For those reasons, the Caribbean was unusually dynamic and largely dissimilar to contested lands in Europe. While the movement of peoples and shifting of geographic control in the West Indies mirrored the conflict and movement that occurred in disputed European areas such as Gibraltar, and the intermixing of people for the reasons of trade was not unlike that which had long occurred in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean’s New World situation and the opportunities it offered for mining and trade made it a unique location for European disputes.77 Europeans had settled their territories heavily, and control over the lands there was established in some cases by centuries of treaty and international recognition. The Americas, having been divided by the European powers relatively recently, and containing lands that were still to be discovered, offered far more opportunity for the expansion of European monarchs’ control over lands than attempts made on the European continent. Alliances with native peoples or signatures on European treaties could allow Spanish or British settlers to lay claim to American land, and to benefit from the attendant gold or silver, native labor, natural resources, and trading potential. This shifting of sometimes very weak control, coupled with the high stakes represented by control over the richest trading opportunities to the New World, made the Caribbean an unusual area of mixing and conflict.
Figure 2. Map of the locations of the South Sea Company’s factories. Despite restrictions on non-Spanish residents in the colonies, the company was officially allowed to station a small number of agents at each of its factories. Map by Darin Grauberger, University of Kansas Cartographic Services.
The West Indian and Spanish American ports in which these British factors lived were also very different from the British ports, including London, to which many of them were accustomed. In places like Jamaica, Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Panama, and Portobello, the employees of the South Sea Company encountered a hugely diverse group of people, unfamiliar terrain, and an inhospitable climate like none in Europe. Some men adapted well to these new conditions and stayed for years, while others either returned home quickly or succumbed to illness in the tropical or subtropical heat.78
Dover and his company arrived into this context of cosmopolitanism and uncertainty when they reached the port of Buenos Aires in the summer of 1715. Partington held the ship off the coast for several months, guarding the factors against external dangers while they established themselves on shore.79 While in Buenos Aires Partington reported that several of his crew had died since coming into the Rio de la Plata area, including his cook and boatswain, presumably from subtropical diseases.80 The city’s location on the southern Atlantic coast put them far from the other company factories, but close to a major source of Spanish wealth. Merchants from Buenos Aires, both British and Spanish, could trade nearly directly to Potosí, the great mountain of silver in Bolivia, despite official rules mandating that that trade occur only through Lima. Buenos Aires was one of the most important cities in the Spanish Atlantic empire when the factors arrived, and in the middle of doubling its population, which rose to nearly nine thousand within the decade. This economically vital region stood on the edge of the empire, in an agriculturally rich area sometimes raided by native groups living on the frontier.81 The port was of particular importance to the South Sea Company; in the later part of the contract period, the company would be allowed to send groups of several hundred slaves inland, to Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, giving them access to a huge area of the Spanish Americas.82 In the time after enslaved laborers’ arrival on company or independent ships and before willing buyers could be found, the agents housed them on various farms and estates. The factory, far from British supply routes, provided its own food with its farm near the river.83
In Jamaica, where the factors sometimes paused en route to their respective ports of employ and where the main South Sea Company factory conducted much of the trade, some new arrivals had a first introduction to their new life. Jamaica had a large enslaved population, and small proportion of Europeans compared to Great Britain.84 Here individuals of different races came into regular contact. Both slaves and indigenous individuals from other islands and the mainland migrated to Jamaica, and slaves purchased by the company were often brought to the island for “refreshment” before continuing on to Spanish America.85 In addition to its demographic diversity, Jamaica’s economy integrated closely into the multi-imperial Caribbean system of commerce, exporting the produce of its plantations and importing manufactured goods and European foods. Internally, Europeans in Jamaica relied on Spanish coins for their day-to-day exchanges.86
If the physical heat and human company in Jamaica seemed strange and perhaps unwelcome, the Spanish American ports proved more removed still from a European way of life. In Cartagena, where the Anglesea deposited its group of factors, the majority of inhabitants belonged to indigenous groups. Traveling to the area in 1735, Antonio de Ulloa described the country as not particularly wealthy, but home to a number of “splendidly furnished” houses and rich men. Cartagena, about the size of a third-tier European city, lay on the edge of the water, supplied from the east, where “several fruitful valleys” and largely depleted gold mines stretched for many leagues.87 The South Sea Company factors traveling to Cartagena aboard the Anglesea could expect to meet several distinctive castes of people, from peninsulares born within Spain to a wide number of individuals of mixed parentage. Ulloa, himself Spanish, spoke highly of the men and women he met in Cartagena, who he felt “possessed a great deal of wit and penetration.” Though they appeared sluggish and possessed a “wan and livid complexion,” they were quite healthy, Ulloa assured readers.88 But the very foreign geography and population doubtless shocked some of the merchants.
Cartagena was placed strategically, in a location that allowed it to protect possessions on the Spanish Main, but under the Hapsburgs it had become an undersupplied place of disorder. While the empire prohibited most foreign trade, the people of Cartagena threatened rebellion if their access to foreign flour was restricted.89 Early in the century, the judges of the city overthrew and imprisoned the president and captain general over similar differences.90 The Bourbons responded to this disorder with a series of reforms in 1717 that included the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada and a reassignment of the American trade to Cádiz rather than Seville.91 This attempt at a reassertion of imperial power was a reflection in part of the variety of interests at play in the colony and the metropole, a situation that the South Sea Company and its individual agents would sometimes exploit to their own advantage.
Factors inhabiting another key strategic site in the empire at Portobello found themselves on the eastern side of the Isthmus of Panama, a three-day journey over land from the port of Panama.92 Ulloa described these cities as substantially similar to Cartagena, though Portobello was particularly infamous for its inclement weather.93 Some expressed concerns that the British factors sent to the area might be at particular risk for catching infections “among the Spaniards,” given the unhealthy climate.94 Portobello had poor soil and few provisions; its main value was as a gateway to Panama and the rest of South America from the Atlantic Ocean.95 For two centuries, Panama was one terminus of the carrera de Indias, a sailing of fleets of ships between Spain and the Americas, convoys meant to secure the Spanish monopoly on their trade and to protect their cargoes.96
For a few weeks each year, as the fleet arrived, Portobello would fill up for the annual trading fair. Vessels crowded the harbor, huge numbers