The Spanish Convoy of 1750: Heaven's Hammer and International Diplomacy (review)

With the recent publication of a textbook and several critical appraisals by leading historians, Atlantic history is quickly becoming an established field of historical scholarship. In response to the recent ascendancy of Atlantic history and the flurry of publications, conferences, and seminars, David Armitage has declared, "We are all Atlanticists now."¹ With its inclusion in the New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology series, edited by James C. Bradford and Gene Allen Smith, and more specifically with its emphasis on international diplomacy between Spain and England, James A. Lewis's The Spanish Convoy of 1750 is unquestionably an Atlantic tale that speaks to the growing development and possibilities of Atlantic history.

The Spanish Convoy of 1750 is a straightforward narrative history of the Spanish flota that left Havana in August 1750, only to run into Heaven's Hammer (Lewis's own moniker for the hurricane that battered the boats) and scatter along the coast of British North America. The book is also an intimate look at the history of the people aboard the ships that made up the flota and the peoples whom the shipwrecked crew encountered when they reached the shores of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. In so doing, Lewis proceeds in a relatively strict chronological order focused on the events of the ships, the crews, and the subsequent activities after the hurricane based on "hundreds of pages of testimony, letters, diplomatic correspondence, and contemporary legal records" (2). After the shipwreck—or shipwrecks, to be more accurate, as there were seven total ships in the convoy—the Spanish crews scrambled both to survive and to protect any remaining goods from the ships from pirates or greedy colonial officials. Although most of the settlements for the ships concluded by 1768, Lewis continues the narrative into the present day, as legal battles in American courts between salvagers and the kingdom of Spain have been waged to determine who has rightful ownership of those ships and the goods that sank into the ocean. In 2001, the U. S. Supreme Court determined that Spain maintained ownership of both the goods and the ships, but as Lewis makes clear, any more discoveries of privately-owned Spanish ships off the eastern coast of the United States are sure to bring about more lawsuits.

Although Lewis never explicitly advocates for an Atlantic approach, it is quite clear that the book could not have been written without one. The interdependencies of the Atlantic world appear throughout the story, as the aftermath of the hurricane's destruction and especially the movement of the scattered goods involved the European governments of Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and Denmark, as well as the colonial governments in the Caribbean and the Americas. Additionally, the crews of the flota were Atlantic in makeup. This is no better represented than by Captain Daniel Huoni, leader of the entire fleet, who was an Irish Catholic who escaped Protestant England for Catholic Spain—Huoni would eventually become teniente general de la armada, one of the highest ranks in the Spanish Navy. Even Lewis's tracking of the hurricane's path is definitively an Atlantic one, as it "undoubtedly originated in Africa, gained muscle crossing the Atlantic, and then unleashed its full power on . . . the northern Caribbean and mainland British colonies" (2). One of the most intriguing aspects that Lewis points out is that the treatment of the Spanish ships varied among the three British colonies. He argues that Virginia, as a result of its "European-oriented" commerce and port of Norfolk, "had more empathy for the unlucky Spaniards" than did their British counterparts in North Carolina or Maryland (60). This theory, however, apparently did not hold for South Carolina and its port in Charles Town, as the governor of South Carolina sent agents after the ship that wrecked on the coast of North Carolina to confiscate the entire cargo as compensation for ships illegally held in Havana during the War of Austrian Succession...