Organizing Maritime Transportation Work in 19th-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

In 1796, a Royal decree extended the Matrícula de mar to Puerto Rico. This system, already present in neighboring Cuba since 1776, gave exclusive privilege over maritime and dock work to sailors and fishermen registered with the Spanish Navy. However, by 1796, the city of San Juan had already organized the maritime transportation towards the city and its port by renting out “pasajes” to people who could provide the service. The leaseholders of these “pasajes”, as the maritime routes across the Bay of San Juan were known, relied heavily on enslaved rowers and pilots to make the trips. Thus, the disputes between the city and the Navy for control over maritime transportation in San Juan masked a broader argument over the reliability of wage labor, conditioned to military conscription, or enslaved labor in the transportation industry of the city. A third avenue, free wage labor, also underscored some of the debates.

This paper follows the disputes between the city of San Juan and the Navy through the first half of the nineteenth century. It draws from records of the Navy, the Governor, the city councils of San Juan, and other neighboring towns to analyze the arguments in favor of abolishing the “pasajes”, keeping them in the hands of the city council, or handing them to the Navy. The goal is to determine the economic and social costs of commodity circulation between San Juan and its hinterland and highlight the specific conditions that made the city rely on enslaved labor for transportation. Looking back at a key period of resurgence of plantation agriculture in Puerto Rico through the perspective of transportation work expands Puerto Rico’s historiography of the period, which often overlooks the connections between urban and rural regions and the role of enslaved people in sustaining these links.