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

Introduction

1 Introduction No event of nature so captivates our attention on a daily basis as does the weather. Even today, with all our inventions to counteract the extremes of temperature and humidity, we still organize basic activities in reaction to what the weather of a day, season, or cycle presents. Yet academic historians generally ignore these events. The weather is too mundane or too random to warrant much study or consideration. It is hard to imagine a topic that separates popular from scholarly history more than the weather. Social conversation includes the weather on a daily basis, often in a historical context. Americans who lived through the blizzard of 1888, the floods of 1940, or the tornados of 1974 never forgot these events, and use their appearances to place family and community history. Blissfully, the academician studies other events or themes deemed more important . All of this is unfortunate, because the extremes with which The Spanish Convoy of 1750 2 Mother Nature confronts us and our institutions force us to react immediately and decisively, if not necessarily effectively. The fate of individuals and families is almost always at stake, and those directly involved are given no choice but to focus attention on the emergency at hand. Such was the case with the Atlantic hurricane of mid-August 1750, which swept up the east coast of the British North American colonies from Georgia to Delaware and flattened the men, ships, cities , and crops in its path. Beyond disinterest, what makes events like hurricanes difficult for scholars to study is that they are almost always international, rather than national, in scope. Propelled by forces of the ocean and the heat of the sun, hurricanes cross modern political and cultural borders. Surviving records and accounts are written in different languages and stored in unlikely places. This August 1750 tempest undoubtedly originated in Africa, gained muscle crossing the Atlantic, and then unleashed its full power on human enclaves dotting the northern Caribbean and mainland British colonies. Sailing directly into this angry swirl of wind, waves, and rain went a modest-sized Spanish flota (convoy) of seven ships. There exists no good time to encounter a hurricane, but the navigation of this fleet and the path of this hurricane intersected at just the point where the hurricane would have been at its strongest. It was still out to sea and not yet slowed by the resistance of land or the cooling waters of the North Atlantic. It is a testament to technological advancement in building seaworthy ships and to sheer will to live that most of the 1750 fleet survived ,butbarely.Becauseofthesizeof thisflota,becauseitendedupin the territory of a foreign and not very friendly neighbor, and because it carried considerable wealth, this event produced hundreds of pages of testimony, letters, diplomatic correspondence, and contemporary Introduction 3 legal records. Two and half centuries later, the sum of this ink opens a unique window into the British and Spanish political, economic, social, diplomatic, and colonial worlds of the mid-eighteenth century . Foul wind, rich history! ...