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PEARLS AND A POLITICAL ECOLOGY OF EMPIRE, 1498–1541

The hum of news and excitement buzzed through the port towns of southern Spain and Portugal in the waning years of the fifteenth century as ships, sailors, and the tales and treasure they carried sailed into Iberian harbors. It was not until Columbus’s third crossing into the unfamiliar Caribbean archipelago that he encountered pearls. On this 1498 voyage, as he and his crew wended their way along the South American coastline through the Gulf of Paria, the admiral made contact with pearl-wearing Indians (likely Guayquerí from neighboring islands). A shared appreciation for the jewel presumably facilitated communication: in contrast to New World commodities such as chocolate and tobacco, pearls’ luminescence and their sensual associations with fertility and the mysterious and generative power of the sea linked indigenous American and European approaches to the jewel.¹

Upon the mariners’ return to Spain in the wake of this encounter, word of the region’s rich oyster beds spread quickly. Scattershot settlement and plunder began and rapidly increased along the Venezuelan coastline, focused largely on the trade in pearls, without generating major crown intervention or any sustained set of administrative privileges. In these early haphazard years of raiding and encounters, confronted by chaotic novelty and unprecedented challenges of all types, the Spanish crown struggled to make sense of this New World, seeking to impose administrative order upon it without a clear blueprint of how to do so. Embedded in global Iberian merchant networks, populated by indigenous peoples from the circum-Caribbean as well as Africans and Europeans of all origins, the teeming waters and contested territories of this corner of the evolving Atlantic world would provide enduring early lessons in the importance of intricate ecosystems that bound the natural world to local practice and to imperial coffers. Over the course of the first four decades of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of the coast would work together in an often brutal and coerced fashion to produce extraordinary pearl wealth. In doing so, they put forth their vision of an American political economy, one that had a living ecology at its heart. In the pearl fisheries, the vocabulary of imperial administration evolved in dialogue with practices on the ground, as subjects from three continents labored under wildly varying conditions to build lives on land based on riches from the sea. De facto practices of wealth generation and management informed emerging de jure approaches to imperial control over the region’s resources.

Map 2. The Pearl Coast in the Greater Caribbean. Drawn by Gerry Krieg

A “Pearl Coast” Political Economy

As the Spanish crown and its servants struggled to assimilate the import of recently encountered lands in the Americas and their riches, pearls gave form and vocabulary to this evolving corner of a new imperial geography. Columbus, inspired by the pearls he and his crew received in exchange for various goods—and, according to a later account by Bartolomé de Las Casas, by the abundant dew Columbus saw throughout the region (which recalled Pliny’s explanation of the genesis of pearls as the product of dew falling upon open oysters)—invoked the jewel in his names for the waters and islands around which he had sailed. He baptized the stretch of water between the small island of Cubagua and its larger neighboring island the “Golfo de las Perlas,” or the Gulf of Pearls. In a similar vein, he christened the large island “Margarita.” In 1500, the map of Juan de la Cosa, a mariner who traveled with Columbus during the pearl-producing third voyage, labeled the entire adjacent coast as the “Costa de Perlas,” or Pearl Coast. These early monikers proved predictive: pearl-fishing operations would expand along the coast throughout the century as profit-hunters sought undisturbed oyster banks.² The region figured prominently in early Spanish administrative engagement with this unfamiliar world; it was not only depicted on early maps but also explicitly mentioned in the charter decree of Seville’s Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), which included distinct clauses addressing the trade and exploration of “the islands where pearls are found.”³

Pearls—never the oysters from which they were drawn—inflected the vocabulary of life and labor in these settlements for centuries. The Pearl Coast became alternately known as the “Costa de Aljófar” (Seed Pearl Coast); the humble dwellings in which Spaniards lived during pearl-fishing seasons were known as rancherías de perlas, or pearl settlements. Often the region’s specific place-names were entirely ignored: after Cubagua and the adjacent islands of Margarita and Coche became centers of pearl fishing, they were often referred to simply as the “Islas de Perlas,” or the Pearl Islands, or simply the pesquerías de perlas, or pearl fisheries.⁴

From the region’s earliest days as a site of imperial experimentation, its simple pearl-focused nomenclature belied the diversity and complexity of these rough-and-tumble communities. European settlement and exploration of the Pearl Coast reflected from the beginning a mixture of individual and royal initiative, an uneasy if necessary partnership that underlay life and commerce in the pearl fisheries. With no fixed policy for settlement of the Pearl Coast, Spanish king Ferdinand continued to try to gain control of the region through piecemeal contractual concessions. In 1500 and 1501, five additional voyages, all financed privately, sailed for the region, along with one crown-financed expedition.⁵ Spanish settlers and sojourners on the larger Antillean islands (particularly Puerto Rico and Hispaniola) also played a critical role in redirecting the flow of money and people to the Pearl Coast from around the Caribbean. In 1504, in recognition of this steady traffic, the king ordered the governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando, to build a fortress on the mainland to provide protection for pearl traders and rescate (forced trade or barter) expeditions. In 1512, the crown authorized private pearl-trading voyages to Cubagua and adjacent territories from Hispaniola. Subsequently, the crown began to receive modest pearl payments from Cubagua in the form of the quinto, a tax on a fifth of the total pearl haul. Pearls were to be assessed by weight and grouped into units called marcos, equivalent to roughly half a pound. Payment to the crown from the region averaged one hundred marcos in weight (or roughly fifty pounds) of pearls per year from 1513 to 1520. It was at the start of this period, in 1513, that the new governor of Hispaniola, Diego Colón, received royal permission to build a fort in las perlas (“the pearls,” an ambiguous phrase that likely referred to the Venezuelan mainland near the island of Cubagua). Overall, the relative royal neglect that facilitated a chaotic evolution of pearl-fishing settlements reflected the crown’s preoccupation with the larger Antillean islands. Royal attention was firmly fixed on Hispaniola, its gold mines and political and religious disputes.⁶

Meanwhile, a distinct regional political economy developed on the Pearl Coast. As the pearl-fishing settlements along South America’s northeastern littoral and adjacent islands grew, they transformed the area’s political economy, its ecology, and its demographic makeup. Pearls were only one component of the Venezuelan coast’s natural wealth, which included copper, gold, rocks, and various semiprecious stones. However, the hunt for pearls soon eclipsed interest in these other resources. Although indigenous inhabitants of the Venezuelan littoral had long harvested oysters—Pinctada radiata—for their meat and pearls, the scale of exploitation changed dramatically with the arrival of Spaniards in the early sixteenth century. The lasting impact of this unswerving focus on pearls had less to do with a new European valuation of the jewel than with the changing scale of their pursuit and the complex related costs.⁷

European incursions along the Pearl Coast also transformed local ecology in ways that Spaniards could not have predicted based on their prior experiences in Iberia, taking a toll not only on the oyster beds but also on the flora and fauna on land. On the islands of Margarita, Coche, and Cubagua, for example, livestock multiplied and began eating young plant shoots, allowing cacti to proliferate. The frenzied “greed they [the Spaniards] had for getting pearls, even if the oyster banks were destroyed,” wreaked havoc not only on the waters and lands adjacent to the pearl-fishing settlements but also on places and peoples within striking distance of European profit-seekers hunting for laborers.⁸

Regional transformation was rapid but uneven, with Europeans’ pearl avarice checked by their dependence upon local peoples for sustenance. For example, although European mechanisms of commercial exchange and the place for precious stones and metals within them might have indeed been different from those that existed in the pre-contact Americas, evidence suggests that pearls continued to be exchanged and valued in ways that reflected concerns beyond the purely economic. This kind of cultural continuity might well have been particularly true along the Pearl Coast of Venezuela, where the particulars of population distribution and social organization meant that these coastal peoples maintained their relative autonomy until the mid-seventeenth century. The Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak (Lokono) peoples of the northern South American coast critically influenced the region’s evolving character in the aftermath of the arrival of Europeans. Initially, Spanish interlopers exchanged plates, bells, wine, and foodstuffs for pearls gathered by groups of indigenous divers. This kind of trade activity might not have been a disruptive innovation—local native economies revolved in part around the exchange of food surpluses and were influenced by ideological concerns as well as economic ones. Along the northern coast of what is now Venezuela, the inhabitants relied on shellfish gathering, and the conch Strombus gigas was used to make tools as well as prized as food. The tools made from Strombus shell, for example, such as axes and adzes, were likely employed in the manufacture of canoes. (The name Warao meant “canoe maker” or “canoe owner.”)⁹

Even as the settlements dedicated to pearl fishing developed along the coast and on outlying islands, European sojourners could ill afford to anger their trading partners, depending on them as they did for most essential items, from food, fuel, and water to clothing and canoes. Most notable was the Spaniards’ reliance on manioc flour (aru) and fresh water supplied largely by the Arawaks on the Guayana coast, among other native peoples. The Arawak peoples of the Atlantic coast would remain essential trading partners for decades. As violence and disease took their toll on coastal populations, however, European settlers extended their predatory raids in search of a labor force to dive for oysters. These rescate forays brought violence and dislocation to the native populations of the Greater Caribbean and the South American mainland.¹⁰

Guaranteeing a regional labor supply revealed itself to be a problem early on in the decades following the Spaniards’ arrival in the Caribbean. In the wake of Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos’s 1511 condemnation of Spanish crimes against Indians on Hispaniola, the crown issued the Leyes de Burgos in 1512, prohibiting the enslavement of Indians in the New World. A few years later, Ferdinand’s grandson and successor Charles I and V (who ruled from 1516 to 1556 and became Charles V when he was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519) authorized several religious missions to the Pearl Coast, hoping to maintain peaceful relations with its indigenous inhabitants. These forays met with only moderate success, and enslavement continued by other means and names, as the flood of indigenous peoples forcibly transported to the pearl fisheries attests.¹¹

As the settlements along the Pearl Coast grew, relative local indigenous power meant that European sojourners had to look elsewhere for their workforce. Spaniards carried on slave raiding in Carib and Arawak settlements in the Lesser Antilles and along the Caribbean coast up to the Yucatán. Some populations in particular suffered greatly because of the perceived needs of the fisheries: Spaniards believed Lucayan inhabitants of the Bahamas to be adept divers and brought them into the pearl fisheries in increasing numbers, leaving those islands nearly depopulated by the end of the 1520s. Estimates for the number of indigenous people enslaved and transported in the region vary wildly, from six thousand taken from the Pearl Coast, Trinidad, and Curaçao to between thirty and forty thousand Lucayans removed from the Bahamas. Not all of these people went to the pearl fisheries, of course, and the pearl fisheries contained diversity beyond these populations.¹²

Caribbean peoples could be enslaved if they were designated caribes, defined in the first decade of the sixteenth century as any native peoples who resisted Spanish authority. Those classified as taíno (also aruaca or guatiao) were treated as subjects. Unsurprisingly, the designations were political. Even in 1520, when the labor needs of Spanish residents of Hispaniola led the crown to sponsor a formal reevaluation of the region’s inhabitants (leading to new designations of caribe to justify slave raiding), the indigenous residents of Margarita (among a handful of other islands in the vicinity of the pearl fisheries) were exempted, a reflection of Spaniards’ reliance on their indigenous neighbors. Neither the encomienda / mita system (the two paradigms of coerced indigenous labor that came to dominate colonial settlements in the Spanish Americas) nor the epidemic disease devastation that transformed the larger Caribbean islands in the first few decades of the sixteenth century characterized Venezuela’s coast, which meant that native labor remained, for the most part, under the control of local indigenous leaders.¹³

In the context of the search for laborers for these New World settlements, in 1512 the king consented to a request from the secretary of the Real Audiencia de Santo Domingo (royal court) on Hispaniola to send more esclavas blancas, or white female slaves, to the Indies. Just a few years later, however, Spanish residents of the West Indies put pressure on the crown to provide enslaved laborers directly from Africa. In a 1518 petition, Spaniards on Hispaniola argued that enslaved Africans would be less likely to be rebellious than slaves brought over from Castile. That same year, Charles I indicated his support of this proposed change in the workforce by licensing Lorenzo de Gouvenod, comte de Bresa, to deliver four thousand black slaves to the Spanish Americas over seven years (de Gouvenod then resold the license to four Italian business partners). The crown also authorized Dom Jorge, the illegitimate son of Portuguese king João II, to send four hundred African slaves to Hispaniola. These early royal experiments in supplying the region with enslaved Africans underscore the conundrum posed by the New World. On the one hand, the unfamiliar territories represented a new arena in which to pursue European alliances; on the other, the labor demands of these American settlements gave rise to innovation and experimentation with many unintended consequences, such as the political and moral dilemmas posed by the growing trade in enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples.¹⁴

As a result of these initial experiments in administering new Atlantic territories, the Pearl Coast became ever more deeply embedded in networks of commerce and alliance that spanned the Atlantic and extended into the Indian Ocean and Asia. The pearl wealth beginning to come from the Caribbean gave the Spanish crown hope that these western Indies would allow them to compete with their peninsular rivals, the Portuguese, recently enriched by the charting of new maritime paths to eastern markets. Just as pearls from both eastern and western fisheries mixed and mingled as they traveled the globe (for example, prominent pearl merchant Lazarus Nürnberger procured pearls for sovereigns from Iberia to Turkey, including the pope, from both the East and West Indies), so, too, did many of the networks that competed for and distributed them.¹⁵ It was not only the commercial circuits that connected these distant pearl-producing locales. Just as the Caribbean pearl fisheries drew immediate attention from the most prominent religious figures of the day, so, too, did the Indian Ocean pearl fisheries (located on the so-called Fishery Coast). While famed advocate for the indigenous population in the Americas Bartolomé de Las Casas represented the Dominicans on the Venezuelan Pearl Coast, in the Indian Ocean fisheries none other than Francis Xavier, the founder of the Jesuit order, played a prominent role in the conversion of the Fishery Coasts’ Tamil-speaking pearl fishers, the Paravas, in the 1540s. In the Indian Ocean, the Paravas remained at the center of negotiations surrounding pearls’ production and circulation for the next two centuries, navigating among the competing interests of regional Hindu and Muslim powers as well as rival Europeans.¹⁶

Although overlapping networks linked the history of eastern and western pearl fisheries, a major difference between the two sites of resource exploitation was the labor system. The enforced servitude and slavery that came to characterize the American Pearl Coast early on did not have a parallel in the Indian Ocean. The enslaved laborers along the Pearl Coast worked in appalling conditions to harvest the oysters whose pearls enriched the sundry merchants and officials with investments in the fisheries. One of the most vocal critics of the Caribbean settlements’ regime of pearl diving was Las Casas, who in 1517 successfully lobbied in Spain for permission to join the missions in the fisheries, where he hoped to bring an end to Spanish encroachments in the region. It was during his time there that he formed his enduring impressions of the danger and suffering that accompanied the pursuit of pearls.¹⁷ His account characterized the fisheries as violent and lawless, a hotbed of nefarious practices that flourished in the absence of good governance. Indeed, a central aspect of Las Casas’s critique was the lack of an effective administration for dealing with the abuses perpetrated in the Indies. In his blistering condemnation of Spanish behavior, Las Casas laid the blame for the state of affairs squarely on the shoulders, not of the king, but of the Council of the Indies, a weak body with no powers of enforcement “with whom principal fault and great sin lies.”¹⁸

Las Casas’s lengthy History of the Indies, which he began drafting in 1527, described pearl fishing as a monstrous labor regime that transformed the Indian divers into terrifying otherworldly creatures. Laboring from sunrise to sundown, the divers would repeatedly descend three or four fathoms (eighteen to twenty-four feet) to gather oysters. They were beaten upon returning to the canoe by a brutal Spanish overseer if they took too long between dives, and they were frequently bitten or killed by sharks and other marine predators. The salt opened sores on their backs, and seawater caused their naturally black hair to appear burnished, making the divers look like “sea wolves.” Las Casas observed that these enslaved Indians, disfigured by their labor, looked like a “different race of men or monsters.” The life of these divers was no life at all, he asserted, but rather an “infernal death,” characterized by violence as well as terrible ailments, such as dysentery, brought on by spending so much time in cold water. The pressure on divers’ chests from the depth of the water frequently caused them to hemorrhage blood from their mouths, and many died after only a few days in the fisheries. In his Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies, Las Casas wrote of pearl fishing that “no hellish and hopeless life on this earth that may be compared with it, however hard and terrible taking out the gold in the mines may be.” The many extractive and productive industries of the Americas would produce suffering of innumerable varieties and magnitudes for those who labored in their mines, fields, plantations, and fisheries. It seems clear that pearl diving was indeed one of the many ways to live and die in agony in the wake of the Columbian encounter.¹⁹

Royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s account of the pearl-diving regime in the fisheries during the heyday of the 1520s echoed that of Las Casas. By the 1520s, the small, unwelcoming island of Cubagua had become the center of Spanish-controlled pearl-fishing operations. Miniature and desolate, Cubagua was an unlikely base. Located ten miles off the Venezuelan coast and just fifteen square miles in size, the island had no sources of fresh water, few sources of food on which humans can survive, and little shelter from a relentless, blazing sun. The first Spanish settlements on the island were little more than seasonal shelters (Oviedo later referred to them as “huts and shacks”), impermanent dwellings for the residents of Santo Domingo and San Juan who made regular seasonal forays to the island and the adjacent mainland to barter for pearls harvested by large clans of Guayquerí divers working under the command of a chief. Oviedo described crews of six to seven pearl divers who sailed at daybreak for the oyster banks, where they worked in shifts for hours on end. At night, they would return to the islands, where overseers would seize their hauls and lock them into jails. In his General and Natural History of the Indies (1526), Oviedo marveled that this grueling labor regime had turned Cubagua, a “very small and extremely sterile” island, “without a drop of water from a river or any other source . . . nor any place to plant or maintain anything in support of man,” into the source of riches exceeding those of any other settlement in the Spanish West Indies.²⁰

They were astonishing riches indeed. During the 1520s, climbing quinto payments sketch the outlines of the growth of the slave trade and the aggressive oyster harvesting that supported its rise. In 1521, the number of Cubaguan pearls sent to the crown in payment of the quinto rose dramatically to more than two hundred marcos (approximately one hundred pounds of pearls), double the average yearly payments of the preceding seven years. This figure more than tripled the following year, and from 1522 to 1526 the average annual quinto payment totaled more than seven hundred marcos of pearls. The following year, the crown’s pearl haul reached its peak, with quinto payments producing twelve hundred marcos, or six hundred pounds, of the jewel.²¹

The profits of the Pearl Coast’s boom years reflected a rapid rise in Cubagua’s population. In 1520, the island’s European population totaled roughly three hundred, and the following year Spanish denizens of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola founded the small city of Nueva Cádiz on Cubagua. By the mid-1520s, Cubagua’s European residents numbered close to one thousand, and the island was home to almost one hundred rancherías de perlas. By the 1530s, as many as fifteen hundred people lived on the island. These residents were a mixture of indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean, New Christians from Spain and Portugal, German commercial factors and their associates, Italian merchants, and Spaniards from all over the peninsula in addition to Moriscos (Christian converts from Islam) esclavos blancos (white slaves) from the eastern Mediterranean, and enslaved Africans brought to the fisheries by privateers or licensed ships directly from Africa or via the Iberian Peninsula.²²

The numbers of indigenous and African inhabitants of these settlements remain elusive, as do their precise origins, although occasionally the latter can be glimpsed. In 1527, the paymaster of Hispaniola received permission to carry “to the island of Cubagua and the pearl fisheries twelve black slaves from Cape Verde or from Guinea or from wherever you want . . . they must be good swimmers and divers.” Preferences could work in the opposite direction, as well: in 1534, royal correspondence concerning a cargo of one hundred slaves being brought to the region included an order not to import any “blacks from Gelofe [Wolof].” It seems likely that these enslaved laborers were believed to be particularly rebellious, perhaps a reflection of the region’s long-standing integration into Iberian trade networks as well as its particular linguistic and religious characteristics.²³

As the king and royal officials in Seville worried about the glut of pearls depressing prices for the jewel, the cost of enslaved laborers in the fisheries rose to new heights: by 1526 and 1527, at the peak of pearl production on Cubagua, Spanish pearl canoe owners were paying between 100 and 150 pesos de oro (with each peso worth slightly more than four grams of twenty-two-carat gold and equivalent to 450 maravedis) for each Lucayan diver. The prices for male divers—of unspecified origin—remained high more than a decade later, at 144 pesos de oro in 1540. Occasionally, Pearl Coast residents paid slave traders for their human cargo in the same currency that the enslaved would then be expected to harvest: pearls. The two industries—pearl harvesting and the transatlantic slave trade—were deeply intertwined from their earliest days.²⁴

The enslaved workers came from far-flung places of origin and performed diverse tasks as part of their bleak lives. When Spaniard Pedro de Barrionuevo died in 1528, he left among his possessions one morisca slave, Ana, age thirty; two indias de servicio (service Indians) named Beatriz and Juana; one “india naboría” (naboría was a term of Arawak origin whose meaning varied in different time periods and regions but commonly referred to a permanent Indian dependent of a Spaniard); and twelve Indians “in a jail.” In 1533, Pedro de Herrera left one black slave, Isabel, with two children; one Indian woman from the Yucatán, Isabelica; one Indian girl from Margarita, Luisica; six naborías belonging to the governor Diego de Ordás (suggesting that individuals residing elsewhere sent Indians to the fisheries to obtain pearls, a practice that would become increasingly common later in the century); one “Indian woman” and “2 sick Indian men” with no geographic identifier and “1 Indian man from the Yucatán”; and Juanico “from the pearl fisheries.” Miguel de Gaviria owned in 1533 “one little black boy, ‘Andresico’”; one enslaved Indian woman “in chains,” Catalina; one Indian from Trinidad, “Perico”; and three Indian boys obtained through rescate known as Perito Carioco, Juanico, and Periquito. The same year, Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo left behind an estate including four Indian women (Isabel, Catalinilla, Elena, and Leonor), two canoes, and twenty-three “pearl Indians.” The names of a number of these “pearl Indians” suggest their distant origins: Perico Darién, El cacique (“the chief”), el muco (meaning unclear), Juan Lucayo, Panagua, Francisquillo Ranaburi, Francisquillo Bihón, and Gil de Paria. Spaniard Francisco Portillo, who also died in 1533, claimed ownership of “7 Indian women and men who worked in the home”; “a black man who goes in a boat”; “a new canoe”; “16 old pearl indians that use it [the new canoe]”; and “2 chapetónes [meaning unclear] Indians.” The names and occupations of these laborers reveal the wide-ranging origins and statuses of the inhabitants of the pearl fisheries. The simplicity of the descriptors of their perceived ethnicities and labors belie both the complex world of various types of work that sustained the fisheries and the immense dislocation and hardship of those forced to toil there against their will.²⁵

The most obvious products of these settlements—the millions of pearls harvested—served to put this corner of the Americas on actual maps while also solidifying pearls’ place in imagined geographies of the New World, a symbol of the wealth maritime empire could bring. Pearls’ prominence as adornment and their utility as ready cash obscured their origins: the circumstances of their production were invisible to their consumers. Pearls’ ubiquity as much as their plain, fragile beauty—they brooked no more human alteration than a drilled hole—obscured the violent maelstrom of commerce and labor that produced them. On a hem, around a neck, traded for food or wine or passage, pearls bore no traces of the lives altered and lost through enslavement or the submarine pillaging of the reefs that brought them to light. Pearls bore no marks of origin, leaving room for their consumers to imagine one as they saw fit.

Pearls in Private and Imperial Hands

It is impossible to track the precise quantities of pearls that flowed from the Americas into Iberian markets and beyond. Not only was the official mechanism for registering and taxing pearls flawed (as will be discussed in more detail below), but the majority of the pearls traveled through private channels. Nonetheless, abundant—if eclectic—evidence from the time period attests to the immense influx of Caribbean pearls and their importance to individuals and to the crown as adornment, money, and sources of imperial funding.²⁶

With pearl harvesting and circulation embedded in religious, commercial, and political networks that spanned the globe, pearls from all over traded hands among humble and enterprising individuals, facilitating the fortunes of small-scale businessmen (and women) of varying profiles, even as they were used by rulers to arrange marriages, pay for armies, and convey status and spectacular wealth. In Seville, pearls generated their own specialists within the larger jewel trade—at least six pearl drillers and twenty-two silversmiths who specialized in working with pearls lived in the Andalusian port town from 1517 through the close of the 1540s. The ability to drill a pearl without shattering it was a valuable one; in 1525, one Andrés de Carmona, identified as a “seed-pearl driller,” bought an enslaved woman and her son in exchange for 15,000 maravedis, or 40 ducados (maravedis are coins that served as the base unit of accounting, with 375 equaling 1 ducado) and the promise to drill twenty-four marcos (or roughly twelve pounds) of aljofar, or seed pearl, for clothing.²⁷

Not all the pearls arriving in Iberian port towns came on official ships. The distribution of Caribbean pearls was not necessarily chaotic, but it certainly obeyed a different, privately determined order from the vision the monarchy held for the controlled distribution of this source of New World wealth. Individuals, royal officials, and the crown did not often act in concert when it came to moving wealth around the Atlantic, and pearls were particularly susceptible to personal rather than royal fiat, small and easily hidden as they were. Records of small-scale pearl transactions reveal how the jewel facilitated personal aims, alliances, and fortunes. An early example comes from 1522, when French corsairs attacked the ship of one Alonso de Algaba just off the Portuguese coast as it was returning to Spain from the Indies loaded with many items of value. A Portuguese ship came to the rescue only a short time later, but the crew then seized all precious items from the Spanish ship. This double piracy generated a series of exchanges between the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs and their ambassadors, as the Spanish king attempted to recover the fruits of his overseas domains on behalf of the merchants who had claims to the ship’s cargo. The Portuguese king finally relented and ordered the return of the confiscated merchandise, pearls included—only to have the Spanish officials in charge of redistributing the recovered jewels to their original owners withhold a portion of the valuable cargo.²⁸

Some years later, a similar case unfolded involving the jewels carried aboard the ship of one Alonso Delgado, on his way to Spain from Hispaniola on a ship whose cargo included pearls from Cubagua. After a forced landing on the island of Faial in the Azores, he transferred his goods to a Portuguese ship and sailed into the Portuguese port of Viana. Upon arrival, port officials seized all his cargo. When Delgado sued for the return of his goods in court, he won back nearly all of his possessions—but a tenth of his pearls remained with the port officials. Delgado lodged a complaint with the Spanish ambassador to Portugal, who then relayed the incident to Charles V, who demanded that the pearls be returned to Delgado, employing language that explicitly stated that the wrong to the individual was a wrong perpetrated against the crown and its control of the Indies trade. It is unclear whether Delgado received his pearls. In these early decades of overseas imperial administration, however, the success of laws governing the management of overseas wealth depended as much upon individuals’ assessment of their utility as official enforcement. The dialogue between individual imperative and imperial directive was not entirely antagonistic but rather often mutually reinforcing, with privately assessed value intersecting with imperially dictated approaches to wealth management. The experiences of both Algaba and Delgado attest to how possession could challenge and legitimatize formal claims to jurisdiction.²⁹

Another glimpse of the interplay between private approaches to wealth management and the nascent imperial regulatory infrastructure is offered by the case of Hispaniola resident Antonio Meléndez. In 1526, at the height of Cubagua’s pearl boom, Meléndez sent pearls from the West Indies to his wife in Spain via a cleric and friend. When the ship on which the cleric was traveling docked in Lisbon, the cleric disembarked with the pearls, whereupon Portuguese port authorities promptly seized them, claiming that he had lost the right to keep them by carrying them into foreign territory. In an attempt to regain the jewels, the intended recipient of the pearls, Inez de la Fuentes, wrote directly to the crown. Charles V in turn wrote to king João III of Portugal and asked him to restore the pearls. By this time, the pearls had made their way into the possession of a resident of Lisbon, who presumably had bought them from an enterprising port official. Individuals could easily bypass rules that were not yet hard and fast; defending his decision to carry the pearls off the ship, the cleric claimed his only crime was ignorance of the “law and custom” of Portugal. Whether or not the cleric knew the rules, it seems likely that he carried the pearls off the boat hoping to sell one or two on the Lisbon market and to keep the profit as payment for serving as a courier.³⁰

Nor was it only Europeans who put pearls to private uses: in spite of stringent measures intended to control divers’ movements in the settlements and their contact with pearls, they frequently managed to keep many for themselves. As a result, Charles V issued a decree in 1527 detailing punishments for slaves who absconded with pearls. Later in the century, slaves were permitted to purchase their freedom, but only by paying with gold, not with pearls—presumably because pearls were too easy to come by.³¹

The crown issued regular measures intended to cut down on the number of pearls that disappeared from official sight as soon as they were pried from the oysters that produced them. The attention the crown gave to these failures of accounting suggests a deep concern with the proliferation and promiscuous circulation of the jewel. If only residents would store pearls properly (in iron chests with three keys specified by the crown) and send the court the requested varietals of pearls, the Casa de Contratación could keep track of them, and the crown could rest assured that proper oversight of this resource prevailed. But these mechanisms did little to achieve their intended purpose. The series of royal decrees invoking the power of storage protocols, official pearl evaluators, and proper counting houses and warehouses mark the attempt to hold some beachhead of royal authority against the relentless tide of actual practices. In a world of rapidly evolving laws and customs, individuals acted independently in their assessments of risks and rewards. They worried about government response only if necessary.³²

This type of independently determined action involving pearls characterized their circulation at court as well as on the high seas and in bustling harbor towns. Throughout the 1520s, jewelers employed by the royal household bought pearls from individual merchants; female members of the royal households of Spain and Portugal arranged pearl purchases directly from one another; agents of the Portuguese crown bought Caribbean pearls in Seville. In spite of the quantity of pearls (or perhaps because of it: it was very easy to remove a single pearl, or handful of pearls, from a large pile of them, their absence barely detectable yet their new owner enriched) and royal efforts to count and tax the jewel, the flow of pearls remained unpredictable and difficult to track.³³

Spanish attempts to draw the Pearl Coast, its products and inhabitants, into an imperial fiscal and administrative orbit would require a new approach to the region’s resources. However, officials first tried to institute familiar mechanisms for managing wealth. For example, the introduction of the quinto into the governance of Pearl Coast wealth reflected familiar practices such as those laid out in the Siete Partidas, but it fell short in revealing ways. Pearls posed particular accounting problems. The crown attempted—and largely failed—to fiscalize this irregular jewel by treating it as bullion and seeking to impose the weight-based tax of a fifth of production, the quinto. The unit into which pearls were gathered, the marco, was ill suited to capturing the worth of any particular pearl or batch of pearls. The marco was the same weight-based measure used to assess silver bars, but pearls bore little resemblance to precious metals. First, they were very small. Many contemporary sources, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés among them, described Cubaguan pearls as tiny, from two to five carats (with five carats equivalent to one gram). Second, pearls exist in tremendous natural variety, and the worth of any particular specimen reflects its shape, luster, and color in addition to its size. A weight-based measure failed to account for the quality of any given pearl; it reflected ideas about the nature of wealth born of experience with gold and silver rather than an organic maritime product.³⁴ Furthermore, the tax was easy to avoid at sea or on land by skimming the best pearls off the top of the harvest before the quinto was assessed. The private, hidden nature of diving as well as pearls’ small size and immediate accessibility (they did not need to be altered in order to be rendered valuable) made them a very difficult commodity to supervise. At sea and on land, inhabitants of all origins traded pearls for sundry items. Merchants committed fraud by sending unregistered shipments back to European markets alongside registered ones. The regular arrival of pirates and foreign corsairs, who called on the fisheries to do welcome or unwelcome business at predictable intervals throughout the sixteenth century, further contributed to Caribbean pearls’ untaxed circulation. Finally, even if the pearl quinto had been assessed without fraud of any sort, which was highly unlikely, the quinto represented at its most ambitious and frictionless just 20 percent of the pearl harvest. Thus, at least 80 percent of the pearls harvested from the Caribbean oyster beds moved through private channels into markets on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.³⁵

Figure 5. Quentin Metsys, The Moneylender and His Wife. 1514. Oil on wood, 70.5 × 67 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, N.Y.

Where did the pearls that traveled along independent paths end up? Who were the people and what were the practices that facilitated their movement from hand to hand? The picture of pearls sitting on a small black cloth in the 1514 painting by Quentin Metsys, The Moneylender and His Wife, is suggestive of the way a pearl, or pearls, functioned as currency and how pearls could blend unremarkably with similar specimens once sold (Figure 5, Plate 4). While the moneylender and his wife carefully weigh and separate the assorted coins lying on the table in a jumble, the pearls sit apart. They are part of the panorama of liquid wealth from which the couple makes their living, but they cannot be weighed and categorized like the coins. Resting invitingly on what appears to be a small black cushion, their provenance and future remain a mystery. The pearls’ simple beauty reveals nothing about their origin. There is no hint of what purpose they might be put to in the future: they do not seem to have been drilled for use in jewels. The pearls simply lie in wait for the infinite possible fantasies and paths that potential consumers may project upon them.

In the hands of monarchs, pearls functioned to further imperial goals through diplomatic alliances and large-scale financial transactions. During his nearly forty-year reign, Charles V made liberal political use of the jewel, granting large numbers of pearls to trusted advisers or potential dynastic allies. In 1518, the king granted the wife of a courtier that year’s entire royal pearl allotment. On numerous occasions throughout the early 1520s, he promised his sister Leonor, the wife of King Manuel of Portugal, all the pearls from the Indies, perhaps laying the groundwork for his own 1526 marriage with Isabel of Portugal. It is no wonder that pearls figured prominently in the emperor’s political negotiations: over the course of his reign, Charles V received a total of fifteen thousand marcos of pearls—34.5 million pearls (nearly eight thousand pounds)—two-thirds of them from the pearl fisheries along the Pearl Coast and the remainder from pearl-fishing ventures along the South American coast and in Panama.³⁶

The king further influenced the distribution of American pearls across global markets through his use of administrative concessions that tied non-Spanish merchants to the wealth of the Pearl Coast. German merchants, jewelers, and bankers figured prominently in the Caribbean fisheries’ early years thanks to the particular diplomatic alliances that the Spanish crown pursued in the name of securing powerful European supporters. The king’s willingness to grant the Welser family administrative control of Venezuela from 1528 to 1556, the height of the fisheries’ production boom (a concession that recognized the Welsers’ support of his successful bid for the title of Holy Roman emperor), reflected the influence of European concerns on the initial administrative approach to the New World. The Welsers were also crucial in the development of the slave trade in the region: they solidified their commercial ties to the Pearl Coast when Charles V granted them the slave trade asiento (or contract) in 1528.³⁷

Welser-affiliated merchants as well as the factors of other German and Flemish commercial houses such as the Fuggers and Herwarts also became major distributors of pearls from the Pearl Coast beginning in the 1520s, placing pearls at the heart of the networks of resource distribution that launched the Atlantic imperial economy and spanned the global Iberian world. Representatives of the Herwart family and Seville-based merchant Lazarus Nürnberger were charged with receiving all pearls delivered to Seville from Cubagua and seeing them safely to the Casa de Contratación. Nürnberger worked as a factor for the Hirschvogel firm in India in 1517 and, as noted earlier, sold pearls from both the East and West Indies to German and Turkish clients. These men became Seville’s principal pearl merchants for the duration of Charles’s reign.³⁸ By drawing these northern European merchants into the trade in New World pearls, Charles V set in motion the globalization of the trade in one of the Spanish crown’s flagship Atlantic imports, positioning the Americas in global context from their earliest post-Columbus days.³⁹

The movements and uses of pearls, then, in these earliest years of Atlantic empire reveal the numerous imperatives shaping patterns of transoceanic commerce and administration in the initial decades of the sixteenth century. Produced by an unfamiliar habitat, harvested by indigenous Americans and, increasingly, Africans, and moved throughout global markets by Europeans of various provenances, pearls illuminate the myriad small- and large-scale interests molding the contours of this New World and the infrastructure intended to govern it.

Aware of the failings of the quinto as a taxation mechanism, royal administrators turned to the nuances of language to counteract its inefficiencies, introducing elaborate categories in which to place pearls depending on their perceived quality. The taxonomy of pearls was from its inception intimately tied to the administration of imperial wealth and stands as a striking example of language intervening to add precision and efficacy to power structures. By the 1520s, these terms for pearls aimed to better capture the inherent variety of the natural jewel and the resulting profound variation in any individual specimen’s perceived worth. Intended to separate pearls into useful subcategories within the marco, the descriptors in circulation (there were at least twenty-one different qualitative classifications in use during the decade) could capture a pearl’s form or its function. A perla barrueca (baroque pearl) was a bulbous, irregular pearl; a perla chata, a flat pearl; an asiento pearl was flat on one side and round on the other. One of the chief determinants of a pearl’s worth was its oriente, or orient, referring to a pearl’s general luster and reflecting the jewel’s historic association with the Far East. These categories changed over time and in part reflected the common uses to which pearls were put. The employment of this subjective, evaluative language reflected the mixture of fantasy and reality informing the regulatory infrastructure intended to govern the New World’s products and people. On the one hand, the terms assigned to the Pearl Coast and the people who lived and labored there effaced realities on the ground, emphasizing the product (pearls) over the processes that produced them. On the other hand, the ever-changing range of words employed to describe the pearls themselves reflected the crown’s fiscal aims (the descriptive categories were intended to facilitate taxation of pearls) but also reflected the uses to which people put pearls in the fisheries and beyond.⁴⁰

If the vocabulary for pearls was rich and nuanced, the opposite was true of the language to describe the settlements and their inhabitants. The simple pearl-centered descriptors belied the rough-and-ready, hodge-podge, and violent nature of the island settlements, which relied on the labor of a variety of people employed in different capacities. The diversity of the region’s inhabitants and European reliance on indigenous partners and Europe alike for necessary food and supplies was elided by regional nomenclatures that suggested that pearls were the sole purpose of the settlements and their inhabitants. This perception was both true and misleading. Not only was the region called the Pearl Coast, or the Seed Pearl Coast, the region’s residents were also defined by their involvement with the pearl fisheries. Owners of oyster boats were called señores de canoas, or “lords of canoes,” “canoes” being the term for the (increasingly large) vessels used to arrive at the oyster banks. Indian and later African laborers were also frequently referred to as buzos de la pesquerias de perlas, or “pearl fishery divers.” Although residents complained to the crown about the stench of large piles of rotting oysters in the pearl-fishing settlements, references to oysters were conspicuously absent elsewhere.⁴¹ The phrases used to describe the enslaved divers suggested that they did not fish for oysters but for pearls themselves: they were known as esclavos de perlas, or “pearl slaves”; negros de concha, or “conch blacks”; or sacadores de perlas, “pearl extractors.” Only the terms for the settlements themselves— granjerías (from granja, farm)—evoked general cultivation rather than the extraction of pearls.⁴²

Just as the predominance of “pearls” in the toponymy of the region elided the range of needs and activities of the residents, the vocabulary of administrative structure imposed an imaginary order on the chaos of flux and impermanence that characterized the island. As the population of Cubagua grew, its changing legal status brought with it the development of municipal organization, with mayors, councils, and deputies all structured and governed by Spanish law. Granting the island’s settlement of Nueva Cádiz the title of villa (town) in 1526 and ciudad (city) in 1528 revealed royal and residential aspirations for the incorporation of Cubagua into a European-based fabric of empire and carried powerful and long-standing associations with paradigms of Spanish civic and governmental control. However, the imperatives of local governance proved more influential on both regional patterns and crown approaches to the management of Cubagua and the entire Pearl Coast. As these formal Spanish terms bestowed notions of civic incorporation upon these pearl-fishing settlements, the reality of those who lived and labored in them stood in stark contrast to the order that the familiar terms implied. In fact, they were new settlements with new types of relationships being forged in them, relationships among subjects and between subjects and the environment.⁴³

Pearls’ abundance and the crown’s reliance on them for all sorts of purposes made manifest early on the difficulties of managing the jewel, posed primarily by their range in quality and kind. The qualitative language for pearl assessment proved critical to officials back in Spain charged with managing the jewel’s distribution. Because of the subjective nature of these categories (one man’s baroque pearl might be another man’s asiento pearl; the gem’s irregular shape assessed differently), pearls also served as a reminder of the confounding independence of individual assessments of worth. Fiscalizing pearls depended upon the judgment of those subjects charged with assessing them, which was highly variable and beyond control.

The frustration caused by this reliance on individual acumen is evident in the king’s negotiations about pearls with customs officials in the Casa de Contratación. In 1525, 416 undrilled pearls that the Casa officials had sent to the court needed to be weighed again upon arrival: the king chastised officials of the Casa for sending him pearls from Seville without “seeing, counting, and weighing them.” Six months later, the king again ordered the Casa to auction all gold and silver arrived from the Indies and to sell all pearls except for 15 marcos “of the largest barrueca pearls and of all types,” which he needed at court. Why he needed them is unclear, but it is noteworthy that he wanted these irregular specimens for a particular use. In November, he ordered the sale of 170 marcos of pearls and requested that a particularly large pearl from Cubagua be sent to the court. Every royal request or rebuke involving pearls pointed to the essential role played by subjects’ independent judgment in their assessment of the jewel.⁴⁴

Employing the various terms in circulation to describe pearls of distinct qualities, Charles V and customs officials in Seville often differed over how to evaluate and dispose of the pearls delivered from the Pearl Coast. Whereas unusual or particularly valuable specimens were usually sent to the court for incorporation into the royal wardrobe, the king also used pearls as a source of cash, selling large numbers of them to finance his mounting military campaigns throughout Europe. These latter appropriations forced the king to confront the adverse effects of rising pearl harvests on their price as well as the inadequacies of the existing administrative bureaucracy charged with channeling pearls between the monarchy’s expanding realms. Presumably motivated by concerns about the price of pearls, in 1525 Charles V ordered that Casa officials maintain absolute secrecy about the arrival of pearls from the Indies. No one was to see them, and, if possible, their mere presence in the Casa was to be kept a secret until the king himself gave the order. After the monarch asked officials what pearls were selling for, Casa officials warned the king that a surfeit of pearls had brought the price down, and a marco of pearls was selling for just thirteen ducados (or ducats, each worth 375 maravedis). In need of cash, Charles V nonetheless ordered the bulk of the shipment sold and the proceeds sent to court—along with particular types of pearls (large ones and those with varied shapes) that he intended for personal use.⁴⁵

In 1527—Cubagua’s peak year of production, with a quinto of nearly 1,300 marcos—the king again drew on pearls to finance the costs of his expanding empire and in his haste bypassed the directives of his own administrators. Six ships bearing 505 marcos of pearls arrived in Seville at the end of that summer, and the impending glut of pearls threatened to bring their price down. The king’s counselors advised him to hold off on the sale, but the monarch could not afford to wait: he ordered that the pearls be sold at the highest prices possible “because due to the need we have here we cannot wait any longer as you say.” Ignoring the advice of his administrators, the king turned directly to a private merchant to dispose of the jewels. The Casa learned that the king had arranged for the sale of the pearls to Burgos merchant Cristobal de Haro, at 10.5 ducados per marco, for which de Haro paid in specie directly to the court.⁴⁶

The single-minded focus on the pursuit of pearls in the fisheries belied the complexity that characterized the settlements, their inhabitants, and the multiple uses—in the Caribbean and far beyond—to which the jewel was put. The patterns of pearl circulation (highly variable, determined privately, and difficult to control) reveal the central element of the political economy of the jewel to have been independent judgment. It was independent judgment that determined not only the nature of the pearl in question (its type and worth) but also the risks and rewards involved in moving, selling, or buying the pearl. The detailed and shifting qualitative vocabulary for describing pearls in the pearl fisheries in these early decades found an echo in the similarly diverse judgments that individuals made when deciding how best to use the pearl to further their own aims.

Technology and Ecology in the Pearl Fisheries

The pearl bonanza carried many costs, some that became immediately visible and some that took decades of dialogue between Pearl Coast residents and the crown to come to light. It was not until the 1520s that the lessons of the pearl fisheries began to become clear, as the haphazard settlement of the early years gave way to a brutal, if lucrative, regime of natural and human resource exploitation and a host of related problems of governance. Over time, the region’s astonishing pearl hauls laid bare the contingent components of wealth creation in the New World, such as the role of ecology and expertise in the cultivation and assessment of this natural resource. New, site-specific approaches to the management of natural and human resources resulted from this maelstrom of maritime destruction and terrestrial transformation, although they developed after much trial and error. Even as news of the extraordinary conquests in Mexico in the 1520s (and, later, in the 1530s, in Peru) reached Spain, the American pearls flowing throughout Caribbean markets and into Seville served to remind people of the wealth being produced along the Pearl Coast. Indeed, the sharpest price inflation under Charles V occurred during the fisheries’ heyday of the 1520s, and it is hard to imagine that observers of Seville’s dockside hustle and bustle did not associate the proliferation of these iridescent gems with the perplexingly painful consequences of this newfound, American wealth.⁴⁷

The numbers of oysters it took to produce the record pearl hauls of the 1520s are difficult to comprehend (see Figure 6). Later arrivals to the Caribbean noticed the lack of birdsong owing to deforestation, but equally stunning, if less immediately obvious, was the alteration of the submarine ecosystem of this corner of the Americas. The estimates of marine biologists who have studied the Venezuelan fisheries suggest that on average a single pearl was found for every ten oysters opened. Using these estimates as a guide, it would have taken an annual harvest of approximately 40 million oysters during the Cubaguan fisheries’ most lucrative decades to produce the pearls reported in official tax records. These numbers indicate an estimated harvest of 1.2 billion oysters in fewer than three decades.⁴⁸

Figure 6. Modern Middens (shell mounds), Isla de Coche, Venezuela. Photograph by Molly A. Warsh

The ecological consequences of these immense oyster harvests were not immediately visible to royal officials, but the corresponding depression of pearl prices as the result of excessive pearl availability drew people’s attention, as did the continual complaints about abuses of all sorts in the fisheries. Perhaps the most dramatic royal failure to impose order on the settlements came in the form of its controversial and futile sponsorship of technology intended to eliminate the need for the labor force that was causing such problems. The Spanish crown backed various oyster-harvesting devices over the course of the sixteenth century, only to meet with repeated failure on the Pearl Coast. In their rejection of these technological intrusions, fishery residents put forth an understanding of the maritime realm as a shared commons where resource control could be established through demonstrated expertise.

The first extant license for mechanized pearl fishing dates to 1520, granted to one Juan de Cárdenas, a pilot and resident of Seville. The terms of his agreement with the crown reflect the lingering influence of ideas about pearls as booty and treasure—wealth to be taxed, rather than cultivated—that informed the royal approach. The challenges that would prompt later mechanical proposals once the full social and environmental costs of the pearl fisheries’ operation became clear (deadly and heavily criticized labor regimes, unorthodox on-island dynamics, and reduced oyster hauls) were not yet apparent. Cárdenas’s license permitted him to arm two caravels (sailing ships) to travel to the coast of Paria (present-day Venezuela) in search of various types of material wealth: gold, silver, precious stones, and slaves as well as pearls. Although the license identifies Coche and Cubagua by name and alludes to rumors of pearl wealth in the vicinity, neither island had emerged as a clear center of pearl-fishing operations.⁴⁹

Several aspects of Cárdenas’s contract suggest that crown hopes for the region already reflected Pearl Coast realities. Cárdenas was explicitly instructed to conduct peaceful trade with the area’s native inhabitants in exchange for goods. This directive spoke to rising concerns about Spanish treatment of the New World’s indigenous inhabitants and the harmful persistence of violent rescate practices. Indeed, the autonomy of the Pearl Coast’s indigenous residents was recognized in the crown’s description of “the people who come to fish for pearls.” Already, it appears that part of the appeal of Cárdenas’s device was its promise to facilitate independent Spanish action by introducing technology, allowing oyster harvesting to proceed without a reliance on these autonomous indigenous pearl harvesters. Cárdenas claimed to have “had word” of pearls that could be found in depths beyond the reach of human divers—his technology would deliver the otherwise inaccessible riches of these waters. Cárdenas’s invention (which his contract described only generally as a “certain device with which you’re confident you will be able to retrieve” pearls) disappeared from the historical record; it could not compete in the face of the demographic transformations that swept the pearl fisheries in the years immediately following his proposal.⁵⁰

In their rejection of the similar proposals that followed Cárdenas’s, fishery inhabitants pointed not only to their own experience but also to that of indigenous and African divers in their defense of the unique approach to the management of the area’s human and natural resources. Even amid the immense oyster harvests of the fisheries’ first decades of operation, Spaniards realized they were dealing with a renewable, living resource and that oyster banks recovered when they were left alone for a time.⁵¹ Residents’ careful attention to their sustaining habitat surfaced in the 1529 debates over a dredge proposed by an Italian resident in Seville named Luis de Lampiñan. As soon as Lampiñan arrived on the Pearl Coast, Cubaguan residents protested his intervention, and just nine months after the original grant the king responded to their petition by revising the depths at which Lampiñan could operate his dredges. Realizing that the new depth restrictions would limit his potential profits, Lampiñan fought back, taking his case to the Audiencia de Santo Domingo in late January 1529. In their opposition to Lampiñan’s device, Pearl Coast inhabitants offered their own understandings of how the region’s marine ecosystem functioned in relationship to circum-Caribbean patterns of commerce and labor. While the crown continued to turn to non-Spanish concessionaires who promised mechanical solutions to maritime wealth exploitation, free residents of the fisheries advocated for their own understandings of resource husbandry.⁵²

Lampiñan’s case caught the Spanish crown at a crossroads, torn between the demands and interests of its European territories and subjects and the challenges of a far less familiar New World empire. On the one hand, the crown’s concession to Lampiñan reflected its established willingness to engage non-Spaniards in the exercise of empire—from contracting out the administration of new territories to granting individual merchant concessions. These contracts were themselves tools of empire, but they would not work as well in the crown’s new Atlantic domains as they had in the Old World. The expertise of new subjects—even enslaved and indigenous ones—would prove to be a more powerful ordering principle in the fisheries.

Lampiñan was a minor noble with influence in a region at the center of Spain’s Italian ambitions, and it is possible that the crown thought the royal grant to the Milanese nobleman (and his two Italian partners) would potentially build allegiance within powerful factions in Spain’s ever-fragile Holy Roman imperial territories. Yet the terms of Lampiñan’s contract also reflected the crown’s growing desire to reclaim the prerogatives it had ceded in the early years of administering unfamiliar territories. Granted a six-year monopoly on fishing for pearls in the vicinity of Cubagua, Lampiñan promised to deliver a third of the haul to the crown. This was a higher proportion than the standard fifth and perhaps reflected an awareness of just how much wealth the fisheries could produce in light of the decade’s pearl bonanzas. Nonetheless, the terms of his agreement adhered to a vision of crown prerogative based in the administration of metals rather than maritime wealth.⁵³

In spite of these lingering European influences on Lampiñan’s contract, the appeal of the Italian’s invention undoubtedly reflected the realities of the pearl fisheries. The debates surrounding his dredge occurred at the apex of the settlements’ most lucrative and destructive decade and in a moment of growing concern about both the depletion of the oyster banks and the toll of these profits on the pearl divers. Just a year before the crown granted Lampiñan’s contract, Bartolomé de Las Casas began composing his History of the Indies in which he assailed the labor regime of the pearl fisheries. The fisheries had already become a symbol of New World mismanagement, and Lampiñan’s device spoke directly to these concerns. Writing several decades later, royal chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas noted that the Italian’s dredge (which he described as so large it had to be “pulled by one or two caravels”) was appealing because of its promise to retrieve “larger and more” pearls “without there being a need for Indians or slaves to dive to the bottom of the sea” to get them. The machine’s successful introduction would spare the crown the headache of dealing with this controversial labor system without sacrificing pearl profits. In this context, the crown’s desire to introduce mechanical devices into the fisheries cannot be interpreted as a reflection of uncertainty over how and where to harvest oysters, as had been the case with Cárdenas. Instead, Lampiñan’s license reflected an attempt to address a problem in a profitable but problematic part of the empire.⁵⁴

The uproar over Lampiñan’s proposed dredge underscored how futile such attempts would be if they failed to consider local practice and knowledge. During the trial generated by Lampiñan’s intrusion into their maritime domains, Spaniards parsed the political ecology of the region into its interdependent parts. The Spaniards who sought to discredit Lampiñan and his device carefully monitored the effects of tides, temperatures, and water currents on oyster reproduction and growth. Witnesses called to testify in the trial illuminated the relationships among different subjects and between these subjects and the environment from which they and the crown profited. Residents’ responses indicate that Spanish inhabitants of the pearl fisheries, predatory and extractive though their practices were, also paid attention to maritime ecology even at the height of their oyster-harvesting frenzy.⁵⁵

The case also revealed the autonomy of Cubagua within a Spanish Caribbean whose administration was increasingly consolidated on Hispaniola. In particular, the case highlights the tension between the mandate of the regional court—the Audiencia de Santo Domingo, located on Hispaniola—and the power and independence of the residents of Cubagua. Though Lampiñan concentrated his appeal efforts on Hispaniola, it was on Cubagua itself where the case was most fully discussed, overseen by the island’s council and prominent residents. Distinct claims to authority, rooted in knowledge of place and particular practice, persisted within the changing geography of overseas imperial administration. The preeminence of local practice was in many ways a reassertion of customary law over imperial law, of tradition as much as innovation.⁵⁶

As the trial unfolded, Spaniards familiar with pearl-fishing practices on the Pearl Coast justified their jurisdiction over a large swath of Caribbean waters through their demonstration of knowledge about the coast’s land and seascapes—knowledge generated in large part by the labor of New World subjects. The witnesses made the case to the crown that free and unfree residents of the Pearl Coast were the region’s essential administrators and that its productivity depended upon their practices, rather than some Italian interloper’s. Spaniards did not point solely to indigenous wisdom to make their case; they bolstered their claims by citing their own experience on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. All the men called to testify had been in the American pearl fisheries for some time, and many also referenced knowledge of dredges gained while working in Iberia.

Even as the Spaniards in their testimony invoked the European context to bolster their claims to authority, they emphasized to the crown that the pearl fisheries were a new setting that demanded innovation and the skills of new subjects. Indeed, the witnesses’ attention to the region’s marine ecology focused on the indigenous divers’ critical role in exploiting and caring for the oyster banks. Only the divers could hear the noises the oysters made, Spaniards claimed, sounds likened to “hogs rooting for acorns”—likely the snapping shrimp or other marine life that flocked to the rich waters where pearl fishing took place. From the sonic landscapes of oyster reefs to the centrality of sea grass to oyster reproduction patterns, to the deleterious effects of raking the ocean floor and the care divers took to harvest only full-sized specimens, trial testimony revealed that Spaniards relied on divers’ expertise. Spaniards’ incorporation of indigenous knowledge was further demonstrated in witnesses’ employment of the Taíno term xaguey, meaning the deep underwater depressions where good pearl-bearing oysters were found. The success of the pearl fisheries and the regional economy they sustained depended upon skilled labor. The oyster habitat required careful, knowledgeable custodianship, as did the divers, who, Spaniards observed, needed rest days if they were to be productive.⁵⁷

When the trial’s judges finally sent all testimony to the Council of the Indies in Spain, they included a damning assessment of the proposed dredge’s potential impact on the region’s political economy. Their statement linked pearl fishing and the pearl trade with regional commerce and the wealth of the empire: “[The dredge] would destroy the said island, its householders [veçinos] and residents, and the trade and fishing of pearls would cease, which would cause great damages to his Majesty’s revenue and royal dues [derechos reales] and to the said householders, residents, and traders on the said island, and not only to them, but also to those islands with which they trade, because commerce and trade between them would cease.” In this explanation of their rejection of the Italian’s dredge, Cubaguan residents identified themselves as the crucial administrators of the wealth of empire; his “Majestys revenue and royal dues” were inseparable from their own locally determined practices.⁵⁸

Throughout the trial, witnesses spoke to the proposed dredge’s effects on tax revenue as well as to its impact on the region’s trade. Each witness was asked to confirm that “the interest and benefit that accrues to the crown from these realms if their villas and towns are inhabited, paying the taxes they owe to his majesty, are far greater than the profits [provecho] that would result from dredging in the said island and surrounding areas [comarcas].” The representatives of the councils of Santo Domingo and Salvaleón de Higüey on Hispaniola added their voices to the chorus of complaints about the device, stating that inhabitants of the surrounding region came to Cubagua to sell their food products in exchange for pearls. Their testimony was followed just days afterward by statements from residents of Cubagua and San Juan, all of whom asserted that their livelihoods depended on their commerce with Cubagua, a commerce that would cease if the islands were to be abandoned because of the introduction of the Italian’s dredge.⁵⁹

Although there were multiple claims for jurisdiction over the region’s human and natural wealth, these regional opinions prevailed in their explanation of the region’s political economy.⁶⁰ Cubagua residents successfully defeated the interloper. Charles V revoked his agreement with Luis de Lampiñan and went on to pass several protective measures that reflected the information generated by the Italian’s case. In the Pearl Islands, the local cabildo, or council of governing men, were the most important arbiters in local matters. A number of laws aimed at protecting pearl divers addressed the depth of dives and the maximum duration of shifts in the pearl canoes. Furthermore, in the 1530s, the crown passed a series of preventive bans intended to protect the oyster banks. These included a system of rotation whereby different oyster banks were fished for a period of time and then left dormant; pearl fishing was also prohibited in particular months, presumably to protect breeding and young oysters during the rest of the year. The crown additionally prohibited the seizure of divers in the case of their owners’ debt; their labor was deemed too essential to the fisheries’ operation.⁶¹

As pearl-fishing operations expanded along the coast of the mainland, fishery residents’ reliance on ever-larger boats manned by increasing numbers of enslaved divers prompted additional prohibitive legislation. In 1537, Charles V tried to address the destruction of young oysters by banning the use of big pearl-fishing boats (known as canoas grandes or piraguas), capable of holding more than six divers. Addressing Cubaguan officials, the king urged a return to the use of “canoes with a single oar” with smaller crews, since the practice of using “big canoes” and catching “new and old oysters” indiscriminately “has greatly diminished the oyster beds.” Free and unfree residents of the Pearl Coast, rather than the crown, which only passed reactive legislation, remained the imperfect custodians of the region’s resources.⁶²

In the meantime, the laborers at the heart of these negotiations over jurisdiction in the fisheries continued to endure exposure to extreme violence, their bodies thrown overboard by canoe owners when the divers died in the boat from exertion. Those pearl divers still in the water were then further endangered by the sharks drawn to the jettisoned corpses. The crown became aware of these practices and attempted to deter them by establishing fines for such behavior in a 1538 decree. The fines suggest that Christianity served as a somewhat useful distinction in the fisheries among enslaved or semi-enslaved Indians and Africans, many of whom bore Christian names in addition to a surname consisting of some ethnic identifier. Although this apparent conversion to Christianity did not protect them from the brutal labor of diving for pearls, it might have afforded them a slightly more dignified death. The fine for throwing “Christian” slaves overboard was twice as much for slaves referred to solely as “black and Indian,” without any religious modifier.⁶³

Even as the crown attempted to reclaim some of the prerogatives it had ceded in its earliest concessions to Columbus and his successors, the proliferating mechanisms for trying to control subjects and objects along the Pearl Coast came to limited effect. Pearls’ promiscuous movement from hand to hand on the Pearl Coast and beyond continually frustrated royal attempts to harness New World productivity to political power. The crown could no more control the harvesting, use, and circulation of pearls than it could control the social relations that developed from the practice of pearl fishing. Pearls could not be controlled as either natural resource or commodity, a blurry distinction in the fisheries. In the absence of specie, residents used pearls as currency and also transformed them into jewelry. The crown targeted both of these practices by establishing in 1531 a marco’s equivalency in pesos de oro and also by continually prohibiting pearl drilling on the islands. Facilitating the orderly transfer of pearls between the Costa de Perlas and Spain proved equally difficult. In 1535, royal officials in Cubagua reported to the king that the Casa had failed to acknowledge the receipt of pearl shipments for more than four years. The monarchy responded with a decree ordering the Casa to provide receipt of pearls in the future and to write an account of the types and quantities of pearls that they had received from Cubagua over the previous ten years.⁶⁴

In the fisheries themselves, enslaved workers in the settlements continued to respond to their captivity and treatment in numerous ways. In the 1530s, the crown specified the punishment (one hundred lashes delivered in public and the amputation of the right hand if a weapon was involved) for any black slave who assaulted a “christian.” Flight from the settlements was another option for the enslaved, an indication of the inadequacy of Spanish authority on the pearl-fishing islands and the mainland. In 1538, local officials enumerated the financial responsibilities of any island resident wanting to own more than two black slaves—he had to contribute to a common fund from which search parties for runaways could be paid, among other things. By the end of the 1530s, the issue of black slaves’ fleeing both Cubagua and Margarita was serious enough to warrant a royal decree determining the punishments to be meted out to slaves who escaped and were caught, which ranged from one hundred lashes to the amputation of the right foot and both ears, to death. On the larger island of Margarita, laborers could flee to the mountains or the remote Macanao Peninsula; the mainland also saw the growth of Maroon communities that would endure for centuries in many iterations. Rough socializing among pearl-fishery inhabitants characterized these settlements as much as the violence and coercion that sustained their labor regime. Spaniards bought and sold and beat the Indian and African laborers who worked on the island, but they also drank and consorted and formed long-term unions with them. If they survived the day’s labors, at night these free and semifree laborers moved about the island with considerable autonomy; they traded and socialized with their putative masters. The crown objected but could do little to alter these realities. These prohibitions paint a picture of a chaotic and fluid society where people—much like the pearls that united them in a common, if coerced, purpose—moved fluidly and without de facto regard for de jure categories. What happened at sea could not be separated from the relationships that obtained on land.⁶⁵

Meanwhile, because pearls could be used to import anything, their abundance discouraged the growth of other industries along the coast. This dependence on a single natural resource molded inhabitants’ relationship with the crown in a number of ways. Fishery residents ignored crown directives when they did not suit them but sought royal intervention if it promised to be beneficial. Cubaguans continually pled poverty and asked for exemptions from import duties. In 1532, the crown responded to a petition from the officials and residents of the city of Nueva Cádiz on Cubagua stating that, because of the regular importation of woolen and cotton clothing, there were no artisans, and women had nothing with which to occupy themselves or from which to earn a living. The crown ruled in the residents’ favor and prohibited the importation of the specified items in order to encourage the presence of “artisans, tailors, and seamstresses.” But, although the crown could bestow the lofty titles of villa and ciudad upon the rapacious settlements and attempt to summon civic occupations such as tailors and seamstresses into existence through decrees, the pearl fisheries continued to be communities dominated in character and labor by one goal—pearl extraction. The singular focus on pearls was pursued by a multitude of people in cacophonous, violent collaboration.⁶⁶

Crown encouragement of new professions notwithstanding, the region’s political economy continued to revolve around pearls and the human and natural resources that went into producing them. In 1535, the crown ordered that Margarita Indians be permitted to work for Spaniards in the fisheries “because this was the only way they could eat.” Perhaps the crown was responding to fictitious claims from Spanish residents, who were hoping to force the crown to approve Indian labor. Even if such assertions were spurious, however, they reflected the degree to which the pearl fishery impoverished the region’s economy and inhabitants. In 1536, the queen prohibited the practice of buying land from the Indians because it left them “with nowhere to plant cassava and corn,” prompting them to move off the island and threatening the viability of the settlement. In a phrase that attests to the degree to which the basic needs of fishery inhabitants vied with their desire for wealth, the crown lamented in 1538 the damage caused by Spaniards who left the Pearl Islands for the mainland in search of “oro, ropa y maiz”: gold topped the list, but clothing and corn immediately followed.⁶⁷

Pearls set the tone for economies of exchange, coercion, and negotiation on the Pearl Coast, but they also existed within commercial networks that extended far beyond this corner of the Caribbean and that revolved around other goods. Indeed, pearls’ ability to move seamlessly from place to place, embedded in multiple overlapping commercial networks, made it almost impossible to track and tax them. Furthermore, pearls’ variegated pathways point to the numerous concerns, people, and contexts that drove their movement beyond imperial directives. In 1540, for example, Charles V ordered the royal court of Hispaniola to take great care to register all items being traded to slave-bearing Portuguese ships because too often these ships failed to declare the merchandise they received from Spanish settlers in return for slaves. As a result, most of the “passengers, gold, silver, and pearls that [Portuguese captains] leave on the Azores islands or in Portugal” remained unregistered and untaxed. The king went on to complain that only a couple of token ships ever returned to Seville in compliance with the law that Portuguese slave traders report all imported goods to the Spanish Council of Trade. These were not isolated incidents: Charles V communicated regularly with the officials at the Casa de la Contratación about the illegal unloading of pearls and other items in the Azores and how to put an end to this independent trade.⁶⁸

After the extraordinary first four decades of exploration and exploitation in pearl fisheries east and west, the Caribbean heyday came to a close in a fittingly spectacular and destructive fashion. In 1541, a tsunami wiped out the city of Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua, likely destroying the island’s remaining oyster banks as well. New mainland conquests reaped human and material rewards for the crown that overshadowed the profits from pearls—even though the jewel still drew attention from Spanish explorers with an eye for New World wealth, as Hernando de Soto’s accounts of mainland pearl wealth during his 1539–1542 travels attest. French corsairs attacked what remained of the settlement in 1543, carrying people and pearls to Panama and even Peru.⁶⁹

The early history of these settlements illuminates the mutually constructive nature of the regulatory mechanisms of the global Iberian empires. These mechanisms in theory governed the pearl fisheries, but their efficacy depended upon the movements of pearls and people within and beyond the Pearl Coast. Early royal visions of wealth management failed to encompass the realities of life in the pearl fisheries, where residents produced distinct understandings of the relationship between economies on land and ecologies at sea as well as between the labor of diverse subjects and the wealth of the empire. Thus it was in this context, with multiple people pursuing profit with distinct understandings of what that meant and how to create it, that recent arrivals and longtime inhabitants of the Americas argued in word and deed about the nature of a New World empire. Together they debated how to govern its diverse subjects and how to cultivate, harvest, and tax its products. Pearls’ identity at the intersection of natural resource and commodity forced a rethinking of approaches to wealth management, one the precedents established in the Siete Partidas could not address. The conflicting approaches to wealth husbandry that shaped Europe’s New World political economy are glimpsed with clarity in the vocabularies and practices that characterized the pearl fisheries.⁷⁰

Notes

1. On tobacco and chocolate, see Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, N.Y., 2008). On pearls in the Americas and indigenous conceptions of them, see Nicholas J. Saunders, “Biographies of Brilliance: Pearls, Transformations of Matter and Being, c. AD 1492,” World Archaeology, XXXI (1999), 243–257. Despite the commonalities of European and indigenous views of pearls, however, pearls were not exempted from the European instinct to dismiss indigenous ability to assess worth. Columbus wrote of his encounter with native peoples off the coast of Venezuela, “There wasn’t anyone on board who knew gold from pyrite or pearl from chrysoberyl” (ibid., 243). Ann Marie Mester, The Pearl Divers of Los Frailes: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Exploration of Sumptuary Good Trade and Cosmology in the North and Central Andes (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990), provides an overview of the role of light worship in American indigenous societies.

2. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias . . . , ed. Agustín Millares Carlo, with preliminary study by Lewis Hanke, 3 vols. (Mexico and Buenos Aires, 1951), II, 20, 26. See also Pablo Ojer, La Formación del Oriente Venezolano (Caracas, 1966), 14. Las Casas claimed to have used Columbus’s own diary as his source for the retelling of the admiral’s voyages. On Las Casas’s and Hernando Colón’s biographies of Columbus, see William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, 1993), 9. For a discussion of the Juan de la Cosa map, see Ricardo Cerezo Martínez, La cartografía náutica española en los siglos XIV, XV, y XVI (Madrid, 1994), chap. 7. On Columbus’s imagined riches and the creation of an “economy of the marvelous” upon his return to Spain, see Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago, 2010), 53. Antonello Gerbi discusses Columbus’s turning to Pliny to shore up his hopes for the pearls to be found in the New World in Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, 1985), 13.

3. For the Jan. 20, 1503, decree establishing the Casa de Contratación, see Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de Ultramar (Madrid, 1890), V, 29–42, esp. 39, doc. 9 (quotation). For a discussion of the influence of early pearl-hunting voyages on the genesis of the Casa de Contratación, see Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main: Carl Sauer’s Classic Account of the Land, Nature, and People Columbus Encountered in the Americas (Berkeley, Calif., 1966), 161. For a detailed treatment of the Casa de Contratación and its early history, see Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven, Conn., 1978), 54–57; and Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, Tex., 2006), 35–37. The founding of the Casa marked the beginning of the crown’s campaign to regain some of the prerogatives they had bartered away in their initial agreements with Columbus. For a discussion of the Spanish crown’s evolving approach to the governance of the Indies, see Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge, 2003), 42–48.

4. The German historian Enrique Otte, a prolific scholar of the pearl fisheries and colonial Venezuela, wrote the classic history of the Caribbean pearl fisheries in the early sixteenth century and compiled innumerable royal decrees and correspondence pertaining to the colonial history of the South American Pearl Coast. This book owes an immense debt to his labors and would have been impossible without his pioneering scholarship. Otte discusses the naming of the coast by explorers and the crown in Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua (Caracas, 1977), 93.

5. For details on King Ferdinand’s various attempts to establish an asiento approach (meaning a contract, or individual license, granted to an individual or company by the crown) for the Costa de Perlas from 1504 to 1511 and on the triumph of rescate (forced trade or barter) instead, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 96–97, 102–107, 127–128. Cerezo Martínez, in La cartografía náutica española, discusses the years of plunder that followed Columbus’s 1498 voyage (80–86). See also Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 100–102; and Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 108–114, 190–191. Sauer discusses these voyages as leaving the Pearl Coast “without provision of government” (114). For an additional discussion of the early-sixteenth-century Pearl Coast, see Michael Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost’: Spanish Destruction of the Pearl Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Environ ment and History, XV (2009), 132–133.

6. Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost,’” Environment and History, XV (2009), 129–161, esp. 150. Otte discusses both the introduction of the quinto into the fisheries and the pearl payments it generated in its first years in Las perlas del Caribe, 52–54. For an overview of early political struggles in Hispaniola, see Patricia Seed, “How Globalization Invented Indians the Caribbean,” in Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar, eds., Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day (Liverpool, 2015), 58–82. Frank Moya Pons also discusses Hispaniola’s primacy in the first decades of the sixteenth century in chaps. 1 and 2 of History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (Princeton, N.J., 2007). B. W. Higman writes in A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011) that “Santo Domingo served for a generation as the centre of administration for the whole of Spanish America” (82).

7. For a discussion of Pre-Columbian patterns of resource use on the Venezuelan coast, see Neil L. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498–1820 (Dordrecht-Holland, 1988); and Louis Allaire, “Archaeology of the Caribbean Region,” in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz, eds., The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, III, South America, part 1 (New York, 1999), 668–733.

8. See Neil L. Whitehead, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The Caribbean (1492–1580),” in Salomon and Schwartz, eds., Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, III, part 1, 864–903; CC, II, 172 (Mar. 10, 1540). The original quotation reads: “cudiçia que tenían de sacar perlas, aunque se destruyesen los ostiales.”

9. Neil L. Whitehead, “Native Peoples Confront Colonial Regimes in Northeastern South America (c. 1500–1900),” III, part 2, 382–442 (quotation on 394), and Whitehead, “Crises and Transformations,” III, part 1, 864–903, both in Salomon and Schwartz, eds., Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas. On Spanish contact with the indigenous inhabitants of Margarita, see C. S. Alexander, “Margarita Island, Exporter of People,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, III (1961), 548–557. For a description of pearl-fishing operations and increasingly aggressive behavior by Spaniards on Margarita circa 1520, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 173–176. For more on the Spanish presence and indigenous labor in the early sixteenth century, see Morella A. Jiménez G., La esclavitud indígena en Venezuela (Siglo XVI) (Caracas, 1986), 162–199; Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 120–150; Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost,’” Environment and History, XV (2009), 129–161. Bartolomé de Las Casas described the enslavement and sale of Lucayans in Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Carlo, II, 353. See also William F. Keegan, The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas (Gainesville, Fla., 1992), 221–222.

10. Even as livestock multiplied and pearl-fishing settlements expanded along the mainland coast during the sixteenth century, residents of the pearl fisheries continued to rely on importation (often from Spain as well as the Greater Antilles) to supply some of the fisheries’ most essential needs, such as tar, ropes, sails, and clothing used for the operation of the pearl canoes, and even pine from the Canary Islands for the boats’ construction. For examples of requests for foodstuffs and other goods, see CV, 114 (May 5, 1519), 311 (Sept. 12, 1528); and CC, I, 72 (Aug. 17, 1538), 89 (Sept. 12, 1528), 178 (Oct. 15, 1532); CC, II, 188 (Feb. 26, 1541). See also Allaire, “Archaeology of the Caribbean Region,” in Salomon and Schwartz, eds., Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, III, part 1, 668–733, esp. 670, 673, 683.

11. For the crown’s evolving Indian policy and its effect on the Pearl Coast, see Francisco Domínguez Compañy, “Municipal Organization of the Rancherías of Pearls,” Americas, XXI (1964), 58–68.

12. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, states that 30,000 to 40,000 Lucayans were enslaved and transported. Nancy van Deusen estimates that more than 650,000 indigenous people (a number she says is likely low) were enslaved and forcibly relocated throughout the Iberian world in the sixteenth century, beginning in the 1490s. She acknowledges that exact figures are hard to arrive at given widespread illegal slave raiding and the scarcity of accurate records. Van Duesen also cites Karen F. Anderson-Córdova, “Hispaniola and Puerto Rico: Indian Acculturation and Heterogeneity, 1492–1500” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990), which estimates that 34,000 “foreign” slaves, including Lucayans, were transported to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Otte estimates 6,000, which Van Deusen deems low. See Nancy E. Van Duesen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Durham, N.C., 2015), 2 n. 5.

13. For the significance of the terms caribe and taíno, see Whitehead, “Crises and Transformations,” III, part 1, 864–903, esp. 869–870, 879–880, and Whitehead, “Native Peoples,” III, part 2, 382–442, esp. 407–408, both in Salomon and Schwartz, eds., Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas.

14. For the 1512 petition for esclavas blancas, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 122 n. 589. The 1518 petition is discussed in Esteban Mira Caballos, “Las licencias de esclavos negros a Hispanoamérica (1544–1550),” Revista de Indias, LIV, no. 201 (May–August 1994), 273–297, esp. 275. As late as 1527, blancos ladinos (acculturated whites, likely orthodox Christians from the eastern Mediterranean) worked alongside enslaved indigenous and African laborers in the Caribbean, and one resident received a royal license to bring a woman and a boy identified as such (in addition to “twelve black slaves”) to Hispaniola. The two ladinos were later referred to as “slaves” as well; see “Real Cédula a Francisco de Frías vecino de Salvatierra de la Sabana, dandole licencia para pasar doce esclavos negros y dos blancos ladinos,” July 12, 1527, AGI, IG: 421, legajo 12, fol. 168r (quotations). Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), provides excellent background on patterns of late-medieval Iberian slavery. For more on the influence of Iberian paradigms of slavery on the early Spanish Caribbean in a slightly later period, see David Wheat, “Mediterranean Slavery, New World Transformations: Galley Slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, 1578–1635,” Slavery and Abolition, XXXI (2010), 327–344. For the early African slave trade into Spanish America (including the Gouvenod license and the concession to Dom João’s bastard son), see António de Almeida Mendes, “The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 63–94. See also José Luis Cortés López, “1544–1550: El período más prolífico en la exportación de esclavos durante el s. XVI. Análisis de un interesante documento extraído del Archivo de Simancas,” Espacio, tiempo y forma, Serie 4, Histora moderna, VIII (1995), 63–86.

15. On the simultaneity of these Iberian forays into pearl fishing, see Agnelo Paulo Fernandes, “The Portuguese Cartazes System and the ‘Magumbayas’ on Pearl Fishing in the Gulf,” Liwa, no. 1 (June 2009), 12–24, esp. 5–6. Otte discusses the international networks of pearl merchants and Lazarus Nürnberger’s eastern and western pearl dealings in Las perlas del Caribe, 74.

16. Caught in a series of violent regional conflicts with Muslim rivals, the Paravas decided to seek the protection of the Portuguese king in return for mass conversion to Christianity. On the Paravas and the Fishery Coast, see S. Arunachalam, The History of the Pearl Fishery of the Tamil Coast (Annamalai Nagar, Tamil Nadu, India, 1952). On the Paravas and their relationship with the Jesuits and Christianity, see S. B. Kaufmann, “A Christian Caste in Hindu Society: Religious Leadership and Social Conflict among the Paravas of Southern Tamilnadu,” Modern Asian Studies, XV (1981), 203–234; Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707 (Cambridge, 1984), 141–150, 163–184; and, for a later period, Markus P. M. Vink, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; The Christian Paravas: A ‘Client Community’ in Seventeenth-Century Southeast India,” Itinerario, XXVI, no. 2 (July 2002), 64–98, esp. 70–75. For an overview of Jesuits in India, see Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 49, 91–95, 538–544. On the political organization of southern India in the period, see Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, “Notes on Portuguese Relations with Vijayanagara, 1500–1565,” in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Sinners and Saints: The Successors of Vasco da Gama (Oxford, 1995), 13–39.

17. For a short history of Las Casas, see Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Chichester, U.K., 2011). For a brief discussion of the types of labor indigenous residents of Cubagua performed, see also Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 360–361.

18. The Council of the Indies was established in 1524 to oversee all government activity in the Americas. Las Casas’s condemnation of the Council is: “Muchas veces lo ha mandado remediar el Consejo con cédulas del rey e no ha aprovechado nada, pero la culpa principal y el pecado muy grande tiene el mismo Consejo, porque no parece sino que lo proveen solamente por cumplir e para que no se cumpla lo que en favor de los indios mandan, pues no castigan rigorosamente los que no cumplen lo que en favor de aquellas gentes han proveído y proveen, ha sido la causa principal de estar aquel orbe asolado, lo cual se pedirá a ellos principal y aspérrimamente.” See Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Carlo, III, 404.

19. Bartolomé de Las Casas, An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies with Related Texts, ed. Franklin W. Knight, trans. Andrew Hurley (Indianapolis, Ind., 2003), 62–63 (“no hellish”). For an extended description of the horrors of pearl diving, see Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Carlo, III, 402–403. For an overview of changes in Pearl Coast pearl-fishing practices and crew composition during the sixteenth century, see Molly A. Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition, XXXI (2010), 345–362.

20. Charles V appointed Oviedo official royal chronicler of the Indies, a post he held from 1532 to 1557. Oviedo composed the two-thousand-page General and Natural History of the Indies between 1514 and 1549 while living on Hispaniola. In 1535, the first nineteen books were published (of an eventual fifty); the first part of the History was reprinted in 1547 and translated into French (1555) and Italian (1556). The full work was not published until the mid-nineteenth century. His text provided the most comprehensive coverage of the Indies and was based on primary sources, giving it the authority of an eyewitness account. Fellow chronicler López de Gómara referred to it and to Peter Martyr’s histories as the only true accounts of Spain’s early experiences in the Indies. See Kathleen Ann Myers, Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World, trans. Nina M. Scott (Austin, Tex., 2007), 1–5. Oviedo estimated the yearly value of the pearls received by the crown from the island to be fifteen thousand ducados and more. He describes Cubagua as “muy pequeña y esterilísima e sin gota de agua de río, ni fuente, ni lago o estaño; y con esta y otras dificultades, sin haber en ella donde se pueda sembrar ni hacer mantenimiento alguno para servicio del hombre, ni poder criar ganados, ni aver algún pasto, está habitada y con una gentil república que se llama la Nueva ciudad de Cádiz, y ha sido tanta su riqueza, que tanto por tanto no ha habido en las Indias cosa más rica ni provechosa en lo que está poblado de los cristianos.” See Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo, História General y Natural de las Indias, II, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso (Madrid, 1959), 187–188 (quotation on 188). For his characterization of the settlements as a handful of huts and shacks (toldos y chozas), see 195.

21. For quinto figures, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 52–54. Cubagua’s output fell markedly in the years following 1527, to an average of six hundred marcos from 1528 to 1531, to a quinto of slightly more than three hundred marcos in 1532, to an average of two hundred from 1533 to 1536, followed by quinto payments of fewer than one hundred marcos from 1537 to 1540. These numbers reflected the depletion of the oyster banks closest to Cubagua; pearl harvests from the region remained large because of the discovery of new oyster beds near the neighboring island of Coche. For a discussion of the value of pearl imports, see Huguette Chaunu, Pierre Chaunu, and Guy Arbellot, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504–1650 (Paris, 1957), esp. VII, 613–624.

22. For population statistics, see Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost,’” Environment and History, XV (2009), 135. On Margarita, the Indian population dropped from seven hundred in 1528 to four hundred in 1537; see R. A. Donkin, Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl-Fishing: Origins to the Age of Discoveries (Philadelphia, 1998), 322. For individual pearl shipments and the diversity of these private entrepreneurs, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 64. Las perlas del Caribe focuses on the commercial circuits that pearls traveled from Cubagua and includes a discussion of the various merchants who did business in the area (66–78). For an overview of the island’s inhabitants, see also Otte’s section on early Cubaguan society (337–391).

23. CV, 231 (Aug. 2, 1527). Linda A. Newson and Susie Minchin suggest, in From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2007), that Africans were brought in to replace Indian divers because they were believed by Spaniards to be stronger and better suited physically to the demands of pearl diving (5). Kevin Dawson explores this possibility in “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,” Journal of American History, XCII (2006), 1327–1355. On the centrality of slavery to the emergence of Spanish colonial governance, see Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014). Estimates of the total slave importation to Spanish America for the period between 1505 and 1599 suggest an annual arrival between 1,000 and 2,000 Africans, with an approximate total (accounting for both aborted legal voyages as well as unrecorded smuggling) of 132,000 slaves by 1595. See Almeida Mendes, “Foundations of the System,” in Eltis and Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers, 17, 19–22. Research by Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat suggests that the numbers might well have been higher. See Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” American Historical Review, CXX (2015), 433–461. For inventories of Cubaguans’ possessions, including slaves, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 508–514. The inventories are reprinted there. On the “jelofe” or Wolof region of Senegambia and its integration with Iberian trade networks, see Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, 2012), 70–71.

24. Las Casas offers this price for Lucayan divers in Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Carlo, II, 353. For the price of male divers in 1540, see the sale of a pearl-fishing business in appendix II in Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 533–544. The price for each male diver was significantly more than the cost of a female enslaved Indian, who, along with her daughter and a canoe and its various equipment was sold for the same price as a single man. For the worth of pesos de oro in gold, see Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, N.Y., 1998); and Paul E. Hoffman, The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 255. For slave traders’ being paid in pearls, see, for example, AGI, SD: 1121, legajo 2, fols. 65v–68r (Jan. 22, 1536); CMNAC, I, lvii. This phenomenon is also discussed in John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 6, 18–19. On “blacks from Gelofe,” see Otte, Cédulas de la monarquía española relativas a la parte oriental de Venezuela (1520–1561) (Caracas, 1965), 171 (Jan. 6, 1534).

25. These inventories are held in the AGI in Seville and reprinted in Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 508–514. For royal decrees concerning working conditions of divers and prohibiting the importation of inland slaves, see CC, II, 106 (Dec. 7, 1537), 145 (Mar. 21, 1539), 194 (May 1, 1543).

26. Otte discusses the patchy records of pearl shipments in Las perlas del Caribe in his note on sources, 555–556; see also 57 for pearls’ importance to the imperial policies of Charles V. On the use of jewels for political purposes and to offset royal expenses in the late fifteenth century, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, see Priscilla E. Muller, Jewels in Spain, 1500–1800 (New York, 1972), 7–14.

27. For the rise of Seville as a port town, see Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000), 10–14. For pearl jewelers and drillers, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, appendix A II, 403. On Andrés de Carmona, see Catálogo de los fondos americanos del Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, V, Siglos XV y XVI (Seville, 1937), 259.

28. AGI, IG: 420, legajo 9, fols. 24v–26v (May 23, 1522).

29. AGI, IG: 420, legajo 9, fols. 24v–26v (May 23, 1522), legajo 10, fols. 316v–317r (Apr. 28, 1526), IG: 423, legajo 10, fols. 286r–286v (Sept. 19, 1539) (“. . . y porque desto nro. subditos reçiben daño y es en perjuyzio del trato de nras yndias porque como sabeis por el asiento q tenemos hecho con el Serenisimo rey nro. hermano no se puede llevar dezima alguna a nros subtidos asi de perlas como de otra cosa ninguna . . .”), legajo 19, fols. 286r–286v (Feb. 2, 1539), IG: 1092, no. 255 (July 28, 1540).

30. AGI, IG: 420, legajo 10, fols. 319r–319v (Apr. 29, 1526).

31. The decree specified that no free person, Indian, or slave was to leave the island of Cubagua with any undeclared pearls. First-time offenders, if Indian or African slaves, were to be given one hundred lashes in public; if second-time offenders, they were to have both ears cut off and be expelled from the islands. A free person caught smuggling pearls was to forfeit the jewels and pay the town council a fine of twenty thousand maravedis. See RBM, Ordenanza, II/2892, fols. 143r–153v (Dec. 13, 1527). This royal edict also prohibited the drilling of pearls on the island. For slaves’ buying their freedom with gold, see Report by Pedro Luys de Vargas y el tesorero Balthasar Perez Bernal, n.d., AGI, IG: 1805. IG: 1805 corresponds largely to ship registers; randomly included in this legajo are several separate reports (with a range of dates or undated) on the pearl fisheries.

32. On the need for a customs house and a chest with three keys in which to store pearls, see CC, I, 177 (Oct. 15, 1532).

33. For pearl purchases by a Portuguese factor in Seville, see ANTT/CC, Parte 1, maço (mç.) 31, no. 79 (Oct. 29, 1524). Portugal’s Queen Isabel authorized payment for pearls purchased from the marquess of Dénia, ANTT/CC, Parte 1, mç. 32, no. 48 (May 29, 1525), no. 2 (Oct. 3, 1525).

34. The marco was a common measure for silver bars based on the mark of Cologne. For a discussion of pearls’ physical qualities and assessments of their worth, see, for example, Neil H. Landman, Paula M. Mikkelsen, and Rudiger Bieler, eds., Pearls: A Natural History (New York, 2001). For a classic older work, see George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science, and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York, 1908). On the size of Pearl Coast pearls, see Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, ed. Tudela Bueso, II, 204.

35. For early piracy on Cubagua, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 80–81. The Cedularios he compiled of documents pertaining to the Pearl Coast’s early years are also littered with references to corsairs and fears of pirate attacks. The presence of Spain’s imperial rivals in the pearl fisheries shaped the circulation of people as well as the flow of pearls. For residents of Cabo de la Vela (in present-day Colombia) buying black slaves from two men who had ejected French corsairs from the fisheries (and for royal concern about the profits from their sale), see “Real Cédula,” Sept. 21, 1546, AGI, AC: 1, legajo 1, fol. 111r. In the 1550s, the Spanish crown banned residents of Margarita from buying Brazilian Indians from Portuguese merchants. See Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, I (1493–1592) (Madrid, 1953), 297 (Dec. 17, 1551), 339 (Sept. 21, 1556). Another sign that the circulation of pearls was related to the presence of non-Spanish rivals in the fisheries is the Council of the Indies’ decision to reward the treasurer of Cabo de la Vela with sixty marcos of pearls for his successful defense of the settlement from French predators; see “Sumario de Consulta del Consejo de Indias,” post-1550, AGI, IG: 737, no. 63.

36. For Charles V’s sending all pearls to Isabel of Portugal, see AGI, IG: 420, legajo 9, fols. 40r–40v (Nov. 11, 1522). Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, also discusses these early mercedes (or royal grants) of pearls on 57–58, in addition to the total number of pearls received during Charles V’s rule.

37. For the circumstances of Charles I’s ascension to the throne, see J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006), 120–122. The Welsers’ commercial connections facilitated the important German involvement in the Atlantic pearl trade in the sixteenth century. For more on the Welsers, see Alberto Armani, La genesi dell’Eurocolonialismo: Carlo V e i Welser (Genoa, 1985). On Charles I’s Roman imperial ambitions, see David A. Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003), 45.

38. Between sugar and slavery, these German merchants played a critical role in the development of the two trades that would come to define the Atlantic world. That pearls were present—and highly profitable—in these earliest post-encounter decades is largely forgotten. On the Fugger family, see Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville, Va., 2012); and Hermann Kellenbenz, Los Fugger en España y Portugal hasta 1560 (Castilla y León, 2000), 497–498.

39. Many of the most prominent German jewel merchant families (the Welsers and the Herwarts among them) played a large role in loaning money to the Portuguese crown and controlling a variety of the most lucrative commodity trades to emerge from Portugal’s Asian voyages, in particular the spice trade and, later, the jewelry and pearl trade. The Herwart family from Augsburg were major players in Lisbon’s pearl and jewel market from the late fifteenth century onward, with an important feitoria (trading factory) in Antwerp, which dealt in pearls from both Portugal and Spain. On German and Flemish communities in Portugal, see Walter Grosshaupt, “Commercial relations between Portugal and the Merchants of Augsburg and Nuremberg,” in Jean Aubin, La decouverte, le Portugal et l’Europe: Actes du colloque, Paris les 26, 27, et 28 mai 1988 (Paris, 1990), 362–383; and Eddy Stols, “Os mercadores flamengos em Portugal e no Brasil antes das conquistas holandesas,” Anais de história, V (1973), 9–54. On Nürnberger’s pearl dealings, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 61, 74–75.

40. For a discussion of categories in circulation in the 1520s and the changing descriptive vocabulary for pearls over the next several centuries, see also Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, chap. 1, esp. 36–41. He notes that all attempts to categorize pearls according to these descriptors were ultimately unsuccessful.

41. According to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, there were “so many oysters that the excess becomes an annoyance and they are no longer prized as food”; see Fernández de Oviedo, Natural History of the West Indies, ed. and trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 115–116.

42. It does not seem that the term negro was also assigned to indigenous divers, as they are frequently identified as “indios.” The origin of the term “conch blacks” (in circulation at the end of the sixteenth century) is uncertain; it might have reflected slaves’ use of conch shells to collect pearls that they removed from oysters. Another possible source for the term comes from an illustration of a conch shell in the “Histoire naturelle des Indes,” known as the Drake Manuscript (circa 1590), in which the anonymous author asserts that a hair “like human hair” was found and used by black divers to alleviate the pain in their eardrums caused by diving (see also Figure 7, in Chapter 3, below). Or the term might have reflected the use of concha to mean generally “shell,” thus loosely describing the slaves’ involvement with oysters. See also AGI, IG: 1805, fol. 2 (circa 1590).

43. For Cubagua’s shifting legal and administrative landscape, see Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost,’” Environment and History, XV (2009), 136; and Domínguez Compañy, “Municipal Organization,” Americas, XXI, no. 1 (July 1964), 58–68. Otte also discusses the changing legal status of Cubagua in Las perlas del Caribe, 87. For the significance of the terms villa and ciudad, see Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven, Conn., 2000).

44. For additional documents concerning the handling and sale of pearls in Casa custody, see AGI, IG: 1961, legajo 3, fols. 61v–63r (Sept. 13, 1533), IG: 420, legajo 10, fols. 263v–264r (Feb. 10, 1526). These instances are also discussed in Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 58–59.

45. This episode is discussed in Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 58–59.

46. AGI, IG: 421, legajo 12, fol. 208 (Oct. 22, 1527). The king needed pearls in anticipation of his military expedition in Rome and of armed conflicts with France and England; see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 60.

47. On prices under Charles V, see J. H. Elliott, “The Decline of Spain,” in Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays (New Haven, Conn., 1989), 217–240, esp. 235.

48. For more on the ecological transformations along the Pearl Coast, see Molly A. Warsh, “A Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LXXI (2014), 517–548. For a scientific consideration of these early pearl harvests and their effects on the oyster population, see Landman, Mikkelsen, and Bieler, eds., Pearls, 17, 21. Marine biologist Aldemaro Romero is more conservative in his estimates (assuming the highest possible productivity and lowest number of oysters extracted per pearl), but he also comes up with an estimated harvest of more than a billion oysters in less than thirty years; see Romero, “Death and Taxes: The Case of the Depletion of the Pearl Oyster Beds in Sixteenth-Century Venezuela,” Conservation Biology, XVII, no. 4 (August 2003), 1013–1023, esp. 1019; as well as Romero, Susanna Chilbert, and M. G. Eisenhart, “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First Depletion of a Natural Resource Caused by Europeans in the American Continent,” Journal of Political Ecology, VI (1999), 57–78. See also Clyde L. MacKenzie, Jr., Luis Troccoli, and Luis B. León, “History of the Atlantic Pearl-Oyster, Pinctata imbricata, Industry in Venezuela and Colombia, with Biological and Ecological Observations,” Marine Fisheries Review, LXV (2003), 1–20.

49. “Licencia a Juan de Cárdenas para armar carabelas,” 1520, AGI, IG: 420, legajo 8, fols. 253v–255r. Cárdenas received his patent even before the 1524 establishment of the Council of the Indies, the official body intended to oversee all government activity in the Americas. For a discussion of Castile’s patent practices in the sixteenth century, see Nicolás García Tapia, Técnica y poder en Castilla durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Salamanca, Spain, 1989), chap. 9.

50. “Licencia a Juan de Cárdenas para armar carabelas,” 1520, AGI, IG: 420, legajo 8, fols. 253v–255r (quotations); Manuel Luengo Muñoz, “Inventos para acrecentar la obtención de perlas en América, durante el siglo XVI,” Anuario de estudios Americanos, IX (1952), 55.

51. As Antonio Barrera-Osorio has argued, inhabitants of the pearl fisheries were “administrators” of nature as well as consumers of its products, and this active engagement shaped their relationship with a distant crown. See Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, chap. 3, esp. 73–74 (quotation on 74). He makes the point that even unsuccessful experiments provided the crown with useful knowledge about the nature of the New World and helped to develop empirical procedures for evaluating new proposals.

52. For negotiations between Luis de Lampiñan and the Spanish crown, see CC, I, 50–52 (Jan. 10, 1528), 63–64 (Apr. 4, 1528), 64–65 (Apr. 4, 1528), 81–83 (Sept. 12, 1528), 90 (Sept. 19, 1528), 97 (Jan. 22, 1529), 99–101 (Feb. 7, 1529).

53. On Spanish politics in Italy, see Michael J. Levin, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005); Thomas James Dandelet and John A. Marino, eds., Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion, 1500–1700 (Leiden, 2007); Stefano D’Amico, Spanish Milan: A City within the Empire, 1535–1706 (New York, 2012).

54. Lampiñan’s device was described by Antonio de Herrera [y Tordesillas], Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierrafirme del mar oceano, ed. Mariano Cuesta Domingo (Madrid, 1991), II, 645–648 (“larger,” 648). Luengo Múñoz also discusses Lampiñan’s device in “Inventos,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos, IX (1952), 56.

55. For the original transcript of the Lampiñan trial, see “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes vecinos de la ciudad de Sevilla con la Justicia y vecinos en la Nueva Ciudad en cadiz en la Isla de Cubagua, sobre la forma en que aquel havia en hazer la pesqueria en perlas; en 2 piezas,” 1530, AGI, Justicia: 7, no. 4. For an overview and partial transcript of the trial, see Enrique Otte, “El proceso del rastro de perlas de Luis de Lampiñán,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, XLVII, no. 187 (July–September 1964), 386–406.

56. For an overview of Spain’s evolving New World administration, see Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 120–127. On the enduring power of local law in Spain, see E. N. Van Kleffens, Hispanic Law until the End of the Middle Ages: With a Note on the Validity after the Fifteenth Century of Medieval Hispanic Legislation in Spain, the Americas, Asia, and Africa (Edinburgh, 1968), 256. Van Kleffens discusses the limitations of the attempts by Charles V and his successors to centralize administration and public law, emphasizing the endurance of Spanish “particularism.”

57. “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, AGI, Justicia: 7, no. 4, fol. 66. For a lengthier discussion—and accompanying sound clip—of the noisy biodiversity of healthy oyster banks, see Warsh, “A Political Ecology,” WMQ, 3d Ser., LXXI (2014), esp. 535. An extended description of oyster reproduction, its relationship to currents and depths, and the dissemination of oyster spat is quoted in Otte, “El proceso del rastro perlas,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, XLVII, no. 187 (July–September 1964), 395, 401. For the meaning of xaguey, see Manuel Alvar Ezquerra, Vocabulario de indigenismos en las Crónicas de Indias (Madrid, 1997), 216. See also William F. Keegan and Lisabeth A. Carlson, Talking Taíno: Essays on Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2008).

58. For a clear transcription of this explication, see Otte, “El proceso del rastro perlas,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, XLVII, no. 187 (July–September 1964), 386–406 (quotation on 405–406): “Sy el dicho rastro oviese de pescar e pescase en los límites, mares y comarcas de la dicha ysla que por el dicho conçejo e vesinos della en el dicho proçeso están espresados en an pescado e pescan e pueden pescar, que sería destruyr la dicha ysla y veçinos e avytantes en ella, y el dicho trato y pesquería de perlas çesaría, de que vernía mucho daño a las rentas e derechos reales de su magestad e a los dichos veçinos e moradores e contratantes en la dicha ysla, y no solamente a ellos, pero a estas yslas que con ella contratan, porque çesaría el comerçio y contrataçión que con ella tienen, por ser como es la dicha ysla la segunda destas yslas e de donde se a avydo e cada día a y espera aver mucho provecho, e questo hera e es su paresçer, para que sobre todo su magestad mande y provea y aclare lo que fuere servydo.”

59. See “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, AGI, Justicia: 7, no. 4, fol. 74; Otte, “El proceso del rastro perlas,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, XLVII, no. 187 (July–September 1964), 386–406 (quotation on 398): “Yten sy saben que es mucho más el ynteresse e provecho que se sygue a la corona real de estos reynos que las dichas villas e pueblos estén pobladas, pagando como pagan los derechos a su magestad devidos, que el provecho que se puede seguir de rastrear en la dicha ysla e comarcas con los dichos rastros, e digan los testigos lo que çerca desto saben.”

60. Jurisdiction on the Pearl Coast would remain divided for centuries, with ecclesiastical authority emanating from the mainland, judicial authority from Hispaniola, and administration from Seville. The role of the larger Antilles in the settlement of the Pearl Coast, combined with fierce indigenous resistance on the mainland, kept Cubagua and adjacent islands in the orbit of the Caribbean and Spain more than of Caracas for nearly two centuries; it was not until the late seventeenth century, when the Pearl Islands were at last incorporated in the Audiencia de Santa Fé, that the coast finally achieved greater administrative integration with the mainland, or Tierra Firme. On the split nature of different kinds of jurisdiction, see Manuel Luengo Muñoz, “Notícias sobre la fundación de la ciudad de Nuestra Señora Santa María de los Remedios del Cabo de la Vela,” Anuario de estudios Americanos, VI (1949), 757–797. On the pearl islands’ gradual integration with the mainland, see Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost,’” Environment and History, XV (2009), 132–133, esp. 150.

61. For examples of early awareness of the depletion of oyster banks in the wake of Lampiñan’s trial, see CC, I, 218 (Dec. 30, 1532); CC, II, 94 (Sept. 5, 1537), 172 (Mar. 10, 1540). For more on the reproduction cycles of pearl-producing mollusks, see Elisabeth Strack, Pearls (Stuttgart, 2006), 96; MacKenzie, Troccoli, and León, “History of the Atlantic Pearl-Oyster,” Marine Fisheries Review, LXV (2003), 3. These seasonal proscriptions might have been misguided in any event: the female pearl oyster sheds her eggs when the water temperature is highest, but, when water temperatures do not fluctuate dramatically, as is the case in the Caribbean, several breeding seasons may take place during one year. For regulations issued in the late 1520s, see Domínguez Compañy, “Municipal Organization,” Americas, XXI, no. 1 (July 1964), 67–68. The success of Cubagua’s residents in defeating Lampiñan and the passage of laws in the wake of the trial suggests that Spanish officials did, in fact, pay attention to knowledge being generated in the New World. For an opposing characterization, see Alison Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic,” in James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York, 2008), 31–52. She emphasizes how cosmographers were not interested in local knowledge earned through experience. In contrast, my findings echo Susan Scott Parrish’s emphasis in the same volume on the role of colonial subjects in knowledge production (“Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge,” 281–310).

62. See CC, II, 94 (Sept. 5, 1537).

63. CC, II, 129 (Feb. 26, 1538). The 1538 decree ordered canoe owners to cease throwing the bodies overboard and instead to bury them outside city limits in a well-protected grave to prevent dogs and other animals from digging up the corpses. Failure to obey carried one fine if the dead slaves were black or Indian and a different penalty if the deceased diver was deemed “Christian” with no racial modifier. These regulations could mean two things: European pearl divers (that is, “Christians”) sailed in pearl canoes alongside African and Indian enslaved divers, or some black slaves were recognized as Christian.

64. A marco of pearls was declared to be worth twelve pesos de oro when used as payment for goods and supplies, but, when using pearls to purchase gold, the exchange rate was to be determined by the parties involved. For an early attempt to stop pearls from being used as currency, see CC, I, 135 (Nov. 4, 1531). For more on the use of pearls as currency in the early years of the fisheries’ operation, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 35–36, 54–55. For an early prohibition of pearl drilling, see CC, I, 188 (Dec. 14, 1532). In 1532, Charles V passed the first of these laws prohibiting the drilling of pearls on the island: AGI, IG: 420, legajo 10, fols. 263v–264r (Feb. 10, 1526). For Queen Isabel and Cubaguan officials, see AGI, IG: 1962, legajo 4, fols. 1–2 (Nov. 13, 1535). For additional documents concerning the handling and sale of pearls in Casa custody, see AGI, IG: 1961, legajo 3, fols. 61v–63r (Sept. 13, 1533), IG: 1963, legajo 7, fols. 160v–1633r (Aug. 14, 1544), IG: 1963, legajo 9, fols. 116v–117r (Sept. 13, 1544).

65. See CC, II, 128 (XXIII, Feb. 26, 1538), 129 (XXVII, Feb. 26, 1538), 231 (Nov. 10, 1550). This mention of “Christians” without a racial modifier again raises the issue of whether black and Indian slaves could be deemed as such or only as Europeans. For Spanish men and Indian women, see, for example, CC, II, 28 (Aug. 17, 1535). A 1538 decree prohibited the giving of wine to any “black slave nor Indian of any color” (item XXI in the decree), and the penalties for this offense varied depending on whether the wine had been given for free (that is, in a social setting) or for payment of any sort (CC, II, 126). The fine for sharing wine socially was more severe than for engaging in trade or barter. The decree also ordered that blacks and Indians (either slave or free) were not to leave their owner’s house after dark unaccompanied, suggesting that both groups did regularly move about the islands of their own accord.

66. For sample requests for exemptions from the almoxarifazgo (a customs tax on merchandise), see CC, I, 121 (Apr. 4, 1531), CC, II, 32 (Oct. 17, 1535), 40 (Dec. 8, 1535), 202 (May 1, 1543). For the importation of seamstresses, etc., see CC, I, 199 (Dec. 30, 1532).

67. CC, II, 18 (Aug. 7, 1535), 61 (Nov. 3, 1536); CC, I, 86 (Apr. 20, 1538). For licenses to conduct rescate for corn and canoes, see CC, I, 72 (Aug. 17, 1528); for the need for a well on Cubagua, see CC, I, 220 (Dec. 30, 1532). A royal decree issued by Charles V in 1538, dealing with the administrative and logistic problems facing residents of Cubagua, highlighted in passing the Spanish residents’ dependence on Indian pearl divers’ specialized skills. Because fortune-hunting governors of the islands were so frequently departing on exploratory trips and taking provisions from Cubagua, the “Indians who know how to [dive for pearls]” were left without food and provisions, which forced the fisheries to cease operation and caused the royal treasury to suffer. See CC, II, 65–66 (Feb. 16, 1538).

68. AGI, IG: 1963, legajo 7, fols. 160v–163r (Aug. 14, 1540); AGI, SD: 868, legajo 1, fol. 269v (Sept. 7, 1540). On more than one occasion, the Casa was accused of deliberate mishandling of the precious commodity, if not outright theft. In 1544, the king issued a royal order demanding that the officials of the Casa refrain from withholding private shipments of pearls that rightfully belonged to Seville merchants—illegal behavior that prompted merchants to bring lawsuits and write many letters of complaint to the king. See AGI, IG: 1961, legajo 3, fols. 61v–63 (Sept. 13, 1533), IG: 1963, legajo 9, fols. 116v–177r (Sept. 13, 1544).

69. For Garcilaso de la Vega’s account of Hernando de Soto’s pearl findings in southern North America from 1539 to 1542 and for effects of storms on pearl mussels, see Landman, Mikkelsen, and Bieler, eds., Pearls, 125, 186. For corsairs’ carrying people and pearls to elsewhere in the Americas, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 394–395.

70. My findings are in keeping with Tamar Herzog’s work on the nature of early modern citizenship, particularly as explored in Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, Conn., 2003), in which she argues that the exercise of rights (as opposed to legal or political declarations) shaped the boundaries of early modern communities. On the elaboration of different types of authority in distinct geographic settings, see Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010). John Lynch, in Spain, 1516–1598: From Nation State to World Empire (Oxford, 1991), discusses taxation as a key component of the processes that were transforming ruling powers in this period and helping to establish the dominance of a central governing authority.