Involuntary Cosmopolitans: Forced Mobility, Networks of Knowledge, and Empire

Appearing before Spanish officials in Santo Domingo in the late 1640s, a Bahían fisherman named Francisco de Acosta testified that nearly two years earlier a French crew kidnapped him from his fishing vessel in the Bahía de Todos os Santos. The French ship captain needed more men and saw in the solitary figure of de Acosta an opportunity. They seized him and for the next decade, the Bahían fisherman found himself forced into the service of a French crew, during which time he traveled throughout the Atlantic world, crossed that ocean at least twice, and served in some capacity on a transatlantic slaving voyage. According to de Acosta, when the French crew unloaded their enslaved captives on the island of Tortuga, the temptation of profiting from the sale of de Acosta as a slave outweighed his usefulness as a mariner. He described how he was sold to the French governor, the Chevalier de Fontenay, and how he escaped to the island’s interior before he met two other runaways—Indigenous men kidnapped from the Yucatán—who helped him steal a boat and sail to Spanish-held Hispaniola. This paper analyzes the testimony of unwilling or coerced cosmopolitans during the mid-seventeenth century, like de Acosta, in order to think about how involuntary mobility created networks of knowledge about the Atlantic World that influenced decision-making back in Europe during a formative moment of Caribbean development.