Of shipwrecks, fraudsters, and divers: Cartagena de Indias and the transformation of Spanish Caribbean labor and bullion flows, c. 1650–1660

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using the wreck of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Las Maravillas (1656) as a point of departure, this article analyzes the role of Cartagena de Indias as a logistical center for fraudulent silver salvaging and transportation in the Spanish Caribbean during the middle of the seventeenth century. After 1640, Cartagena's insertion into Atlantic maritime networks suffered from the collapse of Portuguese-led slave trading, the decline in legal silver circulation in Spanish ports, and expansion of other European colonial powers across the Caribbean. The article uses the cases made against officials and contractors involved in unauthorized silver salvaging in Cartagena to show how Caribbean-based Spanish merchants and administrators created trans-Atlantic bullion transportation networks independent of royal control. Like their legal counterparts, these unauthorized networks relied on specialized maritime labor from free and unfree divers of African and Amerindian origin, and sailors of all races. Simultaneously, maritime laborers' knowledge, often extracted under torture, formed the basis of prosecutors' cases against suspect colonial officials. By following these maritime linkages, this article highlights the centrality of maritime labor and communication logistics in the structural rearrangement of the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.