From the Bottom of the Pit to the Bottom of the Ocean: Maritime Labor, Fraud, and the Logistics of Silver Transportation in the Mid-17th-Century Spanish Caribbean

In 1658, the Council of the Indies ordered an investigation into alleged frauds committed during salvage expeditions to the wreck of a silver galleon sunk in 1655 in the Bahamas. Originally a pet project of the governor of Cartagena de Indias, the two salvage expeditions in the summers of 1656 and 1657 relied on the labor of free and enslaved Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous divers. Prosecutors in port cities all over the Spanish Atlantic, including San Sebastian in the Iberian peninsula, Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Havana, and Cartagena in the Caribbean, relied heavily on the accounts from European sailors and Afro-descendant slaves, some of them obtained under torture, to build their cases against several Spanish maritime contractors and colonial officials. This paper uses the episode as an avenue to explain two connected, yet under-explored, problems of seventeenth-century Iberian colonialism in the Atlantic: In the first place, the reliance on localized and specialized forms of maritime labor, as exemplified by the free Indigenous divers from the coast of Venezuela who sued the commander of the salvage expedition to demand what they considered their just wages, or by the camel conductors working on ship provisioning in the Canary Islands. Secondly, I use this case to show the extent to which Spanish logistical networks around the Atlantic were affected by (and mixed with) Dutch and English webs. By reassessing the importance of maritime labor and communication logistics to imperial communication, this paper will contribute to the debates on the nature of European expansion in the seventeenth-century Atlantic.