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139 4. To El Dorado via Slave Trade OPENING COMMERCE WITH FOREIGN COLONIES, CA. 1660–1713 If we had negroes, the convenience of our ports . . . would certainly draw all the trade [the Spanish] may have with strangers to us. —Lt. Governor Thomas Lynch of Jamaica, 1682 Foreigners get the best of the negroes, and we only the refuse at £22 a head. . . . Ready money has been refused because it was not pieces-of-eight. —The Council and Assembly of Jamaica, 1686 In 1662, acting deputy governor of Jamaica Charles Lyttelton faced a dilemma. Spanish American colonists kept arriving at his island with silver, hoping to trade the mineral wealth of South America for African people delivered to Jamaica as slaves. Faced with these affluent outsiders, Lyttelton waffled between chasing Spanish silver and upholding the law. On one hand, the English had spent the last century and a half pursuing Spanish American riches; indeed, many English adventurers first sailed to the New World as pirates and privateers, viewing Spanish treasure fleets as the ultimate prize. Now Spanish colonists were sailing to English ports, begging for permission to leave their silver behind when they departed. Surely, Lyttelton thought, this had to be a good thing. On the other hand, Lyttelton’s superiors had just laid down the law against foreign trade. The Navigation Act of 1660 expressly forbade exports from all English colonies in foreign ships, so Spanish departures from Jamaica with enslaved Africans would violate the act, since the law defined African people as property. As a stand-in governor, Lyttelton faced a tricky decision, and his choice reveals English imperial priorities in the second half of the seventeenth century. Although the letter of the law prohibited Spanish ships’ trading at Jamaica, Lyttelton concluded that the spirit of the law intended something different. In his interpretation, when the Navigation Act discussed exports from England ’s colonies, the law’s authors envisioned only colonial produce—sugar, tobacco, timber—as likely exports. Under the reigning imperial philosophy 140 / To El Dorado via Slave Trade of the day, later dubbed “mercantilism,” the utility of colonies rested in their gathering or cultivating such raw materials and exporting them to the mother country for manufacture or consumption. Furthermore, mercantilism dictated that colonies offered captive markets for the mother country’s manufactured goods. When foreign vessels traded at English colonies, imperial policy makers feared the mother country would be cut out of both profitable aspects of holding colonies; New World produce slipped out of the empire, and foreign traders paid for it with European manufactured goods that competed with England’s own exports. Slave trading with Spanish American colonists did not fit neatly into this mercantilist conception of colonial trade. Africans’ labor certainly helped cultivate the produce that made colonies profitable, but Lyttelton did not view selling some of these captive laborers to foreigners as cutting England out of its rightful colonial trade. The foreign slave trade lacked the problems of, say, a Dutch merchant in Virginia trading European manufactures for tobacco. No Jamaican sugar left the empire, and Spanish American buyers offered payment, not in European goods, but in silver or colonial produce. The only thing that pleased a mercantilist more than holding silver was taking it from his rivals. So Acting Deputy Governor Lyttelton boldly proclaimed that he considered fostering trade with Spanish colonists part of his mission for the king. Since Spanish officials refused to grant English slave traders access to their colonies, Lyttelton announced “that the Merchants and Inhabitants of the Island of Cuba, Hispagnola, or any other the King of Spain’s Subjects in America shall receive free Trade and Comerce with the King my Majt’s Subjects here.” 1 The crown quickly endorsed Lyttelton’s actions. Upon hearing in 1663 that colonial officials in Barbados, unlike Lyttelton in Jamaica, had denied entrance to Spanish buyers seeking “a supply of Negro Slaves,” the English Privy Council recognized the Navigation Act’s potential to block opportunities to open Spanish American trade. In response, the council put Lyttelton’s ad hoc policy on a more solid footing, announcing that allowing the trade 1. Charles Lyttelton, “A Proclamaçon,” Sept. 21, 1662, HCA 49/59, fol. 12, National Archives, Kew. Lyttelton’s predecessor in Jamaica had made a similar decision about prospective Spanish slave buyers in 1661. Since English merchants in the colony lacked slaves to offer at that moment , the governor purchased slaves from Dutch merchants to sell them to the Spanish buyers. The...

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