Smugglers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean: “Forced Arrivals” in Santo Domingo
Despite the Spanish crown’s efforts to control trade to their American territories, the Caribbean in particular was rife with opportunities for contraband. Ideally, only properly licensed and registered Spanish ships were supposed to be admitted to Spanish ports. However, the provision that vessels without the proper paperwork – as long as they were not from enemy nations – could request shelter in case of emergencies, such as storm damage or a desperate need for food or water, offered a loophole that was exploited by a variety of foreign merchants in order to trade their wares to Spanish residents. These forced arrivals, or arribadas, were common in the relatively isolated port of Santo Domingo throughout the seventeenth century, and even though local and metropolitan authorities showed concern about the potential for illicit trade, at times these emergency arrangements may have provided a more reliable supply of merchandise than the limited numbers of officially approved vessels. Likewise, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and English merchants were well aware of the possibility of gaining access to Santo Domingo by claiming an arribada, and, based on the political situation in Europe at the time, astutely balanced the risk of arrest and seizure against the potential profits to be made, most commonly from slaves and cloth; a number even successfully sued for restitution of ships and cargo with the backing of their home governments. Unlicensed arrivals, then, connected Santo Domingo and the rest of the Caribbean directly with a much wider Atlantic world by permitting vessels from European, African, and Brazilian ports to evade Spain’s royal monopoly on trade, a monopoly that often appears fictitious from the point of view of seventeenth-century Spanish Hispaniola.
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