Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Vicente de Amezaga Aresti, Hombres de la Compañía Guipuzcoana (Caracas, 1963), 24-31.
2. Magnus Mörner, "Economic Factors and Stratification in Colonial Spanish America with Special Regard to Elites," Hispanic American Historical Review 63 (1983): 347.
3. The most recent summary of this literature is Fred Bronner, "Urban Society in Colonial Spanish America: Research Trends," Latin American Research Review 21 (1986). See especially pages 35-39.
1— Commerce and Conflict: The First Caracas Elite, 1567–1620
1. Hermano Nectario María, Historia de la conquista y fundación de Caracas , 2d ed. (Madrid, 1966). Juan de Pimentel, "Relación de Nuestra Señora de Caraballeda y Santiago de León (1578)," in Antonio Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas de Venezuela (Caracas, 1964), 118. The estimate of Indian population comes from the testimony of Francisco Infante and Garci González de Silva, 3 January 1589, in Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas (hereinafter cited AGN), Encomiendas , 5 vols. (Caracas, 1945-1958), 1: 230-232. Peter Boyd-Bowman, "Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the Indies, 1579-1600," The Americas 33 (July 1976): 78-95.
2. Domingo Ibarqüen y Vera, "Relación sobre El Dorado y sobre la expedición de Antonio de Berrio (1597)," in Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas , 247-257.
3. Those who participated in these ventures stood to share in the spoils; this is what kept the group together and it was contingent on the leader to execute effectively what a modern historian has called "the technique of hope" if he was to maintain order and his own authority. See Mario Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1975), 3-5.
4. In Venezuela the New Laws restructuring of the encomienda, including the requirement that tribute be paid rather than labor service, was observed largely in the breach; Eduardo Arcila Farías, El régimen de la encomienda en Venezuela , 2d ed. (Caracas, 1966), chaps. 8 and 9. J. A. de Armas Chitty, Caracas: Origen y trayectoria de una ciudad , 2 vols. (Caracas, 1967), 1:78-79, 226, 2:135-136. San Sebastián de los Reyes was refounded on several occasions; Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, Materiales para la historia provincial de Aragua (Caracas, 1977), 268-269, 297-329. break
5. Luis A. Sucre, Gobernadores y capitanes generales de Venezuela , 2d ed. (Caracas, 1964), 104-105.
6. "Relación de Santiago de León," Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas , 120. The accomplishments of these men are given in Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Fundadores de Caracas, Méritos y Servicios, II, tomo XIX.
7. Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l'Amérique: XVI e -XVII e siècle (Paris, 1977), 181-186, 296-297. C. H. Haring, The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century , reprint ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1966), 16.
8. "Relación de Santiago de León," Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas , 121.
9. Late sixteenth-century grants of land and water rights, too numerous to be cited individually, can be traced in Actas del Cabildo de Caracas , 12 vols. (Caracas, 1943-1975) (hereinafter cited ACC), I, passim. The prominence of wheat mills on the Caracas landscape in the 1590s is reflected in their frequent use as reference points in grant petitions made to the cabildo. Also beginning in the 1590s the cabildo made various attempts to control certain aspects of the wheat trade: the quantity of flour that had to be gotten from a given quantity of grain, the price of bread, and occasional prohibitions on the export of wheat and flour from the city. The present-day depository for colonial notary records is the Archivo del Registro Principal de Caracas (cited here as ARPC). There are two small volumes of synopses of these records for the last years of the sixteenth century: Manuel Pinto C., Los primeros vecinos de Caracas (Caracas, 1966); and Agustín Millares Carlo, ed., Protocolos del siglo XVI (Caracas, 1966).
10. Haring, Buccaneers , 38-39.
11. Academia Nacional de la Historia, Actas del cabildo eclesiástico de Caracas (1580-1770) , 2 vols. (Caracas, 1965), 1:64, 78-79; ARPC, Escribanías, June 27 and July 13, 1595. The cabildo ordered all masons and carpenters to work exclusively on the church until it was completely rebuilt; ACC, 1:442 (May 11, 1596).
12. ARPC, Escribanías, June 9 and July 21, 1597.
13. ARPC, Escribanías, February 3, March 24, and September 15, 1599; July 15 and October 30, 1605. Baltasar García's land grant is in ACC, 1:259 (May 24, 1593); and his marriage to the widow Medina is given in Consejo Municipal del Distrito Federal, El libro parroquial más antiguo de Caracas (Caracas, 1968), 135.
14. AGN, Real Hacienda, legs. 3, 5, 6. The royal tax recorded in these volumes is the almojarifazgo , and Caracas vecinos enjoyed royal exemption from this tax for most of the first half of the seventeenth century. The original cédula granting this favor, dated April 16, 1608, was copied into the cabildo record in 1619; ACC, 4:127-128. The complete record begins in 1603 because an earlier exemption for vecinos lapsed in April of that year; AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 3, fol. 460 (April 24, 1603).
15. The figure of six arrobas of wheat flour from every fanega of grain milled is based on the actual yield of the mill belonging to the heirs of Juan Rodríguez Santos; ARPC, Testamentarías, 1638 R, fols. 279-283.
16. In 1578 the climate in the Caracas Valley was described as having a "fresh and humid temperament and with much rain which generally begins in May and ends in December"; "Relación de Santiago de León," in continue
Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas , 117. Records kept at the Cagigal Observatory in Caracas during the course of the twentieth century show an average monthly rainfall of more than 100 millimeters during the months from June to October; Marco-Aurelio Vila, Aspectos geográficos del Distrito Federal (Caracas, 1967), 52-84.
17. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II , 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 1:588-590.
18. Andalusian wheat prices are from Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 (New York, 1934), 353-357, 376-381. Hamilton's prices are in maravedís per fanega of wheat in the grain. For Caracas the single price of four reales per arroba of wheat flour, the price used to calculate the almojarifazgo export tax, was used. The following equivalents were necessary to make the comparison: one fanega of grain was equal to six arrobas of wheat flour, and one real equaled thirty-four maravedís. Therefore, the 4-reales price of one arroba of flour was equal to 816 maravedís for one fanega of wheat in the grain (4 × 34 × 6 = 816). The years between 1580 and 1620 in which Caracas wheat was cheaper than Andalusian were: 1582, 1584, 1589, 1598, 1603, 1604, 1605, 1616, 1617, 1618, and 1619. Wheat exports from Seville are analyzed in Michele Moret, Aspects de la Société Marchande de Seville au début de XVII e siècle (Paris, 1967), 78-79, 95-103. The interesting study by Carla Rahn Phillips, Six Galleons for the King of Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century (Johns Hopkins Press, 1986), gives a detailed assessment of the procedures and costs of outfitting the fleet. The rising cost of wheat, fivefold during the course of the sixteenth century, is considered (pp. 99-100), and Phillips notes that suppliers of the armada "frequently used local American products to supplement the standard rations" (p. 101). However, the case of Caracas wheat may be the exception to her contention that "In the Indies nearly everything supplied to the fleets cost more and was harder to procure" (ibid.).
19. AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 3. ARPC, Escribanías, November 16, 1605.
20. Due to its earlier importance as a pearl fishery, and perhaps because of its location as the first landfall after the Atlantic crossing, during the first years of the seventeenth century the island of Margarita still served as a principal depository and center for Spanish merchandise which was reexported for sale all along the Tierra Firme coast. Enrique Otte, comp., Cedularios de la monarquia española de Margarita, Nueva Andalucia y Caracas (1553-1604) , 8 vols. (Caracas, 1959-1967), 1:xix-xlvi.
21. Carrasquer's name appears very frequently in the early records of the Caracas notaries. As befitting both his merchant occupation and his place in Caracas society, Carrasquer was the first officer ( castellano ) of the La Guaira fortress; Otte, Cedularios , I:xliii. Carrasquer as encomendero can be found in AGN, Encomiendas , I:73. See also Stephanie Blank, "Patrons, Clients, and Kin in Seventeenth-Century Caracas: A Methodological Essay in Spanish American Social History," The Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (May 1974): 274-275.
22. Frederick Pike, "Aspects of Cabildo Economic Regulations in Spanish America Under the Hapsburgs," Inter-American Economic Affairs 13 (1960): 83. break
23. Blank, "Patrons, Clients, and Kin," 260-83. Blank's consensus view is most clearly expressed in her "Societal Integration and Social Stability in a Colonial Spanish American City, Caracas 1595-1627" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971).
24. Sucre, Gobernadores , 115-118.
25. ACC, 1:169-171 (October 8, 1591); 1:191 (May 25, 1592); 1:209-211 (September 4, 1593); 1:221 (June 28, 1593); 1:239 (March 30, 1593).
26. Riberos's sitio de molino was located near where the Anauco emptied into the Guaire, ACC, 1:374 (June 13, 1594); Lázaro Vásquez's 1597 request for a toma de agua was from the Guaire proper, ACC, 1:392 (May 22, 1597). It is possible that the technical problems of irrigating and operating mills on the Guaire--which has as it passes through Caracas only a slight vertical drop, low banks, and therefore a broad flood plain in colonial times--made it unsatisfactory for wheat agriculture and milling. The river typically carries from two to three times more water during the heavy-rain months than it does during the dry months; Marco-Aurelio Vila, Aspectos geográficos , 94.
27. ACC, 1:374 (June 13, 1594). The cabildo granted petitions for eleven mill sites during the 1590s, however only four are referred to in the Actas as actually in place and functioning (those that were certainly built are marked by an asterisk in the following list; dates refer to the first reference in the source). Anauco: Juan de Villegas Maldonado (September 14, 1592); Juan de Riberos (June 13, 1594); Chacao: *Sebastián Díaz (May 24, 1593); Francisco Olalla (May 24, 1593); Jácome Fantón (May 24, 1593); Diego de Xexas (May 24, 1593); Garci González de Silva (May 24, 1593); Catuche: *Esteban Marmolejo (August 2, 1599); undetermined site: *Alonso Andrea (November 27, 1592); Juan de Guevara (June 6, 1593); *Francisco Sánchez de Córdova (October 24, 1590).
28. ACC, 1:480 (January 8, 1598).
29. The provision which allowed millers one almud for every fanega of wheat that they ground is in ACC, 3:70-71 (January 29, 1607); that an almud was the eighth part of a fanega comes from Hamilton, American Treasure , 192.
30. Blank, "Patrons, Clients, and Kin," 267.
31. ACC, 1:298 (November 26, 1593). This history, written by a "poet-soldier" named Ulloa, has been lost.
32. ACC, 1:379-380 (June 15, 1594); 1:383-384 (July 4, 1594) for ejido . Figueredo is in ACC, 1:160 (December 3, 1590); 1:380 (June 14, 1594); 2:311-312 (June 14, 1594); 2:313 (September 1, 1594). The first reference to González de Silva's petition for the same land is ACC, 1:511-512 (August 2, 1599). Figueredo's composición payment is recorded in AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 3, fol. 6.
33. González de Silva appears as padrino at Figueredo's wedding in February 1759; Consejo Municipal, El libro más antiguo , 167. Figueredo's quinto payment is in AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 3, fol. 16; his statement about his respect for González de Silva is in ACC, 2:327-328 (January 24, 1601).
34. ACC, 2:320-329 (January 24 and 29, 1601). Paula and Clara Guevara Díaz de Rojas would marry Baltasar and Gaspar González de Silva Rojas in the 1620s; Carlos Iturriza Guillén, Algunas familias caraqueñas , 2 vols. (Caracas, 1967), 1:325-326. break
35. ACC, 2:325 (January 29, 1601).
36. ACC, 2:336-339 (April 17, 1608).
37. Recopilación de Leyes de las Indias , libro iv, tit. xii, ley xiv, cites a royal cédula of November 1, 1591, which required that land and water not held with adequate title was to revert to the crown. Governors and viceroys could ask to see titles at any time, and they could declare invalid ones null and void. Libro iv, tit. xii, ley xx, cites a cédula dated January 10, 1589, which allowed viceroys and governors to revoke grants made by cabildos if title had not been confirmed by the crown, always after the grant holder had been given opportunity to pay the composición fee.
38. ACC, 2:286-290 (July 29, 1609).
39. ACC, 1:183 (September 14, 1592); 3:97-98 (June 28, 1607); 3:163 (June 9, 1609); 3:234-236 (April 9, 1610); 3:273 (March 21, 1611); 4:45 (June 6, 1619).
40. Tulio Febres Cordero, Archivo de historia y variedades , 2 vols. (Caracas, 1930), 1:191-194. In 1612 the commerce between San Antonio de Gibraltar on the south side of Lake Maracaibo and the Andean town of Mérida was so extensive that the cabildo of Mérida proposed the establishment of a customs house and warehouses at Gibraltar to protect their wheat shipments; ibid., 1:97.
41. Caracas was at the peak of its wheat boom in 1606 when Maracaibo vecinos sent for help to Governor Sánchez de Alquiza, who had passed through Maracaibo on his arrival in Venezuela that same year and knew first hand of the war between Quiriquires and Motilones and the Maracaiberos. At first Sánchez de Alquiza refused, ordering instead that the lake town's encomenderos had to put down the uprising within four months or lose their grants. A change of heart in 1608 sent Juan Pacheco Maldonado and fifty men, gathered from the Andean town of Trujillo and from Coro, to the succor of Maracaibo. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 208.
42. F. Braudel and F. Spooner, "Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750," chap. 7 in E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1967), 4:471, 477, 484-485.
43. AGI, Contaduria, leg. 1613.
44. ACC, 2:23-233 (December 6, 1605). Eduardo Arcila Farías, Economía colonial de Venezuela , 2d ed., 2 vols. (Caracas, 1973), 1:128-129.
45. Sucre, Gobernadores , 98-107.
46. Tomás Polanco Martínez, Esbozo sobre historia económica venezolana (Madrid, 1960), 109-115. Eduardo Arcila Farías, Economía colonial de Venezuela (Mexico, 1946), 289-292.
47. José de Viera y Clavijo, Noticias de la historia general de las Islas Canarias , 5 vols. (Madrid, 1772-1783), 4:259.
48. See n. 14 above.
49. AGN, Real Hacienda, legs. 3, 5, 6. For vecino status of shippers, see: Consejo Municipal, El libro más antiguo ; Carlos Iturriza Guillén, ed., Matrimonios y velaciones de españoles y criollos blancos celebrados en la catedral de Caracas desde 1615 hasta 1831 (Caracas: Instituto Venezolano de Genealogía, 1974); "Relación de los extrangeros que residen en la ciudad de Santiago de León (1607)," AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 193; road tax list, ACC, 2:96-99, 118-119.
50. The foreign vecino share of tobacco exports for the period 1604- hard
1607 was: 1604: 0 of 122 arrobas (0%); 1605: 135 of 1970 arrobas (6.8%); 1606: 995 of 5583 arrobas (17.8%); 1607: 250 of 1362 arrobas (18.3%).
51. Carlos Iturriza Guillén, Algunas familias valencianas (Caracas, 1955), 100-104 (Juan de Guevara); Carrasquer, Guevara, and Vásquez de Escovedo were concuñados , brothers-in-law by marriage (to the sisters Díaz de Rojas), Carlos Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 1:243-249. Baptisms of the Rodríguez Jaramillo and Villanueva children are in Consejo Municipal, El libro más antiguo , 17 and 32. Diego de Villaneuva was royal treasurer and author of an important survey of the Caracas region, ''Relación de Diego de Villaneuva y Gibaja, (1607)," given in Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas , 287-301. His marriage to young catalina Mejía is in Iturriza Guillén, ed., Matrimonios y velaciones , 35. The Portuguese traders Caravajal and Diaz León are listed in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 193, "Relación de los estrangeros. . . ." Juan de Aguirre can be found in ARPC, Escribanías, August 15, 1605. Alonso Rodríguez Santos and his descendents are in Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 2:778-787.
52. ACC, 2:255 (June 26, 1605).
53. Sucre, Gobernadores , 106-107; Consejo Municipal, El libro más antiguo , passim.
2— Cacao in the Seventeenth Century: The First Boom
1. An earlier version of this chapter was published as "Encomienda, African Slavery, and Agriculture in Seventeenth-Century Caracas," Hispanic American Historical Review 61 (November 1981): 609-635. "Relación de Diego de Villanueva y Gibaja (1607)," in Antonio Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas de Venezuela (Caracas, 1964), 287-301. Few Caracas residents received goods on consignment from merchants in Seville. For a list, see AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 11, fols. 23-25. The illegal entry of slaves is discussed at length in Miguel Acosta Saignes, Vida de los esclavos negros en Venezuela (Caracas, 1967), chap. 3. Examples of slave ships allegedly blown off course on their way from Angola to the Canary Islands can be found in AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 10, September 22, 1613, and June 25, 1618.
2. "Relación de Villanueva," in Arellano Moreno, ed., Relaciones geográficas , 280. Thirty leagues was Villanueva's statement of the distance from Caracas to San Sebastián; however, the San Sebastián site was changed five times during the seventeenth century, according to Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, Materiales para la historia provincial de Aragua (Caracas, 1977), 273-278. The Spanish league used in Caracas was most likely the legua común of 5.57 kilometers, judging from the measure of 24 leagues given in Villanueva's report as the distance from Caracas to the stable settlement of Nueva Valencia, a distance of approximately 125 kilometers. Thus the San Sebastián referred to by Villanueva was located about 160 or 170 kilometers south of Caracas. See Roland Chardon, "The Elusive Spanish League: A Problem of Measurement in Sixteenth-Century New Spain," Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (May 1980): 294-302.
3. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1653-1655 CL; AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 14, July 29, 1628. The Ibarra-Ovalle dispute is in Archivo Arquidiocesano, Caracas (hereinafter cited AA), Episcopales, Obispo Gonzalo de Angulo. continue
Venezuelan historian Eduardo Arcila Fariás suggested that cacao grown on the coast originated in the Andes because cultivation of the plant was recorded in the mountain town of Mérida (Venezuela) in 1579; Eduardo Arcila Fariás, Economia colonial de Venezuela (Mexico City, 1946), 88. The designation árboles de Trujillo may refer to transplanted Andean cacao, but these trees appeared in the Caracas region after the initial boom was well underway.
4. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America 117, 241, 378.
5. Arcila Farías first published his data on Caracas commerce in 1946 in Economía colonial , 96-101. He made no clear reference to the source of his information, but evidently he used the series entitled Libro común y general de la tesorería , AGN, Real Hacienda. The tax record in these volumes is the almojarifazgo , and therein lies a problem: Caracas vecinos, who shipped most of the region's cacao, enjoyed royal exemption from this duty during most of the first half of the seventeenth century. The original cédula granting this favor, dated April 16, 1608, was copied into the cabildo record in 1619; ACC, 4:127-128. Arcila Farías was aware of this exemption ( Economía colonial , 89, 463), but when he compiled his statistics on commerce, he ignored the fact that his source did not include the greater part of all cacao shipped, that which belonged to Caracas vecinos. Due to this error, Arcila Farías's often-cited data give the impression that cacao cultivation and trade developed gradually and steadily over the course of the seventeenth century. In fact, exports were more considerable during the thirty years before 1650 than during the thirty years thereafter. The same flawed data are given in Eduardo Arcila Farías, Comercio entre Venezuela y México en los siglos xvii y xviii (Mexico City, 1950), 71-73.
6. The most thorough account of Portuguese Jews who traded Venezuelan cacao in New Spain is by Stanley Mark Hordes, "The Crypto-Jewish Community of New Spain, 1620-1649: A Collective Biography" (Ph.D. Diss., Tulane University, 1980), esp. 81-84, 92, 107-109, 131-132. Also see J. I. Israel, Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610-1670 (Oxford, 1975), 124-130.
7. In 1638 a Portuguese agent in Angola reported that slave traders were packing ships with 700 and 800 Africans rather than the customary 400, with the result that "at sea it causes the death of many hundreds of them because of the excessive crowding and lack of water." Quoted in Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, 1978), 200, n. 47. In these circumstances, Caracas's proximity to Africa and its situation as the first significant port after the Atlantic crossing where slave cargoes might be absorbed on a regular basis made it a welcome sighting for ships' captains and crews, and, of course, for the slaves as well. The hypothesis that slaves were used as a medium of exchange to acquire readily sold, highly profitable cacao, and that they were purchased in Caracas by individuals who had only limited immediate labor needs (many were encomenderos), but who needed a market for their cacao beans, supports the argument of Brazilian historian Fernando Novais, who would have it that the slave trade created African slavery in the New World, and not the reverse. Fernando Novais, Estrutura e Dinâmica do Antigo Sistema Colonial (Séculos XVI-XVIII) , Caderno CEBRAP, no. 17 (São Paulo, 1974). break
8. Eduardo Arcila Farías, El régimen de la encomienda en Venezuela (Seville, 1957), chaps. 8, 9.
9. Sucre, Gobernadores , 115-118.
10. The ca. 1635 document is in AGN, Fundación de Trujillo, leg. 10, fols. 335-346. The sources listed in n. 50 below were used to fix a date for this document. It was published, dated tentatively but erroneously as sixteenth century, by Guillermo Morón, Historia de Venzuela , 5 vols. (Caracas, 1971), 4:631-638. In 1609 the local definition of Indian tributary was established as all men between the ages of twelve and sixty and all women between the ages of ten and sixty inclusive: "Ordenanza de encomiendas de Sancho de Alquiza y de fray Antonio de Alcega de 30 de noviembre de 1609," published in Arcila Farías, El régimen , 342-351.
11. AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 12, fols. 166-167.
12. Cornelius Osgood, Excavations at Tocorón, Venezuela (New Haven, Conn., 1943), 49. For the literature on pre-Hispanic Venezuelan culture and civilization, see Mario Sanoja and Iraida Vargas, Antiguas formaciones y modos de producción venezolanos (Caracas,, 1974). Climatic information is from J. Sánchez C. and J. García B., "Regiones meso-climáticas en el centro y oriente de Venezuela," Agronomía Tropical (Caracas), 18 (October 1968): 429-439. A basic source for identifying Venezuelan place names is the Gacetilla de nombres geográficos (Caracas, 1974); Marco-Aurelio Vila, Antecedentes coloniales de centros poblados de Venezuela (Caracas, 1978), is also helpful.
13. The trade between Caracas and San Sebastián was too slight in 1609 to interest Hispanic mule-skinners, and an exception to the general prohibition of Indian teamsters was made by Alquiza and Alcega in their ordenanza of that year. So that San Sebastián encomenderos would not keep these drivers at work nearer the coast, the ordenanza required that Indian muleteers return from Caracas within fifteen days; Arcila Farías, El régimen , 347. At least until midcentury there was no permanent road between Caracas and San Sebastián. The cattle ranchers of the district offered encomendero Luis de Castro 1000 pesos to open a trail from Paracotos to the Tuy River, midway between the towns; ARPC, Escribanías, April 22, 1649. Evidence of Indian slavery is in ACC, Episcopales, Obispo Mauro de Tovar.
14. Travel in the Aragua Valley is described in Mariano Martí, Documentos relativos a su visita pastoral de la diócesis de Caracas, 1771-1784 , 7 vols. (Caracas, 1969), 2:286-429. Shipping costs in 1841 are compared in John V. Lombardi, The Decline and Abolition of Negro Slavery in Venezuela, 1820-1854 (Westport, Conn., 1971), 116, n. 27.
15. ACC, 6:147 (October 9, 1626).
16. MacLeod, Spanish Central America , 117. In Yucatan the average encomienda income fell from 1390 pesos in 1607 to 659 pesos in 1666; Manuela Cristina García Bernal, Yucatán: Población y encomienda bajo los Austrias (Seville, 1972), 418-419.
17. The actual meaning in the Caracas context of this designation of gentility is not considered here. That the title held significance, although usage varied with time and place, is argued by James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerers of Peru (Austin, 1972), 31-33, 111, 208.
18. Ovalle's will is in ARPC, Testamentarías, 1650-1653 sin letra . The Blanco Ponte family is traced in Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 1:161- hard
180. The first reference to the Blanco Ponte family in the Caracas documentation is ACC, leg. 4, fol. 310 (September 9, 1619). Trade between the Canaries and the Indies is explored in detail in Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l'Atlantique (1504-1650) , 8 vols. (Paris, 1955-1958), vol. 8, pt. 1, 424-430.
19. Pedro de Liendo's will is in Universidad Central de Venezuela, La obra pía de Chuao, 1568-1825 (Caracas, 1968), 190-194. The Liendos and don José Rengifo Pimentel are also included in Iturriza Guillén's genealogical study, Familias caraqueñas , 2:451-452, 726. Multiple holdings of encomiendas were not unusual in seventeenth-century Caracas; Arcila Farías, El régimen , 170-172.
20. ARPC, Testamentarias, 1650-1653 sin letra ; Ovalle's wife's dowry, 12,565 pesos of 10 reales, is in ARPC, Escribanías, February 21, 1602. His brother Antonio was corregidor in Santo Domingo; ARPC, Escribanías, November 12, 1637. In the absence of other heirs, Ovalle's nephew Juan inherited the valuable Choroní estate, much to the disgust of his wife's Caracas family. Ovalle heads the list of foreigners in "Relación de los estrangeros (April 12, 1607)," Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereinafter cited AGI), Santo Domingo, leg. 193.
21. AA, Episcopales, Obispo Gonzalo de Angulo.
22. His donation of 1000 reales to aid the expedition against the Indian rebels in Nirgua, at a time when few benefits were to be had from such military activity, could not have been overlooked by his Spanish peers, whose contributions were 10, 25, or 40 reales; ACC, 5:389.
23. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1650-1653 sin letra .
24. Antonio de Herrera's Historia was a common item in colonial Venezuelan libraries; see Ildefonso Leal, Libros y bibliotecas en Venezuela colonial , 2 vols. (Caracas, 1978), 1:cix-cx. Ovalle's small collection does not appear in Leal's extensive inventory.
25. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1650-1653 sin letra .
26. No peso value was assigned to the slaves on the Ovalle estate in the inventory of 1653, but the average value of slaves recorded in other inventories taken at about the same time was 250 pesos or more; ARPC, Testamentarías, 1648 RU; 1653-1655 CL.
27. La obra pía de Chuao , 191-194.
28. Total sale was 7693 pesos; ARPC, Escribanías, September 21 and 24, 1640.
29. The genealogies of these women's families are traced in Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas . The 1000 pesos were loaned by the Rodríguez Santos family, wheat farmers and merchants; ARPC, Testamentarías, 1638 R, fols. 457-459.
30. Alonso Rodríguez Santos's will is in ARPC, Testamentarías, 1648 RU. Francisco Castillo de Consuegra's will is in ARPC, Testamentarías, 1614-1634 CEFMSU.
31. Baltasar de Escoverdo, ARPC, Testamentarías, 1634-1637 MDPACVG; Agustín Pereira, ARPC, Testamentarías, 1656-1657 sin letra ; ARPC, Escribanías, January 21 and December 23, 1630, May 3 and October 3, 1634.
32. Chap. 3 contains a detailed analysis of the Liendo estate; see table 13 there which includes harvest and price data. break
33. ARPC, Escribanías, January 15, 1630; Testamentarías, 1653-1655 CL. The Liendo slaves, with ages and their inventoried peso values, are listed in Appendix E.
34. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1656-1657 sin letra , will of Elvira de Campos, states that 1800 fanegas of cacao worth an estimated 50,000 pesos were harvested from the 22,000-tree coastal hacienda of Juan Navarro during an unspecified number of years before 1637.
35. Ibid. The Navarro groves were completely destroyed by the alhorra . In 1684 a Caracas escribano wrote: "It should be noted that in the year 1635 there began the alhorra in the arboledas de cacao that existed then in the valleys of the costa de la mar arriva y abajo and others of the tierra adentro and because many haciendas were lost it was necessary for some vecinos to plant again, and [although] the said alhorra lasted ten years more or less, it still continues [to afflict] the árboles de la tierra ." AGI, Contaduria, leg. 1613.
34. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1656-1657 sin letra , will of Elvira de Campos, states that 1800 fanegas of cacao worth an estimated 50,000 pesos were harvested from the 22,000-tree coastal hacienda of Juan Navarro during an unspecified number of years before 1637.
35. Ibid. The Navarro groves were completely destroyed by the alhorra . In 1684 a Caracas escribano wrote: "It should be noted that in the year 1635 there began the alhorra in the arboledas de cacao that existed then in the valleys of the costa de la mar arriva y abajo and others of the tierra adentro and because many haciendas were lost it was necessary for some vecinos to plant again, and [although] the said alhorra lasted ten years more or less, it still continues [to afflict] the árboles de la tierra ." AGI, Contaduria, leg. 1613.
36. The best description of the earthquake is Bishop Mauro de Tovar to the king, August 14, 1641, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 218. The bishop's colorful career is described in Andrés F. Ponte, Fray Mauro de Tovar (Caracas, 1945), and in Manuel Guillermo Díaz, El agresivo obispado caraqueño de don Fray Mauro de Tovar (Caracas, 1956).
37. MacLeod, Spanish Central America , 251.
38. Ibid., 242-244.
37. MacLeod, Spanish Central America , 251.
38. Ibid., 242-244.
39. Archivo del Consejo Municipal del Distrito Federal, Caracas (hereinafter cited as ACM), Actas del cabildo, Originales, 1669-1672, August 6, 1670.
40. MacLeod, Spanish Central America , 280-287.
41. Several millions of pesos were confiscated by the inquisitors according to Hordes, "The Crypto-Jewish Community," 153.
42. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1653-1655 CL.
43. ARPC, Escribanías, Tomás de Ponte, August 5, 1653, fols. 110-116. Occasionally the slave trade itself depended on Mexican credit: Almeyda sold an additional nine slaves to don Manuel Felipe Tovar, knight of the Order of Santiago, for 2790 pesos, 2400 pesos of which were to be paid him in Mexico by Tovar's agent, Luis Pérez de Castro, vecino and alguacil of Veracruz. Escribanías, Juan López Villanueva, June 13 and July 14, 1653, fols. 68-70.
44. Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, Las acciones militares del gobernador Ruy Fernández de Fuenmayor (1637-1644) (Caracas, 1978), 35, 52-58.
45. ACM, Actas del cabildo, Originales, 1669-1672, May 21, June 20, 1671. If the mal 'olanda were the same disease later described as the mal de Loanda , then it probably meant scurvy, an infirmity associated with over-loading and undersupplying the slave ships. See Joseph C. Miller, "Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical Evidence on Causality," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (Winter 1981): 412-413.
46. MacLeod, Spanish Central America , 363.
47. New appointments to the cabildo are in ACM, Actas del Cabildo, Originales, 1673-1676, February 6, May 16, 1675.
48. The construction of the new seminary is in ACM, Actas del Cabildo, Originales, 1673-1676, October 25, 1673; the jail is mentioned on September 2, 1674; and the fort was discussed in the sessions of November 16, 27, and December 1, 1673.
49. This document is in AGI, Contaduría, leg. 1613; it was published in continue
Revista de Historia (Caracas), 28 (August 1970); 63-81. The effort was made to auction the collection of the alcabala on two occasions, September 25, 1673, and again on June 5, 1675, but no one was willing to bid. ACM, Actas del cabildo, Originales, 1673-1676.
50. Only four of the thirty-eight encomenderos who held encomiendas with an annual renta of 1000 pesos or more have not been identified by place of birth and with a descending kindred network. The genealogical studies used are those by Carlos Iturriza Guillén, Algunas familias caraqueñas , already cited, and Algunas familias valencianas (Caracas, 1955). José Antonio de Sangroniz y Castro, Familias coloniales de Venezuela (Caracas, 1943) is serviceable, but lacks the detail and completeness of Iturriza Guillén's work. The marriage registry for the cathedral parish has been published by the Instituto Venezolano de Genealogía, Matrimonios y velaciones de españoles y criollos blancos celebrados en la catedral de Caracas desde 1615 hasta 1831 (Caracas, 1974).
51. An idea of the size of the slave labor force comes from an estimate of 16,000 slaves in the Caracas region made by Bishop González de Acuña in 1674; Bishop Antonio González de Acuña to the king, June 15, 1675, in Guillermo Figuera, ed., Documentos para la historia de la iglesia colonial en Venezuela , 2 vols. (Caracas, 1965, 1967), 2:101-104.
52. Leopoldo de la Rosa, "La emigración canaria a Venezuela en los siglos xvii y xviii," Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos (Tenerife), 20 (1976): 617-631.
53. The concentration of canarios in the Candelaria parish is revealed in the "Matrículas de las parroquias de Caracas y demás pueblos de su diócesis, 1759," a manuscript census located in the Biblioteca Nacional, Caracas.
54. Castillo Lara, Materiales para la historia de Aragua , 240-244.
55. Guillermo Figuera, ed., Documentos para la historia de la iglesia , 2:119-120.
56. The 1690 encomienda census is in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 197-B. A copy is in the Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas (hereinafter cited AANH), Traslados, Sección Caracas, vol. 138.
57. All encomienda Indians, whether defined as tributaries or not, were counted in 1690.
58. Classified "zambos" by the Ynforme compilers, these children of Indian and African parentage were considered Indians for tax purposes.
59. There were virtually no Indians remaining on the coast by 1719. AANH, Misiones de Capuchinos, Trinidad, Guayana y los Llanos de Venezuela, leg. 2, no. 36, fol. 81.
60. ARPC, Civiles, 1730.
61. Mario Góngora, "Urban Social Stratification in Colonial Chile," The Hispanic American Historical Review 55 (August 1975): 430-431.
62. Peter J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge, 1971), 208-220.
63. Ibid., 229.
62. Peter J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge, 1971), 208-220.
63. Ibid., 229.
3— Wheat Farm and Cacao Hacienda: Agricultural Business and Elite Families
1. Kathy Waldron, "A Social History of a Primate City: The Case of Caracas, 1750-1810" (Ph.D. Diss., Indiana University, 1977), 84-85. François Depons, Viaje a la parte oriental de Tierre Firme en la América Meridional , 2 continue
vols. (first published in 1806), trans. Enrique Planchart, (Caracas, 1960) 1:232.
2. This combination, which he fears may be a "theoretical monstrosity," is discussed with considerable sophistication for New Spain by Eric Van Young, "Mexican Rural History since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda," Latin American Research Review 18 (1983): 18-22. The link between town and rural hacienda is not emphasized by Van Young, who assumes that landowners practiced patriarchal or seigneurial status and authority in the countryside where they were constant residents. This may be appropriate for owners of Mexican haciendas, but Caracas cacao hacendados most often made such influence felt from and within their urban residences.
3. This custodianship was known as the tutela . Most frequently the guardian was both tutor and curador ad litem of minor heirs, which meant that he or she was obliged to care for such minors, educate them, and defend them in legal cases that might be brought against their persons or their property.
4. Moreover, the existing historiography of colonial Spanish America does not, to my knowledge, make any use whatsoever of tutela records. This may be due to their rarity. I am certain that these two cases are the only ones for seventeenth-century Caracas for which the set of documents, both guardian's accounts and estate inventories, are extent. Although unwieldy and of short term, they seem to me to be of considerable utility, as this chapter demonstrates.
5. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1648 RU.
6. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1638 R.
7. The Rodríguez Santos estancia was comparable in size to New Spain wheat haciendas at the same time. In Mexico a transition from small farms to large haciendas, of 100 sown fanegas or more, had taken place during the second half of the sixteenth century. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, 1964), 322-325.
8. Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 47, 778-779.
9. According to Rivillapuerta's account, bags of one vara of lienzo , worth four reales, were filled with four arrobas of flour; since four arrobas were equivalent to two-thirds of one fanega of wheat in the grain (the Rodríguez Santos mill ground six arrobas from every fanega of grain), the added cost for bags was approximately six reales for every fanega ground and bagged.
Compare the estimate of milling earnings of 20 to 30 percent with the cabildo provision that millers receive in payment one-eighth (one almud per fanega) of the grain they ground for others in their mills, see n. 29, chap. 1.
10. Escudero's age and the tenure of his service with the Rodríguez Santos is given in ARPC, Tierras, GRS 1637.
11. They were criticized for selling bread in four-pound loaves for two reales rather than the stipulated five-pound loaves for that price; ACC, 5:191 (April 1, 1623) and 6:297 (November 18, 1628).
12. ACC, 6:147 (October 9, 1626).
13. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1638 R. break
14. AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 14, July 29, 1628. Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 2:451-452.
15. Universidad Central de Venezuela, La obra pía de Chuao, 1568-1825 (Caracas, 1968), 183-190.
16. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1653-1655 CL.
17. Cacao from coastal haciendas located downwind from La Guaira was only rarely brought to that port for sale and reshipment. The custom was for a buyer to make his purchase in Caracas from the hacienda owner, who then wrote a bill of sale that entitled the buyer to either a specified quantity or, more often, all the cacao available at the hacienda when the buyer arrived there. The mayordomo would then fill the order and take a signed receipt for the amount of cacao taken by the buyer, who would then continue on his way down the coast, perhaps stopping to take on cacao from other haciendas before proceeding to New Spain with his purchases. It was not uncommon for buyers to pay for their purchases only after they sold their cacao in New Spain, a payment that was made to the New Spain agent of the Caracas hacienda owner. In 1654 and 1655, with record low prices and no buyers in New Spain due to the currency shortage there, Pedro de Liendo paid five reales the fanega to bring Cepi cacao to La Guaira "to sell it and to give it a market because there was none in Cepi and the cacao was about to be lost, rotting in the storehouse." ARPC, Testamentarías, 1653-1655 CL.
18. Most likely these names referred to cutaneous diseases common to slaves which were caused by nutritional deficiencies, most probably yaws, perhaps pellagra or beriberi. The term bubas is discussed in this context in Kenneth F. Kiple, The Carribean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge, 1984), passim.
19. ARPC, Testamentarías, 1653-1655 CL, fols. 385-388.
20. There are no data for the year 1653. An estimate of income was made by multiplying the harvest average for recorded years by the current sale price of cacao (10 pesos). The estimated gross income for 1653 is thus 2137 pesos.
21. In colonial Caracas the value of developed cacao property was determined by the number of cacao trees growing on a given hacienda. The custom was to evaluate every fruit-bearing tree at one peso; trees that had divided at the trunk and were about to bear fruit (known as horqueteados ) were worth half as much or four reales, while recently planted saplings ( resiembros ) were worth two reales. This method of appraisal was peculiar in that it did not vary over time with the price paid for cacao, and was not, therefore, strictly an assessment of the productive value of the cacao property. Mature trees growing in the rich alluvial soil of the Tuy River valley were usually appraised at one and one-half pesos each, but this was also fixed and did not fluctuate with prices or over time. A survey of cacao haciendas made in 1720 indicated that Tuy River cacao groves then had a much higher yield than did coastal arboledas , about 25 fanegas of beans per 1000 trees compared with 10 fanegas per 1000 trees on the coast; Pedro José Olavarriaga, Instrucción general y particular del estado presente de la provincia de Venezuela en los años de 1720 y 1721 , published by the Academia Nacional de la Historia (Caracas, 1965). Yet the cost of planting cacao in the interior was high, and a portion of the return from higher yields obtained there went continue
for planting and for transport of cacao beans to market. The one peso per tree assessment (and one and one-half peso per tree in the Tuy) probably provided a quick, rule-of-thumb evaluation of the cost of establishing and maintaining a given grove. It thus functioned as an estimate of the grove's market value, and that is how it is used here. The current price paid for cacao and the cost of slave labor were two factors that determined the income from cacao haciendas, but the fact that these variables had no effect on the appraised value of cacao property seems significant. Could it be that Caracas planters ignored such prices in their estimates of the value of their estates because they could do nothing about them? Was the calculation of estate value with current market prices of cacao and slaves too sophisticated for the accounting techniques of the times, or was it that prices of both cacao and slaves tended to fluctuate around a rather constant mean, and therefore had no significance for Caracas planters?
22. AGN, Real Hacienda, leg. 14, July 29, 1628.
23. The 1684 survey is located in AGI, Contaduría, leg. 1613; it was published in Revista de Historia (Caracas), 28 (August 1970): 63-81.
24. ARPC, Tierras, 1681 BGHLV. Cacao holdings in 1720 are from Olavarriaga, Instrucción general .
4— The Tuy Valley Frontier
1. MacLeod, Spanish Central America , 241-252.
2. The padrón of the rural domain of Caracas taken in 1684 serves as a base census of cacao haciendas; AGI, Contaduría, leg. 1613. This document was published in Revista de Historia (Caracas), 28 (August 1970): 63-81. For 1720 the document is Olavarriaga, Instrucción general . The original is in the archive of the Academia Nacional. Olavarriaga listed cacao haciendas by geographical location, owner, and number of trees, and also included an assessment of the yield of each hacienda in fanegas of cacao beans per 1000 trees. The 1744 listing is in AGN, Caracas, Diversos, XXVII, fols. 348-361.
3. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 752. Sucre, Gobernadores , 188-194. Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 2:700.
4. León, his wife, and ten children comprised the largest canario family on the petition. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 793.
5. A detailed summary of the competition between canarios and morenos libres to get royal permission to settle in Curiepe is in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 793. The best general history of the settlement of the barlovento region in Venezuela, based largely on previously unknown materials found in Caracas archives, is Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, Apuntes para la historia colonial de Barlovento (Caracas, 1981), 337-477.
6. G. Scelle, La Traite Nègrière aux Indes de Castille , 2 vols. (Paris, 1906), 2:122-129, 145-158.
7. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 793.
8. Sucre contends that Cañas's preference for the lower classes of Caracas society and his abuse and uniform rejection of the elite stemmed from his African upbringing. A man of cruel nature for whatever reason, his excesses (including the hanging of eleven muleteers accused of smuggling) resulted in a secret appeal made by the cabildo's regidores to the continue
Audiencia in Santo Domingo. In 1714 Jorge Lozano y Peralta, oidor of the Audiencia, arrived in Caracas, arrested Cañas, placed the alcaldes ordinarios of the cabildo in charge of the province, and sent the governor in chains to Spain. In Madrid Cañas was deprived of his membership in the Order of Santiago and sentenced to death. His life was saved by a general pardon issued to celebrate the birth of Prince Charles (1716). Sucre, Gobernadores , 207-213.
9. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 350-354.
10. The transfer was ordered by royal decree dated May 27, 1717. In 1726 Venezuela returned to its previous status as an autonomous executive gobernación dependent judicially on the Audiencia of Santo Domingo. From 1739 to 1742 Venezuela would again be subordinate in both the executive and judiciary realms to the authority of the viceroyalty of New Granada.
11. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 380-383.
12. Sucre, Gobernadores , 229-236.
13. Four of the corregidor jurisdictions were on the coast: Choroní, Maiquetía, Cuyagua, and Caraballeda. The interior regions with corregidores were La Vega, Petare-Baruta, Guarenas, and Turmero-Aragua Valley. Otto Pikaza, "Don Gabriel José de Zuloaga en la gobernación de Venezuela (1737-1747)," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 19 (Seville, 1962): 522-523, 658-659.
14. Ibid., 523.
13. Four of the corregidor jurisdictions were on the coast: Choroní, Maiquetía, Cuyagua, and Caraballeda. The interior regions with corregidores were La Vega, Petare-Baruta, Guarenas, and Turmero-Aragua Valley. Otto Pikaza, "Don Gabriel José de Zuloaga en la gobernación de Venezuela (1737-1747)," Anuario de Estudios Americanos 19 (Seville, 1962): 522-523, 658-659.
14. Ibid., 523.
15. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 393-418.
16. Ibid., 425-429.
17. Quoted in ibid., 452.
18. Ibid., 455-465.
19. Ibid., 465-468. The details of the foundation of Panaquire are given in Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, La aventura fundacional de los isleños (Caracas, 1983).
15. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 393-418.
16. Ibid., 425-429.
17. Quoted in ibid., 452.
18. Ibid., 455-465.
19. Ibid., 465-468. The details of the foundation of Panaquire are given in Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, La aventura fundacional de los isleños (Caracas, 1983).
15. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 393-418.
16. Ibid., 425-429.
17. Quoted in ibid., 452.
18. Ibid., 455-465.
19. Ibid., 465-468. The details of the foundation of Panaquire are given in Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, La aventura fundacional de los isleños (Caracas, 1983).
15. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 393-418.
16. Ibid., 425-429.
17. Quoted in ibid., 452.
18. Ibid., 455-465.
19. Ibid., 465-468. The details of the foundation of Panaquire are given in Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, La aventura fundacional de los isleños (Caracas, 1983).
15. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , 393-418.
16. Ibid., 425-429.
17. Quoted in ibid., 452.
18. Ibid., 455-465.
19. Ibid., 465-468. The details of the foundation of Panaquire are given in Lucas Guillermo Castillo Lara, La aventura fundacional de los isleños (Caracas, 1983).
20. Some doctrina towns on the lower Tuy created by Dominican and Capuchine missionaries to evangelize Indians were established earlier than frontier settlements located closer to Caracas which were based entirely on cacao production. Capaya, for example, which was somewhat nearer Caracas than Curiepe, was founded by Dominicans in 1712. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , chaps. 7-10, details the foundation history of the Tuy settlements.
21. The increase in number of trees from 434,850 trees in 1684 to 3,251,200 trees in 1720 was an average of 78,245 trees per year for the 36-year interval. The average annual increase for the 24 years from 1720 to 1744, when 5,094,200 trees were counted, was 76,792 trees. These numbers directly refute the Guipuzcoana Company claim that cacao productivity in the province went up dramatically after its creation in 1728.
22. In 1764 Pedro Felipe de Llamas, commissioned by the governor to survey certain settlements of the upper Tuy, included in his report from Ocumare del Tuy: "from this pueblo for a distance of twenty leagues [the Tuy] is not navigable, and from there to the point where the river enters into the sea, it would be about twenty-five leagues more or less, it is navigable, and when it is clean canoes that carry sixty to seventy fanegas of cacao can travel on it." AGN, Visitas Públicas, vol. 6.
23. The real cédula, dated 3 July 1735, was issued in response to the continue
letter of Basque governor Martín de Lardizábal to the king, 18 June 1733. Lardizábal's letter, cited in Ermila Troconis de Veracoechea, Documentos para el estudio de los esclavos negros en Venezuela (Caracas, 1969), 250, reads in part:
. . . the many haciendas of cacao in the valleys of Caucagua and Capaya are near enough to the coast, and by allowing a port on that coast cacao will be taken there and all of it will be lost to the foreigners, as already has begun to happen; and, with the hope that in that district a port will be allowed, many haciendas have been established at a great distance from this city, with the objective of later proposing that, because of the resulting high cost of transporting [overland] said cacao, [hacienda owners] will be allowed to ship it from the coast in those parts.
24. Muleskinners' charges in the Tuy are from the accounts of the haciendas of Simón Piñate, ARPC, Testmentarías, 1735 P. Testimony in the disputed sale of a Caucagua cacao hacienda in 1744 provides this information: '' . . . not only is mule travel difficult on the said road, but during certain seasons it is almost impossible, requiring at all times a great deal of work." At the best of times muledrivers would charge twenty reales for each carga of cacao, but during the rainy season no one could be found to do it even for twenty-four reales the carga. At only fourteen reales the carga above Caucagua regardless of the season, mule transportation from the upper Tuy to Caracas was always much cheaper. ARPC, Civiles, 1744 F.
25. Information about English slave sales in Caracas is from Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700-1739 (Urbana, 1981), chap. 6. The Guipuzcoana Company's record as slave trader is mentioned in Roland D. Hussey, The Caracas Company, 1728-1784 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), 172-174.
26. The best discussion of Anglo-Spanish diplomacy and the American trade during this period is Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700-1789 (Bloomington and London, 1979), chap. 8. Data on slave sales is from Palmer, Human Cargoes , chap. 6.
27. The Piñate data are located in ARPC, Testamentarías, 1735 P.
28. At San Joseph, of thirty-four adult slaves, twenty-six were married and there was one widow and one widower. The slave community was comprised of nineteen dwellings, described in detail in the inventory. The typical hut was ten by four varas --about eight and one-half by three and one-third meters--and had two openings for windows. They were most often covered with straw, although the leaves from sugar cane ( cogollo ) or an aquatic plant ( gamelote ) were also used for roofing material. Walls were uniformly of stick-and-mud construction known as bahareque . ARPC, Testamentarías, 1735 P. A list of Piñate slaves and further information about their dwellings are given in Appendix G.
29. ARPC, Escribanías of Gaspár Joseph de Salas, 1722-1726.
30. The Liendo data (from October 1645 to December 1656) only cover a period of declining prices in the history of the Cepi hacienda. Were it possible to analyze the decades prior to 1645, given the high prices paid for cacao then, the estimate of net profit given in chap. 3 would have been about three times greater than the calculated 1400 pesos per annum, or a continue
sum about equal to the estimated income from the Piñate haciendas in the Tuy.
31. The hacienda census data shown in figs. 8 and 9 above demonstrate that the number of trees in the province continued to expand at a steady rate from 1684 to 1744, with no discernible change in the rate of increase from 1720 to 1744, as would be expected if the Company had greatly influenced cacao production. This fact is not to be understood as an entirely new discovery, but even historians who reject the Company's argument that it alone was responsible for the greatly increased planting of cacao in the province have not been certain about the part actually played by the Company in the development of the colony.
The Guipuzcoana Company's claims to substantial stimulation of production were published in its Manifesto que con incontestables hechos prueba los grandes beneficios que ha producido el establecimiento de la Real Compañía Guipuscoana de Caracas (Madrid, 1749). The document offered a statistical argument in which an effort was made to show that more cacao was shipped to Spain during the eighteen years from 1730 to 1748 than during the twenty-nine years from 1700 to 1729. Hussey, Caracas Company , accepted the veracity of the Manifesto in this particular: "Its figures, on the other hand, are chiefly a compilation of certified copies of treasury accounts. It is satisfactory for most purposes as the accounts themselves, and more available for the average reader" (p. 86). Arcila Farías, Economía colonial , is much more critical of the Company's manipulation of the export statistics. For Arcila Farías, the numbers are misleading because they do not account for the difficulties of carrying on commerce during the years before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company when the War of Succession interfered with high-seas shipping. Nor did the Company care to point out the increase in cacao shipped to New Spain, shipments which were in fact much greater in volume than the Company commerce with Spain and independent of the Company (2:279). Although he did not attempt to document the point, Arcila Farías's instincts accurately told him that "the Company had no right to claim that [the increase in exports from 1730 to 1749] were due to its efforts and not the result of the surge made by the province itself" (2:263). Castillo Lara, La aventura , agrees: "All the accomplishments that the Company wanted to take credit for as exclusively the results of its own efforts could have come about without the Company's presence'' (p. 266). Castillo Lara's comment, based on the simultaneous increase of commerce with Mexico, is substantiated by the hacienda censuses used here.
32. Palmer, Human Cargoes , 170.
33. Ibid., 126-128.
32. Palmer, Human Cargoes , 170.
33. Ibid., 126-128.
5— León's Rebellion
1. Don Prudencio Peníchez, corregidor of Petare and Baruta, to the governor, April 28, 1789, AGN, Gobernación y Capitanía General, leg. 41.
2. Mariano Martí, Documentos relativos a su visita pastoral de la diócesis de Caracas, 1771-1784 , 7 vols. (Caracas, 1969), 2:609-610.
3. Esteban Fernándes de León to the governor, Sabana de Ocumare, August 1, 1775, AGN, Gobernación y Capitanía General, leg. 38. The continue
response of the governor, José Carlos de Aguero, noted on the margin of the cited letter, indicates that there was nothing that could be done about the problem besides more vigilant policing. The governor's note does reveal that slaves could work on Saturdays for their own benefit:
I should say to you . . . that to avoid the theft of cacao, in response to the three points you mention as causes, do not let hacendados give to their slaves any more remuneration than the freedom to work for themselves on Saturday; . . . I say that the first point has a remedy, because every master should give to his slaves what they need or suffer punishment; with the respect to the illegal sale of clothing and other dry goods, I order you to collect all the licenses of this sort and oblige the holders to erect a public store if they want to sell those things; and as far as the aguardiente de caña is concerned, you must see to the total extinction of the distilleries.
4. " Justicia Mayor era el nombre técnico del delegado del gobernador fuera de Caracas. El que desempeñaba el cargo en las ciudades y villas se denominaba Teniente y Justicia Mayor . Se anteponía el nombre de Corregidor a quien ejecía funciones análogas en pueblos y comarcas de indios. El nombramiento de ambos corría de cuenta de Gobernador de la provincia, aunque había de estar refrendado por la Audiencia de Santo Domingo," Otto Pikaza, "Don Gabriel José de Zuloaga en la gobernación de Venezuela (1737-1747)," Anuario de Estudios Americanos (Seville), 19 (1962): 523.
5. Zuloaga was named governor and captain-general of Venezuela in August 1736, and took possession of the office in Caracas in October 1737. He was first given the right to appoint and to remove tenientes at his independent discretion by a real cédula dated November 7, 1739. AGI, Caracas, leg. 65. His arguments opposing the incorporation of Venezuela to the viceroyalty of New Granada, of which the matter of the tenientes was only a part, are in Zuloaga to the king, September 20, 1740, AGI, Caracas, leg. 66. The provision which provided that the Caracas governor be exempted from the authority of New Granada in the particular naming tenientes is in Crown to Zuloaga, February 12, 1742, AGI, Caracas, leg. 11.
6. Zuloaga to the king, January 1, 1745, AGI, Caracas, leg. 418.
7. The only evidence that would ever be forthcoming was given by Nicolás de León, Juan Francisco's son, who testified after his capture in 1752 that his father
had written to Don Luis Arias Altamirano [who was then maestre de campo], informing him of the new Teniente and the resistance put up by the people of the area, but there was no written response [from the mantuanos], and only by word of mouth did they tell us, especially the said Don Luis, that it was time to throw out that Teniente and all the Vizcayans who were dominating the land, and that it would be a good idea to go to Caracas, with everyone carrying arms, to ask for the suspension of the Royal Guipuzcoana Company, and to inform His Majesty [of the widespread opposition to the Company].
Statement of Nicolás de León, February 8, 1752, in Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, Documentos relativos a la insurrección de Juan de León (Caracas, 1947), 188.
8. León to Castellanos, April 4, 1749, AGI, Caracas, leg. 418.
9. Castillo Lara, Apuntes , chap. 19. Not until 1773 would the Guipuz- soft
coana Company begin to load cacao in the Cabo Codera region at the mouth of the Tuy River; ibid., 521.
10. AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. León's letter of explanation, written in December 1751 after the exhausted fugitive had decided to surrender, is given as the prologue in Francisco Morales Padrón, Rebelión contra la Compañía de Caracas (Seville, 1955), 7-14.
11. AGI, Caracas, leg. 937. Born in 1682, Lorenzo Ponte was sixty-seven years old in 1749, one of only three sexagenarians among elite men in Caracas at that time. (The other two, Feliciano de Sojo Palacios Gedler and Gabriel Regalado Rada Arias, were both born in 1689). The third Marqués de Mijares, don Francisco Nicolás Mijares de Solórzano y Tovar, was born in 1693. Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 1:73 (Rada); 1:308 (Palacios); 2:529 (Mijares); 2:682 (Ponte).
12. Quoted in Castillo Lara, La aventura , 221.
13. AGI, Caracas, leg. 418.
14. AGI, Caracas, leg. 419.
15. AGI, Caracas, leg. 418.
16. Castillo Lara, La aventura , 231-233.
17. Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, Documentos relativos a la insurrección de Juan de León (Caracas, 1947), 39-40.
18. Cited in Hector García Chuecos, Historia Documental de Venezuela (Caracas, 1957), 28.
19. Castillo Lara, La aventura , 243. The Company's violations of its original charter are discussed in chap. 6.
20. The best description of these events is in Castillo Lara, La aventura , 273-288. León's statement was made in a conversation with lieutenant governor Domingo Aguirre y Castillo, cited in José de Armas Chitty and Manuel Pinto C., eds., Juan Francisco de León: Diario de una Insurgencia (Caracas, 1971), 67.
21. Armas Chitty and Pinto C., eds., Juan Francisco de León , 80.
22. Ibid., 67.
21. Armas Chitty and Pinto C., eds., Juan Francisco de León , 80.
22. Ibid., 67.
23. This description of the attack on La Guaira and its immediate aftermath is based on the narrative account in Castillo Lara, La aventura , chaps. 13-14.
24. "Recopilación o resumen General de las almas que tiene esta Gobernación de Venezuela y Caracas según consta de las matrículas del año 1750 y 51 de todo el obispado," AGI, Caracas, leg. 367.
25. Castillo Lara, La aventura , 341.
26. ARPC, Civiles, 1749 T.
27. One Company ship, the San Joachin , made port in Spain in 1750. Its cargo of 4429 fanegas of cacao had most likely been purchased before frightened Company employees fled Caracas in April 1749. The record of Company shipping is given in Hussey, Caracas Company , 305-318.
28. Ibid., 135-136.
27. One Company ship, the San Joachin , made port in Spain in 1750. Its cargo of 4429 fanegas of cacao had most likely been purchased before frightened Company employees fled Caracas in April 1749. The record of Company shipping is given in Hussey, Caracas Company , 305-318.
28. Ibid., 135-136.
29. Ensenada was in charge of the ministries of War, Navy, and Indies, and Finance and State. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Eighteenth-Century Spain, 1700-1788: A Political, Diplomatic and Institutional History (London: Macmillan, 1979), 80-94.
30. Arriaga to Ensenada, January 14 and March 29, 1750, quoted in "La politica del marqués de la Ensenada--asesorado por el ex-virrey Eslava-- hard
en relación con el levantamiento contra la Guipuzcoana," Demetrio Ramos Pérez, Estudios de Historia Venezolana (Caracas, 1976), 654-655.
31. Palmer, Human Cargoes , chap. 8.
32. Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700-1789 (Bloomington and London, 1979), 210-220.
33. Ibid., 111-113, 116, 189, 205.
32. Geoffrey J. Walker, Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700-1789 (Bloomington and London, 1979), 210-220.
33. Ibid., 111-113, 116, 189, 205.
34. José Campillo y Cossio died in 1744, but he had been in charge of the ministries of Marine, War, and the Indies in 1743 when he wrote in opposition to the slave trade and in favor of encouraging economic growth in the colonies by drawing Indians into the marketplace as a free peasantry, wage laborers who could consume the manufactures of the metropolis. Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (1743) (Madrid, 1789). Campillo is discussed in Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore and London, 1983), 55-56. If the ministers of empire thought that Indians could replace slaves, certainly they would have considered Canary Islander immigrant farmers as capable substitutes for slaves as well.
35. Letter of Nicolás de León, August 17, 1751, Documentos relativos a la insurrección de Juan Francisco de León (Caracas, 1947), 87-88.
36. Hussey identifies these two groups as "liberals," those who favored abolition of the Company and mercy toward the Caracas rebels, and "conservatives," those described here, whose harshness toward Caracas is understood as ''what would be expected of those trained in the absolutist school of civil or military command"; Caracas Company , 144-150.
37. Quoted in ibid., 148-149.
36. Hussey identifies these two groups as "liberals," those who favored abolition of the Company and mercy toward the Caracas rebels, and "conservatives," those described here, whose harshness toward Caracas is understood as ''what would be expected of those trained in the absolutist school of civil or military command"; Caracas Company , 144-150.
37. Quoted in ibid., 148-149.
38. Venezuela was separated from the viceroyalty of New Granada by order of a real cédula signed February 12, 1742. Zuloaga to the king, September 20, 1740, AGI, Caracas, leg. 66.
39. In 1741 he gained widespread fame for successfully defending Cartagena from the English admiral Edward Vernon, and he had earned a flawless reputation for his able management of the new viceroyalty during ten years of constant economic and diplomatic stress. Walker, Spanish Politics , 207-216.
40. Ramos, "La politica," 665. The principal purpose of Ramos's article is to affirm Eslava's central role in influencing Ensenada's policy. The Havana Company is summarized in Hussey, Caracas Company , 207-214.
41. Walker, Spanish Politics , 100. Analola Borges, Alvarez Abreu y su extraordinaria misión en Indias (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1963), passim.
42. The reasons for Alvarez y Abreu's presence in Caracas were probably public knowledge by this time; he is listed in the cathedral marriage register as "Alcalde Visitador, Abogado de los Reales Consejos." Marriage between families of royal officials on temporary assignment did not violate the prohibitions against marriage between the king's administrators and women of local elite families. In June 1716 the Basque accountant of the Caracas royal treasury, Juan de Vega Arredondo, married a second daughter of the governor, María Josefa de Bertodano, making him and licenciado Alvarez y Abreu brothers-in-law. Instituto Venezolano de Genealogía, Matrimonios y velaciones , 367-369. Alberto Bertodano is in Sucre, Gobernadores , 216-218.
43. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Eighteenth-Century Spain , 78-87. Alvarez y Abreu's letter to Ensenada is quoted in Hussey, Caracas Company , 146. break
44. Castillo Lara, La aventura , 391.
45. Sucre states that Ricardos was married to doña Leonor Carrillo y Albonorz, daughter of the Duke of Montemar, Gobernadores , 275. Montemar's career is traced in Hargreaves-Mawdsley, Eighteenth-Century Spain , 67-79. Ensenada had served as Commisary of the Navy during the Orán expedition, and he was made a marquis for his part in the defeat of Naples in 1734-1735; ibid., 80.
46. AGI, Caracas, leg. 57.
47. Castillo Lara, La aventura , p. 387.
48. These men were maestre de campo Luis Arias Altamirano, alcalde ordinario for 1751, regidor Pedro Blanco de Ponte, Alejandro and Miguel Blanco Uribe, Antonio Blanco Uribe, Pío Blanco de Ponte, and Miguel de Monasterios. These were mature men in their forties and fifties who had been leaders of the protest against the Guipuzcoana Company for a decade.
49. Ricardos to the king, April 30, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
50. Testimony of Nicolás de León, February 8, 1752, Documentos relativos a la insurrección de Juan Francisco de León , 188.
51. Ricardos to Ensenada, October 20, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
52. Ricardos to Ensenada, September 11, 1751, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
53. Castillo Lara, La aventura , 430-439.
54. Ibid., 468-470.
53. Castillo Lara, La aventura , 430-439.
54. Ibid., 468-470.
55. Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas, Colección Villanueva, 130, fol. 224.
56. Letter of Antonio Díaz Padrón to Ricardos, August 26, 1751, in Documentos relativos a la insurrección de Juan Francisco de León , 93-94.
57. Archivo de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, Caracas, Colección Villanueva, 133, fol. 172.
58. Cited in Castillo Lara, La aventura , 494-495.
59. Testimony of Nicolás de León, February 8, 1752, Documentos relativos a la insurrección de Juan Francisco de León , 192; AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. John V. Lombardi, Venezuela: The Search for Order, the Dream of Progress (New York, 1982), 87-88.
60. Castillo Lara, La aventura , chap. 20, passim.
61. Neither Bolívar nor Tovar signed the 1744 memorial protesting the policies of the Guipuzcoana Company; AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 787.
62. Morales Padrón, Rebelión contra la Compañía de Caracas , 7-14.
63. Ibid., 10.
62. Morales Padrón, Rebelión contra la Compañía de Caracas , 7-14.
63. Ibid., 10.
64. Ricardos to Ensenada, April 30, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
65. León and his son surrendered in late January 1752, some weeks after he wrote his apology and defense. While in the Caracas jail Nicolás spoke of the support given them by maestre de campos Luis Arias Altamirano, who was already dead, but otherwise they refused to name their mantuano supporters. The Santa Bárbara left La Guaira on March 28, 1752. Ricardos to the king, 29 June 1751, AGI, Caracas, leg. 57; and Ricardos to Ensenada, October 20, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
66. Ricardos to Ensenada, March 2, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. Archivo General de la Nación, Insurrección de Juan Francisco de León, vol. 2, fol. 293. Ensenada was informed of León's death by Julián de Arriaga, August 4, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
67. Archivo General de la Nación, Insurrección de Juan Francisco de León, Vol. 2, fol. 293. The Spanish text of the plaque is as follows: break
Esta es la Justicia del Rey nuestro Señor, mandada hacer por el Excmo. señor Don Phe. Ricardos Tne. General de los Exceros. de Su Majestad su Govr. y Cap. General desta prova. de Caracas, con Francisco León, amo de esta casa, por pertinaz, rebelde y traidor a la Real Corona y por ello Reo. Que se derribe y siembre de sal pa. perpetua memoria de su Infa.
68. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 714. The settlement remained, and according to a census taken in 1758, the year after Felipe Ricardos had been replaced as governor of Caracas, there were 14 households in Panaquire and a total resident population of 264 individuals, of whom 233 were black slaves. "Matrículas de las parróquias de Caracas y demás pueblos de su diócesis, 1759," manuscript census located in the Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela, Caracas.
69. La Gazeta de Caracas , September 20, 1811. The subsequent history of this copper tablet is given in Aristides Rojas, Estudios históricos: Orígenes Venezolanos (Caracas, 1891), 267-273.
6— The Protest of the Caracas Elite
1. Domingo Galindo y Sayas, Pedro Ruiz Arquinzones, José Bolívar, Feliciano Sojo Palacios, Agustín Piñango, Miguel de Aristeguieta, Antolín de Liendo, Mateo de Monasterios, and Miguel de Rengifo were described as "peaceful and loyal to the King" by Sebastián de Eslava, ex-viceroy of New Granada. Demetrio Ramos Pérez, "La política de Marqués de la Ensenada--asesorado por el ex-virrey Eslava--en relación con el levantamiento contra la Guipuzcoana," Estudios de Historia Venezolana (Caracas, 1976), 672.
2. A recent attempt to argue that Company profits came mostly at the expense of contraband trade with the Dutch is made in Eugenio Piñero, "The Cacao Economy of the Eighteenth-Century Province of Caracas and the Spanish Cacao Market," Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (February 1988):86-92.
3. This is my understanding of the benefits available to those who were able to ship their cacao in the tercio buque . The custom is briefly outlined in Eduardo Arcila Farías, Economía colonial de Venezuela , 2 vols., 2d ed. (Caracas, 1973), 1:250-254. Several aspects of the process of taking on cargo remain unclear. Once a ship's captain had received a royal license from the governor to receive cargo, both cosecheros and merchants must have appeared to register the cacao they wanted to export. An agent of the royal treasury probably figured their tax obligations at this point. But what is enigmatic is the method by which it was decided who would get the opportunity to ship when there was more cacao for export than the ship could carry. When there was more cosechero cacao for export than could be accommodated in the hacienda owners' tercio buque, how was it determined who would be allowed to load cacao (and thus be able to profit from the sale of those beans in Veracruz) and who would be obliged to sell cacao at Caracas prices to local merchants or the ship's captain? Did the ship's supercargo accept cacao for these reserved portions of the ship on a first-come, first-served basis? Conversely, when all cosecheros who had cacao available for shipment had loaded it on a given vessel, yet their tercio buque had not been filled, who decided whether the remaining space continue
would be made available to local merchants and not the ship captain? Arcila Farías noted that by order of a royal cédula issued in 1721, before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company, it was the cabildo together with the governor who determined the cargo capacity of each ship, and that except in the case of his legitimate incapacity the governor could not delegate his authority in this matter to anyone else. In 1733, with the Company in competition for cargoes with both the English slave asiento and colonial shippers who wanted to sell all their beans to Mexico, the Basque governor Lardizábal reserved for himself alone the right to examine the cacao offered for placement in their tercio buque on ships bound for New Spain by cosecheros on their own account, and to reject any cacao that he believed had not originated on the cosecheros' haciendas. Economía colonial , 251-253. The powerful role of the governor in this may well have been one reason why the Caracas cabildo, dominated as it was by cosecheros eager to maximize their exports, was always eager to exercise gubernatorial authority in the governor's absence.
4. See the discussion in chap. 4.
5. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 787.
6. In June of 1742 word reached Caracas that the price then being paid for cacao at Veracruz was 52.5 pesos; in Caracas at that time the price ranged from 9.5 to 14.5 pesos; Governor Gabriel de Zuloaga to the king, February 26, 1745, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.
7. The 1744 padrón is located in AGN, Diversos, Tomo XXVII. This was the purpose behind the creation of this well-known document, which has not heretofore been analyzed as to its original function. Presumably the colony's haciendas were to be surveyed frequently, but in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1749 the policy was ended and no other censuses were taken.
8. León to Governor Julian de Arriaga, January 1750; quoted in Arcilia Farías, Economía colonial (1st ed., 1946), 232.
9. They did not find it in their interest to report that from 1740 to 1742 persistent rains, described by Juan Francisco de Leóon as "a constant deluge," had caused floods "never seen before in this province." Juan Francisco de León to Fernando de Mechinel, "Corregidor, Justicia Mayor, Cabo de Guerra Principal, y Juez de Comisos" of Guarenas, November 12, 1742, published in Andrés Hernández Pino, ed., Papeles coloniales: Aporte para la historia de los pueblos del Estado Miranda (Caracas, 1948), 19-20. The fact that exports had tumbled from 1740, when a near-record 63,912 fanegas were carried (a record of 64,829 fanegas had been exported in 1736), to a sixteen-year low of 25,409 fanegas in 1742 (only 16,102 fanegas were exported in 1726), was no doubt due at least in some part to the severe weather that washed away many Tuy cacao groves.
10. Letter of Julián de Arriaga (interim governor of Caracas from 1749 to 1751) to the factors of the Guipuzcoana Company, March 29, 1750, "La política del marqués de la Ensenada--asesorado por el ex-virrey Eslava--en relación con el levantamiento contra la Guipuzcoana," in Ramos Pérez, Estudios de Historia Venezolana , 655.
11. Cabildo to the king, January 1745, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.
12. Examples of Mexican investments in Caracas cacao are included in a Guipuzcoana Company document that lists the ships either lost at sea or continue
taken by enemy corsairs while traveling between Veracruz and La Guaira from 1733 to 1739. In 1733 the frigate of Gerónimo López Barroso, "uno de las del trajín de la Vera Cruz," sank in the Bermuda Channel with 25,000 pesos lost to Caracas and New Spain investors; in 1734 the frigate of Pedro de Arrieta sank off Grand Cayman with cacao worth 150,000 pesos, much of it purchased by New Spain merchants; in 1734 the frigate of Gabriel de Bezama was lost near the island of Arenas, fifty leagues from Campeche, with 10 percent of its cargo silver coin for Caracas; in 1738 a frigate bound for Caracas was taken near the island of Tortugilla with 100,00 pesos in cash and Mexican merchandise. Interested in discrediting the traditional trade, the Company also gave examples of unscrupulous or inept individuals who had stolen or misspent cash intended for the purchase of Caracas cacao: in 1736 Pedro Ariztoy, maestre, could not account for 12,000 pesos he had been given in Veracruz by Andrés González for "the purchase and return of cacaos"; the previous year captain Lorenzo Hernández de Santiago, vecino of Caracas, was jailed in Veracruz for the loss of 50,000 pesos he had received for the same purpose. The directors of the Royal Guipuzcoana Company to the Council of the Indies, March 17, 1739, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.
13. The published broadside is entitled: Segundo Memorial del Conde de San Xavier y de Don Francisco de Ponte en nombre de los vecinos, cosecheros, y cargadores a Nueva España (Madrid, 1746). The observations about the reluctance of New Spain merchants to invest in the cacao commerce and the departure from Caracas as a result of difficulties caused by the lack of capital there were made in an earlier memorial (Madrid, 1745). Copies of these are in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.
14. The directors of the Royal Guipuzcoana Company to the Council of the Indies, March 17, 1739; Governor Zuloaga to the king, February 26, 1745, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.
15. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786.
16. AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 787.
17. The average age at death for these women for whom both birth and death dates are available ( N = 17) is 69.2 years; for men ( N = 36) the mean age at death is 62.6. Birth, marriage, and death dates are found in the same sources cited in previous chapters: Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas and Familias valencianas ; Sangróniz y Castro, Familias coloniales ; and the marriage registry for the cathedral parish, published by the Instituto Venezolano de Genealogía, Matrimonios y velaciones .
18. The 1744 padrón of cacao haciendas was made at the request of Governor Gabriel Joseph de Zuloaga. Archivo General de la Nación, Caracas, Sección Diversos, XXVII, fols. 348-361. Haciendas were listed by location, owner, and number of trees.
19. Documentos relativos a la Insurreción de Juan Francisco de León , 203. Two known signers contributed to this secret fund: Juan Félix Blanco and Juan Rodríguez Camejo.
20. In summary, thirty-eight individuals with cacao haciendas signed the 1744 document; they owned 781,500 cacao trees on sixty-four haciendas. In addition, eleven owners of 263,000 cacao trees on sixteen other haciendas who did not sign can be associated with the signatories by reason of their close kindred to them and other evidence. break
21. Most recently, for example, see Magnus Mörner, "The Rural Economy and Society of Colonial Spanish America," in The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge, 1984), 2:201: "Absentee creole landlords concentrated in Caracas formed a homogeneous, ambitious elite which tenaciously fought royal functionaries and Spanish-born merchants, who from 1728 to 1784 monopolized external trade through the Caracas Company."
22. Sucre, Gobernadores , 243-245.
23. Real cédula, August 11, 1676, AGI, Caracas, leg. 11; this concession was originally granted to the town of Coro in 1560. The years in which Caracas alcaldes ordinarios acted as governor pro tem were: 1705, 1714, 1715, 1720, 1723, 1724, 1725, and 1726. A royal cédula signed January 17, 1723, reiterated the order of 1676. Sucre, Gobernadores , 175-231 passim.
24. Analola Borges, Isleños en Venezuela: La gobernación de Ponte y Hoyo (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1960); Sucre, Governadores , 207-242.
25. The province of Venezuela was transferred from the political jurisdiction of Santo Domingo to that of the viceroy of New Granada in a royal decree signed May 27, 1717; Sucre; Gobernadores , 222.
26. Sucre, Gobernadores , 229-244.
27. In September 1702 an agent of the Habsburg archduke Charles of Austria, don Bartolomé de Capocelato, count of Antería, was arrested in the coastal valley of Ocumare and jailed in Caracas. In May 1703 he escaped, evidently with the help of the governor, Nicolás Eugenio de Ponte y Hoyo, who was accused of sympathizing with the Habsburg cause. Suffering from a debilitating mental illness, Ponte was replaced in November 1703 by the town's alcaldes, but the act of their taking gubernatorial authority was cause for some considerable concern by many who thought that they would go beyond sympathy and actually declare that the province belonged to a Habsburg sovereign. Evidently no charges were brought against anyone for treason, but among those who were later accused of having denounced the Bourbons in favor of the Habsburg archduke Charles were sargento mayor Juan Blanco Infante, elected alcalde ordinario in 1703; capitán Sebastián Nicolás de Ponte y Ponte; his cousin capitán Pedro de Ponte Ochoa; and the regidores Juan Nicolás de Ponte y Loreto, who was also elected alcalde in 1703, and Alejandro Blanco y Blanco. Some of the details of this rather confusing episode are given in Analola Borges, La casa de Austria en Venezuela durante la guerra de sucesión española (1702-1715) (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1963). A generation later the descendants of these Blancos and Pontes were conspicuous in their opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company.
28. Factor Goyzueta is quoted in Castillo Lara, La aventura , 270-271.
29. The cabildo's response is recorded in AGI, Caracas, leg. 418.
30. The woman who supposedly put events in motion on that occasion is also unknown, but factor Goyzueta may have referred to doña Luisa Catalina Martínez de Villegas, aged sixty-nine in 1744, the oldest of those who signed the protest memorial in November of that year, and the first signature on the list. Doña Luisa had been a widow for twenty years in 1744, and in 1741 she claimed that during this time she had been responsible for the care of "a very extensive family," some forty-four people, "counting only children and grandchildren." AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786. Probably her influence in the colony was great: four of her children continue
also signed the 1744 document, as did members of their spouses' families. Her husband, Alejandro Blanco de Villegas, was regidor of the cabildo and served as alcalde ordinario in 1721 and governor pro tem until May of that year, when a new governor was named for Caracas; Sucre, Gobernadores , 227-228. Their son, Juan Félix Blanco de Villegas, a signatory in 1744, was alcalde in 1746, and would be regarded by the Company as one of its most determined opponents. He was arrested and sent to Spain in 1751; AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. It was doña Luisa who put up a determined fight to keep Juan del Rosario and the morenos libres out of Curiepe in the 1720s.
31. The alcaldes ordinarios for the Caracas cabildo from 1700 to 1749 are given in Sucre, Gobernadores , 200-268, passim.
32. The following men were either fathers of 1744 signatories or signers themselves: Juan Luis Arias Altamirano, the governor pro tem in 1714; Francisco Felipe Mijares de Solórzano (who was the Marqués de Mijares) and Juan de Ibarra in 1715; Francisco Gil de Arratia in 1716; Antonio Alejandro Blanco Infante and Mateo Gedler in 1720; Francisco Carlos Herrera and Ruy Fernández de Fuenmayor in 1724 and again in 1725.
In 1705 Francisco Felipe Tovar y Mijares and Francisco de Meneses comprised the third set of alcaldes ordinarios who governed in the absence of Nicolás de Ponte y Hoyo, who had fallen seriously ill in 1703. The children of these men were among those cacao hacendados who did not sign the 1744 letter to the king. Much later, in 1723, Miguel Ascanio Tovar was elected alcalde and became governor pro tem, and in January 1726 Domingo Antonio Tovar and Diego de Liendo were chosen for the position, with the expressed understanding that, because they did not belong to the factions opposed to Diego de Portales y Meneses, they could facilitate Portales's return to office. These three men did not sign the 1744 protest either.
33. AGI, Santa Domingo, leg. 787. "Rolde de los deudores a la Rl. Ca. Guipuzcoana, 10 de diciembre de 1744."
34. The genealogy of the Condes de San Javier is given in Alejandro Mario Capriles, Coronas de Castilla en Venezuela (Madrid, 1967), 275-279.
35. "Relación y noticia de todas las haciendas de trapiche que a la fecha de ésta se hallan en esta Provincia de Venezuela," April 25, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
36. The 1684 count is found in AGI, Contaduría, leg. 1613; the 1720 census is from Pedro José de Olavarriaga, Instrucción General y Particular del Estado Presente de la Provincia de Venezuela en los años 1720 y 1721 (Caracas, 1965); and the 1744 count is in AGN, Caracas, Sección Diversos, XXVII.
37. The relevant genealogical information is in Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 1:164-168, 211-212.
38. The yield in fanegas per 1000 trees was given on a valley-by-valley basis by Olavarriaga in the 1720 Instrucción ; the 1744 yields are assumed to have been the same as they were in 1720.
39. The relevant genealogical information is in Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 1:202-208.
40. Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 1:203. Ricardos to the king, April 30, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
41. Sucre, Gobernadores , 279-283. In the margin of this letter the secretary of the Navy and Indies in the Council of the Indies, former Caracas continue
governor Julian de Arriaga, noted: "It is understood what he says to me about the contador mayor , and I have always been persuaded that in royal offices it is best to have a European, but not a Vizcayan." José Solano to Arriaga, May 20, 1768, AGI, Caracas, leg. 57. In 1772 Juan Bolívar was still only interim contador , AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 549.
42. Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas , 2:603-616, AGI, Contaduría, leg. 1613.
43. This was probably the San Matheo estate where Simón Bolívar and other elites gathered in 1808 to discuss their discontent with Caracas's place in Spain's empire. "Real Audiencia (Caracas) a Juan de Casas y Berrera, Gobernador de Venezuela," November 24, 1808, manuscript in the Lilly Library, Indiana University. "Relación y noticia de todas las haciendas de trapiche," AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
7— First Families
1. Waldron, "Social History," 105 and 303-304 (appendix 1); chap. 3 of Waldron's dissertation is a comprehensive general study of this census. Some of Waldron's conclusions differ from those of the present study, however. The census document is in the Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela, Caracas. "Matrículas de las parróquias de Caracas y demás pueblos de su diócecis, 1759." In 1750, according to the summary provided by cabildo regidor Fernando Lovera, there had been 18,008 individuals in Caracas and 179,716 in the province as a whole. "Recopilación o resumen Gral. de las Almas que tiene esta Gobernación de Venezuela y Caracas según consta de las matrículas del año 1750 y 51 de todo el obispado," April 22, 1752. AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
2. This definition of elite is different from one based on the composition of the household that was used by Waldron. For her, an elite household was one headed by a white individual called don or doña by the census taker, and in which resided many more than the average number of both whites and slaves. Waldron, "Social History," 50-51. In 1759 there were many individuals of impeccable elite status, office holders with wealth and established social prominence, who lived with only a spouse and a few children or other relatives (and many slaves, to be sure). The households of these people, because of the small number of whites in them, would be overlooked if the composition of the household is used as a definition of elite residence.
3. For the city as a whole in 1759 Waldron notes that only 13 percent of all households were extended either vertically or laterally, and that only 8 percent of all households were "extended patriarchal," that is both extended and headed by men. Many of these households, she found, were residences of the elite. Ibid., 116-118. The several studies which show that wealthy whites commonly lived in nuclear-family households are discussed in Linda Greenow, "Microgeographic Analysis as an Index to Family Structure and Networks," Journal of Family History 10 (Fall, 1985): 277.
4. In eighty-two of eighty-five elite households the head of household or the spouse of the head of household had at least one sibling living elsewhere in Caracas in 1759. Two blocks was the average distance be- soft
tween these eighty-two households and the residences of all the siblings of the eighty-two heads of household and their spouses.
Genealogical and demographic data used in the family reconstitutions, the identification of broader networks of kindred, and the study of cousin marriage on which the rest of this chapter depends come from the same sources cited in previous chapters: Iturriza Guillén, Familias caraqueñas and Familias valencianas . Less useful is Sangróniz y Castro, Familias coloniales .
Analysis of the spatial dimension of elite residence presented several problems. The priest who took the census in 1759 identified households by the cuadra on which they were located. Each block received a religious name, for example, the cuadra between the cathedral and the plaza was "Nuestra Señora de Venezuela y Santa Ana," while the next block to the south on the same street, where the residence of ex-governor Felipe Ricardos was located, was called "Dulce Nombre de María." However, the cuadra composed both sides of a street from one corner to the next; consequently it is not possible to determine on which side of the street any given house was located. A more fundamental problem was the difficulty in locating the cuadras on a street map of the city. The census takers did not follow any consistent pattern in their canvas of the city. The key to the solution of this problem proved to be a description, "Plano de la Ciudad Mariana de Caracas," prepared by the bishop Antonio Diez Madroñero in 1766. The document follows each street from beginning to end as it crossed the city, giving the name of each cuadra in succession. An abbreviated version of the "Plano'' is published in Enrique Bernardo Núñez, La ciudad de los Techos Rojos , 4th ed. (Caracas, 1973), 168-173.
5. The research on kin household clusters is surveyed in Greenow, "Micrographic Analysis," 277-278.
6. This couple lived in the cuadra "Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas," located in the southwest corner of the parish, five blocks from the plaza mayor. Juan Mijares's legitimate half-brother, the third Marqués de Mijares, and Melchora Tovar's sister, María Josefa Tovar, were residents in houses on the block "La Visitación de Nuestra Señora," located two blocks north of the plaza.
7. This count was made easier by the publication of the marriage registry for the cathedral parish, Instituto Venezolano de Genealogía, Matrimonios y velaciones .
8. Susan Migden Socolow, "Marriage, Birth and Inheritance: The Merchants of Eighteenth-Century Buenos Aires," Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (August 1980): 390. This difference is most likely due to the fact that, although in Buenos Aires resident merchants were eager to marry their daughters to immigrants with strong commercial connections in Spain, in Caracas such competition was not the rule because the Guipuzcoana Company controlled the European market for Caracas produce, there were few immigrant merchants, and most elite marriages were between men and women from established planter families. As is argued here, with time the number of individuals who were members of families with claims to elite status increased more rapidly than the cacao economy could expand, thus in this sense there was no particular incentive or advantage to early marriage. break
9. Because these calculations are made on the basis of averages of all children without regard for the rank order of their birth, firstborn offspring would have been more likely than the average interval suggests to marry while their fathers and mothers were alive, last-born less likely.
10. This is because the genealogical studies of Iturriza Guillén and Sangróniz y Castro rarely include birth dates for individuals born in the seventeenth century. The 296 cases are all those elites listed in these genealogies, both married and unmarried, who lived to adulthood and for whom both a birth date and a death date are known.
11. Waldron describes the epidemic, although she mistakenly identifies it as measles; "Social History," 25-27.
12. Both the structure and the frequency of first-cousin marriages are influenced by the size of the pool of cousins who are at risk of marriage. Here the structure of first-cousin marriage does not consider the size or composition of this pool. The large number of cases considered, taken as they are from the entire century, gives credence to the argument that the high incidence of mother's brother's daughter marriages was due to strategic choices, and not the result of a consistently greater number of cousins of this type at risk of marriage. In the anthropological idiom, cousins who marry are cross-cousins if their related parents are siblings of unlike sex. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriages are those in which a man marries his mother's brother's daughter, and this form was the preferred one in eighteenth-century Caracas. In the structuralist view of Lévi-Strauss, matrilateral cross-cousin marriage functions to regularize the exchange of women between or among several patrilineages (men give their daughters to their sister's sons for brides, and receive daughters for their sons from their wives' patrilineage), which produces interdependence and social solidarity among groups that might otherwise be antagonistic to one another. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structure of Kinship , rev. ed. (Boston, 1969). Although in colonial Caracas matrilateral cross-cousin marriage was merely preferred by the elite, and was not prescriptive, it did serve to connect patrilineages to one another, defusing the intergenerational authority of patriarchs.
13. The thirteen remaining elite households were headed by single individuals or by several unmarried siblings.
14. Of the twelve households in which the heads were cousins alive in 1759, the structure of the relationship of the husband to wife was:
|
Of the nineteen households in which the heads were either cousins who were both alive in 1759 or widows and widowers whose cousin-spouses had died, the structure of the relationship of husband to wife was:
|
15. By decade, the following surnames were linked in first-cousin elite marriages: break
1720s: Aguirre, Blanco (3), Herrera, Loreto, Lovera (2), Mijares, Obelmejía, Rengifo, Tovar
1730s: Aguirre, Blanco, Ibarra, Liendo (3), Mijares (2), Ponte
1740s: Blanco (4), Bolívar, Gedler, Hidalgo, Mijares, Tovar (2)
This information comes from Iturriza Guillén, ed., Matrimonios y velaciones .
16. In a printed broadsheet received by the Council of the Indies in March 1739, the Guipuzcoana Company accused the Marqués de Toro and the Conde de San Javier of being "the only, or the principal merchants, who for themselves, or on commission for merchants in Veracruz" control the cacao trade between Caracas and New Spain. The Basque monopolists accused them of wanting to keep the Company out of this lucrative commerce. The Company claimed that because Toro and San Javier monopolized this exchange they were able to buy cheaply in Caracas and sell at a high price in Mexico. Los directores de la Rl. Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas , copy in AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 786. Zuloaga to the king, February 26, 1745, ibid.
17. No Blanco married a Mijares (Marqués de Mijares), a Pacheco (Conde de San Javier), a Berroterán (Marqués del Valle de Santiago), or a Rodríguez de Toro (Marqués del Toro). In 1721 Catarina Blanco y Martínez de Villegas married José Tovar Galindo, and their son, Martín Tovar Blanco, became the first Conde de Tovar in 1771.
18. Ricardos to the king, August 1, 1751, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
19. Hussey confused the two men and believed that the count of San Javier was Alejandro Blanco Uribe. Caracas Company , 118, 356.
20. AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. Hussey quotes an unidentified minister who claimed that the count of San Javier could not contain his pleasure (" se le soltaba la risa ") when he came before authorities after the news of the 1749 rebellion reached Spain; Caracas Company , 139.
21. The list is credited to Sebastián de Eslava, ex-viceroy of New Granada, by Demetrio Ramos Pérez, "La politica de Marqués de la Ensenada--asesorado por el ex-virrey Eslava--en relación con el levantamiento contra la Guipuzcoana," in his Estudios de Historia Venezolana , 672.
22. There had been three such marriages in the Liendo family, including that of Antolín de Liendo, in 1738. Liendo's self-interest kept him close to the royal cause and out of the camp of the protesters. His is the exceptional case that proves the rule: his wife-cousin was his mother's sister's daughter, a Blanco, but also the daughter of the royal accountant, Martín Madera de los Rios. He was a lawyer, representative in Caracas of the Audiencia of New Granada when he married, and later a close collaborator of Ricardos's. Arriaga to Ensenada, March 26, 1753, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. Liendo did not use the Blanco part of his surname, but his younger brother, Silvestre Liendo Blanco, did. Silvestre Liendo signed the 1744 memorial, and he also married a Blanco first-cousin.
8— The King in Caracas: The Bourbon Reforms
1. D. A. Brading, "Bourbon Spain and Its American Empire," in The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge, 1984), 1:397-401. break
2. Brading points out Arriaga's American experience in ibid., 397. Early in 1752 it was Arriaga, then serving as the intendant for Cádiz, who imprisoned Juan Francisco de León and the other accused insurgents when they arrived from Venezuela. In Caracas in 1750 he had pardoned these men for threats against the Guipuzcoana Company and their attack on La Guaira. In August 1752 Arriaga, then president of the Casa de la Contratación, wrote to inform the marquis de la Ensenada that León had died in the Hospital Real in Cádiz. Sucre, Gobernadores , 269-271. Arriaga to Ensenada, August 4, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. It was Arriaga who suggested that Nicolás de León be sent to serve in the royal regiment at the African presidio of Orán; Arriaga to Ensenada, February 9, 1753, AGI, Caracas, 421.
3. Arriaga to the king, January 14, 1750, AGI, Caracas, 421.
4. Brading, "Bourbon Spain," 404.
5. Ricardos to the king, April 30, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421. Other elites recommended for recognition for their collaboration were Juan Manuel Herrera and maestro de campo Domingo Galindo.
6. Solano to Arriaga, May 20, 1768, AGI, Caracas, 57. Juan Bolívar's petition was denied, and he was still contador interino in 1772; AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 549.
7. The stock issue, the price-setting policy, and the provision allowing Caracas cosecheros space for their cacao on Company ships were innovations. Perhaps none of these reforms was more significant than the decision agreed to by the Company's directors at their 1752 meeting in Guipúzcoa that a new issue of Company stock be made, doubling it in quantity, and that this stock be offered to Caracas residents. The proposal, which may have been more in the nature of a royal order, was made to the directors by the king's representative, ex-governor Julián de Arriaga. Information about this meeting comes from Jules Humbert, Spanish edition, Los orígenes venezolanos (Caracas, 1976), 112; original edition, Les origines vénézuéliennes (Bordeaux, 1905). Otherwise the reformed Company was simply obliged to return to the conditions of its original charter, which did not include the alternativa privilege or the right to restrict seaborne cacao transport. Notice of the reforms was published in Real cédula de fundación de la Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas y Reglas económicas de buen gobierno . . . con adición de las posteriores declaraciones de Su Majestad sobre varios puntos, hasta el año 1753 (Madrid, 1765). A copy of this document is in AGI, Caracas, leg. 950-B. Hussey gives a general account of these changes in Caracas Company , chap. 6.
8. Arriaga to the king, January 14, 1750, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
9. "Resolución del Rey sobre la Provincia de Caracas y su Compañía," March 6, 1751, AGI, Caracas, leg. 57. Arriaga had brought a total of 1200 soldiers and cavalry with him from Spain; AGI, Caracas, leg. 418.
10. In 1751 the population of Caracas proper, limited to its several parishes and exclusive of its immediate rural hinterland, was 18,008 persons of all ages and sexes, not including the soldiers. "Recopilación o resumen Gral. de las Almas que tiene esta Gobernación de Venezuela y Caracas según consta de las matrículas del año 1750 y 51 de todo el obispado," April 22, 1752, AGI Caracas, leg. 368.
11. AGI, Caracas, leg. 57. break
12. Ricardos to Ensenada, September 11, 1751, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
13. Prior to this, alcaldes ordinarios had repeated in office only when they had been elected in midyear to finish the incomplete term of a predecessor, or when they had taken, as was their privilege, the responsibility of the governor in the event of his unexpected absence and the failure of a new appointee to arrive by the beginning of the next year when elections were held. Alcaldes were reelected for both of these reasons during the difficult years from 1725 to 1727. See Sucre, Gobernadores , 240-242. The alcaldes ordinarios elected from 1752 to 1754 were Francisco Palacios Gedler and Diego de Ibarra. Palacios had less reason to quarrel with the Guipuzcoana Company than did other Caracas elites; see the estimate of his family's cacao holdings in chap. 6.
14. The expansion of cabildo offices is described in Waldron, "Social History," 203-219. No one has studied the records of the late eighteenth-century Caracas cabildo more closely than Waldron, who is certainly correct in her observation that the increased preoccupation with good government after midcentury
. . . reveals a shift away from concern with municipal regularity and towards a concern with the personal conduct of the city's inhabitants. Earlier, the cabildo focused on controlling the use of water, assuring an adequate supply of fresh meat, and maintaining streets and solares, but in the ensuing years, with the regulation of these matters well-established, a greater interest in the economic and social behavior of private citizens is detectable. (Ibid., 200-201)
Waldron errs, however, in assuming that this shift was a kind of natural evolution away from Spanish control due to population and economic growth of Caracas: "During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the city remained no more than a town it was quite possible to manage the daily affairs of Caracas from laws originating in Spain. In the eighteenth century, however, when the city grew most rapidly and expanded its activities significantly, it was no longer feasible or desirable to rely on Spain for direction." Ibid., 199-200. To the contrary, as undesirable as it was for Caraqueños, the increase in town government in the 1750s was precisely the result of the increased interest of the crown in controlling the behavior of its Caracas subjects.
15. José Luis de Cisneros, Descripción exacta de la Provincia de Benezuela (Valencia, 1764; facsimile edition, Caracas, 1950), 43.
16. See, for example, Sucre, Gobernadores , 273; Núñez, La ciudad , 17, 245; and Waldron, "Social History," 205-206. The foremost historian of colonial Venezuelan architecture, Graziano Gasparini, gives no explanation of Ricardos's motives in his Caracas: La ciudad colonial y Guzmancista (Caracas, 1978), 59: "Para la historia de la ciudad, el nombre de Ricardos está ligado a las tiendas que mandó construir en 1755 alreadedor de la Plaza Mayor, las cuales--poco más de un siglo después--fueron demolidas por orden de Guzmán Blanco a fin de convertir la Plaza Mayor en Plaza Bolívar."
17. Waldron notes that it was very unusual for the cabildo to undertake an enterprise as costly as this, but she is unaware of the role of Ricardos when she states that "Given the large amount of money involved it is evident that the city believed the improvement of its plaza and market facilities essential." Waldron, "Social History," 205-206. break
18. Report of Lorenzo Rosel de Lugo to Ricardos, January 31, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 421.
19. Ricardos to Ensenada, May 1, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
20. "Instrucción pública" promulgated by Ricardos, November 15, 1752; and revision of the tax schedules issued April 28, 1753, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
21. Ricardos to Ensenada, May 1, 1752, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
22. In 1751 the cabildo voted public funds to build three new carnicerías , bringing the total number to four. Waldron suggests that this major increase in slaughterhouses might have been done "to keep abreast of population growth and the physical extension of the city"; "Social History," 249. It would seem more likely, however, that the cabildo was persuaded to quadruple its processing facilities so that meat could be more efficiently taxed. In its own estimate of the productive capacity of the province, done to illustrate to the Crown that 150,000 pesos in revenue could not be gotten from the reformed alcabala, the cabildo assumed that 137,000 head of cattle were consumed province-wide per year, but it was acknowledged that this figure was far from certain, "due to the irregularity of the butchering and sale [of cattle] in the countryside at a distance from the community because of the lack of mataderos and carnicerías .'' Cabildo to Ensenada, April 28, 1753, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
23. The Guipuzcoana Company blamed Dutch smugglers, who could undersell them by as much as 35 percent and whose ships could not be stopped by their inferior coast-guard vessels, for the busy contraband trade which caused the Company to operate at a deficit of 350,000 pesos for the period January 1752 to November 1755. Hussey, Caracas Company , 180-183. The prohibition on shipping cacao by sea from sites located upwind from La Guaira, while it forced cacao growers to send their beans to port overland by expensive muletrain, was intended to stop contraband on the coast. Permission to renew seaborne transport of cacao, granted as part of the reform which returned to Guipuzcoana Company to the conditions of its original charter, may have given new impetus to smuggling.
24. Auto of Ricardos, April 28, 1753; Cabildo to Ensenada, May 28, 1753, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
25. Arriaga to Ensenada, September 11, 1753, AGI, Caracas, leg. 368.
26. A summary of the credits and debits of the Real Hacienda for the province of Caracas for 1771 and 1772 are in AGI, Caracas, leg. 33. The record for the last months of 1777 and 1778 are published in Mario Briceño-Iragorry, ed., Orígenes de la Hacienda en Venezuela ( documentos inéditos de la época colonial ) (Caracas, 1942), 187-208. The revised alcabala taxes are identified by Ricardos's name in the entries in both cases, although there is a discrepancy as to when the policy was decreed. The 1772 document reads: "Por el Real Derecho de Alcabala de tierra que según instrucción formada por don Felipe Ricardos, Gob. y Capitán General que fue de esta Provincia en veinte y cinco de abril de mil setecientos cincuenta y tres con facultad y aprobación Real . . ."; in 1778 the date for the origin of the policy is some months earlier: "Este Ramo se cobra por Real Orden de 15 de noviembre de 1752, conforme a la Instrucción formada por el Excmo. Sr. Dn. Felipe Ricardos, Gobernador y Capitán General que fué de esta Provincia con facultades reales." break
27. In good baroque style, the first letters of each line were arranged as an acrostic to form the word "RICARDOS," and they were carved perpendicular to the horizontal so that their meaning could not be missed. A rather free translation of the tablet follows:
THE VERY EXCELLENT SENOR DON PHELIPE RICARDOS
LIEUTENANT GENERAL OF THE ROYAL ARMIES OF HIS MAJESTY GOVERNOR
CAPTAIN GENERAL OF THIS PROVINCE OF VENEZUELA
CALL ON FAME WITH SHOUTING HORN
IN UNKNOWN CLIMES AND RESOUNDING VOICES
PROCLAIM RICARDOS A TRUE HERO
REALIZING RAPID VICTORIES
RENDER HIM THIS CITY WITH FITTING CARE
DUE THANKS FOR YOUR NEW PLEASURES
TODAY IN THIS NEW STREET THERE IS SO MUCH IMPROVEMENT
OF YOUR PROPERTIES WITH THE INCREASING REVENUES
YEAR 1754
Of course the governor's message did not mention that the increasing revenues went to pay for a standing army in the city. This inscription is quoted or a photograph of the tablet is shown in Sucre, Gobernadores , 274; Núñez, La ciudad , 18; and Gasparini, Caracas , 60, but only as a curiosity. None of these authors make any critical comment about the Ricardos poem.
28. Remírez to Arriaga, March 14, 1761. Twice before Remírez had written to the king on this matter, first in response to a royal order to reduce tobacco farming (issued on July 25, 1757) on April 6, 1758, and again on March 25, 1759; AGI, Caracas, leg. 57.
29. AGI, Caracas, leg. 367.
30. Arriaga to Remírez, October 24, 1758, AGI, Caracas, leg. 57. That association with the rebellion left no lasting stain on the Rodríguez de Toro family may have been due in part to the fact that Bernardo José Rodríguez de Toro, the younger brother of the deceased marquis, was oidor in the Audiencia of New Spain, a post that had been purchased for him for 15,000 pesos in 1741, the year before the death of his father, the first Marqués de Toro. Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, Biographical Dictionary of Audiencia Ministers in the Americas, 1687-1821 (Westport, Conn., 1982), 297. This was the highest position in Spain's imperial bureaucracy ever obtained by a Caracas native son. There is no record of the outcome of a second request made by the widow Ascanio in 1760. She wrote to the king that she had been given legal guardianship by her husband of their ten children, and that without royal help she would be unable to keep their house "in the decency and character" with which his majesty had endowed it. Her request was to be allowed to make five voyages to Veracruz and one to Spain with cacao, paying only one-third the royal duties in each case. She also asked to be allowed to send the same ship to colonias amigas to buy 100 slaves for her haciendas and those of her children, and she asked that her son be allowed to assume the title and mayorazgo of the marquisate without paying the media anata tax. Theresa de Ascanio, Marquesa de Toro, to the king, May 25, 1760, AGI, Caracas, continue
leg. 367. The grant of the title of count to Martín de Tovar is discussed in Núñez, La ciudad , 259.
31. Unlike societies where inheritance divisions were discretionary and obedient children could expect material rewards in a father's will for their services, this extended period of waiting in the father's home did not provide a commensurate increase in paternal authority, for in elite Caracas homes slaves did the work and the bipartible inheritance rule ensured an equal share for every heir.
32. Born in 1682, don Lorenzo was probably the only elite man in Caracas in 1759 who had clear, firsthand recollections of the first years of the War of Spanish Succession and the short-lived movement in 1702 and 1703 led by some of the Caracas elite, including his father, to reject the sovereignty of the Bourbon Philip of Anjou in favor of the Habsburg Archduke Charles of Austria. The details of this event remain obscure; see Analola Borges, La casa de Austria en Venezuela durante la guerra de sucesión española (1702-1715) (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1963). In April 1759, the oldest elite woman died, Francisca Tovar Mijares, aged eighty-eight; she had already married twice, in 1691 and again in 1698, before the death of Charles II brought an end to Habsburg rule in the Spanish world.
33. AGI, Caracas, leg. 57. He died August 10, 1759.
34. The Company of Noble Adventurers was initiated by don José Solano y Bote, governor of Caracas from 1763 to 1771; Sucre, Gobernadores , 279-281. "Compañía de Nobles Aventureros Acaballo de la ciudad de Santiago de León de Caracas, formada de sus hijos nobles," 25 July 1768, AGI, Caracas, leg. 850. break