Asturias and Galicia in the Medieval Atlantic Koiné: The Organisation of the Northwestern Cantabrian Port Space

Historiography has long addressed the study of small port towns in the northern Peninsula and their impact on local economies on account of documentary evidence of their economic influence in the late Middle Ages. All evidence appears to verify the leading role of these minor northern ports in the maritime development of the Cantabrian façade from their foundation in the mid-thirteenth century. The foundational text, Las polas asturianas en la Edad Media, published in 1981, was the first serious methodological attempt to consider not just coastal communities but also the medieval Asturian urban phenomenon as a whole. In the wake of this work, several revised analyses of the new coastal towns, both general and based on specific case studies, have endeavoured to gradually build a fuller historiographical survey; however, even today, rigorous research and comparative proposals for many Asturian towns is lacking, leaving a wide and untouched field of study.

Hence, at least in the Asturian case, the present historiographical challenge involves the reinterpretation of an old historiographic theme in the light of new sources, the confirmation of hypotheses, the reconsideration of hitherto confirmed certainties, and the formulation of new inquiries, such as the type of contacts established between the different port towns, the economic consequences of such exchanges, the characteristic traits of the societies that generated them, the creation of regional networks, the hierarchy of ports and their possible function as ports of call on the Atlantic trade corridor.

A border has the important purpose of creating relationships, allowing territories and communities to establish contact with their neighbours. It defines their interactions of rivalry, exchange or cooperation. Commercial relations along the northern border of Portugal have been a fruitful subject for Portuguese and Spanish historiography. A common setting including the physical environment, the mobility of the population, and shared resources – the sea and the river – connected both margins of the river Minho, shaping their history and people.

Much is known of the circulation of products – the importance of salt, wine, fish, or textile routes – the seasonality of migrations following employment opportunities, or the shared local privileges between towns. There remains, however, much untapped potential for the research of shipping logistics such as cargo handling operations. This chapter aims to approach transport and shipping operations in the Portuguese northern border during the sixteenth century, centred on the seaport of Caminha, and the relations established between border communities.

What did the concept of a port territory cover in the Middle Ages? The etymologies of the terms most commonly used at the time to describe a port territory – namely, ‘port’ and ‘harbour’ – allude to the two main purposes that these facilities were expected to fulfil: allowing for the transport of men and their goods, and harbouring fishing vessels and merchant ships. In other words, a port territory could serve as a refuge and a berth space, a hub for the circulation of people and goods, a boarding point for passengers, a shipbuilding and ship repair area, an enclosed space housing naval weaponry workshops, and a tax collecting site. This variety of purposes led to a great disparity in port layouts and amenities: from simple beaching areas to ‘port-channels’ and rudimentarily equipped ports, to complex harbours with multiple basins, stone docks, defence systems, jetties, lighthouses, locks, cranes, etc., and corresponding regulations.

Both materially and spatially, port territories seem to have been rather poorly circumscribed. Ports were territories quite distinct from cities, and the latter sought to protect themselves from the former, since ports constituted entry points for invasion threats. Most often, a port included both a sea basin and a fringe of land of varying width, but sometimes it was merely a body of water, a section of river, or an anchorage near shore. Apart from enclosed ports, which were the exception at the time, ports were only roughly demarcated, most likely by means of a few natural or man-made landmarks.

Atlantic maritime life experienced a continued process of growth during the Middle Ages. The outset can be found in the increasing colonisation of the littoral from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward. This process led to increased human activities in coastal areas, whether through fishing, salt production or commercial endeavours. The growing population fostered a process of urbanisation, with the transformation of pre-existing settlements or the creation of new ones. However, the occupation of the coastline did not entail the abandonment of inland territories. Quite the contrary, rivers and interior routes ensured the connections between these complementary economic spaces.

Development during the late Middle Ages was amplified as a result of two closely related phenomena: a shift in activities from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and European expansion in the Atlantic space. Both phenomena aroused the interest of nascent political powers, the national monarchies, to recognise the ocean as a means to profit from commercial policies and expand their spheres of sovereignty. Their subjects benefitted from royal protection when imposing themselves over the nationals of Mediterranean republics, adopting some of their commercial techniques, to gain dominion of commercial routes.

The end of this process brought about the birth of what has been defined as the ‘Atlantic Civilisation’, characterised by the emergence of a new world order. Even though the driving force lay in Europe, its field of action spread beyond: first onto the African coast and later to the Indies, both Eastern and Western.

The centuries of development brought improvements in all aspects. Among these are those related to technical matters, the subject of this work. These are little-known facets, on account of the traditional focus of Atlantic scholarship on analysing commercial movements of large ports with their rich archival resources. Such analyses have primarily brought to light the role of large companies and of their main products.

Recent research in maritime history has gradually inserted these ports within their respective territories, in line with the definition of the ‘paramaritime’ world. This work sets off by analysing the features and configuration of urban areas. For this, port facilities are identified, making a distinction between docks, berths and loading spots. Further, for each of these sites, the devices employed in handling cargo are described, distinguishing between lifting devices and small vessels.

Port Infrastructures in the Late Middle Ages

The fifteenth century witnessed the flourishing and development of maritime commerce on the coast of Atlantic Andalusia. From that moment on, the region became one of the more dynamic and attractive markets in Europe. This scenario was determined by several interconnected factors. First, the strategic position along the international commercial routes made this area an obligatory stopping point for merchants connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Second, rich fertile lands made this area one of the main exporters of staple goods for the European medieval markets: cereal from the countryside of Seville and Jerez de la Frontera; oil, mainly from the Sevillian Aljarafe region; and wine, in particular from Jerez and the Sierra Norte mountains of Seville. Finally, another element that stimulated the development of the Andalusian littoral was the establishment of numerous foreign communities, attracted to this region for the reasons mentioned above. The majority hailed from other regions within the Iberian Peninsula. They were people of the sea, mostly shipmasters from the Cantabrian seaboard and the Portuguese Algarve, and merchants from the Crown of Aragon. Others came mostly from the Italian peninsula (namely Genoa), Flanders or England. They were fewer in number but highly influential in terms of the development of credit and the export of Andalusian goods.

The vast Andalusian littoral, with an extension of almost 300 kilometres from the river Guadiana on the border with Portugal, to the Strait of Gibraltar, possessed natural features that favoured the establishment of significant port enclaves.

From the thirteenth century, maritime commerce crossed borders and inaugurated a network of routes, from Scandinavian port towns to Castile and Mediterranean markets; a network of seaways giving rise to the consolidation of an increasingly prosperous and fluent mercantile traffic. Medieval maritime commerce was governed by consuetudinary uses and customs of mariners, transporters and carriers; it later became necessary to commit these norms to writing as a means of facilitating their dissemination and enforcement, providing security to mercantile traffic, offering assurance for merchants and seamen and expediting the resolution of conflicts.

Thus, a set of legal corpora – ius privatista – was developed and disseminated along the Atlantic waterfront, systematising maritime transport services, with the main aim of preserving the cargo, since ‘the ship is its cargo’. Areas covered include the loading, type and form of stowage, protection during the voyage and the unloading, storage and, if necessary, the transhipment of merchandise.

A task as complex as that of cargo handling drove the adaptation of port compounds through the building of infrastructures to facilitate tasks and incorporate specialised technology for the handling of cargo that on occasions was weighty and voluminous. Hence, a long chain of players participated in maritime transport, men of the sea and men of the land, the latter being the final actors in the loading and unloading of merchandise.

The last decade has witnessed the growth in number, quality and scope of Maritime History studies centred on historical dynamics of port spaces from Antiquity to current times. This has occurred to such a degree that case studies and general studies on the economic, social, political and cultural aspects of port spaces have granted the discipline a separate identity. There are several excellent overviews of the subject, such as the publications of the GIS d’Histoire Maritime which provide an account of the current historiography on medieval maritime studies; or the work coordinated by Amélia Polónia and myself, centred on longue durée case studies; or the recent publications of Michel Balard and Christian Buchet, or that of Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom and Justina Wubs-Mrozewicz, who explore port realities and ‘their circumstances’, in the words of José Ortega y Gasset. This is what a port and its connections with the city and mercantile dynamics represent. Within this context, Atlantic History emerged as a subdiscipline which, albeit centred mainly on the modern age, delves into the exploration of the port realities of medieval times.

Thus, Maritime History, Atlantic History, and Port History gravitate towards the analysis of large port spaces associated with the new worlds. This leaves a narrow margin for the treatment of minor and/or peripheral ports. However, a growing interest in the smaller enclaves is surfacing. Those enclaves Michael N. Pearson defines as central to or protagonists of any analysis of the maritime landscape, being the point of contact between the land and the sea; Alain Cabantous, Maryanne Kowaleski, Gérard Le Bouëdec or Frédérique Laget identify them as originators of civilisation on the waterfront; André Vigarie, Amélia Aguiar Andrade, Michel Bochaca, or Jesús Solórzano Telechea define them as a koiné between the salty sea and the port town, the interface between the foreland and the hinterland. Here the territorialisation of port activities evolved hand in hand with local communities to create a form of coastline civilisation as well as a maritime boundary. The koiné is also identified and described in work by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Josef Konvitz, Jan de Vries, Peter Rieterbergen and Michael N. Pearson as breathing life into Coastal History, which deals with the maritime dimension and the littoral society.

In April 1722, eight bodies hung in chains on the hills surrounding Cape Coast Castle, the British Royal African Company's chief fortification on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) in West Central Africa. The hanged men were members of Bartholomew Roberts’ pirate crew who had plundered numerous ships throughout the Atlantic Ocean before being captured off the West African coast, tried and sentenced to death. The bodies of eight of the fifty-two men executed were then displayed in locations visible to ships passing by the coast in order to serve as a “terror to future depredators of the same class”. The defeat and capture of Roberts’ crew by Royal Navy Captain Chaloner Ogle was one of the most substantial victories against pirates during the surge of Atlantic piracy that occurred between 1716 and 1726. On his return in 1723, Ogle was knighted for his conduct, becoming the first naval captain to receive a title for triumph over pirates.

Ogle's victory is often retold as evidence of British maritime power overcoming Atlantic piracy in the early eighteenth century. As the opening quotation suggests, however, Roberts’ defeat was one of only a handful of naval victories over pirates during the ten-year surge that occurred after 1716. In 1722, it was the only direct success by the British Royal Navy over Atlantic pirates despite the fact that there was an average of twenty-four naval vessels assigned to protect trading vessels against pirates in the Caribbean, North America, West Africa and the Indian Ocean. That same year also witnessed the furnishing of two local vessels from Rhode Island to chase pirates preying on regional trade, while a small sloop was hired by Jamaican planters as a guardship to protect the island's coastal regions from piratical attacks. These activities in distant waters coincided with new anti-piracy legislation in London as the British Parliament attempted to effect change by introducing further regulations on Atlantic maritime activity.

At Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana), the Royal African Company's headquarters in West Africa, the captured crew of Bartholomew Roberts’ were tried for piracy in nineteen separate trials occurring between 29 March and 19 April 1722. Of the 243 men captured, 168 faced trial. Seventy-seven were acquitted by evidence that suggested they had been forced on board while fifty-two were hanged. A further twenty were condemned to seven years’ servitude in the Royal African Company's African mines, seventeen were transferred to Marshalsea prison in London and two were respited for additional consideration. The remaining seventy-five captured men – described only as “black men” – were sold into slavery without trial. Roberts and his crew had committed numerous depredations in the Caribbean, Newfoundland, Brazil and Africa, before being defeated near Cape Lopez – in modern-day Gabon – by Captain Chaloner Ogle and the crew of the Royal Navy warship Swallow. This proved to be the most substantial naval victory over pirates between 1716 and 1726, which was emphasised by the knighthood granted to Ogle who became the first naval captain to receive a title for triumph over pirates. While the defeat of Roberts, who died during the engagement, and the capture of his crew is often related as one of the most significant events in the suppression of piracy in the early eighteenth century, the role of the British slave trading lobby in facilitating this victory is less understood.

Although historians have acknowledged that pirates’ impact on slave trading capital prompted their “extermination” in the early eighteenth century, these assertions make it appear that influential merchants lobbied and the government responded with naval support. As has been discussed in the preceding chapters, government responses to mercantile petitions were much more complex than this. With multiple groups vying for the same finite naval resources, the government had to make decisions about where and when the Royal Navy was present in extra-European waters. Before 1719, naval vessels were not assigned to protect British trade in West Africa during peacetime and this only changed as pirates attacked British slaving vessels along the coast. The subsequent lobbying by competing groups of London-based slavers offers a revealing perspective into the mechanisms surrounding mercantile petitioning and its influence on the nature of British naval power in extra-European waters.

In 1726, an anonymous pamphlet published in London lamented the impact of Spanish maritime predation on Jamaican trade following the cessation of arms between Britain and Spain in 1712, which preceded the close of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) one year later. In this pamphlet, the writer – identified only as “a person who resided several years at Jamaica” – described the predatory activities of Spanish guardacostas (coastguards) who were commissioned to suppress contraband trade on Spanish coasts, but who were accused of indefensible and violent assaults on British shipping throughout the Caribbean, particularly along the sea routes leading to and from Jamaica. According to the author, it was the immediate post-war actions of the guardacosta that “occassion[e]d the Rise of the English Pyrates, and laid the Foundation of all the Mischiefs which have happened by their Means”. By this account, the surge of piracy that occurred after 1716 was attributed to the geopolitical disputes that arose between British and Spanish subjects in the peacetime Caribbean concerning freedom of navigation and contraband trade.

Although recognised by contemporaries, the impact of Anglo-Spanish disputes in the peacetime Caribbean has not received attention within current understandings of early eighteenth-century piracy. Instead, there are two existing explanations for this surge. The first focuses on the centrality of privateering commissions issued by Archibald Hamilton, governor of Jamaica from 1710 to 1716, following the shipwreck of a Spanish flotilla in July 1715. After receiving their commissions, two Jamaican privateers sailed directly to the site of the wrecks and raided a Spanish salvaging camp that had been established on the adjacent shore. According to contemporary accounts, this raid netted the privateers 120,000 pieces of eight, which they carried back to Jamaica in January 1716. This then created a treasure-hunting sensation, which encouraged further voyages of British colonial vessels to the wrecks. In May, Hamilton's governorship was annulled and Jamaican privateers, as well as non-commissioned treasure hunters from Jamaica and elsewhere, were recalled to their respective ports and prohibited from salvaging the Spanish wrecks. Rather than return to colonial ports and face the potential loss of their accumulated plunder, these displaced mariners instead gathered at the Bahamas and turned to piracy.

In October 1717, Governor Walter Hamilton of the Leeward Islands reported to the Board of Trade that pirates who had formerly been impacting Caribbean trade had “all gon[e] to north america, or to some other parts”. This report coincided with the peak of pirate activity in North America, when pirates voyaged from New Providence and the Caribbean to the North American coast. Arriving in the summer and autumn months of 1717 and 1718, pirates targeted capes near to colonial ports for a short period, intercepting vessels before moving northward to the next chokepoint. They then returned to the Caribbean at the end of autumn to avoid the winter storms, before returning in spring. Throughout 1717 and 1718, there were frequent complaints of pirates operating in the capes and inlets off South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with attacks reported as far as Cape Sables in Newfoundland. While the number of vessels plundered by pirates in North America was relatively small over the duration of these two years, the short-term concentration of piratical attacks within colonial capes had an intermittent yet significant impact on regional trade. This, in turn, encouraged a number of local initiatives intended to chase pirates from nearby waters.

The success of British anti-piracy expeditions in North America in 1718, particularly against Edward Thache in North Carolina and Stede Bonnet in South Carolina, has ensured their inclusion in most studies of Atlantic piracy. Yet, these discussions provide little consideration of the organisation, funding and motivations behind these voyages, and do not consider what they suggest about the state of maritime defence in early eighteenth-century British North America. Instead, these expeditions are viewed as a turning point in a unified imperial project to curtail piracy throughout the British Atlantic. This aligns to the wider historiography of the British Atlantic, in which colonial maritime defence – including that provided by the Royal Navy – has received little focus beyond wartime privateering or naval assaults. Unlike British Caribbean colonies, which had largely been absorbed into royal control, British colonies settled along the eastern coast of North America continued to be made up of an assortment of royal and private colonies.

In July 1716, Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant-governor of Virginia from 1710 to 1722, wrote to the Board of Trade that a “nest of pirates” endeavoured to “establish themselves at [New] Providence”, warning that these would prove “dangerous to British commerce, if not timely suppressed”. Two years earlier, Henry Pulleine, governor of Bermuda from 1713 to 1718, had warned of pirates operating from New Providence, but the imperial administration had yet to act on the news. Several similar reports by British governors were prompted by the rapid increase of New Providence-based pirates from 1716 onwards and their transition from attacking Spanish vessels in the waters surrounding the Bahamas to indiscriminate attacks on colonial shipping throughout the Caribbean and North America. Despite these reports, the imperial administration only began to gradually respond to pirates from 1717 onwards after England-based mercantile groups complained about the impact of piracy on British transatlantic shipping. Consequently, the immediate responses to piracy in the Caribbean Sea before 1717 relied on the fragmented efforts of naval captains and colonial governments acting against pirates operating in waters near to their respective posts. When such undertakings occurred, they proved extremely limited and produced little change throughout the Caribbean. Similarly, when the British government responded in 1717, the measures imposed were obstructed by the lack of resources available to enact them. The result was that between 1714 and 1718 piracy was left largely unchecked in the Caribbean. This enabled pirates to not only accumulate plunder but also recruit additional crewmembers, capture larger vessels and outfit them with superior firepower in order to facilitate voyages against richer prizes further afield.

The lack of success against pirates prior to 1718 offers the opportunity to explore the factors that dictated the strength of imperial maritime power in extra-European spaces. As has been discussed in previous studies of the eighteenth-century Royal Navy, naval vessels stationed in extra-European spaces during peacetime were primarily instructed to provide for the protection of trade by convoying merchant shipping; the vessels were too few and too scattered to achieve anything beyond this. However, the operational difficulties that naval captains faced when they arrived in the Americas, due to obstructive legislation and environmental conditions, inhibited their ability to carry out these instructions effectively.

In June 1723, Barrow Harris, commander-in-chief of the naval vessels stationed in Jamaica, reported to the Admiralty that “We have had little or no damage done for some time in these parts by Pirates, only by some Spaniards that call themselves Guarda Coasts.” Echoing Harris, historians have generally agreed that a decline in piracy had occurred not just in the waters surrounding Jamaica but throughout the Atlantic Ocean by 1726. This, they argue, was the result of either military–legal campaigns, declining markets for plunder, the increased availability of marine insurance, or the changing perceptions of piracy in the colonial theatre. These studies offer important perspectives on crucial factors that helped bring about a stark decline in piracy by 1726, but they also conflate or simplify the events occurring throughout the ten-year surge in piracy to emphasise the importance of one group over another – whether naval captains, lawyers, merchants, journalists, or insurers. In contrast, this book has charted the fragmented efforts to curtail piracy as Atlantic pirates spread from the Bahamas and Florida to the Greater Caribbean, North America, West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and has established that various groups reacted to the impact of piracy in these waters and played a role in the successes and failures of British anti-piracy campaigns. This process continued after 1722 when the remaining active Atlantic pirates concentrated their attacks in the locales of the Caribbean Sea and North American coastline where a high volume of shipping trafficked but where there was little naval or colonial maritime protection.

Although there was a drop in piratical activity in the Americas between 1719 and 1721, coinciding with a number of pirate crews voyaging to Africa, Brazil and the East Indies, there continued to be reports of piracy in the Caribbean and North America. Despite this sustained presence, pirates do not appear to have significantly obstructed regional trade during these years and there were no anti-piracy expeditions in the Caribbean or North America by either naval warships or private vessels outfitted by colonial governments. This changed in 1722 when significantly more piracies were reported in North America and the Caribbean. Compared to piratical activity between 1716 and 1721, the numbers of Atlantic pirates operating after 1722 had significantly diminished and attacks came to be concentrated in regions that received no or only intermittent protection by naval and colonial guardships.