THE SPANISH SUCCESSION AND COLONIES

327 look for the hand that held the helm of British naval policy steady for the Mediterranean, we find almost always that it is Marlborough's",1 and the Mediterranean formed the pivot of the continental balance of power. The flagrant failure of Jack Hill's Tory expedition against Canada justified his misgivings. The dismal record of mutual and profitless destruction in the intercolonial struggle goes far to condemn a form of warfare which must threaten the very existence of the conquests, while a Power beaten in Europe would readily save itself by surrendering these distant possessions intact. Marlborough was in fact, even if unconsciously, the protagonist of British sea power. After Blenheim the coasts of Britain were secure, and as one hard campaign followed another, Louis could sustain his armies only by pillaging his fleet. France continued to produce great seamen and by raids and commerce-destroying to embarrass the allies. But rivalry with Britain by sea, still more the ambition of Colbert and Seignelay, ceased to be possible. As the sea power of France diminished and her need of respite grew, as Holland became less and less capable of supporting both war by land and sea and her accustomed commerce, as England found the means to carry all her burdens and at the same time to expand her trade, inevitably she became more insistent to demand and Louis less disinclined to grant terms of peace which should perpetuate her favoured position. The rise of the barometer is clearly recorded in her diplomatic history. The treaties of alliance had provided that whatever the Dutch and English might capture in Spanish America they should retain. In 1707, by a secret arrangement made at Barcelona with the Habsburg King of Spain, England stipulated that the French should be for ever excluded from the commerce of the Indies, that an Anglo-Spanish Company should be formed for its exploitation, and that, failing this, Englishmen should be ranked with Spaniards for purposes of trade. Two years later, when the terrible winter of 1708-9 had brought Louis to the verge of despair, Torcy secured written peace terms from Heinsius, Marlborough and Eugène. These laid special stress on the total renunciation by France of the Spanish Indies and their commerce, and to this, as well as to the cession of French posts and claims in Newfoundland, Louis gave consent. The pride and greed of the allies, however, and their deep distrust of France, caused this and subsequent similar negotiations to break down. Not until October 1711 did the secret and separate negotiations of Harley and St John issue in an agreement for a more rational termination of the war. "Was there no way", Swift had pertinently demanded, "to provide for the safety of Britain...but by the French king turning his arms to beat his grandson out of Spain?" Now, in return for that peace which the Emperor was still bent on denying, and, as its

2

1 Corbett, J. S., England in the Mediterranean, II, 199.

2 Stanhope, Earl, History of England...1701-1713, 11, 56, 57.

foundation, the acceptance of his grandson's claim to Spain and her dominions, Louis consented to recognise Queen Anne and the Hanoverian succession, to conclude with England a new treaty of commerce, and to raze the fortifications of Dunkirk, the Zeebrugge of an age of privateers. England was further to retain Gibraltar and Port Mahon, those keys of the Mediterranean, to receive the Asiento for thirty years, and to annex all St Christopher, French Newfoundland and Hudson Bay and Straits, frustrating thus in North America many of Colbert's plans.

After more than a year of open congress at Utrecht, and further secret negotiations between France and England, this salutary bargain was confirmed. France renounced for ever any special advantage in commerce or navigation with Spain or Spanish America. In addition to the territorial concessions already named, Nova Scotia (Acadia) became British once again, and Port Royal, an American Dunkirk, was thus rendered harmless. Unhappily for future peace, however, Cape Breton Island and the other islands in the St Lawrence remained French, and the French retained "the right to catch and dry fish" upon part of the Newfoundland coast. England and France further concluded a most-favoured-nation treaty of commerce and navigation. Louis might thus be said to have abandoned vast fields of enterprise overseas to the English. He was no less lavish towards their new dependents, the Portuguese. The clauses by which he agreed to limit French Guiana renounced all pretensions to the Amazon and sacrificed "a commercial itinerary of fifteen hundred leagues".1

Secure of Spain, Philip V could be induced to pay by unbounded deference his debt to France. He therefore abjured for ever the right to sell or pledge to her or any other nation any land or lordship in America. With due safeguards against Jews and Moors, he yielded Gibraltar and Minorca to Great Britain. The Asiento concession was rounded off by the grant of a depôt for human livestock on the Rio de la Plata, and by certain limited rights of trade with Spanish America in other goods. These were to form the sole exceptions to the time-honoured law which prohibited all foreigners from engaging in commerce with the colonies of Spain.

In the complex of international agreements that compose the Utrecht settlement, nothing is more significant than the difference between the stress laid on overseas affairs in those concluded with the English and Dutch and the silence in those concluded with other non-Latin Powers. If a king had made the war but merchants the peace, it was in no small degree because during the war England had become mercantile as never in her former history. The Spectator in 1711 bears witness to an assured cosmopolitanism of expenditure which would have seemed strange to Pepys less than half a century 1 Leroy-Beaulieu, P., De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes, 1, 172.

THE PEACE OF UTRECHT

329 before. "The fruits of Portugal are corrected by the products of Barbados, the infusion of a China plant sweetened with the pith of an Indian cane....The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of a hundred climates....We repair our bodies by the drugs of America and repose ourselves under Indian canopies. Trade, without enlarging the British territories, has given us a sort of additional empire. "Ten years later, it is true, Defoe was indicting China ware, Japanese goods, tea and coffee as "trifling and unnecessary"; while sugar, cotton, arrack, copper and indigo he classified "injurious". Few could doubt, however, that Englishmen would toil, navigate, and, if need be, fight, rather than deny themselves such comforts. Few could suppose that laws and prohibitions would annihilate mutually profitable exchange. Even before the Peace of Utrecht, the English had supplied New Spain with slaves, receiving payment, by an ingenious system, in jars of silver covered over with meal. By a still more flagrant connivance of government officials, both Dutch and English were allowed to import into France goods from the Levant in French ships. Europe, which had discovered in 1648 a new political organisation, was plainly entering upon a new phase of her existence. Henceforward her constituent nations would be more and more closely interwoven by way of trade, and that trade already consisted largely in the exchange of goods from outside Europe. The colonial and commercial age, with England as its leader, had begun.

1 Cf. Davenant, Works, 1, 30, 91.

3

Anon., An account of the Spanish settlements in America (Edinburgh, 1762), p. 416. 'Lavisse, Histoire de France, VII, iii, 256.

CHAPTER XI

THE WEST INDIES AND THE SPANISH

AMERICAN TRADE, 1713-1748

IN the eighteenth century the West Indies held a place of importance

among the colonies of Great Britain which is difficult to explain by their size or population, or even by the extent of their productions or their capacity to absorb British exports. They were the first care of governments in time of war, for they were in constant danger of attack; and their white inhabitants were too few to render them independent of British troops even in time of peace. The high esteem in which they were held is explained by their value, not merely in direct commerce, but also as the pivot of several branches of trade. The sugar trade involved many English interests, shipowners and merchants, refiners and grocers; while the lesser products of the islands, cotton, coffee, pimento and ginger, were all articles of which supplies within the Empire were insufficient. Throughout the eighteenth century there was also a steady intercourse with the British colonies on the mainland. Small coasting vessels plied constantly between the two, carrying West Indian products, particularly to New England, and bringing back the provisions and lumber for which the Plantations offered a constant demand. The regular trade with the North American colonies left the islands to a large extent in the hands of mainland exporters, and, as these were frequently unwilling to take in return sufficiently large quantities of island produce, a considerable export of bullion was necessary. It was to avoid this that attempts were made to open up trade in logwood with Central America. The attempts were only in part successful, as they were hampered by the lack of a recognised status on the coast. Expeditions to Campeachy Bay were organised from Jamaica as early as the reign of Charles II and ultimately representations to the Government at home led to the appointment of a Superintendent of the Moskito Shore in 1749.1 Frequent conflicts took place with Spanish merchants carrying out similar projects, and the ventures were long regarded as of doubtful legality. The trade never reached large enough dimensions to be a substitute for the trade with North America.

In this Central American trade, Jamaica took the lead among the British islands, and through the whole of the eighteenth century she was regarded as the most important of the British West Indies, having outstripped Barbados in the reign of Charles II. The advantage of size was greatly in her favour, as was also the fact that her land was 1 McLeish, J., "British Activities in Yucatan and on the Moskito Shore in the 18th Century", an unpublished thesis in the Library of the University of London.

WEST INDIAN TRADE

331

not "used-up" so early by constant cultivation; but her chief asset was her geographical position, admirably suited to the entrepôt trade to the Spanish Indies. The independent settlers of Jamaica cared little that their activities were illicit, and it was to the interest of no one to interfere. The profits were great so long as the trade was forbidden, but when attempts at regulation began in the opening years of the eighteenth century they dwindled. Then for nearly half a century this phantom of a legal trade deflected colonial enterprise, and in the end brought it to ruin. The story of this mistaken policy, which we trace in this chapter, began with the Peace of Utrecht and is bound up with the activities of the South Sea Company and the working of the Asiento treaty. It is essential for the history of the West Indies, since their fortunes were gravely affected by its failure brought about by mismanagement and lack of loyalty in the "trading part of the nation" in England and the islands.

The history of British relations with the Spanish Indies entered on a new phase with the close of the War of the Spanish Succession, for an age of contract succeeded one of lawlessness. The treaty of 16701 had done little to define the English position in the New World, and had ignored the most significant developments of the period. After this treaty, as before, Englishmen still acted on the maxim that the seas were "free to all", and Spain still held that in the New World they were closed to all. The treaties of Utrecht did not, indeed, entirely set aside these creeds, for they were to be the underlying cause of the war of 1739. But the change in 1713 was a real one. Henceforth there was a specific grant to which to appeal, and English adventure in the New World gained a new status in international relations.

In 1713 Spain was starting a new period under a new dynasty. But it was still the old Spain, with all her old weakness and wealth, and her old policy of commercial exclusiveness for which her industrial impotence made her wholly unfit. But her wealth and importance were even yet great enough to fire the imagination of Europe. She had survived the serious losses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the new losses were not so great as the old. Yet it was the loss of the Italian lands that caused her international decline; to recover them she sold her diplomatic freedom to France, and her commercial prosperity to France and England.

The Indies were still valued by the people of Spain, more than any other Spanish possessions. Even the partition makers of the last fifteen years had left these territories unimpaired, although to France, England, and the Dutch, as much as to Spain, they seemed an unfathomed sea of riches. Visions of wealth there for the taking had come to Drake and Raleigh, to Harry Vane and the merchant advisers of Cromwell, to the diplomatic agents of Charles II; and

1 Vide supra, p. 315.