Maracaibo and its lake

Where is Maracaibo, and what was it like around 1715?

Maracaibo sits on the western shore of the channel that links Lake Maracaibo, a huge body of water in north-western Venezuela, with the Gulf of Venezuela and the Caribbean. A German captain working for Spain, Ambrosio Alfínger, tried to found a town here in 1529, and a Spanish captain tried again in 1569. The lasting town, Nueva Zamora de la Laguna de Maracaibo, was founded by Pedro Maldonado in 1574, though the exact date is disputed.

In the 1600s the buccaneer writer Alexandre Exquemelin described a pleasant town of three or four thousand people, counting enslaved people, with a parish church, monasteries and a hospital. By 1715 it was a provincial capital. A royal order of 1676 joined Maracaibo to the province of Mérida and La Grita, and in 1678 the governor moved his seat there, so the whole province took the name Maracaibo. It answered to the royal court at Santa Fe, today’s Bogotá, and, while it existed (1717–1723 and again from 1739), to the Viceroyalty of New Granada. It only became part of Venezuela in 1777.

Why was the lake bar so important?

The lake is enormous, about 210 kilometres from north to south, but the way in is narrow. A sandbar at the mouth, with shifting banks, kept out ships that drew more than about four metres of water until the channel was dredged in the twentieth century. Exquemelin warned that only one passage was safe and that strangers easily ran aground.

That bar made the lake a natural fortress, and Spain added real ones. Building began in the 1640s after a raid, and more forts and batteries went up at the bar after the attacks of 1669 and 1678. A tax on cacao, cattle and tobacco, ordered in 1681, paid for them. The best-known, the castle of San Carlos de la Barra, still stands, though sources disagree about when it was first built.

The bar worked both ways: a raider who got in could be trapped, as Henry Morgan nearly was.

What did Maracaibo trade?

Maracaibo was the doorway for a large inland region. Small boats crossed the lake from little ports such as Gibraltar and Moporo on its southern and eastern shores, carrying cacao, cotton, wheat and ship’s biscuit, and tobacco from the plains of Barinas. Hides and leather came down from Trujillo and Mérida in the mountains. In the 1600s Gibraltar was the main cacao market, but a royal order of 1688 made ships load at Maracaibo instead.

Cacao was the biggest export. Most of it went to Veracruz in Mexico, and more went to Cartagena, Santo Domingo and Seville. In return Maracaibo bought cloth and clothing, iron and steel, wine, oil, and enslaved Africans.

Trade was not always good. In 1720 the town council complained that, where eighteen or twenty ships a year had once sailed, only two or three small brigantines and sloops now did, and that cacao prices had collapsed. Much cacao also left as contraband, smuggled to foreign buyers. Dutch traders from Curaçao, around Willemstad, worked the Venezuelan coast, and Spanish guardacostas, coastguard ships licensed to seize smugglers, hunted them. In 1728 Spain created the Guipuzcoan Company partly to stamp out this smuggling.

Who worked the cacao estates, and who lived around the lake?

As the cacao, tobacco and hide trade grew in the 1600s, planters around Gibraltar bought enslaved Africans to work their estates, and later their sugar cane. Their lives were hard. After earthquakes and floods struck the southern shore in 1674, many enslaved workers fled into the forest, where numbers of them died of hunger. When French raiders took Gibraltar in 1678, they carried off enslaved people as plunder, and they also captured free Black, Indigenous and mixed-race people and sold them in public.

Indigenous peoples also shaped the region. The Barí, whom the Spanish called Motilones, defended their forests south-west of the lake, and their raids led planters to abandon some cacao estates. Spanish records of a raid in the early 1640s say that some Black and Indigenous people living by the lake joined the attackers. Later, between about 1750 and 1800, the Paraujano people of the lagoons north of the town controlled smuggling routes into Maracaibo.

What happened in Henry Morgan’s raid on Maracaibo in 1669?

Henry Morgan was a privateer, a raider licensed by a government, sailing from Port Royal under a commission from Jamaica’s governor, Sir Thomas Modyford. In January 1669 his ships gathered at Île-à-Vache, an island off south-western Hispaniola. While his captains celebrated aboard his flagship, the frigate Oxford, its gunpowder caught fire and the ship blew up, killing about two hundred men. Morgan survived. With fewer ships he gave up his plan to attack Cartagena and turned to Maracaibo.

In March 1669 his men found the fort at the bar almost empty and sailed in. The townspeople had fled with their valuables. The raiders held Maracaibo for about three weeks and then Gibraltar for about five, torturing captives to make them reveal hidden money.

Meanwhile three Spanish warships under Alonso del Campo y Espinosa blocked the way out. Morgan sent a fire ship, a ship packed with gunpowder and set alight, against the Spanish flagship Magdalena and destroyed it; another Spanish ship was captured and the third was burned by its own crew. He then pretended to land men for an attack on the fort from the land side. When the Spaniards turned their guns to face the shore, his ships slipped out past the fort on the tide.

Who else raided Maracaibo?

Morgan was neither the first raider nor the last. In 1666 the French buccaneer known as L’Olonnais, sailing from Tortuga with Michel le Basque, took the fort, occupied Maracaibo and Gibraltar for about two months, and tortured people for their hidden wealth, according to Exquemelin’s account. In 1678 French raiders under the Sieur de Grammont came with about fourteen ships and sacked the lake towns again. Gibraltar was already shrinking: a report from earlier that year counted only about forty householders there.

After that the forts at the bar were strengthened, and in the game’s years the main threats to the town’s trade were falling prices and smugglers rather than buccaneer fleets. Maracaibo later became a coffee port, saw a naval battle on the lake in 1823 during Venezuela’s war of independence, and, after oil was struck in 1917, grew into the country’s second city.