Cartagena de Indias

What was Cartagena de Indias like in 1715?

Pedro de Heredia founded Cartagena in 1533 on a deep, sheltered bay. By the time Silver & Sails begins, it was one of the most important royal ports in Spain’s empire: a walled city of churches, convents and merchants’ houses, with soldiers in its forts and warships in its bay. It was also a centre of the Spanish Inquisition, the church court that tried people for religious crimes; the Inquisition’s palace there is now the city’s history museum.

Across a narrow channel lay Getsemaní, the suburb where craftsmen and many enslaved people lived. Cartagena belonged to the kingdom of New Granada, governed from Santa Fé, today’s Bogotá. Spain made New Granada a viceroyalty, ruled by a viceroy who stood in for the king, in 1717, abolished it again in 1723, and restored it in 1739.

How did the treasure galleons use Cartagena and Portobelo?

Spain moved its American trade in armed convoys. The fleet for South America, called the galleons of Tierra Firme, left Spain in August. Its first port in the Americas was Cartagena. From there it sailed on to Portobelo, on the coast of Panama, where silver from Peru arrived by mule train across the isthmus and was traded at a great fair.

Afterwards the galleons usually came back to Cartagena to spend the winter, then sailed to Havana to join the fleet from Mexico for the voyage home. Cartagena added gold and emeralds from New Granada to the cargo, but the silver fair itself was at Portobelo.

In the game’s years the system was struggling. After a fair in 1708 there was no Portobelo fair until the 1720s, when Spain tried to revive the galleons under a new plan of 1720. Meanwhile Peru got many of its goods by smuggling, mostly from French ships in the Pacific and later through agents of Britain’s South Sea Company. After a British fleet captured Portobelo in 1739, Spain stopped sending the galleons in 1740 and used single licensed ships instead.

How strong were Cartagena’s fortresses?

UNESCO calls Cartagena’s walls and forts the most extensive fortifications in South America. Work began after the English raider Francis Drake attacked the city in 1586, and a ring of stone walls and bastions grew around the town. Forts at Bocachica, the narrow southern entrance to the bay, guarded the way in by sea.

On San Lázaro hill, behind the city, a royal order of 1657 created the castle of San Felipe de Barajas. It began as a small, three-sided fort. In 1715 it was still that modest castle, repaired after the French raid of 1697 by the engineer Juan de Herrera y Sotomayor.

The huge San Felipe that visitors climb today is mostly later. New batteries were added around 1739, and the castle held out against the British admiral Edward Vernon’s great attack in 1741, defended by Blas de Lezo. Then from 1762 to 1769 the engineer Antonio de Arévalo enlarged it into the massive fortress seen now. UNESCO notes that the whole defence system reached its present size only in the 18th century.

What happened in the 1697 raid on Cartagena?

Eighteen years before the game begins, Cartagena suffered one of its worst disasters. In the spring of 1697, during a war between France and Spain, a French royal squadron under the Baron de Pointis, a naval officer, joined forces with buccaneers from the French colony of Saint-Domingue led by Jean-Baptiste Ducasse. They took the forts and the city surrendered in early May.

The French stripped the city of its wealth. Pointis then sailed off without giving the buccaneers their promised share, so they turned back and sacked Cartagena a second time, treating its people with great cruelty. The damage explains why the forts were being repaired in the years before 1715.

What part did Cartagena play in the slave trade?

For about two hundred years Cartagena was one of the main places where enslaved Africans entered Spanish America. In the late 1500s and early 1600s it was one of the chief landing ports, and Britannica calls it South America’s main slave market in that period. The Jesuit priest Peter Claver (1581–1654) spent his life in Cartagena meeting the slave ships, bringing food, medicine and interpreters to people who had survived the Atlantic crossing.

Spain sold the right to supply enslaved Africans to its colonies to foreign companies. This contract was called the asiento. It passed to a Portuguese company in the late 1690s, to a French company in 1701, and in 1713, under the Treaty of Utrecht, to Britain’s South Sea Company.

In the game’s years the South Sea Company kept a factory, or trading post, at Cartagena, one of several it ran in Spanish ports from Buenos Aires to Havana. People sold at Cartagena were sent to the gold mines of New Granada and other parts of northern South America. Under the British asiento about 75,000 people were delivered legally across Spanish America, and smuggling added many more. Wars between Britain and Spain stopped the trade in 1718 and again in 1727.

What is San Basilio de Palenque?

Enslaved people around Cartagena resisted from the start, and many escaped to build free settlements in the hills, called palenques. Around 1599 a man named Benkos Biohó escaped and led one such community. A settlement with the authorities in 1612 recognised its people, but Biohó was captured in 1619 and later executed.

San Basilio de Palenque grew from survivors of palenques destroyed in the late 1600s. In 1713, two years before the game begins, its captain, Nicolás de Santa Rosa, reached an agreement with Antonio María Casiani, Bishop of Cartagena. The palenque received a pardon and recognition. Historians count it among the very few maroon communities, towns of people who had escaped slavery, ever to win legal recognition in Spanish America.

Palenque still exists. Its people speak Palenquero, a language that mixes Spanish words with grammar from African Bantu languages, and UNESCO recognised its culture in 2005.