Encomienda, African Slavery, and Agriculture in Seventeenth-Century Caracas

Founded in 1567, Caracas, as was soon evident, had neither the human nor the mineral resources to sustain a prosperous Hispanic settlement. The earliest descriptions suggest a sense of general stagnation and disappointment. In 1578, forty of the sixty vecinos in the rustic, thatched-roofed village held encomiendas, evidence that in itself an Indian grant was not enough to distinguish an elite from among the colonists. A fair measure of the lack-luster appeal of early Caracas is the fact that included among the forty encomenderos of 1578 were just eighteen members of the band of 136 men who had overcome the last Indian resistance to found the town such a short time before. By contemporary estimate, these forty enjoyed the benefit of the labor of 4,000 native tributaries, but this was only one-third the number of Indians who had inhabited the region ten years earlier. For an ambitious, adventuresome generation, these small and shrinking encomiendas did not measure up to the promise of the Indies, and the majority of Caracas’s conquistadors had moved on to seek their fortunes elsewhere.¹

A report to the king by the royal treasurer don Diego de Villanueva indicates that by 1607 Caracas had developed a minor, but regular, trade in agricultural products. Tobacco was the principal export, followed by wheat flour and small amounts of sugar, sarsaparilla, and cotton cloth. Hides, from extensive herds of privately owned cattle, were also traded (see Table I). The hides went with the tobacco and sarsaparilla to Spain, while wheat and the other items found markets in Cartagena and other Caribbean ports. Caracas’s imports, on the other hand, consisted principally of Spanish dry goods, Canarian and Andalusian wine, and an occasional African slave. Some few luxury items, a bolt of Chinese silk, silver jewelry and tableware, or several slaves bought in a lot from a supposed “forced entry” ship, were purchased by those few Caraqueños who exported tobacco, wheat, or hides in quantity.² By 1607 the more common of these goods had reached—in small amounts, to be sure—as far as the San Sebastián cattle district, thirty leagues south of Caracas. They were paid for there with hides, tobacco, cotton, and “some cacao,” the only reference in the Villanueva report to the tropical plant that would shortly revolutionize the Caracas economy.³

The origins of cacao cultivation in this part of the New World are obscure. The plant does not appear in the sixteenth-century relaciones geográficas or in any other official documents from the Caracas area before 1607. Most likely for this reason it is commonly assumed that the first cacao trees on the Venezuelan coast were planted there by native and African laborers at the command of Europeans. And yet, from only 0.5 percent of the total value of Caracas’s exports in 1607, cacao became the region’s foremost item of trade before 1650. It seems unlikely that this boom could have been created on a basis of newly planted trees, especially given the difficult labor situation of the colony. In fact, the earliest testamentary inventories of coastal cacao groves indicate that the first trees to be harvested were native to the region. Labeled árboles viejos de la tierra, or simply de la tierra, in the documents, these were almost certainly indigenous plants, both because the phrase itself, “of the land,” virtually means as much, and because the estimated ages of the inventoried trees shows that many of them were already standing when Hispanic commercialization of cacao began. The Basque Liendo family was among the first to ship Caracas beans to Mexico; their first lot was sent to Veracruz in 1628. A quarter of a century later, in 1653, an inventory of the Liendo estate in the coastal valley of Cepi showed a total of 12,382 trees. Only 1,165 had been planted during the previous twenty-five years, and the ages of these trees, labeled árboles de Trujillo, were known exactly. The remainder, 11,217 árboles de la tierra, were dated only as “more than twenty-five years old,” which means that the Liendo family found them standing in the valley when they arrived at Cepi in the late 1620s. The best proof that cacao was native to the Caracas region is a firsthand observation to that effect. In 1618, Juan de Ibarra, a Basque merchant, sent Portuguese encomendero Diego de Ovalle cloth, wheat, wine, pepper, cinnamon, and copper worth 17,099 reales to be paid for with cacao gathered from the trees that grew wild on Ovalle’s Choroní estate. Two years later, in a legal suit brought before the bishop, Ibarra complained that since no one was then interested in the cacao trade, he had been doing Ovalle a favor by offering to take his cacao in exchange for merchandise. Ovalle had refused to pay to have Ibarra’s cacao shipped to La Guaira, however, and while the two men argued over who should transport it, the market value of the merchandise fell by half. In his deposition, Ibarra gave evidence that leaves no doubt about the origin of cacao cultivation and commerce:

Whether the first large quantities of cacao to be exported from Caracas were harvested from indigenous stands or from groves planted by laborers under the direction of Europeans is a question of more than academic importance. Murdo MacLeod is certain that in the 1620s Caracas and Guayaquil cacao replaced beans from the traditional Central American suppliers, Soconusco and Izalcos, in the New Spain market.⁵ Evidently the South American beans were preferred for their flavor, but even with the matter of taste in their favor, it is doubtful that in such a short time Caracas growers, located so much farther from Mexico than their Central American counterparts and with no important labor advantage, could have planted enough trees to capture a significant share of the New Spain cacao trade. A related problem has to do with the very success of this commerce. Once begun, the export of cacao from Caracas expanded at a remarkable rate. The aggregate data compiled by Eduardo Arcila Farias, even though seriously deficient because they do not include the exports of tax-exempt Caracas vecinos, indicate a threefold increase in cacao shipped between the 1630s and the 1650s.⁶ This expansion can be accounted for in part by new groves planted during these years; we know that much of the work of clearing and irrigating the land was done by African slaves who, in all probability, had been purchased with profits made in the 1620s and 1630s, thanks to encomienda labor at work in virgin cacao arboledas. That Caracas growers were able both to sell their beans at a competitive price in the Mexican market and purchase hundreds of slaves with the income from these sales would seem to depend on the existence of substantial groves of indigenous cacao trees.

One clue to this process, which merits much closer examination than is possible here, comes from the record of the Mexican Inquisition. Many of the prosperous Portuguese traders who were accused of being Jews by the Inquisition in the late 1630s and early 1640s had been active in the slave trade and the Caracas-to-Mexico cacao trade.⁷ This suggests the following hypothesis: Caracas vecinos exchanged cacao for Africans at a rate that allowed the Portuguese slave traders-cacao merchants to undersell the Central American cacao dealers in New Spain. Eager to sell their fragile human cargoes as soon after the Atlantic crossing as possible, the slavers needed no large margin of profit in Caracas because they stood to make substantial gains in Mexico on the cacao that they took in return for slaves. In this way, Caraqueños both obtained slaves at a moderate price and found an outlet for their cacao.⁸

Concrete evidence shows that during the infant years of the cacao trade the initial advantage went to a small number of encomenderos with grants located along the Caribbean Coast. Seventeenth-century Caracas encomiendas were of the archaic, servicio personal type. Rather than collect a fixed sum, or tributo, from their Indians, encomenderos expropriated their labor directly: that is, Indians were put to work gathering cacao beans, planting new groves, or carrying on any other activity considered useful or profitable by the encomendero. Caracas encomenderos insisted that their Indians could not produce anything of value to be used as tribute, and by claiming abject poverty they resisted until the end of the century every attempt by the crown to eliminate servicio personal.⁹ A royal order demanding conversion to tribute collection was received in Caracas in 1621, but it was not acted upon by Governor Juan de Tribiño Guillamas. When his successor, Gil de la Sierpe, attempted to make law of the king’s will, he was arrested by order of the cabildo and sent under guard to Spain.¹⁰ In 1633, in response to this act of lese majesty, the crown called for a new study of the Caracas encomiendas. The data compiled in compliance with this decree provide several clues to the relationship between encomienda labor and cacao cultivation at the very beginning of the trade with Mexico.

This document, dated about 1635, lists four series of facts: the names of the encomenderos and the titles of social distinction (don or doña, maestre de campo, capitán, and so forth) of those who were so identified; the geographical location of the encomiendas; the number of Indian tributaries in each grant; and a specific value in pesos defined only as the renta of each encomienda.¹¹ That this value represents the annual income of each grant is confirmed by an existing fragment of the church tithe record. Diezmos collected for the region described in treasury documents as “costa del mar y caraballeda” totaled 2,600 pesos and 2,979 pesos for the years 1632 and 1634 respectively.¹² These amounts correspond very closely to what would have been the Church’s 10 percent share of the 27,450 pesos of total renta for the twenty-five encomiendas located along the “costa del mar de la jurisdicción de Caracas,” according to the 1635 list (Region 1 in Table Ha and Map).

At that time, 3,328 Indian tributaries were to be found divided unevenly among 100 encomiendas held by vecinos of three Spanish towns: Santiago de León de Caracas, Nueva Valencia del Rey, and San Sebastián de los Reyes. The surveyed area, comprising the legal jurisdictions of this triangle of towns, can be divided into four zones of agricultural production (Table II and Map). Region 1, designated Coastal Caracas, includes all the narrow Venezuelan coastline from present-day Chuspa to Puerto Cabello. Here the conditions are ideal for cacao cultivation. Prevailing winds release moisture accumulated during the Atlantic crossing as they collide with coastal mountains, providing a moderate, but constant, supply of water to the hot, cloud-covered valleys that rise steeply from the sea’s edge. One-fourth of the encomiendas counted in 1635 were located in Region 1. In Region 2, Interior Caracas, a few Indians worked in isolated sugar trapiches on the banks of the Guarenas and Guaire rivers, but the majority of native laborers were second- and third-generation wheat farm and flour mill workers. Since the 1580s their toil had served a steady Spanish demand for bread, and in 1635 there were more encomiendas (33) in this temperate climate zone than in any other. Region 3, Interior Valencia, is the long, broad valley west of Caracas that forms at the inland base of the coastal mountains. In this area, described by archaeologist Cornelius Osgood as “probably the most hospitable site for a hungry population,”¹³ the densest preconquest Indian population in central Venezuela had been divided into the province’s largest encomiendas a decade before the foundation of Caracas. Thus concentrated, Valencia Indians survived as an ethnic group to become sharecroppers in that area in the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, many of those of the poor and distant San Sebastián district, Region 4, would be removed from their homeland during the early 1600s. Too few and too thinly scattered to be organized into encomiendas, in many cases the most profitable use of the San Sebastián natives was their capture and sale to Spaniards whose agricultural enterprises were more directly integrated with the marketplace. Slave raids were still formally organized and carried out in this frontier zone in the 1640s.¹⁴ The few small encomiendas in San Sebastián in 1635 were employed exclusively in cattle ranching.

The most profitable encomiendas in 1635 were the large grants located in the Valencia-Aragua Valley, Region 3. Three hundred and fifty tributaries, the largest native labor force in the province, worked a sugar trapiche at Turmero and produced an annual renta of 4,000 pesos for their encomendero, don Juan Martínez de Villegas. Only because their grants held more tributaries did the Valencia encomenderos receive an annual income greater than that of their counterparts whose Indians were laboring along the coast and in the immediate hinterland of Caracas. In terms of the value of each tributary’s labor, average income from Region 3 encomiendas (23.1 pesos per tributary per annum) amounted to only two-thirds that of the coast (36.6 pesos) and three-fourths that of the Caracas region (30.7 pesos) (Table IIa). One of the several possible reasons for the low labor profitability of these larger encomiendas was the high cost of transport from the fertile, but landlocked, Valencia-Aragua zone. Regular commerce across the coastal mountains was impossible except at Caracas, where a break in the range provided relatively easy access to the sea. To reach Caracas from the west, agricultural produce was carried along the banks of first the Aragua and then the Guaire rivers. Except during the dry summer months from March to May, travel was frequently interrupted by floods and was therefore difficult and expensive. Even as late as 1841, carriage costs from the Aragua River to port at La Guaira were equal to shipping charges paid to transport the same commodities from La Guaira to Liverpool.¹⁵

By 1635 encomienda labor was clearly most profitable in the coastal cacao zone. Coastal encomiendas produced a renta of about six pesos more per tributary than those in the traditionally profitable wheat farming areas north and east of Caracas town (36.6 pesos per annum in Region 1 compared to 30.7 pesos in Region 2). With a similar population norm of 29 or 30 tributaries, the annual income from a coastal grant was therefore about 200 pesos, or 20 percent, more than a year’s earnings from a typical grant near Caracas (Table IIa).

In itself this difference, something less than the value of one African slave, does not adequately reflect the impact that the cacao bean bonanza had already had on Caracas society by the 1630s. More revealing is the cabildo’s lament in 1626 that the lure of greater profits from coastal cacao arboledas had left the wheat farm encomenderos without Spanish labradores, overseers who were willing to administer Indian labor in return for a share of the harvest.¹⁶

Cacao created fluidity at more than one level of the colonial society. Evidence from the 1635 document indicates that most of the richest coastal Indian grants were in the hands of recent immigrants to Caracas. Of twenty-three encomiendas with an annual renta of 1,500 pesos or more, incomes comparable to those of the most profitable cacao encomiendas in Central America at the middle of the sixteenth century,¹⁷ eight were located in the Valencia-Aragua region, eight near the town of Caracas, and seven on the coast. A measure of the social standing of the holders of these high-income grants can be derived from the document compiler’s recognition of some of them as “don” or “doña.”¹⁸ In the long-established regions of Valencia and Caracas, nearly two-thirds (10 of 16) of the encomiendas valued at 1,500 pesos or more renta belonged to a “don” or “doña” in 1635, but only one of the seven holders of high renta coastal encomiendas was distinguished by this suggestion of hidalguía (Table IIb). Who were these seventeenth-century parvenus with profitable encomiendas on the inhospitable coastal fringe of Caracas society?

Enough biographical data can be gathered on four of the seven to allow for a composite rendering of these first important cacao producers, the very first of the grandes cacaos, as they would be called by subsequent generations. One was Portuguese. There were several Portuguese among the poorer encomenderos, but Diego de Ovalle was the only individual of this nationality whose grant was valued at 1,500 pesos or more annual income. Alejandro Blanco Ponte was a Canary Islander: his father was from Tenerife, his mother from Flanders. His brother Pedro Blanco Ponte had been in Caracas since at least 1619 when he declared himself a vecino “without estancia or land” and asked the cabildo for a plot near the La Guaira road where he could pasture his pack mules, but Alejandro did not leave Tenerife until after 1627, the year when the Casa de la Contratación formally prohibited direct trade between the Canaries and the Indies.¹⁹ A third encomendero was Pedro de Liendo, a Vizcayan and the nephew of a retired admiral of the galleon fleet. Pedro and his brothers Santiago and Domingo de Liendo, who were not encomenderos, were perhaps Caracas’s most ambitious cacao planters during the first half of the seventeenth century. The fourth grantholder for whom biographical information has been found, don José Rengifo Pimentel, was born in Santo Domingo, where his father was captain of the port and his grandfather had been a royal treasury accountant. The only encomendero on the coast whose rights to Indian labor earned him 1,500 pesos or more annually and who was also classified as a “don” on the 1635 list, Rengifo had in fact four encomiendas, three on the coast and one on the Guarenas River, east of Caracas. With a total of two hundred tributaries and an annual income from them of 6,250 pesos, don José was Caracas’s foremost encomendero.²⁰

The first of these men to settle in Caracas was Diego de Ovalle. In 1602 he married the youngest daughter of don Juan Vásquez de Rojas, a descendant of Caracas conquistadors in both maternal and paternal lines, and received an encomienda at Choroní as part of his wife’s dowry. Ovalle was born in the Vila do Mojadoiro on the upper Douro River in the Portuguese province of Tras-os-Montes. There his family had vineyards and fruit orchards, the produce of which had been sent traditionally to Medina del Campo and Valladolid. With central Spain in depression at the end of the sixteenth century, Tras-os-Montes became part of the economic system of Seville, and there Ovalle established commercial relations that he maintained throughout his life. These connections, and those he evidently had with the Portuguese slavers who monopolized the supply of African labor to the Caribbean, were no doubt of some interest in Caracas. In 1607, the slave factor and six of the town’s encomenderos, including Ovalle, were from Portugal.²¹

He was also a shrewd trader. In 1618 Ovalle sold one of the first lots of cacao ever to leave the Caracas coast to the Basque merchant Juan de Ibarra. Ibarra sent wheat flour and dry goods to Choroní and waited for his cacao to arrive at the La Guaira wharf. These were the infant years of cacao commerce, however, and this was Ibarra’s first purchase. In the future, contracts would specify the location of delivery, either “puesto puerto La Guayra” or “puesto costa del mar,” but on this occasion Ovalle, who had not made arrangements to do so, refused to ship the beans at his cost to La Guaira. Ibarra, having already given merchandise for the much-wanted cacao, had no choice but to send for it and pay the transportation charges himself.²²

Ovalle made a good deal of money selling cacao, and he used his wealth to protect himself from the problems that could arise on account of his Portuguese nationality. An appeal for funds by the crown or the cabildo would find him by far the most generous contributor.²³ Unlike others of his economic position, however, he did not acquire municipal office, and neither he nor his wife owned town property. They were permanent residents at Choroní, and it was there that they made their principal investment: African slaves. This was an investment against any misfortune and one that those who survived the prolonged depression of the 1650s and 1660s seemed to have made freely while cacao sales were brisk and profitable. To the 1602 encomienda work force of thirty-six Indian tributaries, Ovalle by 1626 had added fifty slaves. This number had risen to eighty-four in 1644, and by 1650, the year of his death, Ovalle was master of ninety-four slaves.²⁴

The inventory of Ovalle’s Choroní estate provides a glimpse of the material life constructed from the economic life of Indian and African labor and fifty years of vigorous trading. No doubt primitive by Mexico City or Cartagena standards, the principal house at Choroní was comparable to any Caracas dwelling at that time. It was a simply furnished, two-story stone structure with a tile roof. Two gilded mirrors, a cedar table and chairs, and a silver service for six were the items of greatest value. A dozen books, including Antonio de Herrera’s Historia de las Indias, occupied a shelf.²⁵ The upstairs bedroom contained just the touch of luxury in a style already common to Caracas cacao exporters: two carved cedar chests imported from New Spain and a four-poster bed covered with a Mexican quilt and pillows of Chinese silk reflected the importance of the market where Ovalle had made his modest fortune.²⁶

Close by were the other buildings used for maintaining the estate and preparing cacao for shipment. A huge wooden storehouse doubled in the upper loft as a drying shed. Carpentry tools and a forge, both used by African artisans, were kept in a second structure. The slaves’ quarters, because they represented no value to Ovalle, were not included in the inventory of his holdings, but the livestock and agricultural implements used to produce food to feed them were counted: seven milk cows, a hundred head of cattle, six teams of oxen with harnesses, several plows, hoes, and a variety of other tools filled out the list. In all, the material wealth of Choroní was predominantly utilitarian. The absence of expensive consumer goods may well have been the consequence of Ovalle’s considerable investment in slaves. At 1650s prices, the Choroní Blacks were worth no less than 24,000 pesos.²⁷

The last will and testament of a second cacao encomendero, Pedro de Liendo, has also survived. Like Ovalle, Liendo’s principal expenditure was for African slaves. In 1635, his encomienda at Chuao was made up of thirty-five tributaries. In 1659, in addition to the estate house and tools, he owned a warehouse and two stores in La Guaira, a sloop to carry his cacao there, and 106 slaves.²⁸ For their part, the Blanco Ponte family participated directly in the slave trade; as buyers and brokers their credit was respected from Lisbon to Loanda to Cartagena. In May 1640, Pedro Blanco Ponte bought forty-eight slaves from Francisco de Aquilena, a vecino of Cartagena and agent to don Francisco de Vasconcelo, governor of Angola, on credit at the bargain price of 160 pesos each (the current rate was about 250 pesos).²⁹ There is no record of slaves held or sold by don Rengifo Pimentel.

A Portuguese, a Basque, a Canary Islander, and a creole born in Santo Domingo—these were all men of seaborne and commercial experience. At the same time, they were not dependent on Seville and the traditional flota system, then in decline, which had provided a demand for Caracas wheat since the 1580s. Their entrepreneurial talents and trading contacts made them first welcome in Caracas and then part of its propertied elite. They all married well in that soon after their marriages they obtained encomiendas on the basis of the station and merits of their Caracas-born wives’ families. Don Rengifo Pimentel married the Caracas cattle heiress doña Francisca Gámez and in her name held the four encomiendas already mentioned, including two on the coast worth 1,000 and 3,000 pesos per annum. Pedro de Liendo’s wife was the wealthy doña Catalina Mexía. The granddaughter of Mérida (Venezuela) governor Suarez del Castillo, at her death—having outlived Liendo and two subsequent husbands—doña Catalina founded an obra pía on the encomienda and cacao groves at Chuao. While the encomienda was worth 1,600 pesos annually during the period of Liendo’s possession, in time this estate became the most valuable ecclesiastical property in colonial Caracas. Alejandro Blanco Ponte’s marriage to doña Francisca Infante, the granddaughter of town founders, brought him an encomienda at Caraballeda worth 1,500 pesos per annum. In 1632, the year of his sister’s wedding, don Francisco Infante transferred a debt to the royal treasury of 5,403 pesos to his new brother-in-law, Alejandro Blanco Ponte, who immediately paid one-third of the outstanding amount in cash. In 1634, having already replaced Infante as encomendero at Caraballeda, Blanco Ponte received a 1,000-peso loan in Caracas guaranteed by 5,000 cacao trees in the coastal valley.³⁰ Perhaps entry into the Caracas elite in the 1630s required nothing more than one or two thousand pesos in gold coin. For the established families that provided these ambitious immigrants with wives, however, the acquisition of large numbers of African slaves assured them of a continuing return on their domestic investment. This is exactly what Ovalle, Liendo, and Blanco Ponte were able to provide.

They were not the first to bring Africans to Caracas. From early in the century, encomenderos had invested in slaves. Before 1628 the encomendero-merchant Alonso Rodríguez Santos had forty-seven slaves who farmed his wheat and herded his cattle. Francisco Castillo, encomendero and local tax collector for the Cartagena-based Inquisition court, directed a mixed-labor enterprise that was a variation on the common theme; the wheat grown by fifty African slaves in the Caracas valley was shipped to Cartagena in cotton bags woven by the Indians of his Valencia encomienda.³¹ In the 1630s and 1640s, cacao sales gave a significant boost to the quantity of slaves that Caraqueños could purchase, and although the cacao encomenderos’ Indians afforded them the means to obtain the largest slave holdings, other ways were found to form a slave gang. A considerable variety of these cases could be cited, but two examples will suffice. Baltasar de Escovedo came from Granada to Caracas expecting to inherit his uncle’s estate, but when the elder Escovedo decided that there was much to be gained by the marriage of his daughter to the powerful Juan Rodríguez Santos, what Baltasar had hoped would be his became his cousin’s dowry instead. He turned to making bricks and tiles for the houses of those more directly favored by cacao, and in time he was able to accumulate, in addition to the brick works, a respectable town house, a dozen slaves, and a small fortune in silver and gold coin. The Portuguese Agustín Pereira came to Caracas with a few slaves that he sold to buy two houses in the center of town. With this property as collateral, Pereira worked as a middleman, buying cacao with borrowed money guaranteed in Caracas and selling it for a profit at La Guaira. In 1684 his heirs owned a small cacao grove in the coastal valley of Osma.³²

The slave trade and these secondary economic activities depended on cacao sales that most often took place at the gate or the wharf of the estate. Until about 1650 profits from these sales came particularly easily, for the greater part of the beans was collected from the virgin trees known as árboles de la tierra. The difficult labor of clearing the land and providing shade and irrigation for the young plants was not yet necessary, and there was no need to wait the five years or more after planting that it took for cacao trees to reach fruit-bearing maturity. A precise idea of the profitability of these groves is provided by accounts kept for the arboledas of Domingo de Liendo, brother of encomendero Pedro de Liendo.

More than 90 percent of Liendo’s cacao in the coastal valley of Cepi was de la tierra. Since about 1640, his African slaves had planted some cacao trees in the valley, but in 1653 only 1,165 trees of a total of more than 12,000 were not indigenous to the area. More than half of all the trees were then stricken with a blight known as alhorra, but the Cepi groves had yielded more than 200 fanegas (a fanega of cacao weighed about 110 pounds) annually for five of the seven years before 1653. Although harvests varied somewhat from one year to the next, and prices were falling steadily, Liendo’s gross income averaged nearly 3,500 pesos per year during the period 1645-52 (Figure 1).

That fishhooks were imported to Cepi and small amounts of maize were exported from the valley suggests that food costs were low or nil and that the plantation was largely self-sufficient. Since cacao beans were sold directly from the groves, there were no freight or transportation charges. The value of the Cepi land in 1650 is unknown, but the half of the valley not owned by Liendo was sold for 1,000 pesos in 1630 by someone who had no slaves to someone who did. The thirty-two slaves who formed the Cepi work force were worth a total of 8,550 pesos in 1658.³³

Thus the cacao groves and slaves at Cepi represented an investment of probably no more than 10,000 pesos, and, therefore, it seems reasonable that in an average year Liendo’s gross earnings equaled about 35 percent of the value of his capital, with each adult slave annually earning, on the average, about 40 percent of his or her market value. Considering in addition that many groves were first harvested by “cheap” encomienda labor and not slaves, and that sales were made at high prices from the late 1620s until about 1650, the dynamic profitability of Caracas’s first cacao bonanza becomes clear.³⁴

At mid-century there coincided at Caracas several events that brought this period of remarkable prosperity to an abrupt end. The problems of supply at this critical juncture are much more evident than those that caused the price paid for cacao in Caracas to drop to one-fifth of its customary level (Figure 2). A principal factor in the crisis was the blight known as alhorra. Beginning in the late 1630s on the plantations upwind of La Guaira, within a decade the alhorra had destroyed more than half of all the cacao trees on the coast, leaving many groves without a single fruit-bearing plant. Newly planted trees would begin to reach maturity by 1660, but the coastal groves would not recover their original productivity until the eighteenth century.³⁵ A second disaster took the form of a surprisingly destructive earthquake, which reduced modest Caracas to rubble in 1641. At one blow much of the urban property that had been used to finance the purchase of slaves and cacao was eliminated. The ecclesiastical establishment, its temples and convents in ruins and the mortgages it held rendered worthless by the destruction, suffered the most. Exacerbated by the truculence of Bishop Mauro de Tovar, who refused the vecinos’ request to move the town (his approval would have nullified all claims held by the Church against the owners of the destroyed property), these reverses initiated a rancorous epoch marked by spectacular quarrels between the bishop and many of Caracas’s first citizens.³⁶

As yet there is no clear explanation why cacao prices, at twenty and thirty pesos the fanega until 1647, collapsed to five pesos by 1654. The answer will come from a fuller understanding of the Mexican market than is possible from the vantage point of Caracas. MacLeod documents falling prices for cacao in Santiago de Guatemala after 1651 and attributes the decline to successful competition from Guayaquil and Venezuela: “In all the price history of cacao in Middle America, the main factor seems to have been the question of supply.”³⁷ If this was indeed the case, the high prices paid for cacao in the Mexican highlands and elsewhere (including Caracas) until the late 1640s may have been in part the consequence of declining production from Caracas because of the alhorra. The price collapse in Caracas at that time could then be linked to the resumption of high output in Guayaquil after 1640.³⁸ The diseased Caracas industry, rather than contributing to the seventeenth-century crisis of the Central American cacao economy, was like it overwhelmed by competition from Guayaquil.

Undoubtedly much impressed by the combined disasters of earthquake and crop blight, Caraqueños appealed to divine providence for assistance. A festival with the Virgin Mary as patron was held annually from 1638 to 1670 to plead for relief from the alhorra.³⁹ On the other hand, while the documents abound with references to these events, a thorough search uncovered no comment whatsoever about the low prices paid for cacao. What little evidence pertaining to Caracas’s commercial woes exists suggests that cacao growers did not understand their economic problems in terms of competition from other suppliers. With silver production in decline, and forced to depend on the Mexican peso by the crown’s decision to devalue the debased Peruvian currency, would-be buyers in New Spain preferred to hoard their sound coins rather than let them go out to distant markets such as Venezuela from whence they might not circulate back. From 1650 to the 1670s a general crisis in the supply of currency choked trade in the Spanish Caribbean.⁴⁰ To aggravate matters further, from 1620 to 1650 the Mexican Inquisition tried more than 200 Portuguese for practicing Judaism, many of them cacao traders who had been the primary buyers of Caracas cacao.⁴¹ By eliminating these middlemen and reducing the opportunity to barter cacao for Africans, Caracas growers were forced to depend on cash sales to Mexican merchants who were generally unwilling to make such purchases. The growers were aware of the currency shortage and, even as the price dropped to five pesos the fanega, of the lack of buyers for their cacao beans. In 1649, Santiago de Liendo paid the priest at Cepi in devalued copper currency, the unwanted vellón, because “there was nothing else.” In 1654, for the first time cacao had to be brought at Liendo’s cost from Cepi to La Guaira, “to sell it and give it a market because there was none in Cepi and the cacao was about to be lost, rotting in the storehouse.”⁴²

The better to weather this combination of events, Caracas residents withdrew to the countryside. Urban functions and services came to a standstill. For years the cabildo was without its full complement of regidores and the governors’ secretaries had to double as escribanos públicos.⁴³ By the 1670s the preoccupations of property and status had returned to give renewed importance to urban life. Plans to construct a new seminary were presented and discussed in the cabildo. Of more dubious benefit, but a clear indication of the reemerging social order, the jail, destroyed in the 1641 earthquake, was rebuilt in 1674. Frightened by marauding French corsairs and by raids on Maracaibo by the Englishman William Henry Morgan, townsmen expressed faith that Caracas was once again worth protecting and weighed the possibilities of persuading the crown to finance a new fort to be built on the road to La Guaira.⁴⁴

It is reasonable to suppose that the opportunistic Dutch, then the Atlantic’s leading merchants, provided planters with an alternative outlet for their cacao during the years of sluggish legal commerce. Indeed, fewer than half of all the men designated for the Caracas militia, encomenderos and planters among them, responded in 1639 when an expedition was formed to dislodge the Hollanders from the nearby island of Curasao.⁴⁵ What took place along the miles of open coast is as difficult to account for now as it was to control then, but the Dutch were no doubt quite willing to replace the Portuguese in the lucrative slaves-for-cacao exchange. By 1671, the role of Curaçao in the supply of slaves was so commonplace that the Caracas cabildo issued a matter-of-fact warning that slaves afflicted with the “Dutch evil” (mal ’olanda) were entering from the island.⁴⁶ Yet it may be that Curaçao did not immediately become “little more than a gigantic slave pen” after the Dutch occupation, as one historian recently suggested.⁴⁷ Between 1659 and 1671, the slave population at Chuao underwent changes in demographic composition that suggest that few, if any, African slaves had been introduced to that coastal valley. The overall population declined from 110 to 100 individuals, and of those who can be identified by place of birth with certainty (76 percent in 1659; 79 percent in 1671), the number of African-born dropped from 36 to 26. A sharp decrease in the number of single men, from 30 to 11, and a significant rise in married or widowed men and women, from 20 to 27 men and from 26 to 34 women, are further indicators of adjustment to a reduced slave supply. More conjugal pairs and a greater sexual balance in 1671 occurred as single men found creole wives. The majority (14 of 27) of married and widowed men in 1671 were African-born, but the majority of women of the same status (17 of 34) were creoles. At least in the Chuao case, the immediate presence of Dutch traders was unimportant and, from the point of view of the slave community, the stagnant African trade had beneficial demographic effects (Table III).

By the 1680s the Caracas economy was vigorous once again. In 1684, the crown ordered a survey of rural property to determine whether noncollection of the alcabala, which had been suspended by royal favor since 1631, was still justified. Acknowledged by contemporaries as the first such census of the town’s rural domain, the 1684 padrón is a crucial document for the history of seventeenth-century Caracas.⁴⁸ Caraqueños owned 373,250 cacao trees distributed on 167 estates, 18 wheat farms, 26 sugar trapiches, and 28 cattle hatos in 1684. Wealth accumulated during the first years of booming commerce made it possible for the families of many of the first encomendero-slaveholders to survive the several decades of economic slump. A close study of the 146 owners of cacao groves listed in the 1684 padrón reveals that at least half were descendants of encomenderos named in 1635, and of the 38 encomenderos who had then been holders of grants of 1,000 pesos or more renta, the heirs of at least 28 were growing cacao in 1684.⁴⁹ The moderate size of many of the cacao groves belonging to children and grandchildren of the first planters, and the location of these arboledas in sites different from their ancestors’ encomiendas, suggests that the majority of the 1684 groves had been planted since the 1640s. Started during the period of alhorra blight and low prices, this was expansion that already purchased slaves could execute. Unfortunately, the only estimate of the slave labor force is a figure by Bishop González de Acuña, who claimed that there were 16,000 slaves in the Caracas region in 1674.⁵⁰ That more than 10 percent of the cacao trees counted in 1684 were new plants located along the Tuy River south and east of Caracas, however, is proof that there had been labor enough to increase production. Once planted, an arboleda required only a maintenance crew of waterers and weeders during most of the year, and this meant that a gang of the younger, sturdier slaves could be kept constantly at work bringing new land under cultivation. Such were the profits from cacao that favored planters came to have three sets of slaves: in addition to their domestic servants, they had a caretaker crew and an expansion crew. In 1658, the heirs of Domingo de Liendo had 24 men and boys and 8 women and girls on the original coastal estate at Cepi, 7 men and boys and 7 women and girls in domestic service in Caracas, and 8 men and 3 women at work planting cacao trees at Santa Lucía in the Tuy Valley.⁵¹

Here we have perhaps the most salient characteristics of colonial Caracas economy and society: the ready availability of well-watered land and the mobility of the slave gang encouraged constant expansion. In 1720, before the establishment of the Guipuzcoana Company in Venezuela, there were more than two million cacao trees in the Caracas province, and by 1744 the number of trees had risen to over five million; in each case more than half of the trees were located in the Tuy River region. The multitude of small holdings that resulted, brought and held together by a complex system of carefully arranged marriages, kept elite status and profits in the hands of generations of select Caracas families.⁵² Even the humbler growers, indigent Canary Islanders for the most part, who came to Caracas in a steady stream after 1680,⁵³ could make a bid for gentry status with cacao and the few slaves they were able to buy. Before 1700 these hopeful immigrants had begun to harvest quantities of cacao in the valleys at the remote edge of the province. They also settled in Caracas town, in the Candelaria parish on the settlement’s eastern fringe, which in time became a Canario barrio. This was a labor force of a somewhat different order, although as artisans, grocers, vegetable farmers, overseers, and, perhaps more than any other occupation, muleteers who served the increasingly distant arboledas, they were as closely dependent on the production and sale of cacao as the estate owners who bought their wares and hired their services.⁵⁴

Before 1700 the population structure of the Caracas region had become a racial-class continuum, with white masters and Black slaves at opposite poles and Canarios, other poor Spaniards, and the mixed-blood pardos and mulattoes scattered in between. In this world that his forced labor had helped create, the Indian seems to have had no clearly defined place. At best, it was an uncertain and unstable order. With a growing slave population and at a time when several decades of economic hardship had ended and a new, poor white class had begun to fill the town and countryside, Caracas seems to have become quite race conscious. The marriage of a Valencia favorite son to the daughter of an Aragua Valley cacique provoked near hysteria in the Hispanic community.⁵⁵ In an effort to freeze melting social-racial distinctions, Caracas Bishop González de Acuña declared that he would no longer ordain anyone who had as much as one-fourth Indian or African ancestry—a challenge to the Church’s evangelical mission that was quickly disallowed by Pope Innocent XI.⁵⁶

In this tense atmosphere, the crown’s decision in 1691 to insist on the termination of the servicio personal encomienda and thereby put an end to more than 150 years of de facto defiance on the part of the Caracas encomenderos met surprisingly little resistance. Definitely not the outcome of easy mestizaje and racial toleration, the encomienda’s demise was finally allowed because the immobile, legally circumscribed institution had little place in the dynamic cacao economy now based on African slavery. Once freed from encomienda service, it was decided that Indians would be required to pay a tax for the religious instruction that they were to continue to receive. Bishop Baños y Sotomayor’s Ynforme of 1690, on which the tax was to be based, allows a glimpse at the remnant of Indian society that was then very much at the margin of Caracas’s Hispano-African community.⁵⁷

The bishop’s agents found 7,464 Indians on 64 encomiendas in the jurisdictions of Caracas, Valencia, and San Sebastián.⁵⁸ Of these the majority, 5,278 Indians and 37 encomiendas, were in the possession of Caracas vecinos. Comparison with the agricultural property owned by the encomenderos who held these 37 grants—as the 1684 padrón permits— makes it possible to account for the specific activities that employed Indian labor at the end of the century. More than three-fifths, 3,262, were in 9 encomiendas located near sugar mills owned by their encomenderos; 1,085 Indians in 11 encomiendas were at work farming wheat; and 931 were spread thinly among 17 encomenderos whose grants were located near their coastal cacao groves. More revealing is the portion of all agricultural estates that benefited from encomienda labor; while a third of the sugar trapiches and fully two-thirds of the wheat farms were owned by encomenderos, only about one cacao planter in ten was also the holder of an Indian grant in 1690.

The bishop’s Ynforme also indicates that for some time many encomenderos had allowed their grants to revert to the crown rather than pay fees for the confirmation of their titles. Twenty-four of the province’s sixty-four encomiendas were already royal possessions in 1690. Legal rights had been allowed to lapse in both the case of the small coastal encomiendas, now of only minimal value, and in the case of the large, still important grants in the Valencia-Aragua sugar region. Only encomenderos with Indians in the wheat fields near Caracas, in Petare, Barata, and La Vega, had uniformly paid their taxes and kept their titles in order. Why this was so can be inferred from the demographic composition of the encomiendas recorded in the Ynforme.

By 1690, cacao cultivation and the forced immigration of Black slaves had reduced the coastal Indian communities to fragments of their original form. African men without African women were fortunate if, as occurred in Chuao, they were provided with creole women; otherwise they found substitutes among the women from the coastal encomiendas. Many of the husbands of the women in the coastal encomiendas at Maiquetía, Caraballeda, and Naiguatá were listed as anonymous negros in the Ynforme, and most of the encomienda-born children were recognized as Afro-Indian zambos.⁵⁹ For their part, the Indian men from these encomiendas were frequently married to women who belonged to populous inland encomiendas near the sugar trapiches at Turmero and Guarenas. These groups were still stable in 1690, sexually balanced and headed by an aged patriarch, quite unlike the truncated, often caciqueless encomiendas on the coast.⁶⁰

In the Aragua Valley, where the original population had been dense and indigenous culture was able to survive the seventeenth century more nearly intact than it had on the coast or in Caracas, it may have simply made good tactical sense to allow the encomiendas to return to the crown. In this area, eliminating the encomienda altogether assured access to Indian labor to those whose encomienda privileges had expired; in this way, there would be no chance of one’s competitors gaining exclusive control of a needed work force. With two of the four trapiches located in the Aragua pueblo of Turmero, the powerful and wealthy Tovar family had no desire to part with the skilled Indian workers who had made sugar for them for decades. The end of the encomienda also put an end to this possibility, and the Tovar dominion in Aragua continued. In 1710, Turmero Indians complained that Tovar canefields were encroaching on their village, and in 1730 these same Indians were still identified as “the people of Don Antonio Tovar,” their last encomendero—who had been dead for more than forty years.⁶¹

Finally, although now nearly insignificant as a source of income alongside slavery and cacao, the prestige value of the wheat farm encomienda had not diminished during the course of the seventeenth century. Mario Góngora has shown how the encomienda in agrarian Chile was absorbed by a “class of owners” who derived their power from various sources and who were therefore not dependent on Indian tribute for wealth and prestige.⁶² This was all the more true in Caracas, where the monetary value of an encomienda frequently depended on the market skills of the encomendero, and where, especially after 1650, ownership of large, movable gangs of slaves was the decisive factor in the maintenance of aristocratic status. In 1684, all eleven of the encomenderos whose Indians grew wheat near Caracas were also owners of either sugar or cacao properties. Born several generations after the time when wheat exports and Indian labor had determined membership in the local elite, these grant-holders could liken themselves to those earlier encomenderos and thereby call attention to the tenure of their families’ importance in Caracas. For a boom-and-bust society of slavers and smugglers, it was a useful symbol of stability and the nobility of their origins, and for this reason the titles of these encomiendas were nearly all in order in 1690.

During the half century after 1630, Caracas completed the transformation from a minor supplier of a European food crop to Spanish sailors to a major supplier of a tropical quasi-drug to Indian and European consumers alike. In the process, African slavery rendered the encomienda a nonessential anachronism. The Mexican demand for cacao initiated this transformation, and it would appear that, once committed to cacao and slavery, Caracas continued to be very responsive to shifts in the economy of New Spain. The Mexican market for cacao surged in the late 1620s and lasted for about two decades thereafter. New Spain merchants offered considerably less for Caracas cacao from the late 1640s until the late 1660s, a period that corresponds closely to the general depression of Zacatecas silver mining. Silver production reached new highs from 1675 to 1690 as the supply of mercury was made certain once again,⁶³ and it was at this time that cacao exports resumed and Caracas’s prosperity returned. To what degree these trends are coincidental must await a study of the New Spain cacao market and its merchants, but such a study might well reveal that the rise of seventeenth-century Caracas was closely tied to the simultaneous development of a diversified capitalist economy in Mexico. Increasingly self-sufficient generally, New Spain continued to depend on external suppliers for cacao, and when commercial capital was unavailable, as was the case from about 1650 until about 1670, Mexicans invested their money in local enterprises and probably did without cacao beans. For their part, growers might have taken Dutch slaves and merchandise in exchange for their harvests during these long years, but only after 1670, when “the discriminating customer”⁶⁴ from across the Caribbean was again willing to buy, did Caracas, permanently established as New Spain’s cacao colony, enjoy a resurgence of wealth and well-being.

Author notes