1616 Read online

  The trade fairs would last about two months. When the fair was on, the indolent village became a restless place. Food and water had to be brought in regularly from the interior. Stevedores loaded and unloaded merchandise; new warehouses would need to be constructed to store it. Soldiers, their numbers swollen from a few dozen in the off-season to two hundred or more when the galleons were in port, enforced the peace and guarded the warehouses in which the precious cargo was stored. Entertainers, prostitutes, and con men did their best to redistribute the wealth. Ship workers were kept busy making repairs for the long return voyage, for which crews would need to be assembled and passengers recruited. Not all of the passengers were volunteers — a trip to Manila was an effective way to get rid of troublemakers. Servants sometimes found themselves sold as slaves at the end of their journey.

  Boot, arriving from his home in Mexico City, was in the employ of the Spanish crown. He had been recruited in Paris by the Spanish ambassador in 1612 and had sailed to New Spain two years later. His assignment was to review and, if necessary, repair or redesign an ambitious drainage system that was being constructed to relieve flooding in Mexico City. As a consequence of the destruction of Aztec dikes during the Bloody Night when Cortés and his allied native armies overthrew the central Mexican empire, the city — located on a island and landfill in the lowest of five valley lakes — had been subject to regular flooding. The problem was exacerbated by the Spaniards’ removal of surrounding trees in order to plow the land and graze livestock. On several occasions houses simply washed away; at other times residents were confined to the upper stories, and streets were navigated by boat.

  Mexico City, 1628, color lithograph from a watercolor probably by Johannes Vingboons based on a drawing by Juan Gómez de Trasmonte.

  Flooding was a persistent problem in Mexico City, which was built on a site of lakes and swamps. The engineers Enrico Martinez and Adrian Boot were involved in a dispute that lasted for decades about how to address the problem. In 1628 Boot commissioned architect Juan Gómez de Trasmonte to produce this map of the city showing his plan at work. It is one of the few surviving representations of the city in the seventeenth century.

  One solution would have been to move the city, but occupying the Aztec capital was a powerful symbolic gesture that the conquerors, whose control was reliant on alliances with native peoples hostile to the old empire, were reluctant to abandon. Cortés had personally written to the king, arguing that centering New Spain on this location would legitimize it. It was the foremost city of the Americas. When goods from Asia arrived by way of the China Road from Acapulco, if they were bound for Europe, they would continue down the Europe Road to Veracruz, where they would be loaded onto vessels bound for Seville in Spain.

  Another engineer, named Enrico Martinez, had been given the lead in fixing the capital’s flooding problem prior to Boot’s arrival. Born Heinrich Martin, he was a German who had converted to Catholicism in Spain (some sources say he was a Frenchman named Henri Martin, but this seems unlikely since in addition to his work as an engineer, he served as an interpreter of Flemish and German for the Inquisition). Martinez was one of the first printers of the Americas, specializing in the publishing of didactic books and pamphlets. He was Mexico’s official cartographer and cosmographer, in which capacity he charted the movements of celestial bodies. Healso taught mathematics. He was in thick with influential people — the grand inquisitor Torquemada put his personal stamp of approval on one of Martinez’s books, a sweeping survey of cosmology and the natural history of New Spain. He was, in short, a personage of importance — one twentieth-century scholar claimed that he “had brought to the intellectual atmosphere of Mexico the first feeble intimations of the dawning age of science and technology.”

  Applying his advanced skills in engineering and mathematics, Martinez had an enormous canal and tunnel excavated to drain the city. The tunnel was dug as much as 150 feet under the earth. It was eleven feet high and ran for more than eight miles. Nearly five thousand native workers were employed in its construction. It was one of the biggest projects of its type since the days of ancient Rome. It had only one flaw — it didn’t work. The soft soil of the marshy valley was not well suited to tunneling, and the drain frequently became clogged and backed up. It was also built at too steep a slope, so that running water created great pressure against its walls, causing the tunnel to collapse.

  On inspecting the canal Boot immediately dismissed the entire project as unworkable. He proposed instead a system of dikes similar to those used in his homeland (and not unlike the old Aztec system that the Spaniards had destroyed). Unsurprisingly, his opposition to Martinez’s pet project did not win him a friend. Martinez claimed that Boot “does not seem to be an engineer nor to have been one in any part of the world in peace or war. He does not know any arithmetic, geometry, architecture … which it is necessary for an engineer to know. And thus it may well be doubted that he is the person sent by the King, since the tasks which he has had here are of … hardly any skill. The cleaning of canals, diversion of rivers, and building of dikes are very simple works, which even the Indians used to do.”

  The impasse between the two engineers was never fully resolved, as the city officials wavered back and forth between one plan and the other (along with an occasional oddball notion from some other quarter), all the while pleading for friendly cooperation between the engineers, Martinez and Boot. Finally, in the summer of 1616, the Viceroy of New Spain, after weighing the countless and widely varying opinions, contentious argumentation, and lengthy reviews, would give the go-ahead to Martinez to attempt to repair and make functional his work, overruling Boot’s objections. Still, Boot would continue to work on and off on the vexing Mexico City drainage problem until 1827.

  Under the circumstances, Boot was probably relieved to spend 1616 devoting his attention to expanding the fortifications in Acapulco, an assignment he had been given the previous year. What had alarmed Mexican officials at that time was an event involving another Netherlander, the Dutch pirate (as the Spanish thought him) Joris van Spilbergen. Spilbergen was a veteran of expeditions to Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope to Southeast Asia, and was acclaimed as a hero of the Battle of Gibraltar where the Spanish had been defeated in 1607.

  It was not the first time enhanced fortifications had been proposed at Acapulco. Following the entry of Francis Drake into the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan in 1578 a proposal was advanced in 1582. Following raids by Thomas Cavendish in 1587 the proposal was repeated in 1593. Following Dutch expeditions in 1599 and 1600 it was repeated yet again in 1600. But nothing had come of any of these, because no one was willing to pick up the expense of building a formidable fort.

  Logo of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie).

  In the early seventeenth century the logo of the Dutch East India Company was one of the most widely recognized symbols in the world.

  Sponsored by the powerful Dutch East India Company, Spilbergen was in command of eight hundred men, equally divided between sailors and soldiers, on a fleet of four warships, each nearly as large as the Spanish galleons, along with two swift, smaller jachts (one of which deserted off the coast of Chile). The Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), founded in 1602, was known throughout the world as the VOC thanks to its logo featuring those initials, which became the first global corporate brand. The VOC was the world’s first large joint-stock company, thanks to a decision by the States-General of the Netherlands to consolidate the country’s commercial operations. Because most previous commercial ventures had been one-offs, for any given project new money had to be raised, insurance obtained, and participants recruited. The Dutch government, which was getting a later start on the Asia trade than the Portuguese and Spanish, was afraid that piecemeal efforts would be ineffectual and result in Dutch interests competing against each other. To correct this, it asked the various companies to merge into one corporation, which would be given
a monopoly on the Asia trade; failure to participate would mean companies would not be allowed to trade there. In exchange, the corporation, governed by seventeen board members representing “chambers” from various cities and provinces, would be allowed limitless profits, less a small tax. Hundred of investors contributed funds to capitalize the company’s operations. Before long it would centralize its Asian presence in Batavia (modern Jakarta) in Indonesia.

  The new Dutch empire that would result from the operations of the VOC was fundamentally different from the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Rather than being managed directly by the crown (by means of an often inefficient bureaucracy), it was a private venture, little encumbered by government oversight. The VOC was an audacious capitalist enterprise — the company had authority to govern territory, negotiate treaties, and wage war, virtually independent of the Dutch government. In forming the corporation the Dutch recognized that economic power was an essential component of political power. While this seems obvious today, it was less so at the time; with the success of the VOC economics would emerge as an increasingly important consideration in world politics.

  Aquapolque (Acapulco), 1619, by Nicolaes van Geelkercken, engraving, from East and West Indian Mirror, which combines accounts of the navigations of Joris van Spilbergen and Jacob le Maire.

  The Dutch sea captain Joris van Spilbergen threatened Acapulco in 1615, causing the Spanish to hastily erect a fort to protect the city the following year (under the direction of another Netherlander, Adrian Boot). The engravings in van Spilbergen’s book, apparently by the publisher Nicolaes van Geelkercken, are accompanied by text that is less polished than that of the main account by van Spilbergen himself. The author of the key to this engraving exaggerates in calling the town’s fortifications a castle, as the fort was not constructed until the following year. The key reads as follows:

  Aquapolque

  With its explanation in what manner the Spanish prisoners were ransomed.

  A. Is our fleet, consisting of five ships and a small Spanish vessel, which is lying on guard outside the bay.

  B. Is the first meeting, each holding a small white flag as a sign of peace.

  C. Are our boats, with the Spanish prisoners, who are released and set at liberty.

  D. Are a number of asses, bringing our men victuals from the Spaniards.

  E. Are a number of sheep, oxen, and other animals being shipped.

  F. Is a castle occupied by Spaniards, and well provided with cannon.

  G. Is the church or monastery.

  H. Is the hamlet or town of Aquapolque.

  I. Is a wonderful fish that is caught off the coast there.

  K. Are some horsemen we saw with some more victuals that are being brought to us.

  VOC profits would increase the prosperity of the Netherlands (at the expense of exploited peoples elsewhere); the company would pay investors an 18 percent dividend for two hundred years, before being dissolved in 1800. England would quickly follow the same model. In fact, its East India Trading Company had actually been formed earlier, in 1600, but was slower to gain traction, in part because of crises at home, such as the problem of Elizabeth’s succession, and in part because England’s monarchical political system was less supportive of such Dutch financial developments as the futures market (setting prices in advance) and permanent investments that eliminated the need to recapitalize new ventures. Although initially formed to compete in the lucrative Southeast Asian trade, the English company would establish its strongest presence in India and China.

  Officially a trading mission, Spilbergen’s Pacific expedition was authorized by the VOC to use force on the pretext of the Spanish refusing the Dutch the right to trade freely, and the fleet was heavily armed, each of the ships carrying twenty-eight guns. In reality Spilbergen was charged with disrupting the Pacific trade in order to bring pressure to bear on the Philippines. The Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese had been struggling over the Southeast Asian spice trade for decades. The Dutch were especially motivated because, following their secession from the Spanish Habsburg empire in 1581, they no longer enjoyed free access to the spice markets of Lisbon. If possible, Spilbergen would seize a galleon, but his main object was the vulnerable Spanish outpost in Manila. He had stated that “the best and only means of reestablishing our affairs in the Indies and of making ourselves entirely masters of the Moluccas is, in my opinion, to dispatch a fleet and armada direct to the Philippines, in order to attack the Spaniards there, and to overpower all the places and strongholds it may be possible to conquer.”

  In support of this objective, his raids on the Pacific coast of the Americas were opportunistic, aimed at weakening the Spanish economically, disrupting communications, and diverting resources that could otherwise be used in defense of Manila. The fleet passed through the Straits of Magellan in May 1615. Alerted to its presence, the Spanish assembled a powerful armada, which engaged the fleet off the coast of Peru in July. In a twenty-four-hour battle the Dutch emerged virtually unscathed, while the Spanish lost two warships and some four hundred men and were forced to retreat. This was the most alarming development for Spain ever in the South Sea, or “Spanish Lake.” There remained few armed vessels to confront the Dutch fleet in the north, where Spilbergen next headed. Inflicting damage as the opportunity presented itself along the way, the fleet arrived at Acapulco on October 11, 1615, though in a weakened state as a result of having encountered a hurricane off the coast of Guatemala, and of the long time at sea — the great difficulty of reaching the Pacific coast of the Americas from Europe was the main thing that had always protected the Spanish settlements there.

  A European, 1610–1620. Mughal, workshop of Jahangir. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 18 × 29 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. IM 386-1914.

  Indians had a long acquaintance with Europeans. When Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut he was readily identified as an Iberian.

  By the early seventeenth century Europeans had been established in India for more than a century. In 1510 the Portuguese had defeated the regional sultanate of Goa and made it the hub for their Asian operations.

  Now Northern European powers were appearing on the scene — the English established a trading post at Surat, further up the West Indian coast. They were beginning to penetrate more deeply into the interior than had the Portuguese, who for the most part had been content with coastal trading outposts.

  This European appears before a backdrop of religious symbols, but his long sword is the most prominent of his attributes.

  Spilbergen politely let it be known that he was prepared to annihilate the town. What he left unsaid was that there was one problem with this plan, which was, ironically, caused by the pathetic state of the hamlet he was threatening. His sailors were weak with scurvy, and his ships desperately needed provisions. The town had so few resources that it was scarcely worth destroying, and to do so would have left his fleet as weakened as before with no new prey at hand. As a result, he offered to spare Acapulco, and release about twenty Spanish prisoners (who were a nuisance to maintain), in exchange for casks of fresh water, thirty head of cattle, fifty sheep, chickens, vegetables, oranges, and lemons. Outmanned, the Acapulco officials meekly agreed to the exchange.

  A strange week followed in which the Dutch and Spanish mingled with elaborate exchanges of courtesies. The town’s elite were invited aboard the Dutch ships, where they inspected the armaments that were poised for their destruction. For a visit from the Spanish commander the Dutch soldiers made an appearance in full parade uniforms; meanwhile, Spilbergen’s young son spent the day being entertained by the town’s mayor.

  Upon the completion of the exchange, Spilbergen hung around along the north Pacific coast for a while hoping to grab a galleon — and making the Mexicans extremely nervous. Chancing upon a pearling vessel, the Dutch forces captured it and added it to their fleet. Once when they made landfall they were surprised by Spanish forces waiting in ambush. The resulting battle was indecisive; the Dutch
retreated to the sea and the Spanish to the woods. Both sides claimed victory. The Spanish commander, to support his claim, enclosed with a letter to the viceroy the ears of one of the Dutchmen. Finally, around the beginning of December, Spilbergen tired of these diversions and set off across the Pacific, arriving in time to harass Manila and then join the main Dutch fleet in the Moluccas on March 31, 1616; consequently, he missed by days the arrival of the galleon that would dock at Acapulco on Christmas Eve.

  The released Spanish prisoners had reported their impression that if Spilbergen did not capture a galleon along the coast he intended to return to Acapulco and wait there for the next one to show up. As a result, within a few weeks of the encounter at Acapulco, while he was still lurking about the coast, the decision had at last been made in Mexico City to construct enhanced permanent fortifications to protect the bay — and now, after years of procrastination, the job had become a rush. Three hundred soldiers were to be stationed there and two batteries of cannon installed without delay. To cover the cost of building the fort it was decided to impose a duty of 2 percent on all merchandise entering Acapulco, and 1 percent on allowable silver bullion from Peru. The fees were to be collected for six years. Meanwhile, eight cannon were to be removed from galleons and mounted over the town.