THE SPANLSH TREASURE-FLEETS.•
EVERY schoolboy has heard of the Spanish treasure-fleets which throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bore the riches of the Indies home to Seville, braving the perils of the sea and the too active attentions of the enterprising sailors of France and England and Holland. Those galleons, laden with the gold and • Trade and Nariaation between Spain and the /idiot in the Time of the Haplitires. By C. II. Haring. London : B. Illifcrd. [10s. net.1 silver of Mexico and Peru and the pearls of Margarita, poured wealth- into Spain for generation after generation, and left her a poorer country than she was before. But. they provided a continual advertisement of the New World, and they stimulated the Northern nations to develop their nascent sea-power and to seek colonies of their own in North America, while the stores of bullion which Spain could not keep went to fructify the trade and industry of all Europe. It is profoundly interesting to find in this new book by Professor Haring, of Yale, a detailed account—worked up from the voluminous colonial archives which are all that remain to Spain of her lost Einpire—of the elaborate organization of the Spanish. American fleets from the age of Columbus to the death in 1700 of Charles II.; the last Hapsburg King of Spain. The whole trade with the Western Indies, as America was officially termed, was minutely controlled by the Casa de ContrataciOn, or " House of Trade," at Seville from 1503, and was carried on mainly by a close ring, or "Consulado," of Seville merchant princes. The strength of the provincial jealousies which afflicted, and still afflict., Spain may be judged from the fact that Castile at first declined to open the American trade to natives of Aragon or Catalonia, and that Seville; though it was an unsuitable port for sea-going ships of two hundred tons or more, which were often delayed at the bar at San Lucar, bitterly resented the competition of Cadiz, and flatly refused to share its monopoly with a third Spanish port. Till the eighteenth century all the officially recognized trade with the Indies passed through Seville and Cadiz alone, and every ounce of treasure had to be brought to the " House of Trade " to be registered and taxed for the quint() or fifth due to the Crown. The Spanish Monarchy tried at first to monopolize the commerce of the New World, but soon found that what was possible, though unwise, for Portugal in the old settled countries of the East was impracticable in the undeveloped countriea of the West. It was content thence- forth to leave the weak to private enterprise and to take its share of the profits. Spanish capitalists opened and worked the mines, and built the ships which took out European goods and brought home gold and silver, while the Crown levied both export and import duties.
It was soon found that treasure-ships sailing homeward offered irresistible temptations to the French corsairs, who hung about the Canaries and the Azores and had nearly intercepted Columbus himself. When Cortes sent home Charles V.'s share of the plunder of Mexico, his three caravels were taken by the French, and the Aztec trophies went to La Rochelle instead of to Madrid. The Rouse of Trade " therefore instituted a system of convoys, and levied on the merchants a tax called the averta—a word derived from the Arabic term for damage, which is represented in English by " average " in its original application to marine insurance. The insurance rate, as we may call it, was at first 21 per cent., but increased to 7 per cent. when Drake and Hawkins got to work. From the casual convoy system was soon evolved, for reasons of convenience the plan of sending the large yearly fleet, with a powerful squadron of warships, which was made compulsory from 1564. There were in fact, two fleets. One sailed for Mexico, or New Spain, in the, spring ; it had as a rule two attendant warships and was-commonly called the Rota or fleet. The other sailed in August for Nombre de Dios with cargo for " Tierra Firma "—the mainland or Spanish Main—as the Spaniards called South America ; this-fleet, which was to bring back the treasure coming from Peru by way of Panama and the isthmus road, had a much more powerful convoy of six or eight galleons forming the Armada of the Indies, and was therefore generally called " the Galleons." The two fleets, after wintering in the Indies, were intended to meet at Havana in the spring and sail home together. As there was little cargo for Spain apart from bullion, the homeward-bound fleet was much smaller than when it left Andalusia, and it became the practice, Mr. Haring tells us, of thrifty Seville merchants to load up old hulks that were just sea- worthy enough to make the outward passage, selling them for what they would fetch in the colonies. Upon the flota and the " galleons," with their rich freight, the solvency of the Spanish Administration often depended. How much these treasure-fleets brought not even Mr. Haring can tell, for though he prints returns of the official remittances, vast. sums came for private consignees, who did not always want to pay the Royal quingo. Foreign metchants at Cadiz in the late seventeeth century employed young Spanish aristocrats, called metedorea, to get the gold and silver ingots illegally consigned to them in the fetes, paying them one per cent. -for their trouble, besides bribing the Governor, the Mayor, the Magistrate, and the sentinels on duty. But the .Crown. revenues from the fetes- were very large. Philip II. at his accession was drawing about 500,000 ducats or £225,000 a -year from the-Indies--a sum that was equal to Queen Elizabeth's whole revenue from all sources; and that must be multiplied tenfold to give its modern equivalent. In some years the feta brought far larger amounts. In 1550 La Gasca delivered to Charles V. bullion to the value of a million and a half ducats. En 1626 the feta brought for the Crown bullion worth two and a half million ducats, besides eight millions' worth for private consignees. A curipus official account of the silver extracted from Potosi between Ir,50 and 1640 gives a- total of 400,000,000 pesos of eight reals—the
buccaneers' "pieces of eight" or dollars, veiled at four slaillings-_ of which the Crown took rather more than a fifth. There is nothing .fantastic,. then, in the. stories -of the riches borne in the treasure- fleets. Yet for Spain all this wealth was the fairy gold that-turns to withered leaves. For it served " to feed an unpractical vanity and further to unfit the nation for manufacturing'and commercial life." Spain came to depend on the foreigner for everything that could be -bought with American gold—for foodstuffs as well as for 'manufac- tured goods andwhen the flow of treasure stopped at last, Spain woke froin her dreams to find her native • vigour sapped and her industries decayed. '
Corsairs, privateers, and buccaneers, besides the war-fleets of enemy nations, wrought continual havoc On the Spanish treasure- fleets. But it is, as Mr. Haring says, a remarkable fact that an entire fleet was destroyed on only three occasions in the two centuries. Piet Heyn, Admiral of 'the Dutch West India Company, intercepted the !iota from Vera Cruz in 1828, off the coast of Cuba, took the four armed galleons and eight out of eleven merchantmen, and sailed home with a cargo worth -15,000,000 guilders. The Spanish Admiral, who had illegally stowed so much cargo on his galleons that the guns could not be worked, was afterwards executed, like Byng, to encourage the others." The second to suffer was the Tierra Firma fleet of 1656, which escaped the English Fleet in the West Indies only to fall a preyto a squadron of thiee frigates commanded by Captain Stayner, who was cruising off Cadiz under orders from Blake.. One galleon which was taken carried bullion to the value of 2,000,000 pesos ; two other ships with an equal amount between- them took fire and were lost. Blake defied precedent by continuing his cruise- through the winter months, and thus was able to surprise the Mexican fete of 1656, which had lagged behind its sister-fleet and did not reach the Canaries till February, 1657. The fete landed its treasure, to the value of over 10,000,000 pesos, and lay in the harbour of Santa. Cruz, the entrance to which was defended- by a castle and six or seven forts, connected by barricades for musketeers. Early in the morning of April 20th, Blake with part of his-fleet -engaged the harbour .ports, while- Stapler with twelve frigates ran into the harbour, cast-anchor opposite• the-fete, and-battered it until every Spanish vessel was a blazing hulk. - Having completed his work, Stayner brought his frigates safely. out of the harbour; and rejoined Blake, who, like the commander of the ` Vindictive' at Zeebrugge; had exposed himself to almost certain destruction to divert the attention of the enemy from the real objective of the attack. Blake did not secure the treasure, but he prevented it from reaching Spain at a critical moment in the war. We have touched on only a few of the interesting points ain .Mr. Haring's valuable and scholarly book. The history of Spanish colonization is instructive because Spain committed nearly -every possible blunder and has paid the penalty.
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