Port of Spain and Spanish Trinidad

What was Port of Spain like in 1715?

Port of Spain is the capital of Trinidad and Tobago today, but in the game’s years it was a small place. The Spanish called it Puerto de los Españoles, “the port of the Spaniards”, and it grew up near an older Amerindian village called Cumucurapo, in today’s Mucurapo district. In the 1600s its only defence was a mud fort and a fence of logs round a guardhouse.

The real centre of Spanish Trinidad was San José de Oruña, today’s St Joseph, founded in 1592 about 11 kilometres inland. That was where the governor lived and the town council met. It was no grand city either: in 1595 the English explorer Walter Raleigh raided it and captured its governor, Antonio de Berrío, and the historian Bridget Brereton describes it in the 1770s as a poor village of huts. Port of Spain was still a fishing village of a couple of hundred people at that time.

Who lived on Spanish Trinidad?

Spain claimed Trinidad after Christopher Columbus sighted it in 1498, but very few Spaniards settled there. Counts from the 1600s found 24 Spanish settlers in 1625 and about 80 in 1671. In 1702 a governor reported no more than about 60 Spaniards, probably meaning households, alongside about 1,500 Indigenous people living on missions and settlers’ villages.

Most of the island’s people were Amerindians. Many were held under the encomienda, a Spanish system that gave settlers the right to demand work from the people of a village. By 1712 only four such villages, at Arouca, Tacarigua, San Juan and Caura, were still closely tied to Spanish settlers. From the 1680s, Capuchin friars from Catalonia and Aragon also set up missions to convert Amerindians to Christianity, and mission Amerindians were sent to work on the settlers’ cacao estates. In 1713 the missions were handed to ordinary parish priests.

Enslaved Africans were few. Some cacao planters began to buy enslaved workers before 1727, but after the cacao failed many left with them, and a 1782 estimate counted only about 210 enslaved people on the whole island.

What happened at the Arena mission in 1699?

Life on the missions could be harsh, and some Amerindians resisted. On 1 December 1699, at the mission of San Francisco de los Arenales in inland Trinidad, Amerindians bound to the mission rose up and killed the Capuchin priests. When the governor, José de León y Echales, arrived with his men, they were killed too, all but one.

The Spanish response was severe. Soldiers hunted the rebels down; many died, some by drowning as they fled, and others were shot or executed at San José in January 1700. Trinidad people still remember the events as the Arena massacre, and its story has been retold and argued over ever since. It happened only sixteen years before the game begins.

Why was Trinidad’s cacao so prized?

Cacao, the bean that chocolate is made from, was Trinidad’s great crop in the game’s years. Cacao trees were brought from Venezuela for planting around 1678, and by the early 1700s cacao had become the island’s main export. The trees were of the Criollo kind, which gives a mild, fine-flavoured bean that sold for high prices in Europe.

The work was done first by Amerindian labourers, sent from the missions and encomiendas to the Spanish estates. According to an early history of the industry, the missionaries eventually refused to send more people when they saw how worn out the workers came back, and many Amerindians fled to the hills. Planters then turned to enslaved Africans.

Did Trinidad trade with smugglers?

Spanish law said a colony could trade only with Spain, but Spanish ships rarely came to Trinidad. Settlers traded with English, French and Dutch ships against Spanish law, because it was the only way to get many of the goods they needed. Trinidad sat just off the Venezuelan coast, where Dutch traders from Curaçao did a large illegal trade in cacao around La Guaira.

This was an old habit: in the early 1600s, before cacao, foreign ships had come to Trinidad to buy its tobacco.

What was the cacao blast of 1727?

In 1727 disaster struck. A “blast”, as it was called, killed almost all of Trinidad’s cacao trees. Nobody is sure what it was. Researchers at the University of the West Indies suggest it may have been a fungus, a tree disease or the damage from a hurricane.

With its only valuable crop gone, Spanish Trinidad sank into a long depression. Many settlers left for the mainland, taking the people they enslaved with them. In the 1750s planters brought a hardier kind of cacao called Forastero from Venezuela. Crossed with the few Criollo trees that survived, it is said to have produced Trinitario cacao, named after the island and still grown around the world today.

When did Port of Spain become the capital?

In 1757 Governor Pedro de la Moneda moved his home from run-down San José de Oruña to Port of Spain, which then became the capital in practice. The town only grew after 1783, when Spain’s Cédula de Población, a law inviting Catholic settlers, brought French planters and the people they enslaved to the island, and new plantations spread. The last Spanish governor, José María Chacón, made the town council move to Port of Spain. In 1797 a British fleet took Trinidad, and Port of Spain went on to become the capital of the modern nation.