aboard the Anglesea could expect to meet several distinctive castes of people, from peninsulares born within Spain to a wide number of individuals of mixed parentage. Ulloa, himself Spanish, spoke highly of the men and women he met in Cartagena, who he felt “possessed a great deal of wit and penetration.” Though they appeared sluggish and possessed a “wan and livid complexion,” they were quite healthy, Ulloa assured readers.88 But the very foreign geography and population doubtless shocked some of the merchants.
Cartagena was placed strategically, in a location that allowed it to protect possessions on the Spanish Main, but under the Hapsburgs it had become an undersupplied place of disorder. While the empire prohibited most foreign trade, the people of Cartagena threatened rebellion if their access to foreign flour was restricted.89 Early in the century, the judges of the city overthrew and imprisoned the president and captain general over similar differences.90 The Bourbons responded to this disorder with a series of reforms in 1717 that included the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada and a reassignment of the American trade to Cádiz rather than Seville.91 This attempt at a reassertion of imperial power was a reflection in part of the variety of interests at play in the colony and the metropole, a situation that the South Sea Company and its individual agents would sometimes exploit to their own advantage.
Factors inhabiting another key strategic site in the empire at Portobello found themselves on the eastern side of the Isthmus of Panama, a three-day journey over land from the port of Panama.92 Ulloa described these cities as substantially similar to Cartagena, though Portobello was particularly infamous for its inclement weather.93 Some expressed concerns that the British factors sent to the area might be at particular risk for catching infections “among the Spaniards,” given the unhealthy climate.94 Portobello had poor soil and few provisions; its main value was as a gateway to Panama and the rest of South America from the Atlantic Ocean.95 For two centuries, Panama was one terminus of the carrera de Indias, a sailing of fleets of ships between Spain and the Americas, convoys meant to secure the Spanish monopoly on their trade and to protect their cargoes.96
For a few weeks each year, as the fleet arrived, Portobello would fill up for the annual trading fair. Vessels crowded the harbor, huge numbers of mules laden with the gold of Peru milled about the town, and tents were erected for the display and sale of goods. More than half a century earlier, the English traveler Thomas Gage described having seen “heaps of silver wedges [that] lay like heaps of stone in the street,” and imagined that this was the greatest fair in all the world. The sheer quantity of wealth that congregated in the city attracted merchants and smugglers who engaged in a robust contraband trade through and around the fair, despite repeated attempts by the crown to keep all trade visible and taxable. The asiento permitted the company to send one “permission ship” of five hundred tons each year, a significant penetration into the Spanish American market that no other country had managed. In addition to this allowed amount, Ulloa reported that by sailing with separate ships for the crews’ provisions and by reloading from still other ships, the factors were able to bring almost twice that load of merchandise into the city. At the 1721 fair, the English ship the Royal George received goods from more than twenty other English ships, significantly driving down prices among the other merchants as the Spanish government had feared when they first attempted to limit the British to one five-hundred-ton ship. In addition, factors could smuggle merchandise on shore from their regular ships by claiming that the goods were meant for the maintenance of the slaves. This smuggling comprised a significant and critical part of the Caribbean economy, and was warmly accepted by local colonists, given the inability of the Spanish to otherwise supply all the needs of their colonies.97 Given the usual restriction of travel to the annual fair only to subjects of Spain, the British were as enthusiastic about this unprecedented access to the Spanish empire and its markets as the Spanish were nervous about what this British incursion on Spanish trade monopolies and movement in Spanish American lands might mean for their control of large areas of the Americas.
The factories these Britons inhabited in the New World were not only places of business through which the trade in slaves and goods flowed, but also the factors’ own homes. Factors inhabited midsized buildings near large warehouses meant to store goods and provisions, and structures to hold slaves until they were sold. The factory at Veracruz had a kitchen well stocked enough to suggest that the factors often had company; they had more than eighteen pewter plates, twelve stools, and several chairs, plenty for the four to six factors and either British or Spanish guests. Marble and mahogany tables filled a common living area, and mirrors hung on the walls. The factors surrounded themselves with shelves of books in English. Their bedrooms held chests full of clothing, and each employee had an English cot to sleep on. A chiming clock kept the factory’s occupants on schedule.98
The asiento allowed a maximum of four to six British factors to reside at each port to facilitate the sale of slaves coming into Spanish American lands on British ships. In order to run smoothly, a factory needed at least one or two factors working on slave sales and perhaps traveling into the interior with groups of slaves, as well as a bookkeeper and a surgeon; the latter would tend both the South Sea Company employees and the African men and women moving through the port after their voyage through the middle passage.99 In addition to this permanent group, British supercargoes attended the ships that came into these ports with the slaves and goods that supplied the factories, and often stayed in these ports for several months.100 Indeed, from the incomplete records of the South Sea Company it appears that there were often many more British subjects living in and around the factories and traveling through the Spanish Americas than the Spanish officially sanctioned. Factors sometimes invited their own British servants to work in the factories alongside the many Spanish servants that they hired. Even British musicians traveled through the Spanish Americas, entertaining Britons and Spanish officials alike.101
Though much of the correspondence sent from the Spanish American factories to the company’s directors in London has been lost, some copies of the instructions sent from the court of directors to the company’s factors have survived, containing suggestions about the difficulties these factors faced in establishing their factories and the expectations the court and the nation had for the company’s activities abroad. These letters show that from early on the South Sea Company experienced problems with controlling their factors abroad. Issues of language, conduct, and contact arose several times.
The court of directors hoped that some degree of contact would be beneficial to those who supported the idea of taking over Spanish lands directly. In a series of long letters providing instructions to the factors on how to structure their correspondence, the directors included an entire section titled “Concerning the Laws and Customs of the Country.” There, they instructed factors to “give us an Account not only of the Government of Veracruz and Mexico, but all other places you can get information, where we may have any trade, or through which our goods or negroes are to pass … or any thing else that might affect our commerce.”102 Although the company sought information about Spanish American markets to maximize commercial efficiency and reap profits, it also demonstrated a wider curiosity about the Spanish American empire. In many ways, this interest in collecting information about the Spanish empire echoes Defoe’s concern for finding and settling productive and trade-ready areas of the Spanish empire. Collecting information about the areas that the Spanish had already subjected and to various extents settled could position the British Empire well to eventually expand into Spanish territories. Dover wrote to the Prince of Wales directly, offering “a plan of this city & river with the best description I can get of these parts,” which would likely be useful in the case of a British invasion.103 He also sent along a sample of a kind of local tea, a small reminder of the riches, both botanical and mineral, to be had in South America.104
The South Sea Company’s court of directors expected that its factors would learn to speak the Spanish language fluently. The court reminded the Veracruz factors that Spanish was “necessary for your managing our affairs.” The court admonished its employees, scolding them that they had not yet advised the company of the progress
