Campeche

What was Campeche like in 1715?

Campeche stood on the Gulf of Mexico, on the west side of the Yucatán peninsula. It was built on the site of a Maya town known as Kimpech or Can Pech. Francisco de Montejo the Younger founded the Spanish town of San Francisco de Campeche there in 1540, and the city still celebrates its founding on 4 October.

By the time Silver & Sails begins it was the seaport of the whole province of Yucatán. The governor lived inland at Mérida, the province’s capital, and Campeche handled its sea trade. Ships sailed between Spain, Havana, Campeche and Veracruz, and in the 1700s Campeche held a monopoly on the peninsula’s trade by sea. Britannica names dyewood and salt as its main exports.

Yucatán relied on imports for wine, olive oil, cloth and some food. Many cargoes came by way of Veracruz and Havana, and ships from the Canary Islands were regular visitors: one study counts 57 of them arriving at Campeche between 1700 and 1750.

Why did pirates attack Campeche so often?

Campeche shipped the riches of the peninsula, and for a long time it had weak defences. Raiders working for Spain’s enemies attacked it again and again from the later 1500s. The worst attacks came in the 1600s, when buccaneers, sea raiders based in English Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue, preyed on Spanish towns.

In 1663 an English force under Christopher Myngs, with the buccaneer Edward Mansvelt, took and sacked the town. Buccaneers captured it again in 1678. In 1685 Laurens de Graaf, a Dutch-born buccaneer the Spanish called “Lorencillo”, and the Frenchman Michel de Grammont took Campeche and held it for about two months. When the governor refused to pay a ransom, some prisoners were put to death. Accounts disagree about which leader gave that order. An encyclopedia of 1810 records that the raiders burned the town and blew up its citadel when they left.

These raids are older than the game.

When were the walls of Campeche built?

After the 1685 disaster Spain finally paid for proper defences. Work on a ring of walls began in 1686. It formed an uneven six-sided shape with eight bastions, arrow-shaped platforms jutting out from the corners, from which cannon could fire along the walls. UNESCO dates the finished circuit to 1704; one Mexican study gives 1710.

At first there were three gates, including the Sea Gate facing the harbour. The Land Gate, the Puerta de Tierra, was added in the game’s own years. Governor Antonio de Figueroa y Silva, who ruled Yucatán from 1725 to 1733, proposed it, and it was reported finished in April 1732. The hilltop forts above the town, San José and San Miguel, came later.

Many stretches of the walls were pulled down between 1893 and 1916, but long stretches, several bastions and the Land Gate survive. UNESCO listed the historic fortified town as a World Heritage Site in 1999.

What was “Campeachy wood”?

English sailors called logwood “Campeachy wood”, after the bay and port of Campeche. It is a thorny tree whose dark heartwood made dyes for black, purple and blue cloth. The trees grew wild in the swamps around Laguna de Términos, a large lagoon roughly 200 km south-west of Campeche town, and along other parts of the coast.

From the 1660s English cutters, many of them former buccaneers, camped around the lagoon and on Isla del Carmen at its mouth, which they called Triste or Trist. Ships from Jamaica, New England, Britain and the Netherlands came to buy the wood. Spain said the land and the trees were Spanish and the cutters were trespassers.

How did Spain drive the English logwood cutters out in 1716–17?

In November 1716 the King of Spain ordered a force to clear the lagoon. Its commander, Alonso Felipe de Andrade, brought warships from Veracruz, and Yucatán’s governor met the expedition at Campeche. At the end of 1716 Andrade sailed into the harbour at Triste with three warships, a fire ship and three armed sloops.

Most of the cutters were away up the creeks. Andrade proclaimed that anyone who did not surrender would be treated as a pirate. English records list 20 vessels that gave up in the bay and four more taken outside it, from England, Scotland, New England, New York, Jamaica, Barbados and the Netherlands. The captains were sent off with Spanish passes and reached Antigua in February 1717. English and Spanish papers give dates about eleven days apart, because England still used the older Julian calendar.

The Spaniards built a wooden fort of four bastions on the island and landed cannon. On 16 July 1717 about 200 English attacked it. Andrade was killed, but the garrison held. The settlement became the Spanish garrison town of Carmen, today Ciudad del Carmen. Most cutters moved to the Bay of Honduras, around the Belize River in today’s Belize, where Spain kept raiding them. Feeding the new garrison was hard on Campeche, which suffered food shortages as supplies were shipped to the island.

Who were the enslaved and free Black people of Campeche?

People of African descent were a real part of Yucatán. The historian Matthew Restall estimates that they made up about a tenth of its population by 1700. Most were free, not enslaved, and companies of pardo militia, free soldiers of mixed African descent, helped guard the coast against pirates.

Slavery still came through Campeche. Under the asiento, the contract that from 1713 let Britain’s South Sea Company supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America, Campeche was not one of the company’s official trading posts. From about 1725, though, ships brought captives there, probably by deals with merchants in Jamaica. Records count roughly 670 to 805 people landed legally by 1739, and one historian estimates that about 900 more came illegally. In 1730–33 almost all of them were paid for in logwood rather than money.

Most were put to work as household servants in Campeche and Mérida, and many were sold on. Mérida’s notary records preserve a few names: Francisco, a boy of about twelve from Angola, sold in 1732; María Gertrudis, also about twelve; and Isabel, nineteen, who had been branded with an English trader’s mark. All three were bought from the British company’s agents in Campeche in the 1730s.