Seville's ships were confined to the North Atlantic; not so her mercantile empire, which was powerful enough to secure the absolute suppression (at least in official theory) of the flourishing and economically rational commerce between New Spain and Peru. It is true that the happy coincidence of China's thirst for silver and New Spain's argentiferous profusion, with the profits so made, enabled Mexico and Manila to stand up against Seville's pressures, despite their own conflict of interests as buyer and seller; but they were always on an uneasy defensive, compelled to justify their tampering with the sacred principles of Sevillean monopoly. Lima had no autonomous outreach on the scale of the Acapulco Galleon trade—its tentative efforts at direct Peruvian-Philippine contact were quashed, since here the interests of New and Old Spain were in alliance; Callao was, however, the focus of a thalassic commerce whose extreme reaches were at Acapulco and Concepcion. Again, Seville restricted almost to nothingness any legal outlet from Peru to the Atlantic by La Plata, logical as such an alternative outlet might seem on the map. All routes—that is, all legal routes—led sooner or later to Seville and its outports, whose domination was based initially on solid advantages of location and tradition, backed by international capital (especially Genoese) and the interests of local magnates such as the Dukes of Medina Sidonia.^[1] The Andalusian control was exercised through the elaborate machinery of the Casa de Contratacion and the Consulado or Merchants’ Guild. Except at the very beginning, it would be wrong to describe the relation as umbilical: quite soon the mother country was giving less nutriment than she received, though this in turn was being passed on to other and insatiable offspring in Europe, most notably the French and Netherlands wars, while the Genoese midwife took her toll. But clearly there was a maternal bond which became irksome to the lustier children who had adventured overseas.

The monopoly, at least the attempted control, of Seville thus affects all but the most local economics of the Indies; one might say that its Atlantic fleets were the keys, its Caribbean bases the locks, to Spanish trade in the Pacific. This was by fiat of the Crown—not, however, an entirely arbitrary fiat of an economically irrational Crown. It was logical that somewhere in Andalusia should be the main base for the Indies trade, and within Andalusia Seville was by far the most important centre.^[2] Concentration on the massive intake of bullion has tended to mask the fact that trade across the Atlantic was two-way, with diversified exports to supply many of the consumption and construction needs of the New World settlements; and not only was Andalusia the province with the nearest ocean frontage to the vital Trade Winds belt, she was also one of the most productive regions of Spain. The other Atlantic littoral provinces, Galicia, Asturias, Vizcaya, had a more active maritime tradition than Andalusia; indeed, they had an overwhelming dominance in ship-building, and Biscayan seamen were disproportionately to the forefront in maritime enterprise. But these mainly mountainous provinces could not compare with Andalusia either in location or general productivity. The Casa de Contratacion formed at Corunna immediately after the Victoria’s return, especially to handle trade with the Spiceries and backed by Cristobal de Haro, never got off the ground: it foundered before Lusian and Sevillean opposition, and its resources were diverted to ‘the silver dream of the Indies’, specifically to Sebastian Cabot's 1526 expedition to La Plata—which sailed from Seville.^[3]

Indeed, when in 1529 Charles V gave permission for outward sailings to the Indies, from nine ports, mostly northern, little advantage was taken of it; perhaps the point of the concession was frustrated by the limitation that the return must be to Seville, to register cargo, but in any case there seems to have been little interest. By mid-century the need to form convoys against freebooters enforced concentration, and even had Seville not had a head-start, it would probably have been the obvious choice, together with its outports of San Lucar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz; in 1573, by which time the privateering menace was much greater, it was ordered that all departures, as well as returns, must be via Seville. But the city lies about 100km up a winding river, and large ships had often to carry out some of their lading or unlading outside the San Lucar bar. Cadiz gradually began to creep up on Seville, and in 1547 received a subordinate branch of the Casa and the assignment of a third of the Indies tonnage. In the seventeenth century the increasing size of ships took Cadiz ahead, until in 1717 the Bourbon government precisely reversed the roles and statuses of the rivals: Cadiz had now the Casa and two-thirds of the tonnage, Seville the branch and one-third.^[4]

The functions of the Casa have been outlined above (Ch. 3). The Consulado, founded in 1543, was a tight oligarchic pressure group, which came to have executive functions: in 1562 it took over from the Casa the collection of the averia or tax to pay for escort ships, and from 1573 had a direct say in organising- 206 -the convoys. As Vicens Vives says, Casa and Consulado ‘were bound together by a common cause: protectionism at any price’; also by discreet family and financial ties. The price included attempts at regulating not only the direct Atlantic trade to the Indies, but its offshoots in the Pacific; we have seen one small but typical example, the ban on Peruvian wine at Panama. Apart from such meticulous official regulation, the method of control was basically the chronic undersupply of a captive bullion-rich market—although given the distance-times involved, it would have been difficult in any case to ensure smooth supply to American markets, which were usually either in glut or dearth. It is perhaps illustrative of Sevillean ways that when in 1582 it founded a Stock Exchange, the building (now, pleasingly, occupied by the Archives of the Indies) was partly financed by a small octroi-type tax: the building was finished in 1598, the tax was collected until 1826.^[5]

Initially the system was in reasonable accord with the economic views of the age: a not irrational attempt at ‘maximization of the limited possibilities of a backward metropolitan economy’ by protective monopoly.^[6] It had a strong element of the Just Price, and a perhaps stronger one of unjust price-fixers. In the not very long run, Spanish resources proved simply not equal to the integration of a complex economy over such a vast and diversified space, or even to its basic supply. To begin with, the economy, especially in Castile which had the sole responsibility for the Indies, was badly distorted by a bias in favour of wool production, often in great latifundia, over industry and crop farming.^[7] As a consequence, the productive capacity of the metropolis was not enough to keep the colonies supplied, and there were plenty of outsiders eager to break in. The system was exceedingly vulnerable to cracks and leaks at both ends and in the middle: at the American end, by smuggling, illicit trading (on the Galleon or by La Plata), disregard of inconvenient regulations; in between, by the direct pillage of French, English, and Dutch sea-reivers, commissioned or freebooting; at the European end, by more smuggling, the infiltration of foreign merchandise and interests wearing a Spanish mask,^[8] and above all by the drain of the Habsburg wars. Martial glory and the defence of the Faith had to be paid for at rates which led to that succession of six defaults in ninety years.^[9] As with the armoured dinosaurs, the defence mechanism, until the Bourbon reforms, was usually more of the same, a hypertrophy of the protective structures.

And yet this astonishing contraption worked, however creakingly and cumbersomely, for three centuries. At the time of its foundation, probably no other European country with the power to do so would have failed to set up such an organisation; it was well adapted to the thinking of its times. Perhaps also no other country would have kept it so long scarcely modified; but the innovating spirit departed from Spain with the century. The shadow of Seville was thrown on to Pacific waters, since the rhythm of economic life from Mexico to Peru was closely bound in to the rhythm of her fleets, even if that rhythm was often more regular in theory than in practice.

As early as the 1520s merchant ships were forbidden to sail for the Indies singly, and the first royal armada was sent out in 1537. In 1543—the year of the establishment of the Consulado—more formal convoy regulations were promulgated, and in 1564–6 Pedro Menendez de Aviles, an able naval administrator who had been appointed Captain-General of the Armada de la Carrera de Indias, set up the organisation of scheduled and escorted fleets which lasted through the Habsburg era, and indeed in an attenuated and irregular form long after that.^[10] Menendez’ policy had three parts: fortified bases in the Indies; compulsory convoys; Indies-based fighting squadrons. The last of these, obviously an essential for any really serious defence scheme, was initiated by 1598 but not effectively developed until the Dutch admiral Piet Hein had taken an entire silver fleet at Matanzas in Cuba in 1628, and even then, as we have seen, this Armada de Barlovento was liable to be diverted to general convoy duties. But after the shock of Drake's 1585–6 raid, when Santo Domingo and Cartagena were sacked, the fortifications were taken in hand, if with much procrastination, after a survey by a trained military engineer, Juan Bautista Antonelli—one of whose reports fell into Richard Hakluyt's hands.^[11] Meanwhile with all its inefficiencies the convoy system, plus the occasional fast zabra, did good service for over a century: at Cadiz in 1656 and Santa Cruz in 1657 the English gains, though substantial, did not equal the Spanish loss. At Vigo Bay in 1702 all the silver could have been saved had not the Casa delayed the unloading by objecting to the payment of customs at Vigo instead of Cadiz, but even so (and allowing for a considerable diversion of silver to Spain's ally France), ‘the 4,587,493 dollars retained by the King of Spain was a greater sum’ than in any year before or after—in part because the transfer to Vigo had disrupted the normal arrangements for smuggling.^[12] As a rule, the King's enemies did less damage than Acts of God; hurricane disasters were quite frequent, though better management would have avoided the hurricane season, as the regulations provided.

Outwards, there were two convoys: the New Spain flota for Vera Cruz, the galeones for Tierra Firme^[13] and the Isthmus (Fig. 25). The former normally sailed from San Lucar in May, and was usually a smaller affair than the Isthmus fleet, sometimes being escorted by only two warships. The latter usually left in August, on a rather more southerly course, with an escort of as many as six or eight large galleons; after a stop at Cartagena, whence a notice was sent to Panama and Peru, it went on to Nombre de Dios or Puerto Bello, normally reached in ten or twelve weeks from Spain. Here took place the central feature of the whole operation, the great fair where the merchandise of, or at least from, Seville met the silver of Peru. Both fleets rendezvoused at Habana in March, to victual and refit before the summer hurricane season, and then made north to pick up the Westerlies. As with the Manila Galleon, it was easier to adhere to courses than to times, and the failure of the Peruvian silver ships, despite an early warning system, to synchronise with the galeones (or vice versa) was a constant complaint of the merchants; as even a modern Spanish revisionist must admit,- 208 -the timings were precise, but not for long: ‘Poco duro esta prática.’^[14] Although of course the Camino de China and the Camino de Castilla met in Mexico City, it was through the galeones rather than the flota that Seville impinged upon the Pacific, with the Isthmus as the great interchange.