Pirates, Planting, and the Rights of Mankind in Seventeenth-Century Tortuga

Abstract

Pirates, Planting, and the Rights of Mankind in Seventeenth-Century Tortuga Casey Schmitt In the aftermath of the Spanish invasion of Tortuga in 1653, a recently widowed Frenchwoman attempted to piece her life back together.1 For the crime of piracy, Spanish forces had executed her husband and many of the other former inhabitants from the small island located off of the northwest coast of Hispaniola. Now destitute, she petitioned the Spanish governor of Hispaniola, Juan Francisco de Montemayor y Córdoba de Cuenca, for the restitution of her deceased husband's goods. For his part, Montemayor y Cuenca argued that since the Frenchwoman's husband was executed as a pirate, she had no claim to the goods seized by Spanish officials upon his death. In the years prior to the Spanish invasion of Tortuga, however, the Frenchwoman and her husband understood themselves as settlers on an island that had more than two hundred permanent inhabitants, nearly twenty plantations scattered along the coast, and one sugar mill worked by enslaved Africans, Indians, and indentured Europeans.2 Unfortunately for the Spanish governor, this "wife of one of those pirates," exploited political tensions on Hispaniola and appealed to Montemayor y Cuenca's political rivals, who used the petition in an attempt to slander the governor. As a result of political pressure, Montemayor y Cuenca eventually decided in favor of the Frenchwoman and ordered the return of her husband's goods, but not before he argued in writing that the former inhabitants of Tortuga were pirates and suggested the legality of their permanent enslavement as individuals outside of the jus commune, or common law of mankind.3 The case of the French widow and Spanish governor illuminates broader issues surrounding settlement, imperialism, and unfree labor in Caribbean spaces on the edges of European control. Early Tortugans did, in fact, engage in the widespread raiding of Spanish ships and coastal plantations. However, often the men who took to sea used piracy in order to acquire the tools and coerced laborers that they needed to establish their own plantations on Tortuga. This practice of raiding in order to plant blurs the historiographic boundaries normally drawn between colonists and pirates, since many of these men moved between both professions as their circumstances dictated.4 Nor did early Tortugans eschew metropolitan oversight. Leaders on Tortuga repeatedly sought official recognition, first from the Providence Island Company and, when a Spanish attack threw Company control of the island into disarray, from the French crown. Early Tortuga represents an alternative mode of [End Page 584] colonial development in the West Indies, one in which individuals without state support established plantations and created systems of coerced labor and trade before being folded into larger imperial projects. And, although the colony failed to develop on the model of Barbados or Martinique, early Tortuga recasts historical understandings of the relationship between piracy and planting in the Caribbean. While early Tortugans blended plantation production and piracy in order to develop a colony, Spanish officials in the region used accusations of piracy in order to lay claim to the labor of prisoners captured during periodic raids on the island. As European legal theorists grappled with the legal contours of transatlantic slavery, some argued that individuals who engaged in piracy fell outside the bonds of natural law and could, therefore, be enslaved. By the 1650s, Montemayor y Cuenca deployed these very arguments to defend his seizure of property on Tortuga and the treatment of prisoners taken off the island. For their part, some of the English and French settlers on the island viewed acts of piracy against the Spanish as reprisals for the violent treatment of non-Hispanic mariners caught by Spanish patrols. The legal arguments presented by both sides illuminate the entangled nature of piracy, planting, labor coercion, and sovereignty in the early seventeenth-century Caribbean. ________ Some of the individuals accused of piracy by Montemayor y Cuenca understood maritime raiding as a stage in the development of plantations or an ancillary activity to planting staple crops. Such was the case for Paul Aubert, who left Normandy for the Caribbean in the early 1630s. As a young man, Aubert likely signed a labor contract obliging...