Creolization and Contraband: CuraCao in the Early Modern Atlantic World

1 Converging Currents

1 / Converging Currents In May 1565 the English privateer John Hawkins spent ten days on the small Caribbean island of Curaçao, then a minor outpost of the vast Spanish American empire. Hawkins sought to procure hides in exchange for cloth and ten slaves he had brought from Senegambia and Sierra Leone.1 Although his visit to Curaçao often has been portrayed as piracy, an extant receipt for the transaction and a letter to Hawkins from the island governor, Lázaro Bejarano, indicate that this commercial exchange was cordial and voluntary on both sides.2 In two separate transactions with the governor and another local resident Hawkins traded his wares for over a thousand hides.3 Thus, seventy years before the Dutch seized Curaçao from the Spanish, and over a century before the island officially became a free trade center, local inhabitants already were trading clandestinely across imperial divides for their own benefit, in clear violation of the restrictive mercantile policies of Spanish authorities . To do so, they took advantage of both the regional geography and the market realities of this relatively neglected corner of the Caribbean. Such dealings were not limited to Curaçao. As they traveled around the Caribbean, Hawkins and his crew found eager trade partners in many neglected Spanish possessions, whose inhabitants were strictly forbidden from commercial intercourse with foreigners. Hawkins successfully negotiated agreements with governors throughout the region, to the consternation of Spanish authorities.4 In May 1565, for example, authorities in the small town of Río de la Hacha, on the northwestern 18 / emergence of an entrepôt coast of South America (in present-day Colombia), granted Hawkins a license to trade freely with all the townspeople, and a certificate stating that he had displayed good conduct, “maintaining the peace” and “working no harm to any person” during his twelve-day stay.5 Aware that such open agreements sparked the ire of higher-ups, Hawkins had tried another tactic the previous month in the mainland town of Borburata. Pleading that he had been inadvertently “by contrary weather driven to these coasts,” where he sought refuge to repair his damaged vessels, he requested permission to sell his cargo of goods and slaves “at acceptable prices” so he could pay for his ships and crew and obtain needed supplies. The request included a thinly veiled threat to “seek my own solution” if his petition was not granted, and noted that he could not be responsible for any ensuing “harm and damage.”6 Traders of different ethnicities and affiliations would continue to use the same excuse of bad weather to justify their own illicit interimperial trade for centuries to come, even though the narrow channel of water separating Curaçao from the mainland is remarkably calm, outside the hurricane belt, and generally well protected from high winds and contrary currents. From Curaçao, Hawkins proceeded southwest along the Caribbean littoral of the Spanish American mainland, following the prevailing currents and trade winds along a route that had been used by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Curaçao in the Caribbean Close contact between Curaçao’s inhabitants and those of the nearby mainland predated the arrival of Hawkins and other Europeans. The island’s native inhabitants, the Caquetios, were a group of Arawaks who were members of the same linguistic and ethnic group as the people of the northern coast of South America. They likely migrated to the islands of the southern Caribbean from the Maracaibo Basin area of the mainland around 600 CE.7 Archaeological data and early Spanish accounts indicate that there were close economic and cultural ties between the peoples of Tierra Firme and those of neighboring Caribbean islands during pre-Columbian times.8 But the record is also somewhat contradictory. Although the Spanish reported that Curaçao’s Caquetios were under the jurisdiction of a mainland leader named Manaure (sometimes called Anaure) on the Paraguaná Peninsula, archaeological evidence seems to indicate that the island peoples likely had a relatively self-sufficient society and were not part of a broader political structure.9 converging currents / 19 Organizational autonomy would not have precluded close contact or economic exchanges between people in the two areas. The inhabitants of both places cultivated similar food crops (maize, manioc, beans, sweet potatoes, cactus fruits, and agave); traded tobacco and other products with each other; and showed signs of mutual cultural influence.10 Ceramic...