The story of pearls is more than meets the eye. It is the story of early modern risk, entrepreneurship, slavery, Carib geopolitical power and piracy. It is also one in which slavery and conversion were closely linked.

This foundational episode in the story of pearls is the story of the Cardona family, who were granted a royal monopoly on them in the early 17th century. The Cardonas repeatedly lost fleets and capital in the pursuit of pearls, wealth, royal grace, sunken treasure, slaves and converts. Tomás de Cardona grew up a page of Philip III, king of Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Naples, Sardinia and Milan and emperor of the Indies. Sometime in 1610, Tomás won the asiento (monopoly) for pearl extraction in the Caribbean and California. The asiento also included rights to rescue treasure off shipwrecks in the Caribbean. In 1613, Tomás created a company and with financiers put together a small fleet of six naos and caravels. The fleet was led by Tomás’s young nephew, Nicolás de Cardona. The fleet sailed from Cadiz, at the southern tip of Spain. It spent almost two years moving around the Caribbean looking for pearls and the shipwrecked fleet of General Luis Fernández de Córdoba.

Once in the Caribbean, however, the fleet spent two months moving along every island in Barlovento, from Granada to Barbados to Guadalupe, and then sailed down along the coast of Tierra Firme, or Venezuela (Figures 2 and 3).

Nicolás’s fleet was looking for pearls, but also for captives to rescue. Cardona’s company needed slave divers to collect both pearls and treasure from shipwrecks. Cardona did not get his slaves from the Portuguese conversos, who held the monopoly on the African slave trade from Guinea and Angola. He got his slaves from Caribs, the famed ‘cannibals’ who since Columbus had gone from island to island staging raids, wreaking havoc and constantly setting limits to and rules for European geopolitical aspirations.

By 1601, the Caribs had turned the many islands of Barlovento into a pirate’s nest from which to stage raids on the missions of Paria (Venezuela), where they would capture ‘Taíno-Arawak’ natives. By raiding plantations and rescuing survivors from shipwrecks, the Caribs also had taken many African slaves. Arawak and African women worked as slaves in Carib cassava, tobacco and brazilwood plantations. The Caribs cured tobacco and brazilwood dye, which they traded for axes, machetes, knives and fishhooks from French and Dutch smugglers. The Caribs also sold slaves. In 1613, Cardona encountered a thriving decentralised Carib empire based on plantations and slave raiding. Unlike the Comanches, whose decentralised empire of the 18th and 19th centuries was built on the back of horses and rifles, the Caribs built theirs on piraguas and poisoned arrows.

When Nicolás entered the archipelago of Barlovento, he purchased slaves from the Caribs. In one afternoon in the island of Granada, for example, Cardona purchased two African women whose ears and noses had been cut off. He also purchased two mestizo child slaves whose fathers, French and Dutch sailors, had set up households with Carib women before abandoning the island. Finally, Cardona paid for a skinny mission Arawak Indian who alleged that his better-fed brother had recently been barbecued roast at a Carib gathering. Cardona did not call these transactions ‘purchase’ but rescate or ‘rescue’, a term laden with heavy religious meaning. Slaves acquired through rescate from idolaters in the Caribbean and Africa were not simply ‘purchased’, they were rescued into the fold of Christianity to be converted and saved as criados. Slavery was conversion. To be sure, it was also labour.

After purchasing two dozen Indians and Africans from the Caribs, Cardona sailed for Veracruz, where he disassembled his fleet for the long and arduous trudge with a cargo of planks, masts, sails, cordage, iron and slaves across mountainous central Mexico. In the Pacific port of Acapulco, Nicolás had three new ships rebuilt. The viceroy of New Spain ordered Cardona to use his crew to build fortifications in Acapulco and to deploy his ships against approaching Dutch pirates. Cardona stayed put in Acapulco for three months. The pirates never materialised. Finally, Nicolás took his fleet to California to collect pearls, taking advantage of the asiento Philip III had granted his uncle Tomás.

Nicolás took his Carib-purchased slave divers to the islands nearby Mazatlán to recover pearls. He also packed his crew with Franciscan friars, carrying them to the Gulf of California to convert the local natives. Cardona spent nine months reconnoitring California, which he mapped as an elongated peninsula, not an island as it was then imagined, rich in silver mines and, he claimed, pliant, convertible Indians (Figure 4). Cardona left two ships behind in Sinaloa charged with returning to California for pearl fishing. He took the third ship back to Acapulco to inform the viceroy and his firm about his discoveries.

Nearing Acapulco, Cardona’s ship was attacked by the Dutch privateer George Spilberg. Cardona lost the friars, the slave divers and his ship, although not before jumping off the vessel. From the safety of land, Nicolás helped capture six of the pirates. In the meantime, the governor of Nueva Vizcaya (New Biscay) commandeered Cardona’s two-ship Sinaloa fleet to the Philippines to warn Manila authorities of the impending attack by the Dutch, for Spilberg had made clear he intended to capture Ternate and Manila.

Broke, Cardona returned to Spain in 1617. Once back home, he put together enough fresh capital to start out again. In 1619, Cardona embarked from Cadiz with the armada of Don Lope Díez de Aux de Armendáriz, first marquis of Cadreita, bound for Panama to punish pirates. Once in Darién, Cardona crossed the Isthmus, where he had a fleet of three naos assembled, and recruited a crew of some 100 men, including many slaves for hire. Educated by his previous experience, Cardona this time did not buy slaves from the Caribs but instead ‘rented’ them from vecinos in Panama.

As he was departing for California, news arrived from Peru that Dutch pirates were about to attack the port of Cañete in the Isthmus. The viceroy of Peru, the principe de Esquilache, commandeered Cardona’s fleet for two months. Cardona paid the salaries of his rented slaves as well as the defence of the port. Again, the pirates did not show up and Cardona was let go. His fleet of three soon became one as one ship went up in flames and another had the hull cracked during a storm. Cardona was to lose the third to a shipwreck when he briefly disembarked near Acapulco to straighten out the paperwork of the family pearl asiento.

Cardona did not shrink from these contretemps. He had two new naos built with financial resources he quickly scraped together in Mexico. This time, however, the viceroy of New Spain, the marquis of Gelves, commanded Cardona to abandon Acapulco immediately and bring the entirety of his crew of rented slave divers with him across the breadth of Mexico and down to the Caribbean port of Veracruz. Ships were waiting there to take Cardona and his 14 divers to the western coast of Cuba, where the marquis of Cadreita, general of the Spanish Armada, had lost two galleons loaded with silver. Cardona and the divers spent several months looking for the sunken treasure. They managed to rescue muskets and munitions, but only a few ingots of silver.

Empty-handed once again, Cardona returned to Spain to help his uncle. Tomás had recently been promoted to mayordomo or manager of Philip III’s household, and with that post came the asiento on the mercury mines in Andalusia. Nicolás tried to exploit a new mine of mercury in Usagre but to no avail. In 1632, the ever-profitless Nicolás penned a merit report detailing a lifetime of service to the crown, in which he appealed to the monarch for further rewards (Figure 5). His maps and stories of entrepreneurship in the Caribbean and California were part of his petition for grace to the king, which also included a request for a new monopoly on the colonisation of California. His plan included the mobilisation of peoples and missionaries from Sinaloa, who would be attracted by the many promises of untapped silver mines and souls to be saved.

Cardona’s career is a window onto the world of both the 16th-century Caribbean and pearl diving. His report-memoir exposes the nature of the enterprise, one in which the Caribs held geopolitical control of European settlements, the slave and pearl trade and emerging plantations. The world of captivity, smuggling and raiding associated with the Caribs suggests that the production of pearls was not solely an activity controlled by Europeans. Instead, the power of the Caribs to set the terms of exchange of captives and indigenous slaves should make us reconsider the early modern Caribbean more as an African coast, and pearls as the product of the indigenous slave trade and the recirculation of African captives by local ethnic groups and leaders.

FURTHER READING

Monteiro, J.M. (1994) Negros da terra (São Paulo: Editora Schwarcz Ltda.).

Otte, E. (1977) Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua (Caracas: Fundación John Boulton).

Reséndez, A. (2016) The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Warsh, M.A. (2018) American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).

Whitehead, N.L. (1990) ‘Carib ethnic soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles, 1492–1820’, Ethnohistory, 37 (4): 357–85.