owed the Company

and the possession of sugar trapiches (sugar sold in the local market was an alternative to the cacao export trade), are used as a test of the financial vulnerability of the memorial signatories. Finally, all of these circumstances are examined in the specific cases of three families, one, the Blanco, who were firmly opposed to the Company, and two, the Bolívar and the Palacios, who either made no complaint or supported the Basque monopolists.

Who Signed

Of the ninety-three who signed, seventy-six (twenty-one women and fifty-five men) can be identified and linked to a reconstituted elite family whose genealogy for several generations is known. These linkages make it possible to construct age and marriage profiles for these people. All of the elite women who signed were unmarried in 1744, eleven were widows, eight others would never marry, and the remaining two would marry after 1744. It is significant that no married woman whose husband was then alive signed the memorial. In clear contrast, most of the men who signed were husbands and fathers; only eight of the fifty-five identified elite men were not then married and would never marry. Of the remaining forty-seven, twenty-four were married and their spouses were also living in 1744, and twenty-three were either widowers in 1744 or single men who had not yet married but would do so subsequently. Although the data is not complete in every case, it is evident that the elite protesters were mature individuals, with an average age in 1744 of 39.0 years for the men (number of cases with known birth date is forty-two of the fifty-five) and 45.6 years for the women (number of known birth dates, nineteen of twenty-one).^[17]

The census of cacao haciendas also taken in 1744 (for the purpose of allocating tercio buque space on the repartimiento basis) makes it possible to determine how much cacao was owned by elite protesters and elite nonprotesters alike. Only half of the seventy-six identified elite signatories were actually owners of cacao haciendas in 1744; in all, thirty-eight individuals, seven of them women, held a total of 781,500 cacao trees on 64 haciendas, or 15.3 percent of the total number of cacao trees (5,102,221) on 11.5 percent of the total number of Caracas-province haciendas (556) according to the

1744 census of cacao estates. The cacao properties owned by these thirty-eight signatories comprised slightly more than one-third of the cacao holdings of all elites. The thirty-eight owned 37.7 percent of all the trees held by elite hacendados in 1744 (781,500 of 2,071,392 elite-owned trees), and virtually the same percentage, 36.8 percent, of the haciendas owned by elites (64 of 174). In general then, the thirty-eight elite cacao hacendados who made formal protest against the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 owned about 15 percent of all the cacao trees then grown in the Caracas province, and they owned about one-third of the cacao trees that belonged to people who were members of established elite families.^[18] It would be in error, however, to suppose that the owners of the remaining two-thirds of elite-owned trees who did not sign the 1744 document were supporters of the Guipuzcoana Company.

Social conventions kept some elite cacao hacendados from signing. Evidently it was deemed inappropriate or unnecessary for women or adult children to put their names on the memorial if they were married or if their fathers were alive in 1744. For example, one woman who did not sign was Ana Josefa Ibarra y Ibarra, owner of 36,000 cacao trees on two haciendas in the coastal valley of Borburata. Her mother, María Petronila Ibarra, who had 14,000 trees in the coastal valley of Patanemo, was one of the widows whose signatures headed the list. Two of doña Ana's brothers signed, one had a small hacienda of 5000 trees in Patanemo, the other owned no cacao. At first glance it is curious that Ana's sister Antonia, who likewise owned no cacao in 1744, did sign, but closer examination reveals that Antonia was also a widow in 1744, and her signature follows her mother's on the list. It turns out that Ana Josefa Ibarra, who held more cacao in her own name than her mother and all of her siblings together, did not protest against the Guipuzcoana Company in her own name, probably because she was married. Her husband, her first-cousin Diego Ibarra y Herrera, owner of 13,000 trees on one hacienda in Borburata, was one of the memorial's signatories. Presumably, even though his wife's cacao holdings were three times greater than his, the signature of Diego Ibarra represented Ana Josefa Ibarra as well.

There were other women whose protests were made by their men. Noblewoman doña María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro Istúriz owned 10,000 cacao trees on the banks of the Capaya River in the

flood plain of the lower Tuy River. Her brother, the Marqués de Toro, with 90,000 trees on seven haciendas, the owner of more cacao than any other individual in 1744, was among the first men to sign the memorial. Her husband, the second Conde de San Javier, was the principal organizer of the campaign against the Guipuzcoana monopoly. The Caracas elite gathered in the house of doña María to put their names on the appeal for help that they would send to Spain, but the condesa did not sign it. José Rada Arias and Isabel Soto Ibarra had married in 1717. He signed the memorial but did not have a cacao hacienda; she had an estate of 8000 trees in 1744 but did not sign. Fernando Rada Liendo married his cousin Josefa Clara Liendo Blanco in 1738. He signed the memorial but did not own a cacao hacienda; she did not sign but was holder of 10,000 trees on the coast upwind of La Guaira. In 1737 Pedro Gedler Ponte also married his cousin, María Jacinta Bolívar Ponte. In 1744 each of them was owner of a cacao estate in the Tuy Valley; he had 10,000 trees and she had 12,000. But while his signature appears on the protest document, hers does not.

This patriarchy of protest was extended to the children of the signatories. In only four cases did representatives of two generations of the same family sign the memorial. In three of these cases the younger signers were the adult children of elderly widows. There was only one man whose name was accompanied by the signatures of his children: don Lorenzo Ponte Villegas, sixty-two years old in 1744, allowed his three eldest sons to sign the memorial. Ponte Villegas was a major cacao hacendado, with 79,000 trees on six haciendas, but none of his children, including the adult sons who signed in 1744, owned cacao haciendas in that year. This was not exceptional. The fact that, with the exception of Ponte Villegas and his sons, adult sons and daughters did not sign the document if their fathers signed reflects the status of these sons and daughters as cacao hacienda owners: in general they had no cacao in 1744. A total of twenty-seven of the fifty-five identified elite men who signed the 1744 document were married or widowed men with living children in that year. Two-thirds of these men had married in the mid-1730s or later and therefore their children were still adolescents in 1744, but nine men had married during the period 1699 to 1728, and most of their children were adults in 1744. Not one of these adult offspring signed the protest statement, how-

ever, and none of them owned cacao property in that year. Unlike their mothers, who did not sign but may have possessed haciendas in their own right, these adult sons and daughters of elite cacao hacendados had neither political voice nor cacao estates of their own while their fathers were still alive.

This all means that the signatures on the 1744 memorial signified determined opposition to the Company, not only on the part of those who actually signed, but also on behalf of the signatories' wives and their offspring, both children and adults. Yet, few of these represented kin had cacao haciendas; only the five wives mentioned above, who held a total of 76,000 trees, can be added with certainty to the names of hacienda owners who spoke out against the Company. There were many other mantuanos in 1744 who did not sign the document and were neither the wives nor the children of those who did. Is it probable that they opposed the Guipuzcoana Company, or should we suppose that they were either its supporters or had simply chosen to maintain a neutral position in the struggle?

An additional six individuals, owners of 187,000 cacao trees on ten haciendas, were most likely allies of those who signed, although they did not themselves sign the protest memorial. Doña Ana Carrasquer Rada was one of the "eleven widows" who wrote to the Council of the Indies in 1741, and her three cacao estates were inventoried in her name during the course of 1744. She died in September, however, before she could sign the memorial, which was written in November of that year. Fernando Aguado Lovera and Miguel Aristeguieta Lovera were hacendados who did not sign in 1744, but when the rebellion began in 1749 they made surreptitious cash contributions to the cause against the Guipuzcoana Company.^[19] Three other hacienda owners might be considered allies because of their close familial relationship with signatories: the widow doña María Ponte Marín, because her brother-in-law signed, as did her son, Pedro Francisco Gedler, a principal organizer of the movement against the Company; Antonio Liendo Blanco, because his brother and sister signed, as did his mother's sister and several of his maternal cousins; and finally, Juan Lovera Bolívar, because his brother signed, may have opposed the Company as well.

Altogether the identified and presumed opponents of the Guipuzcoana Company held more than a million cacao trees, about 20

percent of all the trees bearing fruit in the Caracas province in 1744.^[20] No other person of elite status can be directly or indirectly linked to the protest, which is surprising in light of the fact that historians heretofore have assumed that the local elite was united in its desire to limit or end the Basque monopoly.^[21] Several score planters, many of them much like the outspoken opponents of the Company in terms of their prestige and many generations' presence in Caracas, made no discernible effort to have the Company's control over the colony's economy limited or removed. A total of fifty-eight planters, owners of 722,924 trees on seventy-eight haciendas, have been identified as elite Caraqueños who neither signed the protest letter nor expressed their dissatisfaction with the monopoly in any other form. What were the differences between these two groups of mantuanos which might elucidate why some protested the Company and others did not?

Why They Signed

Deeper Roots?

In respect to the possibility that protesters were from older and therefore more venerable families, perhaps with more at stake therefore in the colony, there was only the slightest difference between those who did or did not sign the 1744 memorial. For the most part all elite cosecheros, consistent with the definition of their elite status, belonged to families that had been resident in Caracas since the seventeenth century. By definition—except in the very unusual case of immigrants who had married into an elite family—all elite hacendados, both signatories and nonsigners, were colonyborn creoles. As a rule the parents of both factions had been born in Caracas as well. At the level of grandparents a modest difference emerges: while fully three-fourths (twenty-nine of thirty-eight) of the elite hacendado signatories knew that all four of their grandparents had been native Caraqueños, a somewhat smaller proportion, two-thirds (thirty-six of fifty-eight) of the elite hacendados who did not sign shared this status of having four Caracas-born grandparents. At the level of great-grandparents the signatories' roots continued strong, since many (sixteen of thirty-eight; 42 percent) of the signatories could find in their family trees that all eight of their

great-grandparents had been resident in Caracas, while those who made no overt protest did not have quite the same long family tenure in the colony. Less than a quarter (thirteen of fifty-eight; 22 percent) of elite planters who did not sign were descendants of eight native-Caraqueño great-grandparents.

The depth of these family roots, when viewed from the perspective of the mid-eighteenth century, meant that for signatories the most recent ancestor to immigrate had typically come to Caracas at least two, and typically three or more, generations before they were born, which meant that in 1744 the last family member to immigrate to Caracas was only a historical figure, never known to them in person. They and their families were truly part of the permanent elite of the town. For those elites who did not sign, although they were all locally born criollos , and although a few of them were members of families such as Bolívar and Tovar that had been in Caracas since the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was somewhat more likely that a grandfather or, rarely, even a father had been an immigrant to the colony. And yet, as conscious as these provincial aristocrats might have been of the tenure of their families' residence in Caracas, the difference in antigüedad between those who signed the protest memorial in 1744 and those who did not sign was slight, not more than a generation on the average.

A Basque Connection?

A second possible distinction between signatories and nonsignatories is that of an affinity for the Guipuzcoana Company based on the Basque origins of some of them. A number of the elite hacendados who did not oppose the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 were of Basque parentage. Three examples will suffice: the father of Feliciano Sojo Palacios Gedler had come to Caracas from Burgos in the 1670s and died in the town in 1703. Don Feliciano had served as alcalde ordinario in 1719, in 1735, 1736, and again in 1744; his son, José de Sojo Palacios Lovera, was born in 1705 and was elected alcalde in 1743. Together father and son owned 57,000 cacao trees on four haciendas; neither of them signed the 1744 memorial. Domingo Rodríguez de la Madrid, born in Santander, immigrated to Caracas and married there in 1664. His son, Andrés Rodríguez de la Madrid

Vásquez, married Germana Liendo Gedler, the granddaughter of Basque immigrants, in 1693. In 1744 don Andrés and his sons, Santiago and Salvador Rodríguez de la Madrid y Liendo, owned 18,824 cacao trees on three haciendas. They did not sign the memorial. Finally, the grandfather of Sebastián de Arechederra Tovar, a Vizcayan, had come to Caracas as royal treasurer late in the seventeenth century. Arechederra's father married Luisa Catalina de Tovar y Mijares, a daughter of perhaps the wealthiest Caracas family, in 1682. In 1729 and 1730, with the cabildo locked in a bitter struggle with Governor Lope Carrillo y Andrade, no elections for alcalde were held and in both years Sebastián de Arechederra was named to the position by the king's representative. In June 1730 the replacement for Carrillo y Andrade arrived at La Guaira aboard the first of the Guipuzcoana Company's ships to sail to Venezuela, and as the new governor disembarked he was received by the alcalde Arechederra.^[22] In 1744 Sebastián de Arechederra and his sister María were owners of 37,000 cacao trees on three haciendas. They did not sign the 1744 memorial.

In general, then, elite hacienda owners whose families were of slightly more recent residence in Caracas, some of whom were of Basque ancestry, did not protest the policies and activities of the Guipuzcoana Company in the years just prior to the 1749 rebellion. And yet, some individuals with deep criollo roots in the colony and no immediate Basque connection did not come forward in outspoken opposition to the Company. Cacao hacendados from several of the colony's oldest families remained silent in 1744: José Bolívar Aguirre, owner of 20,000 trees on two haciendas; sisters Josefa and Teresa Bolívar Arias, with 17,000 trees on two haciendas; the brothers José Domingo, José Manuel, and Fernando Tovar Galindo, owners of 62,500 trees on six haciendas; their cousin Martín Tovar Galindo, whose large hacienda in the coastal valley of Cuyagua contained 24,000 trees; and the brothers Mauro and Antonio Tovar Mijares, who held 27,000 trees on three haciendas. A criollo presence of many generations and no Basque ancestors describes many of the elite who wanted the crown to rescind the Company monopoly; but the fact that there were more than a few mantuanos who fit these criteria yet did not sign the 1744 memorial suggests that other factors may more adequately explain why some mantuanos protested against the Company while others did not.

Political Activists?

One such factor may be a tradition of political activism possibly more characteristic of the families of those who protested the Company than of the families of those who did not. The political history of Caracas during the half-century prior to the rebellion of 1749 was marked by a series of confrontations over the right of the cabildo's annually elected alcaldes ordinarios to administer the province in the absence of the governor. This privilege applied both to short-term absences, for example when the governor left Caracas to inspect the other towns in the province, and also in the event that the governor died while in office, in which case the alcaldes would occupy the post until a successor arrived from Spain. Originally granted by royal cédula to the Venezuelan town of Coro in 1560 and reaffirmed for Caracas in 1676 and again in 1723, cabildo alcaldes exercised the authority of the governor for more than six months in no fewer than eight years during the period 1700 to 1730, the year in which the first ships and employees of the Guipuzcoana Company reached Caracas.^[23] On only one occasion did the cabildo assume the obligations of governor because the holder of the office was physically unable to carry on with his duties: in 1704 it became evident that Governor Nicolás Ponte y Hoyo was mentally unbalanced and the alcaldes replaced him. It was far more common for governors to be removed for political reasons: three of the four governors appointed to the Caracas post after Ponte y Hoyo were charged with malfeasance and forced from office by order of higher royal authority (Cañas y Merino in 1714 by the Audiencia of Santo Domingo; Betancourt y Castro in 1719 by the viceroy of New Granada; and Portales y Meneses in 1723 and again in 1724, also by the viceroy of New Granada).^[24]

In most of these instances, the cabildo's alcaldes did not simply take possession of the governor's office, but rather they were obliged to struggle for the gubernatorial authority against aggressive viceroys and other agents of the centralizing Bourbon monarchy who probably regarded the Caracas cabildo's traditional privilege as excessive. Conflict was especially bitter in the 1720s. Supported by the Caracas bishop, and with backing from influential friends at court in Spain, Governor Diego de Portales y Meneses fought openly with the Caracas mantuanos, who were in turn usually sup-

ported in their opposition to the governor by the colony's new viceregal administrators in Santa Fe de Bogotá.^[25] Tensions generated during this bitter political struggle, discussed in detail in chapter 4, carried into the governorship of don Lope Carrillo y Andrade, who succeeded Portales in 1728. Under Carrillo, the issue was one of red damask parasols, which the cathedral clerics used in formal processions out-of-doors to protect themselves from the tropical sun. The governor found the practice to be excessively vain and lacking dignity, and threatened the churchmen with physical violence when they refused to give up their umbrellas. The regidores of the cabildo made common cause with the clerics, and in protest they refused to attend the New Year's session of the municipal council, with the result that elections for alcaldes ordinarios were not held for the years 1729 and 1730. Governor Carrillo was obliged to appoint alcaldes for these years.^[26]

On the surface these fights may be viewed simply as the petty posturing of provincial aristocrats who were starved for symbols of status, but the rights to act as governor pro tem and to use red parasols were in fact issues of deeper meaning. At stake was nothing less than royal usurpation of customary local authority in the Caracas polity, authority that in the minds of many Caraqueños was naturally theirs to exercise. Jealous of privileges embodied in their town government, the town's political elite showed little patience in matters that seemed to threaten the traditional balance of power in their relationship with the monarch and state. In fact, at the turn of the century, some elites had even been bold enough to question whether the Bourbon Philip of Anjou, victor in the War of Spanish Succession, had sovereignty over the Caracas province.^[27]

Local political sensitivities were directly challenged in a more serious and threatening fashion after 1730 by the activities of two Basque governors. That the first years of the Guipuzcoana Company's residence in the province coincided with a long period of Basque governorship, the administrations of Martín de Lardizábal (1732 to 1737) and Gabriel José de Zuloaga (1737 to 1747) caused many Caraqueños to believe that the governors and the monopolists were conspiring to deny them their traditional authority for the economic benefit of the Company. The long-standing belief of the Caracas elite that the Bourbon state was eager to reclaim local administrative privileges thus merged with a widespread popular

antagonism toward the Company. As a result, the political tradition of protest against royal encroachment provided a rationale for the participation of many mantuanos in the popular uprising in 1749 when Juan Francisco de León and his followers from Panaquire and other settlements in the Tuy Valley occupied the Caracas plaza. There was little doubt about the collaboration of the Caracas elite in this armed protest; the view of Juan Manuel Goyzueta, the Guipuzcoana Company factor who fled for his safety to La Guaira in 1749, was widely held if difficult to prove:

Juan Francisco de León is the head of this uprising, but there is no doubt that all the citizens of Caracas have agitated for it, for it is said that this infamy originated on the 25th of August, 1744, first put into motion by a woman, and this is obviously true because since the time of his arrival in this port, no gentleman, neither military nor civil nor cleric, has come down to give support to the Governor, not even for the sake of appearances.^[28]

With events out of hand, the cabildo defended itself and placed the blame on the governor, who had fled to La Guaira, abandoning the city and his authority. The cabildo's struggle for interim authority was an old game in 1749; on other occasions the town council had fought with official decrees and jail terms for the right to govern in the absence of the royal representative. But with an armed mob in the plaza and accusations of conspiracy and treason in the air, the old debate took dramatic new meaning. By leaving the cabildo to resolve the problem of the rebellion, the governor in fact forced the town's principal citizens to either give up their support for León's protest, which had now become a rebellion because the king's representative had been forced from his office, or leave themselves open to charges that they were part of the conspiracy.

Castellanos's flight proved to be an effective tactic, and on this occasion, for the first time in the history of the town council, the alcaldes ordinarios were not eager to assume the governor's authority. The cabildo's claim of innocence in 1749 does not specifically mention the nature of the responsibility placed upon it by the governor's departure, but its self-image as long suffering was made perfectly clear:

[F]or eighteen years this Province has begged Your Majesty to release it from the yoke and tyranny of the Company, and just as we have been loyal while we made such efforts (even though our ap-

peals were not heard), so will we remain loyal as long as we are able to serve Your Majesty; but for the Governor, because the citizens of Panaquire have forced the Company to abandon Caracas, out of fear and because of other things that took place here in Your Dominion, to pass the blame to this city, treating it as a town of traitors and provoking the townspeople in any way possible, is a hardship never before dealt against a loyalty maintained in the face of so much suffering.^[29]

As the list of signatures on the protest memorials reveals, the Guipuzcoana Company factor exaggerated when he claimed that "all the citizens of Caracas" had been actively seeking an end to the Company since "the 25th of August, 1744," a date that refers to no event that has yet been identified.^[30] But there was a sharply contentious political tradition in Caracas that antedated the creation of the Guipuzcoana Company. Rather than a homogeneous elite, united in opposition to the Company (as the Company stated for its own purposes in 1749 and historians have accepted since), perhaps only the most politically active portion of the Caracas elite, those whose families had participated in the cabildo's struggles to administer the province in the absence of the governor during the first decades of the eighteenth century, made their opposition manifest by signing the 1744 letter. Those of the elite who wrote to the king claiming that the Company was openly abetted in its activities by the Basque governors Lardizábal and Zuloaga might have been following in an activist tradition begun by their fathers in the decades before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company. Is it possible that the opposition of certain prominent Caraqueños to the Company in 1744 was still primarily political, the most recent of a series of jurisdictional struggles between local and royal agencies?

Two men were elected by the cabildo regidores on the first day of every year to be alcaldes ordinarios for a one-year term. This means that from 1700 to 1749, the half-century prior to the rebellion, a hundred different men could have been selected for the position; in fact, seventy-one men actually served, many of them on more than one occasion.^[31] Of the seventy-one, sixty-six have been identified as men who were born to elite Caracas families or were immigrants who had married into such families. If the relationship of these sixty-six men to the mantuanos who signed and did not sign the 1744 protest memorial is determined, it appears that the signatories did in fact have a stronger history of cabildo

participation than those who did not sign, although this is not immediately evident. Of all adult elite men who were alive in 1744, both signers and nonsigners had cabildo experience, and elite men who signed the 1744 document were only slightly more likely to have been alcaldes ordinarios before León's rebellion in 1749 (thirteen of fifty-five signatories; 24 percent) than were elite men who did not sign (nine of forty-eight nonsignatories; 19 percent). However, the somewhat deeper generational roots of the signer group contributed to the fact that they were twice as likely as the nonsigners to have had fathers who had been alcaldes ordinarios. There were seventy-six elite men and women who signed the 1744 memorial, and forty-five of them (59 percent) were the children of men who had served at least one term as alcalde. Of the fifty-eight elite cacao hacienda owners who did not sign, only seventeen (29 percent) were the children of fathers who had been selected for the alcalde position.

Only a few of all those men who became alcaldes ordinarios ever governed the Caracas province in the absence of the governor, and very few of them were still alive in 1744. During the twenty years of the Guipuzcoana Company presence in Caracas prior to the events of 1749, the Basque governors remained healthy and dutifully at their post, and consequently the cabildo alcaldes did not have occasion to act as governor as their predecessors had done with such frequency during the first thirty years of the eighteenth century. Most of those men who, decades earlier, as alcaldes ordinarios had served as governor pro tem (eight men on six occasions), were either protesters themselves in 1744 or the fathers of individuals who signed the 1744 letter. Conversely, although the mantuano cacao hacendados who did not speak against the Company in 1744 were more numerous than those of their class who did sign the memorial that year (fifty-eight in contrast to thirty-eight), they and their fathers were only half as likely to have governed the province in the absence of the royal executive (four men on three occasions).^[32]

Comparison of those elites who protested against the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 and those elites who made no written remonstrance indicates that the protesters were for the most part members of families that had been Caracas residents in both the paternal and maternal lines for three and four generations. The protesters' families had been well represented on the town council

during the first half of the eighteenth century and, what is more significant for the protest against the Basque monopoly, members of these families had participated directly in a rough-and-tumble political tradition in which the violent quarrels between cabildo and governor were frequently decided by distant higher authority, both viceroy and king. Mantuanos who did not protest in 1744 had local roots that were somewhat less deep, and their involvement in cabildo politics was both more recent (their fathers had not often served as alcaldes ordinarios) and had not been directed at the royal governors (they rarely served as alcaldes—governors pro tem). Yet the difference between the two elite groups on these social and political points is still less than striking. Were there other differences that might better distinguish them from one another, and in the process provide us with a clearer idea of the impact of the Guipuzcoana Company on the Caracas planter elite?

Debt with the Company?

Within a few weeks of the creation of the 1744 protest memorial, officials of the Guipuzcoana Company prepared a most interesting document of their own. A complete list of all the debts owed it by hacienda owners and merchants, both Caracas vecinos and non-vecinos, showed that the Company had provided a substantial sum in loans and merchandise on credit in the Caracas region, most of it since 1740, and much of it to those same individuals who were most vociferous in their opposition to the Company. By the reckoning of accountant Nicolás de Aizpurua, as of December 1744, at its Caracas factoría , the Company was owed 299,444 pesos. About 12 percent of this amount (37,195 pesos) were loans made to unnamed individuals in Spain to be paid in Caracas; the remainder was loaned out in Caracas and registered by name of the debtor in two categories: cosecheros and merchants. Cosecheros had been given cash and goods in credit to the value of 200,618 pesos, and mercaderes had received 61,631 pesos.^[33]

The individual with by far the largest debt owed to the Basque monopoly was don Juan Javier Pacheco Mijares, the second Conde de San Javier,^[34] who was also the principal activist among the elites who opposed the Company. The 1744 protest memorial was signed in his house. In 1740, the year his father the first Conde de San

Javier died, don Juan Pacheco borrowed 20,671 pesos from the Company factor, Nicolás de Francia. The Conde made but one small payment, and the loan had not been paid when its term expired in March 1743. In December 1744, he still owed 19,365 pesos, 6 reales. This sum amounted to 7.4 percent of all the loans made by the Company in Caracas. There were three other debtors with obligations of more than 10,000 pesos, and two of them, Antonio Gregorio Landaeta and Fernando de Aguado Lovera, were also signers of the 1744 protest. Doña Ana Juana de Tovar, Marquesa del Valle de Santiago, who did not sign, owed 11,911 pesos. These four owed a total of 55,806 pesos, 21.3 percent of the total debt, but in all, 154 individuals and 3 convents owed money to the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744. Of these, 56 have been identified as members of Caracas elite families, 28 of whom signed the 1744 memorial, and 28 who did not. The signatories' total debt was 87,141 pesos, more than twice the 42,922 pesos owed by those who did not sign. But in both cases this was mostly new endebtedness, contracted since 1740, and on the average the sums were not particularly large. Excluding the four debts of more than 10,000 pesos (three belonging to signers, one to a nonsigner), the average amount owed by 25 elite signatories was 1730 pesos, while 27 mantuanos who did not sign owed an average of 1149 pesos.

The large debts held by the Conde de San Javier, Antonio Landaeta, and Fernando de Aguado may go far toward explaining their personal interest in reforming or suspending the monopoly's operations, but since the typical amount owed was less than 2000 pesos, and since there was but little difference in the debt of those who protested versus those who did not, it does not seem likely that endebtedness by itself was a strong motive for protest against the Company. Yet it may have been the case that, as cacao prices sharply declined and few ships departed La Guaira loaded for Veracruz—circumstances both related to one another and directly caused by Company policies in the minds of many—there were those who feared that the Company was purposefully seeking to keep them in its debt indefinitely. The 1744 protesters had more reason to be concerned because they were, as a group, more dependent on cacao sales to repay their loans than were other elite Caraqueños, some of whom had sugar as an alternative cash crop.

Sugar Trapiche Ownership?

Sugar was an agricultural commodity that was sold exclusively within the Caracas region, and it was therefore isolated to a degree from the crisis in cacao exports. A census taken in 1752 estimated the annual renta , or gross income, of all the sugar trapiches throughout Venezuela.^[35] Of the 135 trapiches located in Caracas, the Tuy Valley, Valencia, and the coastal regions, 41 belonged to elite citizens of Caracas. The total renta from these 41 sugar estates amounted to 91,400 pesos, of which 36,100 pesos came from the 17 trapiches that belonged to the protest group; another 55,300 pesos were generated on 24 trapiches that belonged to mantuanos who did not sign the 1744 memorial. The sugar earnings of the protesters represented less than half of the 87,141 pesos that they owed the Company, but the nonprotesters, with a total debt of 42,922 pesos, could have paid their obligation to the Guipuzcoana Company with the income from one year's sugar sales. Thus protesters had no choice but to export or sell cacao in exchange for the cash they borrowed and the merchandise that they bought from the Basque monopolists, who held the exclusive license for the sale of imported goods of all kinds, including food and clothing. In 1744, with the price paid for cacao at only 8 pesos the fanega, this had become an intolerable situation for those Caraqueños whose income came mostly or entirely from cacao.

Profits and Protest: The Fortunes of Three Mantuano Families

There is perhaps one more reason why certain Caracas elites were adamant in their opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company, and this may have been the most important. Both the number of cacao trees and the number of haciendas in the Caracas province increased significantly during the sixty-year period from 1684 to 1744 (from 434,850 trees in 1684 to 3,251,700 trees in 1720 and 5,102,221 trees in 1744; and from 167 haciendas in 1684 to 326 haciendas in 1720 and 556 haciendas in 1744).^[36] The Guipuzcoana Company claimed credit for the dramatic expansion in cacao planting and production which its directors argued took place after the monopoly began operations in 1728. But these figures make clear that

the elite widows who complained in 1741 were right: the Company did no more than take direct advantage of expansion that had begun more than forty years before 1728. This was substantial growth, even if the monopoly was not responsible for it, but was it enough growth to keep pace with the ever-greater number of individuals in Caracas with claims to elite status? On a per capita basis, did mantuanos possess as many cacao trees in 1744 as their parents had owned in 1720 and their grandparents in 1684?

In fact, the Guipuzcoana Company's creation coincided with that point in time when the Caracas cacao boom began to fail to keep pace with the surging increase in numbers of many of the town's foremost families. The Company monopoly grew increasingly more threatening, first as Basque governors worked to further the objectives of the Company at the expense of the traditional cacao trade to New Spain, and then as the price paid for cacao dropped to record low levels. That this all resulted in crisis for some elite families in the 1740s is surely related to the fact that for them, after many decades of adequate expansion, per capita cacao wealth had then begun to decline. This trend cannot be illustrated effectively for the elite in aggregate but must be analyzed on a family-by-family basis. For this purpose three cases have been selected: (1) the Blanco Uribe, a family of many generations' residence with strong grievances against the Guipuzcoana Company; (2) the Bolívar, a family of equal generational depth in Caracas but without strong grievances; and (3) the Palacios, a family of more recent vintage in Caracas with no recorded complaint against the Company. The data presented in the following pages are summarized in table 18.

From Blanco Ochoa to Blanco Uribe

Alejandro Antonio Blanco Uribe was the eldest child of Antonio Blanco Ochoa, regidor and alférez mayor of the Caracas cabildo, and Isabel de Uribe y Gaviola. His parents were married in May 1696 and Alejandro was born in June of 1697. His father died in 1736; his mother, a widow before she married Blanco Ochoa, had three children by her first husband and thirteen, including Alejandro, by Blanco Ochoa.^[37] The elder Blanco had been one of the region's largest cacao owners in 1720; in the coastal valleys of Aroa,

Guaiguaza, Ocumare, and Cata he owned four haciendas with a total of 62,000 cacao trees. He had thirteen living children in 1720, but only the eldest son, Alejandro, then aged twenty-three, was a cacao hacendado in his own right that year: he owned 10,000 trees in the expanding Tuy Valley. In 1744 Alejandro Blanco Uribe would have 18,000 trees at Caucagua on the lower Tuy, 80 percent more trees than he personally had owned twenty-four years earlier. However, in 1744 Alejandro Blanco, at forty-seven years of age, was owner of only one-third the cacao trees that his father had owned at age forty-four in 1720. In fact, all the cacao owned by Alejandro Blanco Uribe and his brothers and sisters in 1744 amounted to 95,000 trees (on eight haciendas). Together these siblings held just 50 percent more trees than their father alone had owned in 1720; on an estimated per capita basis, the cacao tree wealth in 1744 of the Blanco Uribe siblings and their dependents was much less than the wealth in trees that had provided for them when they were their father's dependents in 1720.

A look at this matter in detail reveals that in 1720 the benefits from the income of regidor Antonio Blanco Ochoa's 62,000 cacao trees probably went to fourteen people: the regidor, his wife, and twelve of their thirteen children (not counting eldest son Alejandro, who already had 10,000 trees of his own). Possibly Isabel de Uribe's two daughters by her first marriage, Juana and María Bolívar Uribe, who were unmarried and in their late twenties in 1720, were also dependent on their stepfather's cacao haciendas. If six-

teen individuals took their sustenance and their social standing from these four haciendas and 62,000 cacao trees, the average benefit to each one of them would have come from the annual production of 3875 trees. In 1744, the descendants of Antonio Blanco Ochoa and Isabel de Uribe numbered thirty-five individuals, the thirteen Blanco Uribe siblings and the twenty-two children who belonged to the five of them who had married. Leaving aside, for the sake of simplicity, the five spouses of the Blanco Uribe—who may have shared in the benefits from trees owned by their own consanguineous kin, but adding mother and grandmother Isabel de Uribe to the list (the date of her death is unknown), then the best estimate is that in 1744 thirty-six people derived their needs and status from these eight haciendas and 95,000 trees. Thus the average per capita portion of the overall Blanco Uribe family cacao holdings was 2639 trees, down 1236 trees, or about 30 percent fewer trees per capita than a generation earlier.

That the Blanco Uribe kin experienced declining cacao wealth during the first two decades of the Guipuzcoana Company presence in Caracas can be made clearer if cacao prices and the probable yield from their haciendas in fanegas of cacao beans are considered. First, the lower number of trees per capita is misleading, because many of the 1744 trees were located in the high-yield Tuy Valley. Tuy Valley haciendas typically produced 40 fanegas of cacao per 1000 trees, compared to 10 fanegas per 1000 trees on coastal estates.^[38] In 1720 the annual yield from regidor Antonio Blanco Ochoa's 62,000 trees would have been 620 fanegas, or about 41.3 fanegas per year for each of the fifteen people who shared in the benefit from his haciendas. Twenty-four years later, the Caucagua hacienda of Alejandro Blanco Uribe contained 18,000 trees, his brother Miguel had a new grove of 1000 trees in Curiepe, and at the high-yield rate of 40 fanegas these two haciendas produced some 760 fanegas of cacao annually. The other 76,000 trees that belonged to Blanco Uribe siblings were on six coastal haciendas, the same haciendas in most cases that had belonged to their father, and these trees, at the ratio of 10 fanegas per 1000 trees, produced an equal amount, 760 fanegas of cacao, every year. The per capita share of the thirty-six people who benefited from this quantity of cacao, 1580 fanegas, was about 43.8 fanegas, slightly more in fact than the 1720 per capita figure. Without Alejandro Blanco's Cau-

cagua hacienda, however, the cacao wealth of the Blanco Uribe kin and their children would have fallen far behind that of the previous generation; a widower without children, Alejandro was only one of thirty-six individuals in 1744, but the other thirty-five, without his 720 fanegas of annual production, would have each received the benefit from only 22.8 fanegas of cacao annually, about 48 percent less than the Blanco Uribe siblings had received as children in 1720.

Even with the Caucagua hacienda, the declining price paid for cacao left the Blanco Uribe siblings poorer as adults with children than their parents had been a generation earlier. The 1720 price paid in Caracas for cacao was about 12 pesos per fanega, a sum that had risen from a low of about 7 pesos in 1710 and would continue to fluctuate upward until 1735, when it would reach a high of 18 pesos. In 1744 the cacao price stood at 9 pesos, having fallen steadily from the 1735 peak. At the 1720 price of 12 pesos per fanega the per capita gross income of regidor Blanco Ochoa, his wife, and their children was about 495 pesos (12 pesos times 41.3 fanegas); at the 1744 price of 9 pesos, the Blanco Uribe siblings and their children would have received a per capita gross income of about 394 pesos (9 pesos times 43.8 fanegas), a decrease of about 20 percent over the course of the lifetimes of the Blanco Uribe siblings. Without the Caucagua hacienda earnings, the per capita income of this family would have stood at only about 205 persos, a decline of about 59 percent during the previous quarter century. For the Blanco Uribes new cacao planting in the fertile Tuy region had not been enough to keep pace with both a flourishing family and declining prices. The individual wealth of Alejandro Blanco Uribe improved by 70 percent from 1720 to 1744, but the modest expansion of the coastal haciendas inherited by his siblings from their father did not keep up with falling cacao prices. As eldest son and brother, holder of the hacienda that earned about 50 percent of his extended family's declining income in 1744, and as a bachelor with no immediate family to make him cautious, Alejandro Blanco Uribe became a leader in the cause against the Guipuzcoana Company.

From Bolívar Martínez to Bolívar Aguirre

It is curious, in light of the enormous fame that history would bestow on Simón Bolívar, to discover that the Bolívars were never

significant owners of cacao haciendas. This fact may help explain why José Bolívar Aguirre, the uncle of the Liberator, was ready to take an active part in opposition to the rebellion that many other prominent citizens supported, at least surreptitiously. José Bolívar owned 8000 trees in the lower Tuy Valley district of Taguasa in 1720, and 12,000 trees in the same place in 1744. By that year he had also begun to harvest cacao for the benefit of two of his daughters, young women who would marry in 1747 and 1749, from a new hacienda of 5000 trees also located on the banks of the lower Tuy. In addition, he was owner of 8000 trees on the Costa Abajo, in the Cepi Valley. The Cepi hacienda may have come to him as his inheritance from his father, Juan Bolívar Martínez, who had 5000 trees there in 1720 and who died in 1729.^[39]

José Bolívar Aguirre was the first of the Bolívars to own cacao in the Tuy; the small haciendas of his father and grandfather were all located on the coast. His father's 5000-tree Cepi estate was modest, but in 1720 this hacienda had provided income for only five people: the elder Bolívar, his second wife, María Petronila Ponte Marín, and their three young daughters (they would have two more children, including Simón Bolívar's father, Juan, who was born in 1727). On a per capita basis, the 5000 trees belonging to Juan Bolívar Martínez provided the benefit from 1000 trees to him, his wife, and to each one of their three children. However, the measure of the total cacao tree wealth of this family in 1720 should include the 8000 trees at Taguasa of José Bolívar Aguirre, who was twenty years older than his half-siblings and holder of his own cacao groves in that year. With these additional trees the estimate of the number of trees per capita for José Bolívar, his father and stepmother, and his three stepsisters comes to 2,167 (13,000 trees divided by six people). Twenty-four years later, José Bolívar had married and he and his wife María Arias were the parents of eight children. This was a young family in 1744; none of the Bolívar Arias offspring was yet married and none of them owned a cacao hacienda. Therefore, the 25,000 trees that belonged to José Bolívar Aguirre in 1744 represent per capita cacao wealth of 2,500 trees for each of the ten members of his immediate family. Don José may not have noticed the modest increase in his family's cacao wealth that had taken place during the generation after 1720, but it was no doubt evident in 1744 that size of Bolívar's family had not yet begun to surpass the productive capacity of his haciendas.

In fact, José Bolívar Aguirre had reason to be satisfied in 1744 with the progress that his family had made in its cacao enterprise since 1720. The 5000 trees of his father were all located on a low-yield (10 fanegas per 1000 trees) coastal estate, returning probably a total of 50 fanegas of cacao annually. At 12 pesos per fanega, the total annual gross income from his father's hacienda could be estimated at a modest 600 pesos in that year. Adding José Bolívar's 8000 trees, which presumably produced at the high-yield Tuy Valley ratio of 40 fanegas per 1000 trees, the total family cacao harvest in 1720 was likely to have been about 320 fanegas of beans, worth 3840 pesos. In per capita terms (divided by six), this would have amounted to 640 pesos of gross income for each member of the family in 1720. In 1744, although cacao prices had fallen to 9 pesos, José Bolívar's holdings included 17,000 trees in the Tuy and 8000 on the coast, which would have given an estimated total yield of 760 fanegas, worth 6840 pesos. In per capita terms (divided by ten), this was about 684 pesos for the ten members of Bolívar's immediate family. With almost twice the number of dependents as his father, his cacao earnings had nearly doubled since he had married, and he was providing for his family better than he and his father together had done twenty-four years earlier when prices were 25 percent higher.

It is also curious to discover that the uncle of Venezuela's foremost patriot was, of all the old-family Caracas elites, one of the most visible supporters of the royal effort to suppress the colonial opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company. José Bolívar Aguirre was named sargento mayor of the Caracas militia in 1722, and in 1751 he was named principal accountant, contador mayor, of the royal treasury. The latter appointment was made by Governor Felipe Ricardos, who was then about to begin his offensive against Juan Francisco de León and the other rebels of 1749. Ricardos was eager to enlist the help of the militia in his search for León, and Bolívar was willing. He led the militia on an extensive march through the Aragua and Tuy Valleys during the last months of 1751 but failed to find León. For his collaboration he was rewarded by Ricardos with the contador position and a recommendation for knighthood in one of the three military orders, Santiago, Alcántara, or Calatrava.^[40] This favor did not result in membership in one of the honored orders for José Bolívar, perhaps because he died, at age sixty-five, in 1758. His sons would also become militia officers, and his eldest

son, Juan Bolívar y Arias (b. 1723, d. 1789) held his father's post of contador on an interim basis in the 1760s but was denied permanent, formal possession of it for interesting reasons.

The governor and captain-general in Caracas from 1763 to 1771 was don José Solano y Bote, a naval officer, the fourth active military officer to govern the province since the rebellion of Juan Francisco de León in 1749. Juan Bolívar petitioned the crown for the position of contador mayor, and in a letter to the Council of the Indies in 1768 Solano noted that "Bolívar [the father] . . . acted with much disinterestedness [in the conflict with the Guipuzcoana Company], and he [the son] is without doubt efficient and of sufficient ability to fulfill the obligations of the position. . . ." Solano, however, preferred to advance the career of one of his own retinue, a peninsular Spaniard named Joseph de la Guardia. The previous service and tenure of the Bolívar family in this royal post made the situation difficult for Solano, who recommended that there be "two contadores mayores, " which would make it possible to "accommodate Bolívar for the good work he has done," but at the same time he would not be the exclusive occupant of a royal office that, it had been determined, "was not convenient for Viscayans, Isleños or Criollos to hold."^[41]

From Palacios Gedler to Palacios Lovera

Whereas the Blanco and the Bolívar were among Caracas's oldest families, the first of the Palacios came to the town in the middle of the seventeenth century, some decades after cacao agriculture had become the region's primary economic activity. Don Bernabé de Palacios y Sojo, royal treasurer in Caracas from 1653 to 1675, native of the Basque province of Alava, came to the Indies accompanied by his niece, doña Juana Teresa Palacios. Doña Juana married, in 1678, her cousin don José Palacios, who had come in turn to Caracas from Alava to inherit the estate of their uncle, don Bernabé. Doña Juana died in childbirth in 1684, and in that year José Palacios owned 5000 cacao trees in the coastal valley of Chuspa.^[42]

In 1686 widower José Palacios married widow Isabel María Gedler, and in 1689 Feliciano de Palacios y Gedler was born. He was to be their only child. In 1720 Feliciano Palacios lived with his wife, Juana Josefa de Lovera y Bolívar, whom he had married in

1707, and their four children. Their eldest child, José, was then twelve. Don Feliciano's only living half-sibling, Ana Juana de Palacios y Palacios, was a nun in the Concepción convent. Counting the monja Ana Juana, in 1720 these seven people received the benefit from 6000 cacao trees (857 trees each) belonging to don Feliciano in the burgeoning Tuy tributary valley of Caucagua. In 1725 Juana de Lovera died, and in July of 1727 Feliciano Palacios married Isabel Gil de Aguirre. By 1744 don Feliciano and doña Isabel were the parents of ten living children.

Feliciano Palacios was owner of 39,000 trees on three cacao estates in 1744. In that year the only surviving offspring of Feliciano Palacios's first marriage was José Palacios Lovera, who had married a cousin of his deceased mother's family (Lovera) in June of 1727, a month before his father remarried. José Palacios had children and a substantial cacao hacienda of his own in 1744. Not counting his son José, in that year don Feliciano probably provided for himself and eleven other people with the cacao from his 39,000 trees. This was a per capita holding of 3250 trees, 279 percent more trees per capita than had been available to the members of Palacios's "first" family in 1720. Unlike many other Caracas mantuanos, Feliciano Palacios did very well in the cacao business during the 1730s and 1740s. Even with cacao prices at 9 pesos the fanega, with holdings of 39,000 trees in 1744 the gross per capita income of his three haciendas (all located in the high-yield Tuy Valley) was 1170 pesos annually for twelve people. This was more than twice the per capita income from 6000 trees for seven people in 1720 (411 pesos), even though prices then had been 12 pesos the fanega of cacao. Feliciano's son José, with six children and his wife, would have received a gross per capita income of about 810 pesos from his Caucagua hacienda of 18,000 trees in 1744. This was more than twice the gross per capita income gotten from his father's hacienda in 1720 when José Palacios was a youngster. It was also more than twice the gross per capita income estimated for the Blanco Uribe siblings and their children in 1744.

Company Debts and Sugar Income

The period 1720 to 1744 marks a significant phase of generational change in each of the three families: individuals who were children

or young adults in 1720 had married and were parents of children of their own by 1744. In each case there is a discernible and different pattern of gross per capita income from cacao agriculture, estimated on the basis of the number of people in each family at each date, the number of trees owned by family members, and the current price of cacao in 1720 and 1744. The Blanco Uribe experienced declining per capita cacao income, the Bolívar Aguirre remained relatively steady, and the Palacios benefited from their increased holdings. For the Blanco Uribe the worsening situation was made more difficult because the numerous family was largely dependent on cacao. In 1752 Alejandro Blanco Uribe earned 1000 pesos annual renta from a sugar trapiche in the Caracas region; a second mill, also valued at 1000 pesos, belonging to "los Blanco Uribe " was located in the Tuy. José Bolívar Aguirre, his large family matched by a proportionate increase in cacao property from 1720 to 1744, had a 1000-pesos-renta trapiche in the Aragua Valley.^[43] Neither of these sugar properties produced significant income, but the Palacios, who had prospered in cacao during the 1720s and 1730s, were also protected from the vagaries of cacao exports and prices by their several trapiches, which produced sugar exclusively for the local Caracas market. They owned three profitable mills in the hinterland of the town: Feliciano Palacios with one of 5000 pesos annual renta; his son José Palacios Lovera, whose trapiche produced 4000 pesos annually; and his eldest son by his second marriage, Feliciano Palacios Gil, with a mill of 2000 pesos renta.

Together with more than 20,000 pesos of gross cacao income, these 11,000 pesos of sugar income brought the per capita income, at midcentury, of Feliciano Palacios and his children and grandchildren to about 1500 pesos per year. By comparison, the 2000 pesos renta received from the two trapiches that belonged to the Blanco Uribe did not go far toward raising the per capita income of the thirty-six individuals who would have stood to take some benefit from them. The combined cacao and sugar per capita income for the Blanco Uribe siblings and their children can be estimated at about 450 pesos. For the Bolívar Aguirre kin the additional income from sugar was similarly slight; 1000 pesos per annum from the Aragua sugar trapiche, divided among eleven immediate kin, would have brought the per capita gross income up from the cacao estimate of 622 pesos to about 710 pesos.

Counting all individuals, adults and children alike, in families at comparable stages in the generational cycle, the 1500 pesos per capita gross annual income of the Palacios and the 450 pesos income of the Blanco Uribe kin would probably have placed them at the upper and lower ends, respectively, of the elite income spectrum in midcentury Caracas. More important for the protest written against the Guipuzcoana Company in 1744 and the much more serious uprising that took place beginning in 1749, is the observation that such income was, in the Palacios case, significantly more than had been gotten in 1720, and, in the Blanco Uribe case, much less. This difference was critical because wealth and social status of the kin group depended on the expansion of their cacao estates, which required acquisition of both land and slaves at a rate at least equal to the generational increase in number of family members. The evidence is that by the 1740s their large families had taken some of the well-established Caracas elite beyond a critical conjuncture, at which they were no longer able to plant enough cacao to keep their per capita income at levels attained a generation earlier.

The evidence also suggests that at midcentury families in straitened circumstances such as the Blanco Uribe had acquired debts that were substantial when considered in light of their declining income and dependency on cacao. In isolation, information about an individual's indebtedness, such as one finds in a last will and testament, cannot be taken as a measure of the economic health of that individual's estate. If income is also known, however, the proportion of debt to income does offer a means to take the pulse of productive property.

One mantuano whose family was definitely not in economic difficulty was Feliciano Palacios, and he had more debt with the Guipuzcoana Company than most other Caracas residents. In 1740 he received several slaves from the Company factor on credit, and in 1744 his obligation to the monopoly was 6218 pesos. His son José had also borrowed, and together they owed 7108 pesos. Four of the Blanco Uribe siblings, all of whom signed the 1744 protest, had gotten credit against future payment in cacao beans from the Company: Alejandro Antonio owed 468 pesos in 1744, Miguel owed 501, Cornelio Blanco was the major debtor of the family with an obligation of 2124 pesos, and María Josefa owed 24 pesos for merchandise she had received. The total Blanco Uribe debt to the

Guipuzcoana Company was 3117 pesos. Of the members of the third kin group considered, only José Bolívar had contracted a debt with the Company, and he owed a modest sum, 654 pesos.

What is most significant about this indebtedness is that although the Palacios owed almost one-quarter of their estimated gross annual income (7108 of 31,000 pesos), the Blanco Uribe owed about one-fifth of their collective annual income (3117 of 16,200 pesos), and the Bolívar Aguirre owed less than one-tenth of theirs (654 of 7810 pesos), both the Palacios and the Bolívar Aguirre could have easily paid their Guipuzcoana loans with one year's sugar income (Palacios: 11,000 pesos of sugar income and 7108 pesos of debt; Bolívar Aguirre: 1000 pesos of sugar income and 654 pesos of debt), while the Blanco Uribe (2000 pesos of sugar income and 3117 pesos of debt) could not. Unless they could ship in the tercio buque to New Spain, the Blanco Uribe were, in the last analysis, directly dependent on the declining price paid by the Company for their cacao beans, both to pay for standing obligations and to finance expansion of cacao haciendas that were already unable to match the cacao earnings of the previous generation. Perhaps understandably then, while the Palacios and the Bolívar Aguirre remained quiet, the Blanco Uribe and dozens of Caracas mantuanos in similar circumstances, their present well-being and several generations of elite social status at risk, first made formal and legal protest to the king. When that brought no relief, they offered their clandestine support to men of lesser status with even more at stake who were willing to risk their lives in order to rid the colony of the Guipuzcoana monopoly.