1—
Commerce and Conflict: The First Caracas Elite, 1567–1620
A band of adventurers led by Diego de Losada broke the fierce resistance of the Carib Indians and established in 1567 the town of Santiago de León de Caracas. Caracas evidently either failed to fulfill the ambitions of these men or they had no intention of giving up the conquistador's freebooting lifestyle, for only 18 of the 136 men who accompanied Losada were still present in the town in 1578. At that time there were some 4000 Indian tributaries divided into forty encomiendas, more native labor than was available in any other Venezuelan town at that time, but, significantly, this was only about one-third the number of Indians who had inhabited the region just ten years earlier. With little besides shrinking encomiendas to offer, it is not surprising that Caracas did not excite many imaginations in Spain. To the end of the sixteenth century Venezuela continued to be the least popular destination for Spaniards who crossed the Atlantic.[1]
Dreams of El Dorado were for many the only tolerable alternative to the poverty of early Caracas. Of course, neither grand illusions nor the bold exploits of those who actually looked for fabled Indian cities in the Guayana jungles would alter the barrenness of this land that seemed to betray the promise of the Indies.[2] The only practical way for Caraqueños to improve their economic condition to any significant degree was to acquire an encomienda, or, if they were already encomenderos , to add Indian laborers to the one they held. On several occasions the first generation of Caracas vecinos , permanent residents who had not moved on to seek their fortunes elsewhere, sallied out from the town in search of Indians much in the same way that a century earlier their countrymen had gone out to raid Muslim villages from wooden fortalezas on the Barbary and Atlantic coasts of Africa.[3] From shortly after its foundation in 1567,
Caracas was the permanent residence of the provincial governor, who was responsible for defending and extending the colony's frontiers and, as a consequence, Caraqueños had more opportunities than did vecinos of other towns to participate in these raids. Such slave hunting was illegal, but in Caracas these forays were disguised as defensive expeditions made to protect existing settlements. They were appealing, both for the slaves that could be made of Indians who resisted in such supposedly "just" wars, and for the royal favors that could be claimed, such as the grant of a vacated encomienda, on the basis of military services rendered. These were the motives behind the campaign led by Garci González de Silva against the Cumanagoto Indians of the Tuy River valley in 1579 and 1580, and the venture organized by Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro, which resulted in the establishment of the frontier town of San Sebastián de los Reyes in 1584.[4] At the same time, the frequent uprisings of the Indians of Nirgua, which were said to have threatened the settlements in the western part of the province and disrupted traffic on the road to New Granada, were suppressed by bands of men sent out by the governor from distant Caracas, and not, as might have been expected if the threat to them had been truly serious, by vecinos from towns much nearer to Nirgua such as Barquisimeto and Valencia.[5]
In these circumstances the urban functions of Caracas remained little different from the primitive ones of an armed camp. Since fully forty of the settlement's sixty vecinos held at least a small Indian labor grant in 1578, encomendero status was not a primary social distinction or a source of local influence. Rather, for men like Garci González de Silva and Sebastián de Alfaro who held it, power was rooted in the personal charisma and other leadership qualities that made it possible for them to assemble and lead a cabalgada , or Indian raiding party.[6] The only other possible source of local influence, a position on the town council, the cabildo , was limited to the formation and execution of rules concerning the use of existing or finite wealth, such as the setting of food prices or the provision of meat for the town. Indian raids, on the other hand, held the hope of increasing that wealth, the only such hope for about two decades after 1567. Even so, they did not produce much profit, for there were simply not many Indians available for capture. But the raids were imbued with social meaning retained from
the archaic traditions of frontier wars with Islam, and for twenty years no other economic activity had the appeal of the organized hunt for Indian slaves.
In the late 1580s, a fortuitous combination of climatic, geographic, and economic factors brought Caracas belatedly into Spain's New World empire. The much quicker pace of the commercial world of the sixteenth century brought noticeable changes to the once-rustic, thatch-roofed village. As producers and exporters of wheat grain and flour, newly prosperous Caracas vecinos added tile roofs and second storys to their churches, homes, and community buildings. With new wealth to administer and an increased opportunity to govern, the cabildo replaced the cabalgada as the town's most important political institution. Coming of age as a colonial town created new tensions and conflict, however, and the controversies that emerged at this time of transition provide a revealing look at the social relations of the powerful and not-so-powerful farmers and traders of early Caracas.
The value of Spain's Atlantic shipping more than doubled during the first fifteen years following the foundation of Caracas, and during this time, with the world's richest commercial highway passing just behind the narrow range of mountains to the north, the town's enterprising vecinos discovered profitable alternatives to hit-and-run Indian raids. The best alternatives came as Caracas was drawn into the market network centered on the annual trade fair at Portobelo. Before landing at Portobelo, the Tierra Firme fleet made port at Cartagena, and from there news of its arrival in America was sent south to Peru by way of Panama. Then, while the Portobelo merchants made preparations for their fair and the wealth of Peru was brought up the Pacific Coast, the waiting fleet, secure beneath the walls of the Cartagena fortress, traded for the gold and emeralds of New Granada and for Venezuelan pearls.[7] The galleons also needed provisions; their sailors, good Spaniards, insisted on wheat bread, and from the early 1580s ships loaded with Caracas wheat grain and flour made the easy, trade-winds assisted sail west along the Caribbean coast to Cartagena.
The transition from raiding to farming could take place because of the particularly mild Caracas climate. Repeated attempts to grow grapes and citrus trees met with little success in the valley, but wheat flourished. Even though the settlement was located near the
equator at about ten degrees north latitude, cereal cultivation was possible in Caracas because its high elevation, about 800 meters in the immediate vicinity of the town, provided moderate temperatures. In addition, although it was never abundant and in time there would be sharp conflicts over rights to its use, during the early years enough water was available to sustain a modest boom in wheat farming and grain milling.
Losada had situated the Caracas plaza in an ideal spot above where the Guaire River makes a wide bend, on the ridge of a broad plain at the base of the high mountains which stood as a barrier between the settlement and the sea. This plain is divided by streams carrying rainwater runoff from the mountains to the Guaire, and the early importance of these streams is made evident by their prominence on the well-known map of the town and environs prepared by Governor Juan Pimentel in 1578 or shortly thereafter (see Map 1). From the text of the detailed report that this sketch accompanied, part of the Relaciones Geográficas ordered by Philip II, it is clear that by this date wheat farming was underway, and that for its cultivation Caracas farmers relied both on rainfall and on irrigation water taken from these streams.[8]
Within little more than a decade after the Pimentel report an increase in the need for water resources became noticeable in the town council record—petitions to the cabildo, for pastures and for cornfields to sustain the Indian population in the 1570s and 1580s, had given way to requests for water rights and wheat mill sites by the 1590s. Other documents indicate that by then wheat had become an important part of the economic life of the town. Business was particularly brisk during the months of September and October, the principal planting season, during March and early April when the grain was harvested (although the harvest occasionally came as early as mid-February), and again in late May and June when it was ground into flour and sent to La Guaira for shipment to Cartagena and other Caribbean ports. During these periods farmers and traders, both vecinos and forasteros , outsiders, from Spain, the Canary Islands, and other Indies towns, appeared at the Caracas notaries' offices to register their wheat sales, to sign promises to pay for merchandise or labor with the next year's harvest, or to make shipping arrangements.[9] Business was so good, in fact, that it attracted the English buccaneer Aymas Preston, who raided the
Map 1.
Pimentel Map
town in 1595. Ten years earlier Cartagena residents had paid the huge sum of 110,000 ducats to Francis Drake in ransom for their city and its warehouses full of merchandise, but in modest Caracas it was easier to flee, carrying away the greater part of one's wealth, and leave the town to be sacked and burned, as Preston obligingly did.[10] The flurry of reconstruction that followed immediately after Preston's attack, also clearly visible in the cabildo and notary records, indicates that by then the town had acquired importance and a strong commitment to permanence.
Although the bishopric see for Venezuela would remain formally until 1637 in the tiny western town of Coro, where the cathedral was a very modest wattle-and-daub edifice ("the best church of straw in the Indies"), Caracas, where the first bishops invested in land and actually spent most of their time, could boast of a stone-walled and tile-roofed church from 1584. In 1595 the pirate Preston burned the timbers of this building and those of a similar chapel then under construction in the Franciscan convent. Eager to reestablish the solid and secure presence in the town that the prosperity generated by wheat had allowed them, the church's agents joined the town's foremost citizens as the first to rebuild after the attack. Within weeks of Preston's departure, Bartolomé de la Canal, church vicar for fifteen years prior to 1595, made arrangements for repairs to his house. The lieutenant governor Juan de Riberos, who was criticized for his absence during the attack, may have expressed a commitment to the future defense of the settlement by trading his straw-roofed house and 350 pesos for one roofed in tile shortly after Preston's destructive visit. So many other residents contracted for construction labor that by 1596 the town's few artisans and the local supply of building materials had been overwhelmed by the rush to rebuild. As a result, the wealthier vecinos and the ecclesiastical establishment sought to outbid one another for the few craftsmen and scarce resources. This indecorous competition, which was ended by a cabildo order in May 1596, is perhaps the best measure of the wheat-driven transition from transience and slave raiding to permanent settlement.[11]
For Caracas craftsmen the wheat trade meant booming opportunity for employment. Equally important, flour and grain became the principal in-town medium of exchange for transactions of all kinds, and by the turn of the seventeenth century many vecinos
were doing much of their business in wheat and wheat futures. In June 1597, capitán Juan de Guevara agreed to pay mason Francisco Benítez the equivalent of 276 gold pesos in flour and carpenter Juan García Cabeza 130 pesos, also in flour, to construct a second story on the house he had purchased the year before. The following month Benítez was promised 125 pesos, this time in gold coin, to finish the masonry work on the Franciscan chapel, but such transactions in specie were rare.[12] Negotiations of all kinds were both regulated by the annual rhythms of the wheat harvest and dependent on a successful crop to satisfy outstanding obligations. In February 1599 blacksmith Juan Muñoz pledged to pay Pascual Pérez 69 pesos in wheat for a year's service as his assistant. At the time of the March harvest of that year Manuel Díaz, master shoemaker, advanced 160 arrobas of flour worth 70 pesos to Juan Pérez, who agreed to work for one year as the cobbler's helper. With the September planting of 1599, Díaz, in return for leather work to be done during the following six months, took a promise to pay in wheat flour worth 89 pesos, to be delivered in March of 1600, from Alonso García Pineda, mill owner, slaveholder, and government notary. Some years later, in July of 1605, shoemaker Díaz's widow, María de Medina, married Baltasar García, who had been growing wheat in the valley since 1593 when the cabildo granted him vecino status and twelve fanegadas (one fanegada was equal to about 1.6 acres) of land. The day after their wedding the couple arranged to buy a townhouse and lot from Diego Díaz León, the Portuguese slave factor. They paid 50 pesos in cash and promised to pay the remaining debt of 130 pesos in flour the following March. Juan Césaro, a Sicilian merchant who had lived in Caracas since the early 1590s, signed a contract in October 1605 with Francisco de Medina, master carpenter, who agreed to put a storeroom and living quarters in a second story that was to be built above Césaro's present shop. The value of the entire project was set at 167 gold pesos, payment to be made half in dry goods at the beginning of construction, half in wheat flour after the first harvest following its conclusions.[13]
While the original significance of Caracas wheat was its export value, perhaps as much as one-half of the wheat grown circulated as an exchange medium and was sooner or later consumed in the town. This ratio can be estimated because the legal exports for the
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
period 1603 to 1607 are known exactly (see table 1),[14] and because the cabildo declared after the 1604 harvest that 2500 fanegas of wheat grain then remaining in the town could not be sold for export. Of this quantity 1000 fanegas were needed as seed for the next planting, and 1500 fanegas were needed for local consumption during the coming year. Ground into flour, 2500 fanegas of grain would yield about 15,000 arrobas of flour,[15] and this amount, which represents the quantity of wheat kept in Caracas every year, is approximately equal to the average annual export of wheat made from Caracas during the short period for which complete data are available (13,644 arrobas, one-fifth of the five-year total of 68,220 arrobas).
During the dry "summer" months from November to March or April, the scant rainfall collected on the mountainsides north of Caracas provided irrigation for the wheat farms of the fortunate few growers who owned land along the streams leading to the Guaire River. Most wheat destined for export was brought to har-
Fig. 1.
Caracas Wheat Flour to Indies Ports by Month and by Destination, 1603–1607
vest at the dry season's end, and the fact that this grain could then be ground into flour in water-powered mills driven by the heavy "winter" rains of May and June made it possible to have Caracas wheat flour in Cartagena well in advance of the flota, which generally departed Spain in August[16] (fig. 1). This was a climatological–commercial coincidence of singular benefit to Caracas growers, but it is likely that the Caracas wheat trade flourished not so much because of favorable local circumstances, but rather because of agricultural problems in Spain. In his classic study of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel informs us that by 1560 "flour from Andalusia was no longer sufficient to make biscuit for the fleets, and the Spanish crown had to go in search every year, good or bad, for 100,000 fanegas of grain. . . . In 1583 the shortage spread to the whole economy."[17] As the price of Andalusian wheat skyrocketed, the Caracas-grown grain became an important cash crop, for ships could load in Seville only the biscuit that was needed by their crews for the Atlantic crossing and then buy the rest of their wheat in
American ports such as Cartagena. During the heyday of the trade, from 1580 to about 1620, even after it had been ground into flour the price of Caracas wheat was only about 15 percent more than the average price paid for wheat grain in Andalusia, and in thirteen of the thirty-three years for which we have information Caracas flour was actually cheaper than Andalusian wheat in the kernel.[18]
Although much of the grain was consumed locally and served an important exchange function in the absence of hard coin, it was as an export commodity that wheat gave life to the Caracas economy. Artisans as well as grower–encomenderos and merchants traded in Caribbean ports with the grain. Wheat exports were often in payment made for merchandise already received in Caracas. Vecino-owned vessels loaded with goods from New Spain and from China by way of New Spain docked in May 1601 and in January 1602. In July 1602 a substantial quantity of Spanish merchandise, several times greater than any other single shipment previously unloaded at La Guaira, was disembarked from the Nuestra Señora del Soccoro , whose master and owner was Sebastián Bengoechea, a Basque merchant. In partial remuneration for his cargo, Bengoechea arranged to have 6000 arrobas of flour, about one-fifth of the rich 1603 wheat harvest, shipped to Cartagena. Promises to pay in wheat flour seem to have increased in amount in accordance with the availability of imported goods to buy; credit for 100 pesos, common in 1595, was given for 600 or 700 pesos in 1605. To secure this merchandise growers were willing to "mortgage the harvest," as the contracts aptly phrased it, not only for the following year's crop, but in some cases for the crop two years distant as well. The Sicilian merchant Césaro granted extended credit of this sort to royal accountant and encomendero Simón Bolívar in November 1605.[19]
During the early seventeenth century a few merchants, attracted by wheat, invested their commercial capital in farming and became resident growers, millers, and encomenderos. In the late 1590s, before he was twenty years old, Nofre Carrasquer established residence in Caracas as agent to the Sevillian merchant Fernán Pache de Sárate, who was a wholesaler to several Caracas importers. Most of early Caracas's European imports were transshiped from the island of Margarita, the first landfall after the Atlantic crossing,[20] and in his own name and that of his associate, Carrasquer
traded for such goods there with Caracas foodstuffs, particularly dried fish and wheat flour. To the west along the Caribbean coast his commercial ties and credit extended to Cartagena, where he preferred that all of his debtors make payment, and in the interior his accounts reached as far as the settlement of El Tocuyo, seventy leagues to the southwest of Caracas, where he exchanged European merchandise for lienzo , the rough cotton fabric used, among other things, to make flour bags. By 1610 he had become a vecino and an encomendero privileged with the labor of 120 Indian tributaries in the Baruta Valley near Caracas, but even before he became a wheat grower in his own right he was an important manager of local agricultural produce: in March 1600, as the annual harvest was just beginning, merchant Carrasquer could guarantee delivery of 1000 arrobas of flour within five weeks.[21]
With the turn from the conquest of the land and its indigenous inhabitants to a more intensive form of colonization and the formation of an agrarian society dependent on seaborne commerce, the exclusive overlordship of the region's remaining conquistadors became diluted and a new, more complex elite was formed. Membership in this elite was expanded from the old soldiers, the first founders and their children, to include several successful merchants who had become vecinos and encomenderos, wheat growers and millers. The authority of the older generation, formerly based on the cabalgada and the heroics of conquest, was now channeled through the municipal law of the cabildo. Most importantly, the rejuvenated cabildo found that its jurisdiction included authority that could directly affect the wheat trade. For the most part town-council policies such as the fixing of bread prices and the work levy assigned to vecinos to upgrade and maintain the road to La Guaira met with no opposition. On other occasions, however, certain powerful wheat growers and traders manipulated the town council, bending its laws to fit their particular needs and private interests.
In an early analysis of Spanish American cabildo politics, Frederick Pike made it clear that social justice was not always the principal objective of town authorities. Pike perceived an agrarian interest in many council decisions. This emphasis was not the outcome of a conscious plot, but rather it was "another manifestation of the glorification of agrarian and rural values over those of trade and manufac-
ture, in short of urban life, which had become an ingrained part of Spanish character as a result of centuries of historical experience."[22] There was no dichotomy of town versus rural, or of urban entrepreneurial versus landed oligarchy, in early seventeenth-century Caracas, for the same prominent individuals were both traders and owners of agricultural estates. However, a close examination of two cases reveals that powerful trader–farmers in Caracas quite consciously did manipulate municipal law in order to extend and to protect their investments in wheat agriculture and commerce.
The devious maneuvering of Garci González de Silva, who used the town council to deprive weaker opponents of the land and water that he wanted, is indeed a simple example of petty greed, but it is useful because it illustrates both the stress that was created as Caracas responded to the booming demand for wheat and the self-serving use of the cabildo on the part of those with access to its authority. In the second detailed case study, a wheat–grower faction is first identified from among the principal planters and traders. This faction used the cabildo authority to restrict tobacco commerce because it attracted pirates and thus interfered with their own wheat interests. Demonstrated is the effective capacity of local Caracas authority, skewed as it was to favor certain individuals and interests, to influence the regional economy during the earliest years of commercial exports. This was characteristic of Caracas only during the period when wheat was king. Tobacco was first to threaten local influence in commerce; cacao, as will be seen, was far too dynamic an export commodity to be regulated in any way by town authority. Not until the 1760s, after a social rebellion that shook the colony to its foundations, would the cabildo be given a voice in the determination of cacao prices. In the interim, a period of 150 years, the dicta of distant markets and the royal will would determine the nature of the Caracas economy. The 1580 to 1620 period is unique, then, for the strength of local interests in the economic life of the Caracas region.
These examples of self-interest on the part of the elite also serve to correct a misconception about the integrated and harmonious nature of early Caracas society. In an often-cited essay, the first detailed study of the Caracas community during its earliest years, historian Stephanie Blank argued that the men of the Caracas elite, because they held prestige and power as municipal officials, and
because they conducted business in the larger world of Spain's empire, were able to perform an essential integrative role in the community as social brokers and patrons for less-privileged vecinos.[23] Blank observed that there were a variety of mechanisms, including kinship and ritual kinship, or compadrazgo , that provided links between Caracas residents, and she believed that these links were used for vertical social integration that affected almost everyone in the town. However, her study lacks the all-important evidence of the service actually rendered the clients of the grandees who were dependent on them for protection and advancement. In fact, rather than the tendency toward consensus that Blank observed, the internal history of Caracas during the early commercial period reads best as a series of petty struggles and at times violent, socially disintegrative adjustments to rapid changes. What most often prevailed was the simple will of strong men concerned with the profits to be realized from their wheat crop and the financing of imports with the anticipated return from future harvests. Rather than benign leaders of an integrated social organism, the members of this elite did what they could to advance their own interests as a class, or, perhaps better, as a kin-linked faction, without much concern for those who were neither powerful nor influential. Willing to incur considerable personal risk by defying the governor, placing him under arrest and sending him under guard to Spain, as they did in 1624 to prevent enforcement of the encomienda law,[24] it was not difficult for them to use the cabildo for their own benefit, even at the expense of poorer vecinos who, in earlier times, had enjoyed the patronage of many of these same Indian raiders now turned wheat traders.
The wheat commerce with Cartagena and other Caribbean ports brought the construction of flour mills on the banks of the Anauco, Catuche, and Chacao streams where they crossed the plain above the town to the north and east. Although their owners' principal income came from the commercial sale of flour, operating these mills was evidently profitable, and their possession was both a privilege and a source of conflict which fell within the dominion of the cabildo to give and to resolve. In 1591 Alonso García Pineda received eight fanegadas of land from the cabildo. The only condition of ownership of this land, which was located on the banks of the Chacao stream, was that García Pineda fence the parcel to keep out the cattle that were still permitted to roam freely in the valley.
By the end of the following year he had obtained two more land grants on the Chacao, and until January 1593 he shared the stream with only one other individual, Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro, a companion of Losada in the foundation of Caracas, an alcalde ordinario in the cabildo, cabalgada leader on occasion, and founder in his own right of the town of San Sebastián de los Reyes. Then, on the same day, capitán Francisco de Olalla and the royal treasurer don Francisco Gomes de Ubierna petitioned for land and water rights along the Chacao. They were followed in May by three other petitioners, including the powerful old soldier Garci González de Silva. The cabildo granted these requests as well, despite García Pineda's claim that his prerogatives were being infringed upon. To protect themselves, in June he and Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro asked for and received guarantees to first water rights to the run-off carried by the stream.[25]
Rights to water usage of the other streams were quickly granted thereafter; the recipients were most often encomenderos. The normal pattern seems to have been that of the Chacao, where several mills were constructed one below the other by growers who also drew water from the same source to irrigate the wheat that they grew on contiguous land. The mill that the lieutenant governor Juan de Riberos began to build on the Anauco in 1594 was different in that his fields were not close at hand. The Anauco passed near the town and most of the irrigable land on its banks was already owned by Garci González de Silva. Located on municipal or ejido land below González de Silva's wheatfields, Riberos's mill was not a threat to the other's water needs and there was no objection made to its establishment. By 1597 the best wheat land in the Caracas Valley had been allocated and the cabildo had begun to grant mill sites to those who were willing to take title to land parcels located along the Guaire River. In many cases these recipients were encomenderos and were therefore at no significant disadvantage with respect to the labor force which they could put to work in their fields, but notary records and the records of taxes paid on wheat exports indicate that vecinos who grew wheat on the banks of the Guaire were not as successful as those growers who had earlier secured preferred land adjacent to the hillside streams. What is more, there is no evidence that it proved possible to divert water from the Guaire for the purpose of grinding flour.[26]
There were no more than five or six wheat mills in the Caracas Valley at the beginning of the seventeenth century, their numbers more limited by the shortage of favorable sites than by construction costs. They were not inexpensive, however. Juan de Riberos claimed that the mill he planned to build would be "of great utility for the republica , for there are few mills, so few that the wheat cannot be ground due to the lack of them, which is because they are so expensive to build, each one costing more than three hundred ducats [equal to 412 pesos]."[27] Yet it may be that Riberos, who could afford the building costs, overstated his case so that the cabildo would be sure to grant him a millsite; we know that encomendero Esteban Marmolejo purchased his mill for only 200 pesos in 1598.[28]
In any event, the mills were probably profitable, and all the more so if they were limited in number. A rough estimate of milling income is made possible on the basis of a provision of the cabildo which stipulated that millers were to receive in payment for the milling service one almud of wheat for every fanega of grain ground in their mills. In Andalusian measure, the almud was equivalent to the eighth part of one fanega,[29] and if each fanega produced six arrobas of flour, then the miller was paid three-fourths of one arroba for every six arrobas ground in his mill. With flour valued in Caracas at seven reales the arroba, the portion that went to millers of the 24,370 arrobas exported and some 6000 arrobas consumed in the town during the boom year of 1603 can be estimated at 3796 arrobas, worth 3321 pesos. If this amount were divided among six mill owners, each would have received 553 pesos or the equivalent value in flour in 1603, some 34 percent more than the total value of Riberos's mill, in that year alone.
The annual flour production in Caracas was much less than that of 1603, however. For the period 1604–1607 the average amount taken in fees by each of six mill owners would have been 230 pesos, about what it would have cost to pay the wages of an overseer and maintenance costs. Thus, as long as the mills remained few in number and wheat harvests and prices remained steady, the cabildo in effect guaranteed that the almud-per-fanega fee would at least pay operating costs. Indeed, this was most likely the intention of the provision, although in a very good year the miller might make a profit that surpassed the purchase price of his mill. Of
course his principal profits, like those of all growers, came from the commercial sale of his flour, either on consignment to his account in Cartagena and other ports, or to forastero merchants and captains of passing ships. The profits from these sales cannot be estimated until price schedules for other Indies ports are available, but we can be sure that before their flour entered the Caribbean market the Caracas millers' had at least one advantage over encomendero–growers without mills: as mill owners they were not obliged to leave one-eighth of their grain at the mill door in order to have the remainder converted to flour. Also, and most importantly, unlike the encomienda, the mill was alienable property and could be sold or inherited without restriction.
While the wheat trade remained active, then, the ownership of a flour mill was desirable and, consequently, a source of competition and conflict. As in other aspects of town life, the sorting out of these problems fell to the cabildo, and here the distinction between public and private interest occasionally blurred. The following account is particularly useful because, although selected by Blank to demonstrate how uncertainty and the potential for violence in the fledgling town were ameliorated by the patron–client relationships between the powerful and the weak,[30] it is more convincing as an example of the propensity of these social bonds to break when burdened with the pressures of booming commercial agriculture.
During the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth there was no single individual in Caracas who was more influential, and therefore more likely to serve as patron to several clients, than Garci González de Silva. Aided by his early arrival in the region and a fortunate marriage to the daughter of a Caracas conquistador, he successfully combined the qualities of cabalgada leader, encomendero, merchant, and town councilman. Such was his prestige in the community that in 1593 he was commissioned by the cabildo to take testimony from the conquistadors and first settlers who were still in the town so that an official history of the conquest of Caracas might be written.[31] Already owner of irrigated wheat farms on the Chacao and the Anauco streams as well as other property in the Caracas valley and cattle ranches elsewhere in the province, his desire to build a mill on the Catuche stream north of the town initiated a struggle that shows
clearly that the martial society of the 1560s and 1570s was indeed past history and in need of its historian.
The Caracas community first formally determined the limits of its ejido in 1594. Twenty-five years had passed since the town's founding before this was done, perhaps because there had been land in abundance until the wheat boom made it scarce and valuable. The ejido was land that was to be used communally, for the common pasture of mules and horses, for instance, or rented to individuals for the benefit of the municipal treasury. Juan de Riberos, for example, paid the cabildo twelve pesos annually for the use of the land on which his mill was located. In the same year that the ejido boundaries were defined, the cabildo granted a parcel of land on the Catuche stream north of the town to Manoel Figueredo, the owner of a small shop and a long-time vecino. The property was on the mountainside beyond the newly determined ejido boundary, near the road that climbed north and west out of the valley before descending to sea. Figueredo paid the required composición fee to have his titles confirmed by the crown, and the land was his, at least according to law. Then, in a cabildo session of August 1599, councilman (regidor ) Garci González de Silva petitioned for a mill site and water from the Catuche as it came from the mill that belonged to Esteban Marmolejo. The location of the land in González de Silva's request seems to have been in the same place as Figueredo's holding, but the land was examined by the cabildo's alcaldes ordinarios and González de Silva's petition was granted in November, in disregard for Figueredo's title.[32]
Figueredo was not an encomendero and not a man of means. In 1598 he paid the royal fifth on 120 pesos of gold, an average sum and the only occasion he registered gold to be smelted by the royal treasury. He had been a member of González de Silva's company in the raids made against the Cumanagoto Indians of Nirgua in 1593, and the respect Figueredo held for his former chief was such that he claimed that he would "always feel as humble toward him as if I had been his own son." What was more, González de Silva had served as godfather at Figueredo's wedding in 1579.[33] This all mattered for little, however, because wheat farming and milling had become profitable and Figueredo's one-time patron was prepared to do whatever was necessary to secure Figueredo's Catuche land and water for himself.
Late in 1600, in preparation for the grinding that would be done following the spring harvest of 1601, González de Silva sent his sons and a carpenter to begin work on the new mill. When Figueredo turned them away from the site, González de Silva went to the Catuche himself, accompanied by five armed men, to warn Figueredo that the work would proceed in spite of any protest. Figueredo pled justice from Sebastián Díaz de Alfaro and Juan de Guevara, alcaldes ordinarios that year who held first jurisdiction over cases of this sort, but Sebastián Díaz was an important wheat farmer in his own right, and he had served as guarantor for the 1200 pesos González de Silva was obliged to pay for the office of provincial attorney (depositor general ) which he had purchased in 1595. Juan de Guevara, for his part, was married to González de Silva's wife's niece, and he would soon be father-in-law to both of González de Silva's sons. He was also a frequent shipper of large quantities of wheat.[34] Perhaps the cabildo intended to compensate for this apparent conflict of interest by sending regidores Rodrigo de León, Nicolás de Peñalosa, and Martín de Gámez to examine Figueredo's claim again, but they too determined that the boundary should be set to suit González de Silva. To no avail, Figueredo complained about the disadvantages of disputing the will of a regidor and a rich man with the rest of the cabildo's officers as judges. With González de Silva's mill under construction the case disappears from the record, to emerge in a somewhat different context several years later.[35]
Sometime before April 1608 Leonardo Ferigo, a cleric, purchased Manoel Figueredo's town property and his disputed Catuche claim. Ferigo renewed litigation with the cabildo, noting that Figueredo, "a poor and miserable man," could not afford the appeal that he was now willing to make to the Audiencia in Santo Domingo. Although he had sold his mill to one Antonio Ortíz, Garci González de Silva responded to padre Ferigo with a series of legal arguments that would end the continuing conflict in a definitive manner. In a counterstatement to the cabildo he first disputed Ferigo's claim in a direct fashion, arguing that his grant had been legally made in 1599, that the mill had been built on land that, in the opinion of both alcaldes and regidores, did not belong to Figueredo. Then, to bring both municipal and royal interests into alignment with his own, and thus to block any appeal that might
be presented by Ferigo to the Audiencia in Santo Domingo, González de Silva offered a new and effective proposal.
The Figueredo-Ferigo land was close to the town in a very favorable location "within a musket shot" of the place most of the mules used in haulage to and from the wharf at La Guaira were pastured. Mules and horses were dying from lack of pasture, he claimed, and the grant of this valuable land to Figueredo fifteen years earlier was an error and an injustice to the king who had been deceived about its value. He did not mention that he, as regidor, had signed the 1594 ejido act that failed to include the Figueredo property. But far from recognizing that the Figueredo claim included the mill which the new owner Ferigo insisted belong to him, González de Silva now argued that Ferigo should be denied all the property, which must be returned "to your majesty or to this city."[36] Royal cédulas of 1589 and 1591 ordered governors and viceroys to revoke cabildo grants if recipients did not pay fees, but there was neither legal provision nor precedent for the restructuring of the ejido on the simple initiative of the cabildo, and much less so when the action would cause legitimate titles to be vacated and land to be expropriated.[37]
In any event, in April 1608, some months after Ferigo made known his intention to take his cause to the Audiencia, members of the cabildo rode east from Caracas with the lieutenant governor to reclaim land for the town by evicting those whose property was located within the newly expanded ejido boundaries. On the second day the committee, which included González de Silva in his capacity as regidor, came to the Catuche land of padre Ferigo. Ignoring his pleas, the town attorney opened and closed the doors of his house, threw out some of his furniture, and pulled up handfuls of grass in execution of the symbols of eviction. The unfortunate cleric was able to afford litigation for a time, and the town attorney took favorable testimony on his behalf from a dozen vecinos, but his property had become too valuable to be left unworked and his claims threatened a powerful man who succeeded in defeating Ferigo by arranging for his land to be transferred to the public domain.[38]
Garci González de Silva was eager to plant wheat and grind flour in 1594 because the trade had become more profitable than in previous years. The force and legal chicanery he used to get his way in
the Figueredo-Ferigo case was intended to maximize his gains in the context of the limited water resources in the Caracas Valley where wheat cultivation was possible. However, even the most powerful and ruthless vecinos could not dominate the weather or the increasingly strong competition from regions with climate and other natural conditions superior to those of Caracas for wheat farming. The Caracas wheat boom lasted long enough for trade patterns and partnerships to be formed and for commercial activity to change the identity of the town, but it was disappointingly short-lived.
Rainfall in the Caracas Valley could be harshly capricious. Cereal cultivation was always a gamble against rain that could not be counted on to fall when the grain needed it most. The first notice of the difficulties of farming wheat in a tropical rainfall system comes in 1592: Juan de Riberos lost his second consecutive harvest that year because, as he complained to the cabildo, "the weather in this province isn't natural for the harvesting of wheat because it is so variable [mudable ]." Shortages in 1607 following the bad harvest of 1606 caused the local price of bread to go up by 200 percent. In 1609 the cabildo recorded that there had been but little rainfall for several years past, and 1610 brought new prohibitions against hoarding and a ban on all exports, with a guard placed on the La Guaira road to prevent clandestine night traffic. The year 1611 was described as sterile, and in 1619 the mills were idled by the lack of rainwater needed to turn the heavy millstones.[39]
In addition to the crop failures, revived and redoubled competition from the wheat producing towns of the northern Andes may have reduced more distant Caracas's share of the Cartagena market. Since the 1570s these highland settlements had sent their annual harvests by mule train to the village of Gibraltar on the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo, and from there the flour was ferried to the port town of Nueva Zamora de Maracaibo for shipment to Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and, especially, Cartagena. Only a few days by sea from this latter market, Maracaibo was recognized by contemporaries as the best harbor and most active port on the Venezuelan coast.[40] In 1608 a long hiatus in the Maracaibo wheat trade ended when more than fifteen years of intermittent Indian wars in the lake region were finally brought to an end by an expeditionary force assembled from neighboring towns, but not from
Caracas, as would have been customary thirty years earlier. The messages of gratitude sent to the king by the cabildos of the Andean towns of La Grita, Pamplona, Tunja, and Mérida, and by Cartagena, attest to the importance of Maracaibo as an essential point of embarkation for the Andean wheat trade with the Caribbean.[41] What is suggestive for the Caracas case is that it was precisely during the closure of the Maracaibo outlet that Caracas wheat began to enter the Caribbean market in unprecedented quantities. The first year of the Maracaibo Indian revolts, 1594, was also the year that Garci González de Silva began in earnest to expand his holdings in wheat farmland. Caracas enjoyed more than a decade as the principal wheat supplier on the Tierra Firme coast, but this fortunate situation had passed by the time González de Silva arranged for the Figueredo-Ferigo land to become part of the town ejido.
There is no direct proof that either the problems of growing grain in a tropical rainfall system or the reopening of the port at Maracaibo caused the collapse of the Caracas wheat trade. Of undoubtedly great importance is the leveling of wheat prices in Spain, which, in terms of the amount of wheat that could be purchased with a given quantity of silver, reached their highest point and began to decline in the 1590s. Presumably too, as the silver production at Potosí fell and the Atlantic trade of Seville leveled off, the demand for wheat at Cartagena was reduced.[42] Cultivation did not stop altogether. In 1684 there were some 500 fanegadas (about 800 acres) in the immediate vicinity of Caracas that were planted in wheat, but this was all consumed locally.[43]
Tobacco and cacao, crops more suited than wheat to the climate and water resources of the central Venezuelan coast and the interior valleys that run parallel to it, were much sought in seventeenth-century Indies and European markets, and it was not long before they became the region's primary exports. At the very beginning of this transition, however, before the substantial profits to be made from cacao had become evident and wheat had not yet disappeared as a trade item, the Caracas political elite demonstrated but little interest in the promotion of commerce in these tropical crops. In part this was because the cultivation of tobacco and cacao took place in distant regions far from the town, and the cabildo's zone of effective influence could not be stretched to include remote haciendas located
along an expansive, difficult-to-patrol coastline. To a limited extent, wheat production and commerce could be influenced by the town council, but only the province-wide authority of the governor could apply adequately to the far-flung agriculture of tobacco and cacao. More importantly, the cabildo's members were personally committed to the wheat trade, they were among its principal beneficiaries, and the town council would not readily relinquish the influence it had over wheat in favor of some other product that could not be subjected to municipal authority. Not surprisingly from this perspective, the cabildo's initial reaction to tobacco, the first of the alternative crops to challenge wheat, was firmly negative.
Caracas tobacco exports began to surpass wheat exports just at the time when wheat exports began to decline. Suddenly, in a surprising move, the cabildo and the governor decided to prohibit not only tobacco exports but its cultivation as well. In December 1604, the cabildo sent its regidores to take account of the tobacco crop in the fields, and then it asked the governor to impose a general ban on tobacco agriculture. The following August, in response to the governor's request, the Audiencia in Santo Domingo prohibited the planting of tobacco in Venezuela for a period of ten years, except by license to be granted by the governor.[44]
The official explanation for this drastic action was given by the governor, Sancho de Alquiza, who claimed that all other attempts to keep the king's subjects from trading tobacco with smugglers had failed. Wheat did not attract pirates, but for tobacco these "enemies of our Catholic faith" offered goods that were "cheaper than if they had been bought in Spain," and given the poverty of the province it was understandable that otherwise loyal subjects would return to the illicit trade after the most severe punishment. Sancho de Alquiza had even hung a few pirates as a warning, but to no avail.[45] His reasoning may have been the authorities' only motivation behind the prohibition, yet the cure does seem to have been worse than the disease. Among Venezuelan historians, Tomás Polanco Martínez suggests that tobacco probably continued to be sent from Caracas and that the absolute ban was only an ultimatum needed to enforce compliance with the licensing aspect of the decree. Eduardo Arcila Farías views it as an attack on local Portuguese farmers, which, he argues, would have been consistent with prevailing prejudices and is plausible because Portuguese vecinos were not represented in the
cabildo and their tobacco farms were often located beyond the easy vigilance of Caracas authorities.[46]
The tobacco ban, described as "disconcerting" and "mad" by these modern historians because it evidently offered no benefit to what was one of the poorest of Spain's colonies, is the more unusual for the full participation of the cabildo, in Caracas on other occasions and elsewhere usually the vociferous defender of local interests against restrictive royal economic policy. Cabildos could lead the residents of a region in armed rebellion when the crown sought to stop contraband by eliminating their only lucrative trade item, as happened in Tenerife in 1655.[47] That this reaction did not occur in Caracas suggests that the political elite of the town was either not trade-minded, as Pike had supposed, or was committed to the commercial exchange of some other product. In light of the importance of the wheat trade, which was still very active in 1606 and 1607, this latter possibility seems to be the more plausible.
An examination of the existing almojarifazgo (customs duty) records, which for the brief period 1603 to 1607 registered all of Caracas's legal trade,[48] allows a test of the hypothesis that a long-standing commitment to the wheat trade led the cabildo to seek to limit, perhaps even to eliminate, commerce in tobacco. The almojarifazgo registry lists every individual who imported and exported at La Guaira. To determine which of these traders were Caracas vecinos a variety of sources was most carefully surveyed. Of exceptional utility were the parish baptismal and marriage registries and a 1603 road-tax assessment made of all vecinos by the cabildo. Also invaluable was a document listing all non-Hispanic vecinos, including Portuguese, who were resident in Caracas in 1607.[49] So comprehensive are these sources for this short period of time that it is highly likely that every vecino who paid the almojarifazgo tax on his agricultural exports from 1603 to 1607 has been identified as a vecino, either Hispanic or foreign (including Portuguese in the foreigner category). Those traders who paid the tax but have not been located in the Caracas sources, with very little likelihood of error, are therefore considered forasteros , or non-vecinos.
Most of the wheat exported from Caracas, some 84 percent, was shipped during the months from May to August. Both vecinos and non-vecinos did most of their wheat business during this season (fig. 2). The major difference between the wheat commerce of
Fig. 2.
Caracas Wheat Flour to Indies Ports Vecinos and Non-Vecinos, 1603–1607
Vecinos and non-vecinos traded wheat during the same season, principally
May to August, but they shipped to different destinations, vecinos
preferring Cartagena and non-vecinos other ports (fig. 3).
vecinos and that of non-vecinos was the destinations of shipments. Vecinos preferred Cartagena, where they sent their grain in May and June, while non-vecinos did business in other Caribbean ports, returning to Cartagena in July and August after the vecinos had already made their sales there (fig. 3). The tobacco trade, like the flour trade, boomed in May and continued active for several months thereafter. Again like flour, once the season ended virtually nothing was traded until the following spring. For the four years for which complete data are available, 1604 through 1607, 88.8 percent of all Caracas tobacco exports (7954 arrobas) were made during the months from May to September (fig. 4a ). Of this quantity, Caracas Hispanic vecinos shipped 51 percent (4062 arrobas), foreign vecinos 15 percent (1219 arrobas), and non-vecinos 34 percent (2673 arrobas). The August 1605 ban does not seem to have had much impact on the foreign vecinos of Caracas, most of
Fig. 3
Caracas Wheat to Indies Ports, May to August, 1603–1607
May-August Totals: 57,618 arrobas, 84.4% of all wheat shipped 1603–1607;
26,066 arrobas by vecinos, 84.7% of all vecino wheat; 31,552 arrobas by non-vecinos,
84.2% of all non-vecino wheat. 31,940 arrobas to Cartagena, 46.8% of all wheat shipped 1603–1607;
15,016 arrobas by vecinos to Cartagena, 48.8% of all vecino wheat;
16,924 arrobas by non-vecinos to Cartagena, 45.1% of all non-vecino wheat.
whom were Portuguese; they shipped 7 percent of the total quantity of tobacco exported in 1605, 18 percent of the 1606 exports (the first full year of the prohibition), and, in 1607, foreign vecinos again exported 18 percent of the total.[50] As with wheat, vecinos traded a month or so earlier than did outsiders, exporting substantial quantities of tobacco in June. Non-vecinos, who may have had to sell merchandise in Caracas before they could buy wheat or tobacco, exported twice as much tobacco in July as in any other month (fig. 4b ).
Much the greater part of the tobacco exports from Caracas went
Fig. 4a
Caracas Tobacco Exports, 1604–1607, Totals
Fig. 4b
Caracas Tobacco Exports, 1604–1607, Hispanic Vecinos, Foreign Vecinos,
and Non-Vecinos
to Seville—86 percent (6826 arrobas) of the May to September four-year total. The remainder was sent to Cartagena, and most of the Cartagena-bound tobacco was shipped by Hispanic vecinos. Indeed, foreign vecinos and non-vecinos only loaded tobacco for Cartagena in minimal quantities and only in June, usually to take advantage of the wheat boats that departed La Guaira then to meet the flota. Hispanic vecinos also preferred to sell tobacco in the Seville market, sending twice as much there as they did to Cartagena (fig. 5).
Fig. 5
Tobacco to Seville and to Cartagena, May to September
Identifying by name the principal tobacco traders (table 2) reveals that, of those who exported 200 arrobas or more, only one, Garci González de Silva, sent tobacco to ports other than Seville. The other three Hispanic vecinos who were major tobacco traders, Pedro Blanco de Ponte, Alonso Rodríguez Santos, and Juan de Aguirre, were newcomers in Caracas and they traded exclusively
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
with Spain. By contrast, most of the Hispanic vecinos who were principal wheat traders (table 3) had been in Caracas for decades prior to 1603–1607. As a group the Hispanic vecino wheat traders were, as their counterparts who exported tobacco were not, both closely aligned with the Cartagena market and holders of cabildo posts and other administrative positions in Caracas. Excepting Garci González de Silva, who was involved in nearly every available business enterprise, this Caracas political elite only dabbled in the tobacco trade in a marginal way, as a minor supplement to their wheat business in Cartagena.
Several of these principal wheat traders had more in common with one another than merely their political prominence and their Cartagena interests. Of the ten most active wheat traders who were also Caracas vecinos (Hispanic and foreign), six were aligned with one another by one or more social or kinship obligations. Nofre Carrasquer, Juan de Guevara, and Diego Vásquez de Escovedo were brothers-in-law. Two of Garci González de Silva's sons mar-
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ried two Guevara daughters. González de Silva was godfather to Diego de Villanueva's first child, born to fourteen-year-old Catalina Mejía some months after their marriage in 1602. Diego Vásquez de Escovedo accepted the same responsibility for the son of Antonio Rodríguez Jaramillo, master tailor and wheat trader. With the exception of Rodríguez Jaramillo, these men had all served as alcaldes ordinarios of the cabildo on at least one occasion; Diego de Villanueva, Diego Vásquez de Escovedo, Juan de Guevara, and Garci González de Silva were regidores perpetuos ; and Juan de Guevara had served as lieutenant governor. Some members of this group also made exports of tobacco—Garci González de Silva (922 arrobas), Deigo de Villanueva (68 arrobas), Diego Vásquez de Escovedo (40 arrobas)—but they sent it exclusively with their wheat to the Cartagena market.
The remaining four of the ten most active vecino wheat traders had no visible relationship to one another, nor were they holders of prestigious and powerful office. Francisco de Caravajal and Diego León were Portuguese; Diaz León was the town's slave factor. Juan de Aguirre lived in a house in 1605 that was rented to traders who were in Caracas only for the season to secure cargoes, and Alonso Rodríguez Santos, a merchant from Extremadura who would become the patriarch of an important Caracas family, was first elected to political office and began to acquire community influence only after his marriage in 1607 to Melchora de Vera Ibargoyen, the daughter of a Caracas founder.[51]
The four unrelated Hispanic vecinos were more interested in the tobacco trade to Seville than they were in the wheat trade to Cartagena. Without local influence and authority, they were unable to prevent the restrictions placed on tobacco by men with more power and different commercial interests. However, as the next chapter makes clear, it will be these less-powerful tobacco traders, together with other vecinos of marginal status, such as the Portuguese encomendero Diego de Ovalle, and immigrants not yet resident in Caracas in 1607, who first discover the substantial profits to be realized from cacao and African slavery. For all their authority at the turn of the seventeenth century, few members of the interrelated wheat group successfully made the transition from encomienda labor, wheat, and the Cartagena market to slavery, cacao, and the Mexican market.
All this suggests the existence in Caracas during the first decade of the seventeenth century of what might be best called a faction, a group of men unified by possession of local political power and by kinship, who had little direct interest in the tobacco trade. They were therefore free to be rigorous about controlling this trade, even to the point of threatening to eliminate tobacco planting altogether. By securing the license policy and ban on exports they did not intend to permanently jeopardize the profits that might be realized from the cultivation of tobacco, in fact, to prevent competition the cabildo refused to allow tobacco seeds to be taken to Spain in 1605.[52] Rather, they sought to protect the established shipping on which they had come to depend. Committed as they had been for more than two decades to the Cartagena market and the outfitting
of the flota there, it was in the interest of these individuals to control tobacco closely and to reduce the attraction to enemy corsairs that it represented. The eager participation in this of Sancho de Alquiza, governor of Venezuela from 1606 to 1611, lends credence to the idea that there was more to the 1606 ban than zeal to comply with royal directives against smuggling and a prevailing prejudice against Portuguese tobacco farmers. Alquiza had served as captain of ocean galleons, and he knew the Indies trade well. As son-in-law of Martín de las Alas, governor in Cartagena, he was no doubt familiar with the commercial interests in that port, and the fact that during his residence in Caracas he served as godfather only to officials of the crown and to Cartagena-faction families, the González de Silva, the Guevara, and the Carrasquer, may be taken as further proof that a preference for continued commercial relations with Cartagena, and the wheat business there in particular, shaped the strict tobacco policies of the Caracas elite.[53]
The effort of a few powerful men to gain a greater portion of the wheat and flour production in Caracas and to favor their established ties with Cartagena was to a large extent what determined the cabildo decisions to change the ejido boundaries in 1608 and to closely circumscribe tobacco cultivation and commerce after 1605. The institutional authority of the cabildo was a useful means to the achievement of these objectives, but only in a limited, short-term sense, for there was nothing to be done about the restricted land and water resources in the Caracas Valley or the resurgence of effective competition from Andean wheat farmers who traded from Maracaibo. In addition, Indian labor was always in short supply in Caracas, and only a few of the more successful vecinos, those like Nofre Carrasquer and Alonso Rodríguez Santos who were successful merchants first and encomenderos and wheat farmers afterwards, were able to purchase African slaves in quantity to augment their modest encomiendas. Wheat profits were sufficient to create a radical reorientation of the economic structure of Caracas, and in this context of change certain individuals collaborated and conspired to form policies that would assure them of an increasing share of such profits, but by the second decade of the seventeenth century wheat agriculture and trade had reached its natural and commercial limits in Caracas. Town politics could do nothing to
extend these limits. Brought to importance by the wheat trade, the cabildo would not be able to control in any significant way the commercialization of the next export crop, cacao, whose dominance in the Caracas regional economy began, with most interesting consequences for the composition of the local society, at just the time when wheat could be developed no further.