The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763

4: The Pacific Ocean and the War of the Spanish Succession

122 4 The Pacific Ocean and the War of the Spanish Succession Le principal objet de la guerre présente est celui du commerce des Indes et des richesses qu’elles produisent. —Louis XIV, February 18, 1709 Tho’ some religious-headed people fancy that money got by privatiering won’t prosper, yet I may venture to say the St. Malo men are as rich and florishing as any people in France. —William Betagh, A Voyage round the World, 1728 On November 16, 1700, Louis XIV proclaimed, in accordance with the will of Charles II of Spain, that Louis’s grandson Philip, duc d’Anjou, would inherit the Spanish throne. The ensuing War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714) would determine which European powers would profit from the riches of Spanish America. Louis and his ministers hoped that French commercial penetration of the Spanish Empire would make Spanish resources available to French merchants and those merchants’ income available to royal tax collectors. In the years after 1700, the French government directed its diplomatic, military, and commercial policies to this end.William III of England and the Dutch Republic saw that control of Spanish American resources might give Louis the capacity to achieve the European dominance he had long sought and others had long feared. William and other European leaders felt they had to resist Louis’s Spanish design.1 1. Louis XIV to Michel-Jean Amelot, Feb. 18, 1709, in Baron de Girardot, ed., Correspondance de Louis XIV avec M. Amelot, son ambassadeur en Espagne, 1705–1709, 2 vols. (Paris, 1864), II, 121 (“The principal object of the present war is that of the commerce of the Indies and the riches they produce ”); William Betagh, A Voyage round the World: Being an Account of a Remarkable Enterprize, Begun in theYear 1719,Chiefly to Cruise on the Spaniards in the Great South Ocean . . . (London, 1728), 308; E.W. Dahlgren, Les relations commerciales et maritimes entre la France et les côtes de l’Océan pacifique (commencement du XVIIIe siècle), I, Le commerce de la mer du Sud (jusqu’à la paix d’Utrecht) (Paris, 1909), I, 561–562, 580–581, 633, 636, 659; Charles Frostin, “Les Pontchartrain et la pénétration commerciale française en Amérique espagnole (1690–1715),” Revue historique, CCXLV (1971), The Pacific Ocean and the War of the Spanish Succession | 123 During the War of the Spanish Succession, there transpired a commercial innovation of great significance for the study of eighteenth-century European interest in the undiscovered North American West: direct commerce between French ports and the Spanish settlements in Peru and Chile. By giving French merchants and statesmen extensive experience with the profits available from Spanish Pacific trade—and painful familiarity with the difficulty of reaching Chile and Peru by wayof Cape Horn—this commerce demonstrated the potential value of an easier western North American route to the South Sea.2 The antecedents to direct French trade with Peru and Chile in the first decades of the eighteenth century lay in the last three decades of the seventeenth. From the 1670s to the early 1690s, simultaneously pushed by imperial efforts to curtail Caribbean piracy and pulled by the lure of lightly guarded Spanish cities and treasure ships, buccaneers had journeyed into the Pacific by crossing the Isthmus of Panama or sailing around South America. They plagued the Americas ’ western shores, burning towns, taking ships, disrupting trade, and forcing the Spanish Empire to divert scarce pesos to defend a region usually protected by isolation. Ulloa remarked in his 1748 Voyage to South America that the city of Guayaquil (in modern Ecuador) still suffered from being pillaged by pirates in 1686. After sustaining numerous such costly attacks, Spain’s Pacific colonies finally succeeded in the 1690s in driving the pirates away. Some of the buccaneers made it back to Europe, bearing tales of Spanish wealth that excited the avarice of their countrymen in French port towns like Saint Malo, in much the same way that Spanish conquistadors some two centuries before had inspired their Extremaduran brethren with tales of Aztec and 307–336, esp. 310, 319–320; D.W. Jones,War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford, 1988), 2, 4; Henry Kamen,TheWarof Succession in Spain, 1700–15 (London, 1969), 125–127, 135, 143; Luis Navarro García, “La política indiana,” and Lucio Mijares Pérez, “Política exterior: La diplomacia,” both in Navarro García, ed., Historia general de Espa...