trying to circumvent the rules of the court of directors and the treaty. In February of 1715, he reported that the factors came onboard in England according to plan, but that they had brought ten African servants and nine additional white people, including five women, onto the ship, despite the restrictions that the treaty placed on the British presence in the Spanish American ports.70 Even with this first foray into Spanish American cities, the factors challenged the limits of the asiento, potentially trying the patience of the Spanish. Partington wished to refuse to sail with the additional passengers, but was instructed to proceed, bringing Dover, his fellow factors, and the rest of the Britons first to Madiera and from there to the South American coast.71
Landing factors in Spanish ports was only the first step in establishing this trade. More complex, the company needed to acquire and deliver enslaved African laborers. The company took a number of approaches to securing a steady supply of slaves for Buenos Aires and the other factories during the asiento period. The Royal African Company had held the monopoly on British trade to Africa since 1672; in 1698 it lost its coveted status, and the coast was opened to independent traders.72 The members of the Royal African Company responded enthusiastically to the opportunity presented by the creation of the South Sea Company, hoping that an exclusive contract would revive their organization. In August of 1713, committees from the two companies met, and the Royal African Company agreed to supply the total quota of 4,800 slaves per year, even before the South Sea Company had mapped out the locations of their Spanish American factories.73 The Royal African Company’s troubles continued, however, and the South Sea Company soon had to turn to other private sources to fulfill its need for slaves, though it did revisit the possibility of a long-term contract with the Royal African Company in the early 1720s.74 In addition to the Royal African Company, independent traders brought slaves directly to the Spanish American coast or to the factory in Jamaica, where they would be redirected to the necessary ports of the Caribbean and South America. Housing and selling these enslaved laborers was then the primary task of the South Sea Company’s agents who had themselves recently come to those cities.
On their arrival in the Americas, those factors who had lived most of their lives in Great Britain found an area of intense movement and mixing of peoples. Diverse religious, ethnic, and racial groups already circulated extensively in the West Indies by the time the British began their legal trade to the Spanish.75 Creole and Spanish Americans in the port cities of the empire lived alongside native Central and South Americans, African slaves, and individuals of various blended cultural and ethnic backgrounds, who now mixed with British factors, traders, and hangers-on, in addition to the various other Europeans who legally, or at times illegally but openly, moved through the area as merchants.76 Lands periodically changed hands, as with Jamaica in 1655 and St. Kitts in 1713. The proximity of a number of European empires, and the periodic native and slave resistance that flared up in the area, made it difficult for any one nation to consolidate power.
For those reasons, the Caribbean was unusually dynamic and largely dissimilar to contested lands in Europe. While the movement of peoples and shifting of geographic control in the West Indies mirrored the conflict and movement that occurred in disputed European areas such as Gibraltar, and the intermixing of people for the reasons of trade was not unlike that which had long occurred in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean’s New World situation and the opportunities it offered for mining and trade made it a unique location for European disputes.77 Europeans had settled their territories heavily, and control over the lands there was established in some cases by centuries of treaty and international recognition. The Americas, having been divided by the European powers relatively recently, and containing lands that were still to be discovered, offered far more opportunity for the expansion of European monarchs’ control over lands than attempts made on the European continent. Alliances with native peoples or signatures on European treaties could allow Spanish or British settlers to lay claim to American land, and to benefit from the attendant gold or silver, native labor, natural resources, and trading potential. This shifting of sometimes very weak control, coupled with the high stakes represented by control over the richest trading opportunities to the New World, made the Caribbean an unusual area of mixing and conflict.
Figure 2. Map of the locations of the South Sea Company’s factories. Despite restrictions on non-Spanish residents in the colonies, the company was officially allowed to station a small number of agents at each of its factories. Map by Darin Grauberger, University of Kansas Cartographic Services.
The West Indian and Spanish American ports in which these British factors lived were also very different from the British ports, including London, to which many of them were accustomed. In places like Jamaica, Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Panama, and Portobello, the employees of the South Sea Company encountered a hugely diverse group of people, unfamiliar terrain, and an inhospitable climate like none in Europe. Some men adapted well to these new conditions and stayed for years, while others either returned home quickly or succumbed to illness in the tropical or subtropical heat.78
Dover and his company arrived into this context of cosmopolitanism and uncertainty when they reached the port of Buenos Aires in the summer of 1715. Partington held the ship off the coast for several months, guarding the factors against external dangers while they established themselves on shore.79 While in Buenos Aires Partington reported that several of his crew had died since coming into the Rio de la Plata area, including his cook and boatswain, presumably from subtropical diseases.80 The city’s location on the southern Atlantic coast put them far from the other company factories, but close to a major source of Spanish wealth. Merchants from Buenos Aires, both British and Spanish, could trade nearly directly to Potosí, the great mountain of silver in Bolivia, despite official rules mandating that that trade occur only through Lima. Buenos Aires was one of the most important cities in the Spanish Atlantic empire when the factors arrived, and in the middle of doubling its population, which rose to nearly nine thousand within the decade. This economically vital region stood on the edge of the empire, in an agriculturally rich area sometimes raided by native groups living on the frontier.81 The port was of particular importance to the South Sea Company; in the later part of the contract period, the company would be allowed to send groups of several hundred slaves inland, to Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, giving them access to a huge area of the Spanish Americas.82 In the time after enslaved laborers’ arrival on company or independent ships and before willing buyers could be found, the agents housed them on various farms and estates. The factory, far from British supply routes, provided its own food with its farm near the river.83
In Jamaica, where the factors sometimes paused en route to their respective ports of employ and where the main South Sea Company factory conducted much of the trade, some new arrivals had a first introduction to their new life. Jamaica had a large enslaved population, and small proportion of Europeans compared to Great Britain.84 Here individuals of different races came into regular contact. Both slaves and indigenous individuals from other islands and the mainland migrated to Jamaica, and slaves purchased by the company were often brought to the island for “refreshment” before continuing on to Spanish America.85 In addition to its demographic diversity, Jamaica’s economy integrated closely into the multi-imperial Caribbean system of commerce, exporting the produce of its plantations and importing manufactured goods and European foods. Internally, Europeans in Jamaica relied on Spanish coins for their day-to-day exchanges.86
If the physical heat and human company in Jamaica seemed strange and perhaps unwelcome, the Spanish American ports proved more removed still from a European way of life. In Cartagena, where the Anglesea deposited its group of factors, the majority of inhabitants belonged to indigenous groups. Traveling to the area in 1735, Antonio de Ulloa described the country as not particularly wealthy, but home to a number of “splendidly furnished” houses and rich men. Cartagena, about the size of a third-tier European city, lay on the edge of the water, supplied from the east, where “several fruitful valleys” and largely depleted gold mines stretched for many leagues.87
