Veracruz and San Juan de Ulúa

What was Veracruz like in 1715?

Hernán Cortés landed on this coast on 22 April 1519 and founded La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the “Rich Town of the True Cross”. The town moved more than once because of bad water, flooding and disease. From about 1525 it stood at La Antigua, on a river a little inland. In 1599–1600, on the advice of the engineer Bautista Antonelli, it moved to the sand dunes facing the island of San Juan de Ulúa, where the city stands today. It was named a city in 1615.

By the time Silver & Sails begins, Veracruz was a walled town with bastions, home to roughly 6,000 people in the 1680s and about 9,000 by the middle of the 1700s. It was the main link between Mexico and Spain. Silver from the mines and Mexico City travelled to the coast along the royal road, through Puebla and Xalapa, and left from here.

What is San Juan de Ulúa?

San Juan de Ulúa is a small island just off the town. Juan de Grijalva’s expedition named it in 1518. It mattered because it gave the only real shelter on a coast battered by “northers”, the fierce north winds of the Gulf. Ships anchored in its lee, cargo for Seville was handled there, and the customs house stood on the island.

The fortress grew slowly over about two centuries. Building began in the 1530s, Antonelli redesigned it in the 1580s, and work went on into the 1700s. Its walls are made of coral stone, because there was little other stone nearby.

In 1568 a Spanish fleet trapped the English trader John Hawkins here. Hawkins was carrying enslaved Africans to sell in Spanish America, and Francis Drake was with him. Most of the English ships were destroyed. Much later, after Mexico won independence in 1821, Spanish troops held on at Ulúa until they surrendered on 18 November 1825. It was Spain’s last foothold in Mexico.

How did the Spanish treasure fleet use Veracruz?

Spain sent its American trade in armed convoys. The convoy for New Spain was called the flota, and the system ran from 1561 to 1778. The flota brought goods from Spain, loaded silver at Veracruz, then sailed to Havana to meet the galleons from Cartagena and Portobelo for the voyage home.

The year 1715 shows how uncertain this was. General Juan Esteban de Ubilla’s flota was at Veracruz by December 1712 and did not leave until 1715, in the troubled last years of the War of the Spanish Succession. It finally sailed to Havana, joined the Tierra Firme ships, and left on 24 July 1715. Early on 31 July the fleet was wrecked on the coast of Florida. Ubilla’s flagship alone carried about 1,300 chests of silver coin, along with gold, jewels and Chinese porcelain that had crossed the Pacific from Manila.

After that loss the fleets stayed rare. From 1720 they reached Veracruz in 1720, 1723, 1725, 1729, 1732 and 1736: one every two to five years.

Why was Veracruz so feared for yellow fever?

The hot, low coast was a deadly place. Yellow fever, which people called vómito prieto or vómito negro (“black vomit”) after one of its symptoms, was always present, along with malaria. Both are carried by mosquitoes, though nobody knew that at the time. They were worst from about April to October.

For that reason merchants avoided spending long in the port, which led to the next big change.

What was the Xalapa fair?

Because of the fever, the malaria and the northers, merchants preferred to do business away from the port. Between 1718 and 1720 a trade fair was set up at Xalapa, a cooler town in the hills on the road to Mexico City. Its first rules were set for the fair of 1720, and later viceroys kept to them.

When a flota arrived, its cargo was carried up to Xalapa and sold there to Mexican merchants over two or three months. Veracruz still handled the ships, the customs and the silver, but much of the buying and selling happened inland. The flotas of 1720 onwards, including 1729, traded this way.

Who lived in Veracruz, and who were Yanga’s people?

Veracruz was one of the main ports where enslaved Africans were brought into New Spain, especially between 1595 and 1640, when a Portuguese company held the asiento, Spain’s contract to supply enslaved people to its colonies. They came from both West Africa and West Central Africa. Arrivals slowed after 1640, though they never stopped.

By the 1680s many townspeople were of African descent. Spanish records called them negros, mulatos, pardos or morenos. Many were free, and many had married into Spanish and Indigenous families.

Inland, enslaved people resisted. From the 1570s Yanga, a man who had escaped slavery, led a maroon community, a free settlement of runaways, in the mountains near Orizaba. In 1608 he offered terms: freedom for his people, their own town, a priest, and government by his family. A Spanish force attacked in 1609–10, but in the end a free town, San Lorenzo de los Negros, was recognised, most likely around 1618, though the exact year is not certain. It was one of the first free towns of formerly enslaved Africans recognised by the Spanish Crown. Today the town is named Yanga.

What happened in the 1683 raid on Veracruz?

Thirty-two years before the game begins, Veracruz was captured by buccaneers. At dawn on 18 May 1683, Laurens de Graaf, Nicolaes van Hoorn and Michel de Grammont took the town. They held townspeople hostage for ransom, many of them on the nearby Isla de Sacrificios.

The raid was also a mass kidnapping. Before leaving on 31 May, the raiders carried off between 1,000 and 1,500 Black and mixed-race residents, both enslaved and free, up to a quarter of the town. They sold them as slaves in Saint-Domingue and in Charleston, South Carolina, where at least 200 were sold. The historian Pablo Sierra Silva has traced their stories in the archives. Five women are known to have made their long way home to Veracruz.