Varieties of Trade: A Dutch Merchant in the Rio de la Plata

Through the career of a Dutch captain-merchant active in the Rio de la Plata during the seventeenth century, this paper examines the various trading possibilities open to merchants who were technically outside of an imperial trading system. On his return journey from Buenos Aires in 1663, the French merchant, Acarete du Biscay wrote that their ship carried “some Persons whom he [the colonial governor] had seiz’d, that were guilty of holding the Correspondence with the Dutch, among whom there was a Captain, named Alberto Janson, a Dutch-man.”  It was not the first time Jansen traded in the Rio de la Plata nor, interestingly enough, was it the last as he remained active in the region until the 1680s. For the Spanish king, as well as this governor in Buenos Aires, trade with foreign merchants like Jansen was illegitimate.  Likewise, for historians, the traditional way to study Atlantic trade has mirrored that of the Spanish imperial authorities.  That is, the legitimate way of looking at connections was within an imperial association. That said, newer historical research, using the words of Claudia Schnurmann, focuses on “Atlantic trade contacts which were carried out by people ignoring governmental barriers, instead using the Atlantic Ocean as a wide space of traffic and mediator of communication, a natural environment quite the reverse of the artificial human-made borders erected by state frontiers, metropolitan claims, and territories.” Such trade, however, was not necessarily illegitimate, even to colonial authorities.  On the contrary, it was carried on through commercial instruments and sustained by the institutional framework provided by the Spanish Empire.  This paper uses the career of Albert Jansen to provide an excellent example of how this commerce worked with the authorities’ perspective on his trade varying according to circumstance.