2—
Cacao in the Seventeenth Century: The First Boom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Map 2.
Encomiendas, 1635

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough biographical data can be gathered on four of the seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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