4—
The Tuy Valley Frontier

These fruits [cacao] are not like those that emerge from the frightening fertility of the Nile, where nothing more is required than the diligence of the farmers who need only to plant their wheat once the flood waters have subsided in order to have a prodigious harvest. In this country, besides the initial cost of the land and the formation of the haciendas, it is necessary to have a gang of Blacks—what they cost is well known—who must be fed and clothed. It is necessary to buy for them the necessary tools for their labor, to pay for overseers, for chaplains, and they must plant, irrigate, weed, prune, and replant—most strenuous work—and then they must harvest, clean, dry, and bag the cacao beans. After these many tasks are done, it is necessary to pay for muleteams, which in some places cost four or five pesos the carga, and in others as much as eight pesos, to take the beans to port. And, after meeting so many other costs, it is only the most unusual hacienda owner who does not have a substantial mortgage on his land which also must be paid.
—José Félix Valverde, Bishop of Caracas, to the King, 1745. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.

Only modest in size, subject to irregular rainfall, and without rich or resilient topsoil, most of the coastal valleys of the Caracas province had been planted in cacao to the limit of their productive capacity before the end of the seventeenth century. However, from at least the 1640s Caraqueños had also cleared land and cut irrigation canals for cacao haciendas on the banks of inland rivers, in particular the Tuy River and the lower portions of its several tributary streams. Coastal production still predominated in the 1680s, when enough Caracas cacao was grown to replace traditional Central American producers in the New Spain market,^[1] but by the first years of the eighteenth century, after decades of steady planting,

there were more cacao trees on the riverbank haciendas in the interior than there were on the coast. In addition, the newer riverine haciendas were significantly more bountiful. By the 1720s many coastal groves had been steadily worked for a century, with the result that the typical yield from these haciendas was no more than ten fanegas of beans from every 1000 mature trees. In the Tuy, by contrast, fertile soil, abundant rainfall, and the many stretches of low-lying river bank where irrigation systems could be dug meant that harvests of twenty-five and thirty fanegas of beans per 1000 trees were not uncommon. In 1720 some 60 percent of the cacao beans grown in the Caracas province came from new haciendas established along the Tuy and its tributaries, and by 1744 the Tuy share had risen to three-fourths of the total provincial harvest (see map 3).^[2]

The Tuy cacao frontier was of major, and mostly overlooked, importance for the history of colonial Caracas. Had the cacao economy been limited to the coastal valleys, the colony would have no doubt faded to insignificance before the end of the seventeenth century. Instead, with a total of more than 5 million cacao trees in the province by 1744, a more than five-fold increase during the sixty years after 1684, the Tuy haciendas led a prolonged boom that had a profound effect on Caracas society. In the first place, such dynamic expansion attracted the attention of a group of Basque investors, who, using as a vehicle their royally chartered monopoly company, the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana , made a controversial effort to control the Caracas cacao trade for their own benefit.

The Tuy boom also drew many hundreds of migrants across the Atlantic to Venezuela. The great majority of these were African slaves, brought for immediate and involuntary labor in the new groves. Many others were Canary Islanders, known as isleños or canarios , most of them modest farmers in their homeland, who arrived with gentry ambitions of becoming slave holders and hacienda owners in their own right. The canarios' hopes would go largely unfulfilled however, and after the failure of the uprising of 1749 many of them would take a place alongside the slaves as wage laborers in the cacao groves of Caracas elites. Although they regarded the prospect of becoming a rural proletariat as tantamount to passing into the state of slavery, and were driven to rebellion to prevent it from happening, isleños shared an intertwined history

[Full Size]

Map 3.
Fanegas of Cacao in the Caracas Province, 1720 and 1744

with free blacks and slaves in the Tuy region. The example of the Curiepe Valley illustrates well the complex pattern of race, politics, and personal ambition that characterized settlement on the Tuy frontier early in the eighteenth century.

Conflict over Settlement: The Case of Curiepe

By the end of the seventeenth century, although some Caracas vecinos had forgotten who had first explored the lower Tuy River and environs, the value of the region had become evident to everyone. Controversies over land titles in the Tuy had created a boom in legal business in Caracas that paralleled the booming prosperity of the cacao business in the region. As the history of the settlement of Curiepe demonstrates, high station and influence were useful weapons in the competition for land. It is also evident that by the beginning of the century there was already a concern for the supply and cost of labor to work the new haciendas.

In March 1699, during his last month as governor of Venezuela, don Francisco de Berrotarán sent three dozen men to look for the gold mines of "Apa y Carapa" in the hills south of the Tuy. With Tomusa Indians as guides, these men spent six weeks looking for gold where they believed "los antiguos " had found it at the time of the conquest of Caracas. Struggling in torrential rains and opposed by resident Indians, they found nothing. Nevertheless, and there is good reason to suppose that this was the primary reason for the venture, as soon as his men returned Governor Berrotarán began to request title to the land in the area on the basis of the 7800 pesos he had invested in its exploration.

Berrotarán remained in Caracas after his administration of the colony ended, and in 1702, the same year that he was granted the title of first Marqués del Valle de Santiago, he received from the crown legal title to a vast region south of the lower Tuy called "Apacarapa." It turned out, however, that his title was in conflict with others held by Pedro de Ponte y Andrade, a Spanish immigrant from La Coruña, Galicia, who had come to Caracas before 1679. Ponte complained to the crown that the search for gold mines was part of a scheme to grab land from people, like himself, who had already planted cacao in the area. Over the course of several

years Ponte had acquired 79 slaves from the Portuguese asiento, and these slaves had been at work on his Tuy Valley cacao hacienda for some time. Ponte acknowledged that it was possible for Berrotarán to buy 200 slaves, as he planned to do, because this quantity was occasionally available for sale in Caracas, but Ponte doubted that the new marqués had the money to make such a purchase. More importantly, even if Berrotarán bought 200 slaves, Ponte argued that it would be impossible for him to support them for the several years that would pass before the cacao trees matured and bore fruit. There were good profits to be made from cacao agriculture in the Tuy, Ponte acknowledged, but it was a very expensive business to begin from scratch on a large scale. With pointed irony, Ponte suggested that unless his adversary discovered the gold mines he had ostensibly set out to find, Berrotarán would not be able to feed his slaves while they brought his first cacao crop to harvest, "it being very expensive to keep slaves in the Tuy." As perhaps his best argument in defense of his property, Ponte reminded the king that if Berrotarán's titles were upheld and he lost his right to continue to grow cacao on his established hacienda, the monarchy would forfeit the revenues that were already being collected on the exports of Ponte's cacao beans.^[3] Yet Ponte underestimated either his rival's wealth or the capacity of the Tuy to turn a quick profit. In the long run both men were successful there, and in 1720 their heirs were owners of the largest cacao haciendas in the Tuy: Miguel Berrotarán Tovar, the second Marqués del Valle, had a cacao estate of 30,000 trees in the Tuy in that year, and Pedro Ponte Marín, the eldest son of Pedro de Ponte y Andrade, had an even larger Tuy hacienda of some 50,000 trees.

Much of the land in the Tuy Valley had been claimed before the end of the seventeenth century by powerful recent immigrants like Berrotarán or by long-established Caracas residents like Ponte y Andrade. By the beginning of the next century the opportunities created by high cacao prices paid in the expanding New Spain market made the region very attractive to would-be cacao farmers who were neither politically powerful nor members of entrenched local families. The mantuanos , as members of the foremost Caracas families were called in the eighteenth century, fought legal and political battles with groups of these ambitious newcomers for Tuy cacao property. The newcomers, pioneers who were willing to set-

tle on their frontier estates, fought among themselves as well. Illustrative of this conflict is the particularly well-documented struggle over the right to settle and plant cacao in the Curiepe Valley, located in the hills north of the lower Tuy some 20 leagues from Caracas, about halfway between the river and the Caribbean coast. More than a simple dispute at law over land on a remote frontier, the fight for Curiepe became part of some of the most important social and political issues of the day, including the new Bourbon regime's first efforts at centralizing its colonial authority and the challenge this presented to the traditional rights of the Caracas cabildo to govern the province in the absence of the governor.

Payment of a fee to the crown in 1663 had given the mantuano Juan Blanco de Villegas title to Curiepe land that was said to comprise an entire square league. In the early eighteenth century, two different groups challenged the exclusive rights of the Blanco de Villegas in Curiepe. Entirely without success in their effort was a large group of Canary Islanders, a total of 413 people in 73 families, who first petitioned the crown in 1728 for parcels of land drained by the Curiepe River. One of the leaders of the isleños then seeking land was Juan Francisco de León, who would, twenty years later, lead a large band of irate Tuy residents to Caracas to protest the policies of the Guipuzcoana Company. According to their petition in 1728, 60 of the Canary Islander families had been living in the immediate vicinity of Caracas and in the town proper for two decades. They had first gone out to Venezuela at the urging of the crown, but they had never been given land to plant as they had been promised, having been obliged instead, for all the ensuing years, to work as sharecroppers in the fields of others. The canarios recognized the legality of the Blanco de Villegas claim to Curiepe, but they argued that they should be given some of the property since nothing had ever been done by the family to put the land to productive use, and that it would be at best many more years before the Blanco family could acquire the slaves they needed to establish a profitable hacienda there.

To give their case the appearance of something more noble than their own self-interest, the petitioners concluded by depicting for the crown a dire scenario that could result if they were not given the opportunity to settle Curipe. They warned that their competitors in the region, a group of free blacks, morenos libres , who were

also soliciting titles, had already illegally built houses and planted cacao at Curiepe. These blacks, the canarios argued, would multiply greatly in the sparsely populated zone. The petitioners believed that the danger inherent in this situation was obvious, but they recounted for the king rumors of English buccaneers who had raided the region in 1710, carrying off some cattle and a few slaves. The whole region could become a "Nueva Jamayca ," they warned, should the English return to find a large community of free people of color in Curiepe, people unsupervised and of uncertain loyalty, who would most certainly offer no resistance to the invaders. If the Blanco de Villegas titles were disallowed and they were given permission to settle, as trustworthy and hardworking subjects the canarios offered themselves as entirely suitable replacements for the morenos who were occupying Curiepe in violation of both the Blanco titles and the best interests of the empire.^[4]

For their part, by the 1720s the morenos libres in Curiepe had earned a precarious right to their settlement after a fortuitous series of events punctuated by sharp turns of fortune.^[5] Many of them had come to the Indies as Dutch slaves, and they had gained their liberty in a rather remarkable fashion. From 1702 to 1704 some thirty Africans, fleeing their Dutch masters on the island of Curaçao, crossed the narrow stretch of sea separating the island from the Venezuelan mainland. Carried westward by the prevailing winds and current, they arrived finally at the coastal town of Coro, where they were seized by the municipal authorities and put up for sale at public auction. This was probably not the first time that fugitive Dutch slaves in pursuit of their freedom had ended up as the bondsmen of Spaniards on the Venezuelan coast, but the destiny of these slaves was to be different, for in 1701, by means of some deft diplomacy, the French had replaced the Portuguese as holders of exclusive rights to supply Spain's colonies with African slaves.^[6] The French factor of the asiento de negros in Coro claimed that the auction had been illegal, since by contract and by treaty he had the unique right to sell slaves entered into Spanish territory, including those who entered while fleeing from foreign masters. In 1703 the case was brought before the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, a venue with little sympathy for the French cause, since that island had been forcefully divided into French and Spanish portions only in 1697. Citing a real cédula dated November 1697, in which slaves

fleeing from the French district of Santo Domingo to the Spanish zone were given their freedom, the Audiencia declared in 1704 that the Dutch slaves in Coro were also to be freed. As had been the case in Santo Domingo, the Coro libres were also to receive sufficient land so that they might support themselves. This totally unanticipated decision both denied the French factor his profits and the Coro vecinos the slaves they had expected. Word of the Audiencia's order spread quickly, but many Spaniards refused to comply with it. The order went largely unenforced until 1711, when another forty fugitives arrived from Curaçao. Most of these slaves were also seized and put to work for new masters, but some of them, together with a few of those who had been freed earlier, went to Caracas to petition the governor for their freedom and the land they were to be given by law.^[7]

The governor in Caracas from 1711 to 1714 was José Francisco de Cañas y Merino, son of the sergeant major of the Spanish presidio at Orán, Africa. Cañas had been raised at Orán, and had risen in the ranks there to become captain of the infantry. As governor he supported the cause of the Curaçao refugees, and, perhaps as a gesture of defiance directed at the Caracas elite,^[8] he instructed the freedmen to join the town's newly formed free black militia unit. The captain of this unit, the Compañía de Morenos Libres , was a mulatto, Juan del Rosario Blanco, who was named to the position by Cañas in 1711. He had been the slave, and was probably the illegitimate son, of don Alejandro Blanco de Villegas, heir to the Curiepe land. Juan del Rosario could read and write, and he was a popular leader of Caracas's free people of color. In 1715, the year after his patron Cañas had been forcibly removed from office, Juan del Rosario sent a memorial to the king in the name of his compañía, asking for land in compliance with the order given by the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1704. The memorial stated that the twenty-one freed Dutch slaves who belonged to his militia had not received land as the court had ordered, and that many other former slaves released by the Audiencia lived scattered about the countryside without legal means to sustain themselves and without the benefit of priest or religion.

Juan del Rosario provided the monarch with a brief description of the geography of the Venezuelan coastline east of the port at La Guaira. For a distance sixteen or eighteen leagues the valleys of this

barlovento (windward) coast were filled with cacao haciendas; but beyond the valley of Chuspa, where the coastline falls away to the south, forming Cape Codera with its extensive bay known as Higuerote, there were no settlements or haciendas. Protected there from the prevailing westerly winds, ships of all kinds bound for La Guaira and beyond stopped at Higuerote to make sure of their bearings and to make sure that the coast was clear of pirates before continuing down the open Venezuelan coast. The strategic importance was twofold: first, unguarded, it was an attractive rendezvous for pirates, and second, it would be an ideal point of disembarkation for a land invasion of the colony. Juan del Rosario proposed that the morenos libres of his militia unit and others who had subscribed to his plan be allowed to settle in an area about five leagues west of the Higuerote coast called by him Sabana del Oro. This would comply with the Audiencia order to give the freed slaves land, and, since many of them were soldiers in the king's militia, their presence would control contraband and slow down any foreign army that might be put ashore there until aid could be sent from Caracas.

According to the proposal, once established the community would receive a priest named by the bishop in Caracas, and its inhabitants would recognize the local authority of a lieutenant named by the governor. To give their petition added respectability, the claimants reminded the king of a similar settlement of mulattos established by royal decree in New Spain; their community would be "an imitation of the one created in Vera Cruz, on the barlovento coast there, that they call San Miguel de la Antigua."^[9]

The site referred to by Juan del Rosario as Sabana del Oro was in fact Curiepe, as he no doubt knew, and the mantuano family of Blanco de Villegas was quick to point out that fact in Caracas. The petition met with complete silence from the cabildo and the governor, and the cause of the morenos libres would most likely have advanced no further had it not been for the disjunctures and juridical confusion that befell the colony after 1719, when the word arrived in Caracas that the province of Venezuela had been transferred from Santo Domingo to the executive authority of the newly created viceroyalty of New Granada and the judicial authority of the Audiencia of Santa Fe de Bogotá.^[10] As it turned out, the resulting disorder in Caracas allowed the morenos libres their chance to lay what proved to be a lasting claim to the Curiepe Valley.

The viceroy of New Granada took immediate interest in this new dominion, and in 1720 two of his agents, designated jueces comisionarios , arrived in Caracas. These men were charged with the responsibility of investigating the state of the royal treasury, making a census of the Indian population, and putting an end to contraband trade. An imbroglio quickly formed between these viceregal agents, Pedro Martín de Beato and Pedro José de Olavarriaga, who were Basques, and the Canary Islander governor, Marcos de Betancourt y Castro. From Bogotá the viceroy, Jorge de Villalonga, without having had time to receive Betancourt's defense of charges made against him by Beato and Olavarriaga, ordered the governor jailed for smuggling and other crimes. Licenciado Antonio José Alvarez y Abreu, who had come with Beato and Olavarriaga ostensibly as a legal advisor, was told to assume Betancourt's gubernatorial duties. This action violated the traditional privilege of the Caracas cabildo to act as interim governor, and the town council's regidores made an appeal to the viceroy. In no uncertain terms, threatening fines of 4000 pesos, arrest and transport to Bogotá, Villalonga ordered the cabildo to comply. Intimidated, the cabildo did comply, and from March until December 1721 Alvarez y Abreu exercised the governor's authority. During this time Juan del Rosario and the morenos libres would found a settlement at Curiepe.

In June 1721, governor pro tem Alvarez y Abreu granted Juan del Rosario a license to reconnoiter the Sabana del Oro site in preparation for the pueblo that he and his militiamen wanted to establish there. This license was understood by the morenos to be in fact permission to begin the settlement, and construction was begun. With sixteen houses and a church of wattle and daub clustered around a plaza, Juan del Rosario made clear to the governor the full range of his ambitious plans for Curiepe. In a letter he asked Alvarez y Abreu to order his lieutenants on the coast and the interior valleys to send to Caracas all the runaway slaves that they might capture. He asked that all these cimarrones then be "given to the Capitán and founder of Sabana del Oro, for the better establishment and increase of said Sabana."^[11] Not surprisingly, this audacious relocation scheme never received serious consideration, but the settlement of morenos at Curiepe was established. In spite of subsequent efforts to remove them, they remained there, and, as it turned out, more than a few cimarrones would find their own way to the Curiepe region.

The decade of the 1720s was marked by a chaos of governance in Caracas which would, among its several major consequences, have a lasting effect on the way the Tuy was administered and on the attitudes of Tuy settlers toward royal and regional authority. Alvarez y Abreu was replaced in December 1721 by a new permanent governor, Diego Portales y Meneses, who immediately became involved in a serious controversy with both the viceroy in Bogotá and the Caracas cabildo. In the entire eighteenth century, the disorder created by the political struggles of the first years of the 1720s would be surpassed only by the open rebellion of 1749. Portales was as quick to take authority from the viceregal triumvirate of Beato, Olavarriaga, and Alvarez y Abreu as they had been to deny it to the previous governor Betancourt. Portales expelled Alvarez y Abreu and imprisoned Beato and Olavarriaga, acts that won him the approval of the Caracas elite. But the governor then lost his local support by curiously insisting that the bishop occupy his office rather than the cabildo while he made an obligatory tour of the province. The cabildo appealed this infringement to Spain, and in January 1723 a royal cédula was received in Caracas which reaffirmed the town council's right to replace the governor on an interim basis with its alcaldes ordinarios. Neither viceroys nor the governors themselves could abrogate this privilege.

Two months later an order for Portales's arrest arrived from Bogotá, citing his rough treatment of the viceroy's agents the previous year. This time local sensitivities were respected, and the order carefully stipulated that the cabildo would assume gubernatorial authority. From the Caracas jail, Portales complained to the king, and in response to his appeal a second cédula arrived from Spain late in 1723. Contradicting both tradition and the previous instructions, this order gave Portales his freedom and granted him permission to name the bishop, Escalona y Calatayud, as his temporary replacement. He was also told to disregard any challenge to his authority that might come from the viceroy of New Granada.

Armed with this support, Portales began a determined vendetta against certain prominent Caraqueños who had been responsible for his incarceration. In turn, these opponents turned for help to influential friends in the viceregal government, with the result that Portales was free for only a few months when, in February 1724, the Audiencia of Santa Fe demanded that the Caracas cabildo arrest him once again. Placed in chains and even in the stocks for a time,

Portales remained in jail for a month before he escaped and took refuge in the residence of his ally Escalona. The bishop tried to assume the governorship on the basis of the most recent royal missive, but the cabildo rejected the effort, claiming that the governor could not make appointments while under arrest in the Caracas jail. At this point, with the question of jurisdiction in complete confusion, and the practical matter of authority reduced to simple power, both sides took up arms. Bloodshed was averted because the cabildo faction had far greater support in the community than Portales and Escalona, and when Portales escaped to the coastal valley of Ocumare the confrontation ended, with no more immediate damage done than widespread anger. The bishop vented his feelings by excommunicating the alcaldes of the cabildo, but in time tempers cooled, the ecclesiastical dictate was removed, and a third royal cédula, sent in response to an appeal to the crown made by Escalona, brought Portales back to the governor's residence in June 1726. He remained in formal control of the colony until he was replaced in 1728.^[12]

Central to an understanding of this controversy is the challenge that the viceroyalty of New Granada presented to the prerogatives of the Caracas governor. It was the responsibility and privilege of the governor, who in Venezuela was also chief military office as captain-general, to appoint officers who represented his authority in the rural districts of the province. This official, known by the title of teniente de justicia mayor , administered an often extensive jurisdiction. In the first decades of the eighteenth century there were three of these positions in the vicinity of Caracas: responsibility for the coast was given to a castellano y justicia mayor who also administered both the fort and the commercial activities of the port of La Guaira; a second lieutenant executed the king's justice in the Tuy region from the town of Ocumare del Tuy to the mouth of the river; while a third oversaw a jurisdiction that extended south of Caracas to Santa Lucía on the lower Guaire River. In addition to these regional officers, eight Hispanic corregidores were located in towns with Indian populations.^[13] Tenientes could name assistants, or cabos , to patrol the more remote zones of their jurisdictions. As judges of first instance, these men had a variety of responsibilities, but principal among them were the duties of pursuing runaway slaves and preventing contraband trade. To supplement their modest salaries,

all of these officials were entitled to retain a portion of the illegally transported cacao or other contraband merchandise which they seized.

The system of tenientes gave the governor at least nominal control over policing and the exercise of justice in the countryside, and also provided him with positions that he could use for patronage purposes. Until 1717, the names of men nominated for these positions were referred to the Audiencia of Santo Domingo for approval, and the Audiencia had always confirmed the governors' nominations as a matter of course.^[14] But the transfer of administration to the viceroy of New Granada and the Audiencia of Santa Fe brought significant changes to Caracas. Enthusiastic about controlling Venezuelan smuggling, the viceroy sent his own agents, the jueces de comiso Beato and Olavarriage, whose authority in the countryside superseded that of the governor-appointed tenientes. Resistance by Governor Betancourt to this challenge of his traditional prerogatives resulted in his imprisonment on the charge that he was himself a contrabandista . To enforce the effort to centralize control from Bogotá, Betancourt was removed from office altogether and replaced, not by the alcaldes of the Caracas cabildo, but by Alvarez y Abreu, who could then appoint tenientes to the liking of the viceroy, without any regard whatsoever for local sentiment. In a related matter, with blatant disregard for local opinion, Alvarez y Abreu granted Juan del Rosario permission to found a settlement of ex-slaves at Curiepe.

For the principal citizens of Caracas, who may or may not have benefited very much from smuggling, centralization from the distant viceregal capital meant that their influence in the rural hinterland of the Caracas province was diminished along with that of the governor. The vecinos' influence traditionally was dependent on their ability to persuade the governor to support their view—for instance, to be lax in his persecution of smugglers. In the case of Portales, his initial efforts to resist the viceroy's agents struck a blow in favor of regional autonomy that Caraqueños could applaud, but then, by denying the cabildo its right to replace him on a temporary basis, the governor demonstrated an unwillingness to share power. He then became an opponent of the colonists rather than their ally. To the relief of the Caracas elite, in 1726 the judicial responsibility for Venezuela was returned to the Audiencia of

Santo Domingo, and with it the authority of the governor was restored to the status quo ante .

The significance of these events went far beyond the particular case of the settlement of Curiepe, but the resolution of the controversy there demonstrates clearly the powerful impact on all claimants of the highly inconstant royal authority. The morenos continued to plant cacao while power struggles distracted Caracas, but the arrival of Portales and the eclipse of Alvarez y Abreu nearly brought to an end the Curiepe plans of Juan del Rosario. In 1722, while Portales was still on favorable terms with the Caracas mantuanos, Francisco de Monasterios presented the governor with the Blanco de Villegas titles to Curiepe and requested a ruling against the morenos who had no legal right to reside there. Monasterios's wife, Adriana Blanco Villegas, had died in 1721, and his interests in preventing Juan del Rosario from inhabiting the region were probably related to his wife's inheritance there. Portales responded to the Monasterios petition by ordering the destruction of the Curiepe settlement in September 1722. Although houses were burned and crops destroyed, the morenos remained in the vicinity of Curiepe, and in 1723, perhaps unsure to which jurisdiction his case belonged, Juan del Rosario sent appeals to both the Audiencia of Santo Domingo and the Audiencia of Sante Fe.

The final phase of the protracted conflict over Curiepe began in March 1724, with the death of Alejandro Blanco de Villegas. He had always been lukewarm in his resistance to the Curiepe efforts of Juan del Rosario Blanco, who was most likely his unrecognized son. Alejandro Blanco's widow, doña Luisa Catalina Martínez de Villegas, felt no similar compunctions, and in June 1724 she opened a vigorous campaign against "the violent pretensions of the negro Juan del Rosario, my liberto ." In her petition to the Audiencia of Santa Fe, which would finally reach the Council of the Indies for judgment, she argued that there was no valid comparison to be made between the settlement of freed slaves in distant, isolated Curiepe and the land given to their counterparts in Santo Domingo, which was "within view" of the established colony on that Caribbean island. Her opponent's privileged relationship with her husband (she referred to the moreno militia captain disparagingly as her personal servant, or page: "Juan Page, alias del Rosario ") had given rise to the whole problem. The morenos had never re-

ceived actual permission from either governor or viceroy to settle Curiepe or any other place, and they had lied about the location of Sabana del Oro, which was in fact Curiepe, land that belonged to her and her children as heirs of her husband.^[15]

While both parties waited for a decision from the institutions of higher justice, the cabildo took revenge on what it considered to be the pretensions of Juan del Rosario. Early in 1725, with Portales in hiding and the alcaldes ordinarios exercising gubernatorial authority, they relieved Juan del Rosario of the captaincy of the militia, using his advanced age as an excuse. However, Rosario and the moreno community had become pawns in the very serious play for power that dominated Caracas after 1722, and when Portales regained the governor's office in June 1726 he reversed the ruling of his opponents on the cabildo and restored Rosario to his militia command.^[16]

In that year the Audiencia in Santo Domingo ordered the governor to send copies of all the documents pertaining to the Curiepe dispute, and to make no further changes in the status of the settlement until a final decision could be made. It was at this point that the landless Canary Islanders who had been working as laborers made their bid for land and a town in the Curiepe region of the Tuy Valley, ostensibly to protect the province from foreign invasion and the dubious loyalty of the morenos there. Gaining no support from Portales, the canarios were no doubt surprised to find that the morenos of Curiepe, their estwhile competitors, were willing to make common cause with them. A joint petition arguing that there was room for more than one settlement at Curipe was sent to Santo Domingo, and the response from the Audiencia appeared to reward this combined effort with a decisive victory. The decision of the Audiencia, issued in December 1728, was unequivocal:

It is declared that the lands of the Valley of Curiepe, Sabana del Oro, Cabo de Codera, and the Ensenada de Higuerote belong to his Majesty, and the heirs of Don Juan Blanco de Villegas are to be returned the quantity of one hundred and seven and a half pesos, the value of the composition fee that they paid for titles to the Valley of Curiepe, but [since] the titles had never been confirmed and the Valley never settled by them, faculty and license is given so that two settlements can be established in that region, one by the Isleño families described in these Acts, and the other to the free Negros whose commander is Capitán Juan del Rosario Blanco.^[17]

And yet the final resolution of the matter was to be quite different. Doña Luisa Martínez de Villegas made it known in Caracas that, due to the uncertainty and confusion caused by the involvement of both audiencias in the case, she had made a direct appeal to the Council of the Indies to resolve the dispute over Curiepe. The Council reviewed the entire issue and, in October 1731, nullified the decision of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo. In its wisdom the Council recognized two facts: one, that the moreno settlement at Curiepe, although without legal foundation, had become one of the most populous communities in the Tuy; and two, that the intimate link between Juan del Rosario Blanco and the family Blanco Villegas provided the best way out of the impasse. Doña Martínez de Villegas and the other heirs of Juan Blanco de Villegas were ordered to share in possession of Curiepe with the people of color led by Juan del Rosario. The decision of the council confirmed what had become a fait accompli, for the bishop José Félix Valverde, who had replaced Escalona y Calatayud in 1731, decided that since the nearest resident priest was five leagues distant a parish should be established at Curiepe. The first baptism in the new parish was celebrated in May 1732.^[18] The Council of the Indies determined that the Canary Islanders were unnecessary interlopers in what had come to be seen as a Blanco family quarrel at Curiepe, and the council decreed that they be given land at a different site at least fifteen leagues from the coast. In 1733 they received permission from the governor, Martín de Lardizábal, to proceed with the foundation of the pueblo of Panaquire, on the distant bank of the lower Tuy, and by 1737, counting then thirty-two houses of canario residents, Panaquire was organized as a parish and granted a resident priest.^[19] It was from Panaquire that Juan Francisco de León would march to Caracas in 1749 in what would become an armed rebellion against the authority of the king.

Tuy Cacao Haciendas and the Slave Trade

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

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

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

[Full Size]

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

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

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

[Full Size]

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

[Full Size]

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

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

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

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

War between England and Spain ended the English asiento in

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Full Size]

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

[Full Size]

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

[Full Size]

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

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

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

[Full Size]

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

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

The Caldera-Piñate Haciendas: A Case Study

The best extant record of an eighteenth-century Tuy Valley cacao estate is that of the haciendas of María Candelaria Caldera and her husband Simón Piñate. The case is not typical in that while the immigrant Piñate was neither a member of the Caracas elite nor the

founder of an elite family, the census of cacao property taken in 1720 shows him to have been the owner of 56,000 cacao trees on two haciendas, more cacao trees in fact than any other grower in the Tuy region at that time. An Andalusian from Huelva, Piñate was fortunate to have come to Venezuela in time to participate in the best years of the Tuy boom, but his rapid rise to prosperity was due principally to his marriage to María Caldera, a widow whose first husband had begun to plant cacao in the Tuy in the 1680s. When the canario Juan Francisco de la Mar died in 1697, he left real property and slaves worth 18,250 pesos to María Caldera and their daughter Feliciana. Feliciana died a few years after her mother married Piñate, and María Caldera assumed her husband's entire inheritance, including twenty-four slaves worth 6750 pesos and 8800 cacao trees.^[27]

There was nothing luxurious about de la Mar's hacienda. The simple wattle-and-daub, palmleaf-roofed dwelling that had been home to him and his family was valued at only 600 pesos in 1697. Its furnishings were set at an additional 222 pesos. Attached to the house was a kitchen roofed in straw worth 20 pesos. Eight slave huts were thought to be worth 10 pesos each, a stable for mules was appraised at 8 pesos, and a chicken coop was valued at 6 pesos. But from these rustic beginnings in the course of thirty years María Caldera and Simón Piñate developed the most extensive cacao enterprise on the Tuy frontier.

Piñate died in 1728, the year that the Guipuzcoana Company was founded. By that date he and his wife owned two flourishing cacao haciendas and had begun to plant a third. The original groves at San Joseph, planted by Juan de la Mar in the seventeenth century, then contained more than 36,000 trees that were tended by forty-six slaves. In three decades, the number of cacao trees at San Joseph had increased four-fold, and the number of slaves had almost doubled. The 1728 inventory of Piñate's estate reveals that most of the adult slaves at San Joseph (twenty-four of thirty-four adults) had been born in Africa (see appendix G). A newer hacienda at a site known as Cara had a kiln and a tile-roofed house used by the Piñate family. There were 27,229 cacao trees at all stages of maturity here, 15,891 of them were fruit-bearing. Forty-three adult slaves and their thirteen children worked and lived at Cara, and again the majority of adults (twenty-four of forty-three)

were African-born. A third hacienda, located downstream on the Tuy from the first two at a place called Isnetta, was in the process of being planted under Piñate's personal supervision when he fell ill with an achaque grave in 1727. At Isnetta an unspecified number of slaves from the Cara groves labored together with a gang of Africans who had been bought from the English asiento for the specific purpose of peopling the new hacienda.^[28]

Sometime during the first decades of the eighteenth century María Caldera and Simón Piñate moved for a time from the banks of the Tuy to a substantial two-story brick house in Caracas. Here their growing family had many more comforts than they had known in the hot and humid Tuy Valley. Cedar chests and a long cedar table (three varas by one vara , nearly as long as the typical slave cabin at San Joseph was wide), a dozen chairs, a cedar desk, and two oak buffets filled the principal room of the house. Thirty-five paintings of religious themes, including one large (two varas by one-quarter vara ) representation of the Virgin Mary, adorned the walls. Other furnishings included ten gilt mirrors imported from England and seven lacquered screens used as room dividers. Piñate did most of his cacao business with the English slavers, and for this reason Mexican merchandise, such as the Campeche mattresses, Puebla blankets, and pottery often listed in the inventories of other Caracas planters, were not to be found in his home. Also absent was the large retinue of domestic servants characteristic of elite Caraqueño households. Only three house servants were included in Piñate's 1728 testament: Manuel Congo ("old, lame, and half tame"), and a young couple on loan from the Tuy cacao estates.

By all appearances, Piñate and María Caldera preferred the rustic society of the Tuy Valley to the colonial sophistication of eighteenth-century Caracas. In October 1725 they returned to the Tuy and took up residence on the Cara hacienda. Piñate began planting the new groves at Isnetta. Their eldest son Joseph Silvestre Piñate remained in Caracas where he assumed responsibility for receiving the cacao sent from the Tuy groves, arranging its transport to La Guaira, and its sale there. First as his parents' agent and then, following his father's death in February 1728, as legal guardian of the estate on behalf of his younger siblings, Joseph Piñate kept close account of the family's cacao transactions. His ledgers, which cover the period from October 1725 to April 1733,

offer valuable information about the operation and costs of operating this profitable Tuy estate.

The business of cacao agriculture as it was carried out by the Piñates in the 1720s and 1730s was generally similar to the coastal enterprises of a hundred years earlier. During the second and third decades of the eighteenth century the constraining commercial policies of the Guipuzcoana Company were not yet in effect, and prices were on the rise. Prices paid for cacao ranged from eight and a half pesos to twelve pesos per fanega of cacao beans during the last years of the 1720s to from between twelve and twenty pesos per fanega during the first years of the 1730s. Yet there were important differences between the early seventeenth century and this second period of cacao prosperity. While the first haciendas on the Caribbean coast enjoyed immediate access to what was the world's busiest commercial highway, by the eighteenth century most of Caracas's cacao was grown some distance from the coast, and transportation charges consumed a significant share of the income from sales. A second difference was that while in the seventeenth century African slaves had been in abundant supply and were easily acquired from Portuguese traders in exchange for cacao beans, in the early eighteenth century slaves were distributed by the English asiento and were not always available in numbers sufficient to meet planters' steadily increasing demands.

The Piñate estate paid more than 10 percent of its gross income on the transport of beans to market. The family kept a team of mules, but it was used only for carrying cacao from Caracas to La Guaira and for bringing goods up from the port to the city. A peon was hired for two pesos in wages and an additional half-peso for expenses, known as matalotaje , to make the round trip to the coast. To haul their cacao from the Tuy the Piñates paid salaries to professional teamsters who had their own mules. Two brothers, Andrés and Diego Báez, went back and forth to the San Joseph hacienda about twice each month. This was evidently full-time employment for these men. They charged fourteen reales for every full carga , which was something more than a fanega and a half of dried cacao beans. With eight or nine mules apiece, the Báez brothers were each paid about twenty pesos a month for transporting the Piñate cacao, and they were occasionally able to supplement this income by carrying on the return trip merchandise and iron bars that Tuy

blacksmiths forged into hoes and pruning knives. Other muledrivers were paid at the same rate to carry the cacao from the Cara groves to Caracas. These wages were not collected after every trip. Perhaps to keep the muledrivers loyal and at his ready disposition, perhaps because he did not always have cash on hand with which to pay them, Joseph Piñate gave them their wages only at intervals of five or six months. In all, the cost of transporting cacao from the Tuy to Caracas amounted to 3231 pesos for the period October 1725 through November 1728. This amount represents almost 17 percent of the total operating expenditures for the same period (see table 16).

Some twenty years after Simón Piñate's death the Tuy would erupt in a bitter protest that would in turn become rebellion. As prosperous hacienda owners in a period of general expansion, the Piñates had no reason to think of revolt as a means to the ends that interested them. Preferred was the time-honored technique of giving gifts to those individuals who were in a position to favor the outcome of one's legal case or business dealings. From October 1725 to February 1728, at the instruction of his father, Joseph Piñate gave away 937 fanegas of cacao worth at least 7500 pesos, a rather remarkable sum for an enterprise of this size. Some of this cacao went to facilitate legal business in Santo Domingo, "as gifts to those who represent us there and to several judges of the court." A total of 311 fanegas of beans, about one-third of the amount given away, went to the factor of the English asiento in 1725 and 1726. Slaves were in short supply during the early years of the 1970s, and with few landless free blacks and Spaniards as yet willing to work for wages in the cacao groves, these payments were protection against labor shortages. Taking no chances, Piñate kept the English agent supplied with free cacao. Slave sales registered by the South Sea Company with the governor's secretary show that Piñate purchased a dozen slaves in 1724 and 1725, about 5 percent of all the slaves sold in Caracas by the British agent in those two years.^[29]

The documentation for the Piñate estate is limited in such a way as to make impossible either a detailed analysis of expenditures or an estimate of the return on the capital value of the property. Expenditures are not itemized after November 1728, but the information for the period from October 1725 through November 1728 is summarized in table 16. Cacao sales for these thirty-seven months

totaled 23,677 pesos, an annual mean from sales of 7679 pesos. That Piñate was a profit-conscious entrepreneur with but few social pretensions is reflected in the fact that he spent more on the purchase of slaves and land for the new Isnetta hacienda than he did on any other item, and made only modest outlays of cash for items of family and household consumption. These latter expenditures, which figured so prominently in the seventeenth-century accounts of the Rodríguez Santos and Liendo clans, were not very important to this Tuy pioneer who evidently preferred to live on his hacienda rather than in Caracas. In the ledger kept by his son such social expenditures total less than both capital investments and loan payments, and they are only slightly more than payments made for cacao cartage costs and for wages and salaries. The most striking feature of the financial management of this estate, however, is the fact that during the last three years of his life Simón Piñate gave away cacao roughly equivalent in value to the annual gross income of his properties. Although comprehensible behavior in a society economically capitalist and socially seigneurial, this extraordinary largesse is not easy to classify, falling as it does almost exactly between operating expenditures and payments for social and personal objectives.

Discounting the value of the cacao that was given away, the income generated on this, the largest of the Tuy cacao properties, was considerable. As prices rose during the first years of the 1730s, the monthly income from cacao sales increased by some 75 percent, and the estimated net income from the Piñate haciendas for the period from January 1729 to April 1733 is 32,399 pesos, or 7477 pesos per year. This was considerably more than was earned by the estate during the previous three years, the last years of Piñate's life, when the income after expenditures totaled only 1477 pesos for thirty-seven months. For the entire period for which we have a record, the eighty-nine months from October 1725 to April 1733, the estimated net income is 45,728 pesos, or 4568 pesos per year (see table 17). This sum is about three or four times greater than the net income calculated for the Liendo coastal groves in the 1640s and 1650s, and we may therefore suppose that the eighteenth-century Tuy cacao boom was at least as profitable as the first bonanza a century earlier.^[30]

The Closing of the Tuy Frontier

Evidently by choice very little of the Piñate income went for items of social significance, for material goods or prestigious community offices, but even a strict concentration of expenditures on hacienda

expansion, for land, slaves, wages, and gifts of cacao to influential individuals, did not suffice to provide the Piñate family with a permanent place among Caracas's cacao-planter gentry. In contrast to their seventeenth-century predecessors, who, like the Liendo, established enduring family dynasties on the basis of similar or even smaller income, with the division of the estate in 1733 the Piñate family disappears from the Caracas record.

Piñate's failure to convert the substantial returns from his cacao haciendas into continuing gentry status for his family and heirs can be taken as a marker of the closing of the Tuy Valley frontier, and with it the end of the long formative phase of the Caracas elite. Rather than a Turnerian filling of the usable physical space, the end of bonanza cacao opportunities in the Tuy region was the direct consequence of two events: the radical commercial policies of the Guipuzcoana beginning in the 1730s, and the decline in the supply of slaves available for the Caracas market after the termination of the English asiento in 1738. From the early 1740s on, declining cacao income put increasing strain on established gentry families and virtually ruined the investment, comprised mostly of their own labor, of many modest migrants to the Tuy. Using the weight of their long tenure in Caracas and the authority of the town cabildo, which they dominated, to form their protest, many elites ran the risk of sedition in their opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company. At the other end of the Hispanic social scale, the vigorous reaction of many smallholder cacao farmers and other rural poor to the changing conditions led to armed rebellion in 1749.

The most important fact for an understanding of the tension that characterized political and social life in Caracas in the 1730s and 1740s, tension that resulted in the Tuy frontier rebellion in 1749, is that much of the expansion of the Caracas provinces cacao industry had been generated independent of the commercial and anti-smuggling activities of the Guipuzcoana Company.^[31] Subsequent chapters will show how the Company's heavy-handed efforts to acquire an increasing portion of the colony's cacao had the effect of denying profits to planters and therefore, in contradiction to the image it projected, the Company in fact slowed expansion of cacao production. The provocative policies of the Company provided planters with a focus for their frustrations over the ending of the Tuy boom, but it is difficult to see how the customary growth of

many decades could have continued after the end of the English slave contract. It seems probable that the most crucial immediate consequence of the cancellation of the asiento in 1739 was not so much the shortage of slaves that ensued, although this did indeed force a most significant shift to free labor in time, but rather the fall in price paid for cacao as the English no longer competed with the Basque monopolists for Caracas beans.

The asientistas were well informed about the market for cacao and they were especially interested in buying all they could from Caracas haciendas. An extraordinary document prepared by a South Sea Company accountant in 1733 demonstrates the substantial profit that could be expected from the sale in Mexico of Caracas cacao. The English company calculated that the cash sale of 600 slaves delivered at Caracas would produce a net profit, after transatlantic transportation and other charges had been discounted, of 24,003 pesos. If the proceeds of his sale were then used to buy cacao beans, which were priced at 23 pesos the fanega in Caracas, and if this cacao were to be sold in Veracruz at the current price there of 40 pesos the fanega, the South Sea Company could anticipate a much greater profit from its original 600 slaves of 51,356 pesos, even after duties and shipping costs between Caracas and Veracruz had been paid.^[32] In other words, Caracas beans sold in the New Spain market in 1733 increased in value by more than 50 percent according to the South Sea Company estimate.

Therefore, the slave merchants were surely willing to bid up the price for cacao if they had to, knowing that substantial earnings were possible from subsequent sales in Mexico, a market that their Basque competitors could not enter. Probably because they were more interested in acquiring cacao beans than they were in selling slaves, the English asientistas were not willing to extend credit to Caraqueño buyers of their human commodity. In Caracas business with the asiento was done strictly on either an exchange-for-cacao or cash-and-carry basis; the total debt owed to the South Sea Company by Spanish American slaveholders was more than 750,000 pesos in 1736, but none of this debt was located in Caracas.^[33]

Certain fortunate Caraqueños were not much affected by the price paid in Caracas by either the South Sea Company or the Guipuzcoana Company; some privileged elites traded directly with New Spain themselves, either in their own ships or in the vessels

of other private shipowners. Their profits were therefore determined by the price paid for cacao in the Mexican market. The principal beneficiaries of the rising Caracas price were those more modest cacao producers, like the morenos and canarios of the Tuy, who had no choice but to sell their beans in the colony. For a few years in the 1730s, prices (fig. 11) and numbers of slaves sold (fig. 12) both reached record high levels. Prices had begun to fall before war put an end to the English slave business in Caracas, but for a time, while Tuy pioneers like Juan del Rosario and Juan Francisco de León struggled to start their haciendas, competition between the two commercial companies resulted in premium prices paid for their cacao harvests.

The end of the asiento thus had a double impact on the province of Caracas, and on the Tuy frontier in particular. First, left alone as the exclusive buyer of cacao for export, the Guipuzcoana Company could thereafter pay virtually what it cared to pay to hacienda owners who had no other way to get their beans to market. From a record high of eighteen pesos the fanega in 1735 and a respectable twelve pesos in 1739, cacao fell to nine pesos in 1741 and finally to five pesos in 1749, when protest against the Company erupted in rebellion. Second, the virtual end of slave imports reverberated throughout Caracas society. The immediate labor needs of mantuano hacendados were met by the slaves they already possessed, and such elites might well have supposed that their needs in the near future would be filled by the reproductive capacity of the same slaves. But the fact that after 1739 most of the newer Tuy hacienda owners were left with neither sufficient slaves nor the prospect of acquiring them was a cause for much concern.

The slaveholding ambitions of immigrants and other would-be hacendados evaporated, and in time many of them would themselves take the place of slaves as wage laborers on the haciendas of others. This would not begin to occur, however, until the failure of the rebellion of 1749 and the royal repression of the 1750s made it clear that there was no other alternative for most of those who had not solidly established themselves as slaveholding cacao planters by 1739.