“It is ticklish meddling with the navy”: The British navy and Caribbean contraband trade,c. 1713–1750

For all the power connoted by the label “empire,” the British imperial state of the early eighteenth century had remarkably little ability to exercise coercive authority at a distance from the metropole. Its durable apparatus in North America and the West Indies consisted of little more than colonial governors, customs collectors, and the navy. ¹ Further afield, in the British footholds in Africa and Asia, even these minimal organs of government were absent; instead, the Crown deputized merchant companies to rule on its behalf. The challenges of trans-Atlantic oversight and communication meant that individual agents of these organizations at the imperial periphery had considerable autonomy to pursue independent action. Royal Navy officers, like many other such actors, often took advantage of their relative autonomy to advance their own self-interest alongside—or even at the expense of—the interests of their institution and the state.

The state, metropolitan merchants, and mercantile companies alike faced the same tension: their ability to direct policy over long distances depended on representatives thousands of miles away. The men on the spot, however, had unique access and ability to advance their own interests at the institution's expense—and often did. The Caribbean during the period of the British Asiento—the exclusive contract to supply enslaved laborers to the Spanish American colonies, which lasted from 1713 to 1750 but functionally ended with the outbreak of war in 1739—vividly illustrates how a variety of British corporate bodies, including the state, struggled to control the activities of their agents at a distance. In the decades after the war of Spanish Succession (1702–1713), the agents of the South Sea Company (SSC)—a publicly traded joint-stock company—persistently sought personal profits in ways that not only ate into the Company's profits but even threatened the continuation of its privilege to carry on legitimate trade. Government contractors colluded to defraud the Treasury. Governors and other colonial officials bickered over precedence and failed to coordinate effective action. Merchants in Jamaica and Barbados supplied foreign colonies with enslaved laborers and imported the produce of those colonies to compete with that of British planters, and carried on an illicit trade with Spanish America that eventually brought on a major war.

The Royal Navy faced the same problems of oversight at a distance, and naval officers in the Caribbean both supported the British contraband traders and participated in illicit trade themselves. While the navy was administratively and logistically advanced compared with other contemporary institutions, the Admiralty exercised minimal direct control over the officer corps and could do little to shape its culture and norms. Officers routinely disregarded regulations and laws that they found inconvenient; moreover, they did not even pretend to recognize any authority beyond the Admiralty and the king. In the Caribbean, they faced competing demands and requests from a multiplicity of constituents of the British state while operating independently of any local authority and beyond the easy reach of the metropole. As a result, they often chose to support the interest most clearly conducive to their personal gain, whether or not that aligned with the likely priorities of the metropolitan state.

This article will explore how naval officers exploited their position of public trust to pursue self-interest and financial gain at the expense of the public interest. The first section explains the context of the Royal Navy's presence in the Caribbean following the War of Spanish Succession, emphasizing the entanglement of British colonists with the Spanish empire and the persistence and pervasiveness of illicit inter-imperial trade. The second surveys some ways that both merchants and the state attempted to address the challenges of control at a distance. The third and fourth sections consider the behavior of other actors at the imperial periphery as a point of comparison, exploring the activities of South Sea Company officials, the associates of the merchant and government contractor Henry Lascelles, and royal governors. The final section details naval officers’ self-serving activities on the imperial periphery and their impact.

Britain and Spain in the Caribbean

For the British empire of the early eighteenth century, the Caribbean islands were geographically peripheral but vitally important. English colonists had planted the nation's first small overseas enclaves in North America, but by the latter half of the seventeenth century the development of plantation agriculture in Barbados, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica made the West Indian possessions—by virtue of their colonial produce and the customs duties they provided—the jewel of the English Atlantic world. The British West Indies accounted for approximately 12% of English imports and 5% of exports by 1700, rising to 20% and 6% in the middle of the century. ² At the same time, the islands lay 4000 miles across the Atlantic from the metropole and collectively had a combined free population that was smaller than some British towns. ³

As important as the Caribbean islands were to the British empire, however, British power and influence in the region paled in comparison with that of Spain. By the time English colonists settled permanently in the Antilles, the Spanish had been entrenched for over a century in the islands and the mainland of the American continents. Mexican and Peruvian silver formed the taproot of Spanish wealth, and European consumers increasingly demanded colonial products such as sugar, tobacco, cacao, and dyewoods. Spain's European rivals were obliged to operate at the margins in the Americas and to deal with Spaniards as trading partners even as their states were notional antagonists. ⁴

Inter-imperial trade in the Caribbean generated a tangled web of interests, partnerships, and enmities among Spanish and British actors, including commercial elites, the South Sea Company, and naval officers. From their first entry into the region, the Spanish had jealously guarded access to the products of their American empire, especially the silver and gold bullion considered to form the basis of national wealth. Transatlantic trade was limited to the galeones and flota, organized trading fleets that sailed annually from Spain to Veracruz and Portobello, and Spanish officials barred foreign merchants from their colonial ports. But for English merchants and adventurers, the prize of Spanish markets was too tempting to resist, and from the sixteenth century on they sought access by fair means or foul.

Early attempts to trade with New Spain and New Granada were little more than brigandage and piracy, but they eventually coalesced around a coherent goal: to establish a foothold in the Caribbean, break into trade with the Spanish Empire, and acquire the gold and silver with which to overthrow Spanish attempts at world empire. After initially failing to capture Hispaniola, an English force conquered Jamaica in 1655. In 1662, the king ordered the governor of Jamaica and the navy to “settle a trade by force or otherwise” to prevent the Spanish from “ingrossing to themselves all the riches of the Indies, contrary to use and custom of all governments and the laws of nations.” ⁵ They succeeded, and soon the permanent and prominent English presence in the neighborhood enabled a brisk illicit trade to emerge, by which the English colonies supplied Spanish America (particularly Portobello and Cartagena, but also Cuba and elsewhere) with enslaved laborers, manufactured goods, and even necessary foodstuffs like flour. The English received plantation products—sugar, tobacco, cacao—as well as, most importantly, bullion. ⁶ By 1689, the gold and silver obtained in trade and shipped home from Jamaica was worth more than Jamaican sugar exports. ⁷ The legal system of Spanish imperial trade struggled to supply the colonists, not only in quantity but also in type of goods: in particular, metropolitan Spain lagged behind England in its development of industry and manufactures. Even the manufactured goods and textiles carried in the galeones and the flota came almost entirely from foreign trade. ⁸ In any case the galeones had slowed to a crawl by the turn of the eighteenth century: just one visited Portobello between 1699 and 1713. ⁹

Jamaican traders also immediately moved to deliver enslaved Africans to Spanish markets. Beginning in the 1660s, the Spanish government contracted with foreigners to supply laborers to their colonies; Jamaicans both sold at home (where the contractors had established an agent by the 1680s) and carried cargoes of enslaved people to Spanish ports themselves. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, between one-third and one-half of the slaves brought to Jamaica every year were transshipped to Spanish America. ¹⁰ The trade of both types expanded very quickly and soon became tremendously important to Jamaica's economy and the fate of its merchants and seafaring community. ¹¹

The Spanish Crown eventually authorized an inter-imperial trade in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), conceding to Queen Anne the Asiento—a contract to supply 4800 enslaved Africans per year to specified Spanish possessions in America—and the right to send an annual “permission” ship to the trade fair at Portobello. The Queen delegated the treaty's trading provisions to the South Sea Company, a joint-stock company chartered in 1711 with the aim of opening a post-war trade with Spanish America. The SSC established factories in the eight permitted Spanish American port towns, and agreed a deal with the Royal African Company (RAC) to purchase enslaved Africans in Jamaica. ¹²

Over the ensuing decades, both Britons and Spaniards came to feel cheated by the arrangement. The Spanish had hoped, in part, that the British would suppress the illicit trade once they had the Asiento, but it continued unabated. South Sea Company representatives routinely broke the rules governing permitted quantities of trade goods and failed to pay the quarter of their profits owed to the Spanish king. For their part, Spanish officials seized Company property immediately upon the outbreak of minor Anglo-Spanish wars in 1718 and 1727, despite a treaty provision allowing for an 18-month grace period. The resultant friction and distrust meant that the sanctioned trade failed to flourish. ¹³

The illicit trade that continued was in fact vital to the Spanish colonies. They depended on Jamaican merchants for food and goods of all types, and could not be sustained by the intermittent Spanish trade fleets. The Jamaicans and Barbadians met the Spanish colonists’ demand for enslaved African laborers, not just for the South and Central American littoral settlements but for the highlands and Peru as well. As the Spanish did not themselves participate in the transatlantic slave trade at this time, the foreign colonies were a significant source of laborers. Over the whole period of Atlantic slavery, more than a quarter of all enslaved people brought to Spanish America came from another American colony. Contraband trade in all its varieties had been an important part of Spanish colonial economies for over a century; smuggling was embraced by local people and tolerated to an extent by officials of the Spanish crown. ¹⁴

Yet the trade also provided local officials with an opportunity to employ otherwise unoccupied seamen and generally to harass foreign traders. In the early 1720s, Spanish governors throughout the circum-Caribbean expanded the long-standing practice of commissioning guarda costas—private men-of-war tasked with interdicting contraband trade. Like privateers in wartime, the crews of these vessels received little or no ordinary wages but shared in the yield of any captures they made. Predictably, they acted aggressively towards British-flagged vessels. If a ship was carrying any commodity produced in a Spanish territory or even Spanish coin—the most frequently used hard currency throughout the Americas—a guarda costa might use that as evidence of contraband trade and seize the ship. Even when they did not make seizures, the Spanish often insulted and abused British seamen. An incident in which a guarda costa mutilated a Welsh ship master provided the common name for the war that broke out in 1739: the War of Jenkins’ Ear. ¹⁵ Yet British authorities had little leeway to retaliate: they feared that the British merchant marine, which far outnumbered its Spanish counterpart in the Americas, would suffer disproportionately from any decision to escalate. ¹⁶

Naval officers thus found themselves operating on a quasi-warlike footing in the Caribbean in the 1720s and 1730s, escorting merchants and cruising the seas with the goal of deterring Spanish attacks. ¹⁷ However, it was left to each commanding officer to decide how to balance the various demands and interests that competed for his attention. Most immediately, he owed loyalty and obedience to the Admiralty and the king. He was ordered to consult with colonial governors, but not to obey them. As one of his primary duties was protection of trade, he had to account for the desires and interests of merchants and the masters of their ships—but there was not just one group of merchants. The perspectives and aims of a colonial government, the planters of that colony, the merchants of the colony, and the metropolitan merchants who traded to that colony might all be different.

In this complex political and economic environment, clearly divergent interests were present. The clearest conflict was between the institutional interests of the South Sea Company, which wanted to execute the Asiento without interference and without competition from illicit traders, and the individual interests of the Jamaican traders. The two could not be reconciled. Yet the Company was not a monolith, either: its factors, sub-governor, and deputy governor, who were involved in lucrative private trade under cover of the Asiento, may have prioritized their gains from such trade ahead of the aims of the stockholders and the General Court. The metropolitan government that commanded the navy could provide no clear deconfliction of these priorities. The metropole had never moved to stop the illicit trade, even under Spanish pressure; illegal trade with Spanish America generated bullion and import commodities that were returned to Britain, ultimately providing wealth and government revenue in the form of import duties. At the same time, Robert Walpole's ministry clearly wanted to avoid war, and the depredations of the guarda costas and constantly ratcheting tension with the Spanish crown turned on the presence of the contraband traders. Moreover, the South Sea Company's execution of the Asiento was codified in an international treaty. Yet at no time did naval officers receive orders to suppress the contraband traders, or to guard the Company trade in preference to the Jamaican trade.

The principal–agent problem

Thus obliged to determine the intent of their orders themselves—to set priorities and answer questions with implications for foreign policy—naval officers often seemed to find that doing their best aligned closely with doing what was best for them. Given complex circumstances, little supervision, wide latitude to act, and clear opportunities to serve their own self-interest, many did so: sometimes assisting merchants, sometimes competing with them; sometimes cooperating with governors, at other times squabbling with them. The Admiralty had few mechanisms for exercising effective coercive control over naval officers operating thousands of miles away, nor did it strive to incentivize better behavior.

The problem of representatives at the periphery acting in ways that served their own interests rather than those of the central organization was not unique to the navy. ¹⁸ The same tyrannies of distance and time that operated on naval communications and oversight confronted other trans-oceanic networks. Any organization obliged to be represented by local proxy experienced some form of what social scientists call the “principal–agent problem”: the distant principal appoints an agent who has up-to-date information and makes decisions that bind the principal, but how does the principal ensure its agent acts responsibly and in keeping with its interests?

Merchant partnerships, the joint-stock corporations, and the state each found ways to try to address the problem. Some were more successful than others, and merchants, both private and corporate, extended effective control over their servants more reliably and consistently than the state did. This effectiveness sometimes resulted from establishing incentive structures that aligned proxies’ interests with those of the company. More often, however, merchants were effective because they had a clear financial interest in monitoring their agents as closely as possible. They expected frequent communication and for their agent to decline to act when he didn’t understand what his employer would have him do.

In contrast, the state was not regularly able to do any of the things that merchants did to effectively control its agents. In the first place, it was thinly manned and the officials responsible for monitoring and communicating with distant agents had a variety of other duties and responsibilities to fill their time. The Admiralty corresponded with dozens of captains and admirals as well as four other boards of commissioners; only so much attention could be spared to closely follow updates from one particular captain. The Secretary of State for the Southern Department was responsible for colonial affairs and foreign relations with Spain, but he was one of the busiest men in the executive and these two areas made up only a small fraction of his job. The Board of Trade could read and write letters, but exercised no supervisory control. Even so, they communicated with governors in Barbados and Jamaica two to three times less frequently than the Royal African Company's directors did with its agents in the same colonies. ¹⁹ Affairs in the colonies/empire generally received little attention at the upper levels of government. First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Charles Wager asked his cabinet colleagues in 1736 whether “the Plantations did not require half an hour, or an hour consideration, once in half a year or so?” ²⁰ Clearly defined relationships of authority across the executive departments did not exist, and the officers of any of them could claim complete independence from those of any other. The state did not have efficient means of realigning incentives, as the East India Company (EIC) did in authorizing its employees in South Asia to trade privately on their own behalf. State servants could not reliably be detected in and held accountable for malfeasance; investigations dragged on for years, and often political maneuverings prevented action even in the case of charges that could be proved. ²¹ Within the navy, officers accused of a crime were prosecuted by the complainant before a panel of fellow officers and the norms of the officer corps accordingly exerted tremendous influence. Hence, courts-martial usually punished only gross violations of community standards and routinely acquitted defendants who, judged by any reasonable standard, had clearly violated regulations or even laws. ²²

Agents of the South Sea Company

The South Sea Company's execution of the Asiento trade did not reap significant profits. Yet its factory infrastructure and the fig leaf of authorized trade that the treaty arrangements provided enabled the officers of the SSC and colonial merchants to collude in contraband trade on a prodigious scale—in addition to the non-Company smuggling that persisted. ²³ Company factors noted that the demand for smuggled British goods endured despite restrictive imperial trade laws: “The Minister at Madrid may give what orders he pleases & the Commerce at Seville may take their own measures, but still a people who want goods will find out ways for a supply.” ²⁴ South Sea Company vessels transporting “quota slaves” to the authorized ports smuggled European and colonial goods on the individual accounts of the Company's factors. They carried additional enslaved laborers not shown on the official accounts (and thus not subject to normal duties) and piled their holds with provisions notionally to supply the voyage but in fact meant for sale to Spanish buyers. The annual permission ships carried more than their authorized cargoes and even took resupply from illicit traders while they lay in port at Portobello. ²⁵

Alongside the official reports they made to the Court and Directors, several SSC factors exchanged letters directly with the Sub-governor in which they spoke openly about their private trade. ²⁶ This correspondence makes clear that Company operations served in large part as a front for its servants to enrich themselves. This was not actually a case of the principal's inability to control the agent; those on the inside of the scheme weren’t even trying. The two factors in Jamaica, John Merewether and Edward Manning, complained to Sub-governor Peter Burrell when the trade was at a low ebb that “we really live without any perquisites” because, after expenses, “there will remain no more than £1200 to be divided between us” for the year 1736. ²⁷ As an annual net income of £600 apiece would have ranked the two among the class of very successful merchants, they clearly expected to grow quite wealthy in the Company's service. ²⁸ This expectation regarding SSC service appears to have been shared more widely. The executor for John Eden, another factor who had died just a month after reaching Havana, asked the Court of Directors to write off a debt of £1000 the Company had advanced to Eden for outfitting costs, since he had “the misfortune to die before he could possibly make any advantage by his employment.” Eden's other debtors and “poor relations” made insistent demands upon his executor, on the belief “that a South Sea factor, though he died in a month, must have left a considerable estate behind him.” ²⁹

Particularly entrepreneurial and well-connected merchants could also leverage plum Company—and government—posts to obtain even greater personal benefits. Edward Lascelles, the customs collector for Barbados in the late 1730s, combined that office with employment as the SSC's agent for the colony. As agent, he was responsible for purchasing enslaved laborers from private slave ships on the Company's behalf, for subsequent transshipment to Spanish America. ³⁰ He had no particular qualifications for either of these positions—another Company servant noted that Lascelles “understands very little of trade or of Negroes”—but he did have powerful friends. ³¹ Edward's older brother, Henry Lascelles, was one of the wealthiest men in the empire. Henry had spent his young adulthood in Barbados in the family mercantile business while concurrently serving as customs collector for nearly two decades. In that post, he was found to have engaged in rampant fraud, diverting more than £30,000 in revenue due to the Crown from the sugar duty. ³² In 1729, Henry passed his office to Edward and returned to England, where he greatly expanded the family business and partnered with other London merchants in an ambitious slave-trading enterprise, while amassing a tremendous fortune. ³³

By the mid-1730s, Henry's mercantile expertise and political connections won him government contracts to provide provisions and hospital services for naval forces in the West Indies. Merchants with established transatlantic trading networks, like Lascelles, were well suited for the task; they could tap contacts in Ireland and North America to ship beef, butter, flour, and other necessary supplies to the islands, ensuring a steady supply while minimizing costs. ³⁴ Henry exploited this opportunity to great effect, musing that “the victualling in my time was a branch of business which through good management (I reckon) I chiefly made my fortune by.” ³⁵ Lascelles’ “good management,” however, involved making underhanded deals and pulling strings as much as it did lining up suppliers and maintaining an adequate stock on hand. Henry and Edward—his local representative in Barbados—bribed sea officers to operate in ways that saved the expense of properly fulfilling their contractual obligations, drawing ships away from their assigned stations for extended periods and depriving ill sailors of the opportunity to recuperate in hospital. ³⁶ The captains complied happily with Lascelles’ corrupt schemes—which lined both his pockets and theirs—although they manifestly damaged the interests of the service. ³⁷

Agents of the state

The frequent occurrence of disputes between officers of different departments was one of the most prominent features of government in the colonies. Because the executive departments operated independently of one another, and the governor of a colony did not exercise any meaningful power over other state appointees, there was no possibility of marshaling state efforts under one coordinating officer. For example, the governor's “naval officer”—responsible for enforcing the Navigation Acts—and the customs officials in a port did not coordinate their activities, served different masters, and in fact were often in competition for perquisites. ³⁸ Colonial patent officers’ appointments came from the king just as the governor's did; governors were not involved in their selection, and most such officials did not recognize the governor as having any particular authority over them.

Not only were the other officials unlikely to share a political alignment with the governor, there was little he could do to ingratiate himself with them. The Duke of Portland, governor of Jamaica in 1724, complained that he had no means “to reward any body or encourage anyone to distinguish himself in the service of the publick” and could thus “plainly see what can be expected from [the patent officers], particularly when their own interest leads them to make private friends to themselves.” ³⁹ His notice of the officials’ “own interest” was perceptive. Many sought a particular office because, beyond the immediate pecuniary benefits it offered, it would enhance the prospects of their private affairs. When the Jamaica factors for the wealthy London slave merchant Humphry Morice heard that a vacancy was imminent in the office of the chief law enforcement officer, they strongly encouraged him to spend as much as £3000 to buy the patent for himself or for one of them—because it would enable better collection from his debtors, backed by the authority of the state. ⁴⁰ Portland saw clearly the difficulties that he faced in aligning even the representatives of metropolitan government in the colony toward a common goal under such conditions.

The correspondence of the Board of Trade (and sometimes other entities) is littered with evidence of small-scale disputes over authority and perquisites of office. A characteristic example occurred in 1722, when Peter Beckford, the commissioner of customs in Jamaica, tried to stop Governor Nicholas Lawes from allowing a vessel loaded with cacao to depart for Vera Cruz without paying any duty; the governor ordered soldiers to remove the customs officers from the vessel. Beckford thereupon read the Navigation Acts to the governor, which Lawes “was pleased to acknowledge was plain enough however that the intent he believed was otherwise and that the cocoa should go out.” The governor then tried to get Beckford fired, and when he was unsuccessful, complained to the Board of Trade about “the many difficulties a governor is to struggle with in supporting of the King's honour and promoting His service when he is not supported from home.” ⁴¹

A long-standing dispute simmered between colonial governors and the officers of the navy over their respective claims to authority, occasionally punctuated by particular outbursts. Captains assigned to the West Indian colonies received orders from the Admiralty requiring them to

communicate these our instructions to the governor and council … with whom you are from time to time to advise and consult … and govern yourself therein according as shall be agreed on from time to time as far as you shall be able to do the same, without running any apparent danger to the ships you command. ⁴²

Before 1717, the Admiralty had delegated authority in governors’ Vice Admiralty commissions to suspend captains who refused to obey gubernatorial orders; the removal of this power—after one governor appointed a purser (i.e. a ship's supply officer) to take up the vacancy of a captain who died—seems to have spurred the complaints. In 1721, the Board of Trade asked the king to include it in orders to future governors, but they failed to achieve their object. ⁴³ Three years later a group of London merchants trading to Jamaica joined in the complaints to the Board of Trade: guarda costas had been able to plunder the coast and abduct many enslaved people, “while the station ships of war appointed for the protection of that colony employ themselves as they please, being subject to no jurisdiction abroad, nor can they receive any directions from their superiors at home by reason of the remote distance.” ⁴⁴ The Board relayed the merchants’ concerns to the duke of Newcastle (Secretary of State for the Southern Department) and again asked to restore the governors’ power over naval officers, arguing that there could be no hope of the men-of-war doing their duty “more exactly” otherwise, and accordingly insurance rates for the merchants would remain high. ⁴⁵ The captains’ orders went unchanged.

On at least 15 occasions between 1718 and 1742, a dispute arose between a colonial governor and a naval officer that was sufficiently serious as to be reported to the Board of Trade, the Admiralty, or both. The great majority of these related to authority, most often concerning the simple question of whether the governor could tell the captain what to do. Some were astoundingly juvenile, but in several cases the language of the disputes reveals something of how each man thought about his office and its relationship with others. In each case, concerns about honor seem to be bubbling just beneath the surface. The style of communication ranges from pleasant and polite to sarcastic and rude; some letters are awkwardly formal, apparently consumed with proper protocol. Yet each captain assures the governor in no uncertain terms that he does not take orders from him. Governor Lowther of Barbados confined Captain Thomas Whorwood ashore after a disagreement over the governor's right to the proceeds of a seizure. In a letter to the Admiralty, Whorwood relayed Lowther's assertion that

he would serve any admiral in the same manner for he was resolved to maintain the authority the King had given him which I said was my case in respect to their Lordships [ = the Admiralty Board]. He was surprised I should offer to make it a parallel case saying there was a vast difference having his authority from him that gave my masters theirs, a distinction I don’t understand but find his the cant of all governors. ⁴⁶

One of the most jarring and revealing conflicts between the navy and a governor contained no hint of a personal spat. It was purely about privileges and authority, and shows the lengths some officials would go to preserve the prerogatives of their station, regardless of the impact on the national interest. In 1742, after more than two years of war with Spain, a Herculean effort was underway to victual the large force of sailors and soldiers present in the Caribbean. Unable to provide enough wine, the Victualling Board hired two ships to carry French brandy from Guernsey to Jamaica; on their arrival they were seized by the governor's naval officer for violating the Navigation Acts. The Acts required that any European product be landed in England before shipping to the colonies, and the Channel Islands were not England. The navy's victualling agents filed an intent to appeal, which should have stopped all action on the case, but the naval officer immediately sold the seized brandy, and Governor Trelawney received one-third of the proceeds. He took advantage of a clear technicality to deprive the fleet of necessary provisions, in wartime, in the interest of lining his pockets. ⁵⁰ It is hard to imagine that the navy felt everyone was on the same side.

Apart from arguments over the navy's lack of subordination, the most common source of gubernatorial complaint was the navy's participation in illicit trade. Governor Lawes of Jamaica reported immediately after his arrival in 1718 that there were no vessels present to notify the neighboring Spanish governors of his presence because they had all gone to the South American coast to trade. More importantly, naval trading caused the men-of-war to neglect the defense of the island and served as “a very great discouragement to the fair trader,” reducing the trade of the island and the employment of seafaring men, and potentially contributing to piracy. ⁵¹ Lawes’ successor as governor, the duke of Portland, made similar points when complaining five years later about naval trade. Portland's frustration with the captains seems to have reached a breaking point, and a minor after-dinner quibble with one of them exploded into a major fracas when the captain essentially dared the governor to try confining him. Portland interpreted Captain Laws’ outburst as “trampling upon all authority,” had him arrested, and proceeded to write furious letters home to the Board of Trade, the secretary of state, and the First Lord of the Admiralty. ⁵²

The governor complained of the captains’ arrogance and independence: “If you offer to meddle with sea affairs when you speak to any of the captains of the men of war you expose yourself to insults, they carrying every thing in such a manner and with such airs as are not to be expressed.” ⁵³ Speaking of the commodore specifically, he thought “[n]o Grand Vizier in Turkey can support the dignity of his post in a more extraordinary manner without any regard to what common civility requires from him.” ⁵⁴ He claimed the sea officers had taken over trade altogether: “The trade of the island is become the property of the men of war, and none partake with them in it but those they favour, the merchants in general are most of them discouraged, if not undone.” He pointed out the impossibility of competing in trade with captains who don’t pay for wages, provisions, or freight charges. The lack of an orderly arrangement of authority, and particularly the lack of close control of the naval officers, allows them to act with impunity: “the captains of the men of war being accountable to no body here, do what ever they please without the least constraint, if one offers to say a word one is abused, and they lord it as they please hardly allowing any body to be their equal, much less their superior … it is impossible to bear their haughty airs and insulting ways.” His letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty went one better: most importantly, the navy's illicit trade was “putting the public to a vast charge only to enrich the captains of the men of war.” ⁵⁵

The Duke of Portland was a high-ranking peer who had been shattered by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble and was serving in Jamaica to remake his fortune. As such, he was probably more sensitive than most to questions of decorum and the respect owing to one's social betters. His letters are remarkable for their density of impassioned complaints; it is fairly clear he was furious when he wrote two long letters to the Board of Trade on the same day. Yet looking past his concern with arrogance and disrespect, he repeatedly emphasized that the navy was ineffective in its role and nothing but a frivolous expense so long as the captains were not more effectively controlled.

The navy, merchants, and illicit trade

Although Lawes and Portland complained of naval trade that threatened the shipping of Jamaica, naval officers in the Caribbean often enjoyed cooperative relationships with local merchants. Many of these activities were entirely above-board. Captains received ample compensation for the legal carriage of normally arising freights of coin, bullion, or jewels from one port to another in the course of their voyages. Although it was illegal for them to demand payment from merchant captains for escorting a convoy, they often received tokens of gratitude; an officer writing in 1735 warned of the ill consequences of men-of-war interfering with “the trade of the merchant they are designed to encourage, and expect a gratuity from.” ⁵⁶ It was not uncommon for the merchants of a port to personally reward a captain with a gift of cash or silverware in recognition of his diligent performance of commerce-protection duties. In 1744, “sixty-three of the principal gentlemen of Barbados” wrote to Captain Charles Knowles to make their “joint acknowledgement” of his services to the island, “having indeed been immediate partakers of them.” Upon departing Kingston, Jamaica, he received both the thanks of the House of Assembly and, from the “merchants and trading inhabitants of the town,” a piece of plate for “the vigilance and zeal which you have continually shown in protecting the trade, to and from this island.” ⁵⁷ Rewards like these were not appropriated by Parliament or paid from the Treasury, but were no less legitimate for that. They were subscribed and awarded by an important imperial constituency, providing a bonus and incentive for actual public service that happened to particularly benefit the merchants, whose interests were recognized as a powerful component of the national interest.

Officers reaped other dividends from their service that did not serve the national interest. They partnered with local traders in dubious victualling arrangements that benefited both, but injured legitimate contractors, common sailors, and the Treasury. As noted above, they conspired with Victualling and Sick & Hurt contractors for mutual profit, occasionally directing excessive payments to the supplier, and unnecessarily impairing their vessels’ readiness and their sailors’ health even when they did not directly impact the Treasury. Some officers were even more enterprising in arranging private deals with merchants. In addition to those who cooperated in Lascelles’ contracting schemes in the West Indies, at least 10 captains coordinated illicit activities with him and his associates trading to Africa between 1731 and 1743. ⁵⁸

Naval officers also cooperated with local merchants in an array of illicit trading schemes. Sometimes these took the form of convoying Jamaican vessels to Spanish American ports. The navy had provided open support for illicit trade for years. ⁵⁹ A local merchant identified such escorts—complete with the payment of convoy money—to be the preferred mode of participation for most naval officers after the passage of the 1722 “Act for the more effectual suppressing of piracy,” which explicitly forbade carrying merchandise in men-of-war. According to him, “the remedy of the late Act … is become worse than the disease” because the escorting captains charged a 12.5% fee on all the gold and silver brought away from the coast. ⁶⁰ Though copies of the Piracy Act had been sent to all captains, and each set of orders made explicit reference to the law, men-of-war continued to carry merchandise themselves as well. ⁶¹ When Captain Vincent Pearce's Phoenix arrived in New York from Barbados in 1721, it was carrying three casks of sugar and a consignment of “European goods.” A month later, it departed for London with 24 tons of snuff on board. ⁶²

Most trading schemes, illicit as they were, left little if any evidence and will have passed unremarked in the historical record, but one instance of a captain coordinating trade with merchants became visible when it ended in violence. In 1722 Greyhound, under Captain Waldron, was the station ship at New York but frequently sailed to the West Indies, often escorting New England merchants there to harvest salt. At some point, Waldron made the acquaintance of some Jamaica merchants and arranged to carry goods on their behalf. When Greyhound anchored near Havana, Waldron met with several Spanish merchants that he had dealt with before and invited them aboard. As the crew dined belowdecks, the Spaniards “surpriz’d the ship” and briefly seized control of it, murdering the captain and three other men and making off with approximately £10,000 in coin. Greyhound's wounded lieutenant, Edward Smith, successfully got the ship back to New York and entered into negotiations with local officials to offload and avoid paying duties on the 34 enslaved people and sundry European and Indian goods—property of Waldron's Jamaican partners—that remained onboard from the time of the attack. ⁶³

Naturally, situations arose when naval officers’ personal interests did not align with those of the companies and other merchants. Such occasions demonstrate that whatever sense of duty officers felt they owed the Crown did not necessarily devolve on to the quasi-governmental corporations or the king's subjects generally, in the absence of specific orders. When a pair of warships on the African coast recaptured the Royal Africa Company slaver Camwood from a French privateer in 1711, Captains Legg and Chadwick agreed to return their prize and its remaining cargo to the RAC in exchange for £500. However, Camwood had been in enemy hands for nearly a month; the Frenchmen had offloaded a substantial part of its original cargo into their own vessel, Cezar (which the men-of-war had also captured), and subsequently used some of Camwood's cargo to purchase 70 enslaved Africans. The two British captains applied a strict interpretation to their agreement with the RAC, refusing to return anything but the portion of Camwood's original cargo remaining in that ship's hold. Instead, they sold the slaves—as well as two African sailors taken out of Camwood—to independent traders on their own account, and sold the captured linens taken out of Cezar back to the Company. The Admiralty Court in Barbados subsequently condemned Camwood as a lawful prize, confirming the captains’ right to dispose of the vessel and its cargo as they saw fit. The RAC could do nothing but appeal the decision. ⁶⁴

Because prize money offered the most straightforward means to wealth for most naval officers, they vigorously disputed any infringement upon their entitlement. After 1708, laws passed near the beginning of each war allocated the proceeds of lawful prizes to the captors, but the situation was less clear during periods of hostility that preceded a declaration of war, as in the “time of reprisals” that came before the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739. Having been lobbied extensively by the West India merchants, the king declared in 1741 that half the value of the prizes that had been taken between 10 July and 19 October 1739 would be awarded to the captors, and the other half to “such of his Majesty's subjects as have suffered by the unjust seizures and depredations of the Spaniards.” Captain Charles Knowles in Diamond had captured two rich Spanish prizes during that period, and upon sailing for England the following year he was charged with carrying the proceeds of their sale—almost two tons of silver coins, amounting to more than £15,000—freight-free on the king's account, to be lodged in the Bank of England. This marked the beginning of a long dispute between Knowles and the Commissioners for Distributing the Moiety of the Prizes, during which he managed to stymie and infuriate the Commissioners while rejecting the authority of essentially anyone short of the Privy Council. The Commission reported to the king that Knowles had

publicly declared, that if he had imagined your Majesty would have given any part of the said prizes away from the captors, he would have distributed the whole himself; and having likewise declared that notwithstanding your Majesty has been graciously pleased to give the moiety to the suffering merchants, he has been advised that the captors have still a right to the whole of the said prizes. ⁶⁵

Knowles obstructed the Commission's work at every turn in an attempt to keep as much of the money as possible in his hands. He declined to deliver the whole treasure to the Bank in compliance with his bill of lading, reserving two-thirds of the total to himself—purportedly to cover expenses while his pay was outstanding. He demanded a receipt to surrender a portion of it. He deducted the charge of hiring wagons to carry the silver from Portsmouth to London. He wheedled for the payment of freight for the merchants’ half “agreeable to the practice of the Navy … especially as … your Majesty's bounty more than exceeded the losses of the merchants.” He declined the Privy Council's offer to pay half the 2.5% freight charge that he requested. He rejected Admiral Edward Vernon's authority to declare that half freight was fair after the Councilors appointed the senior officer to determine whether freight charges should be paid at all. Each party to the dispute sent letters to the king, and finally Knowles was called to appear personally before the Privy Council—but his quibbles and delays prevented resolution of the affair until the Commission wound up in 1746. The Commissioners determined that he still owed the suffering merchants a little more than 200 pounds to make good their half of the yield. Knowles's rightful share amounted to £1883 4s 10d—roughly 10 times his annual pay. ⁶⁶

Prize disputes were just one manifestation of friction between the interests of merchants and naval officers. At the imperial periphery in the Caribbean, where strong central control of either state or company was an illusion, corporate agents variously cooperated and competed as individual actors sought personal gain. Even speaking of merchants and officers as two coherent and opposed groups with collective, diverging interests risks concealing how much they shared a common motivation to make money, and how much this shared interest eroded other allegiances and produced unanticipated cooperation and competition. ⁶⁷ The South Sea Company (corporately) and its servants (individually) struggled against the illicit traders, whose activities were widely known on both the British and the Spanish sides. Jamaican merchants maintained a thriving trade with Spanish American ports, depressing demand for the Company's authorized supply of enslaved laborers, while also competing with the Company's contraband trade in provisions and other goods. The scale of the illicit trade is evident in the SSC's Jamaica factors’ 1737 report that every Guineaman arriving from Angola or Calabar carried three separate assortments of enslaved laborers: one for the planters, one for the Company, and one for the illicit traders. They complained of being able to purchase just 940 of 2,907 slaves arriving at Kingston over the previous six months. ⁶⁸ The magnitude of smuggling offered plenty of opportunity for naval officers to participate, and they routinely partnered with the Jamaican traders, both providing protection and cooperating in the trafficking of contraband goods into Spanish and French possessions. ⁶⁹

The French complained of trade into their possessions on a number of occasions, aiming to prod the British ministry into investigating and stopping it. In 1730, a French memorial accused the British of carrying on an illegal trade at Martinique and St Domingue, “supported even by ships of war.” ⁷⁰ Again in 1739, they accused specific captains of trading into their territories: Captain Knowles in Diamond had snuck into Leogane with “a great many Negroes onboard” and “landed several armed men” for the purpose of carrying on a “clandestine trade.” ⁷¹ French hints helped convince officials in Barbados of naval officers’ involvement in an illicit trade with French squatters on St Lucia in 1737, “from which trade it is said that some of the commanders of some of his Majesty's ships of war stationed in these parts receive much profit.” ⁷² One of those captains, accused directly, fumed to the Admiralty that he had “always preferred” his duty to protect the island and its commerce “to private views notwithstanding the aspersion [the accusation] seems to throw on the commanders of his Majesty's ships stationed in these parts.” ⁷³ The Barbados Council President hit on the key issue in his letter on the subject to the Board of Trade: the illicit trade “is done in such a secret and private manner that unless their own officers would prove it on them they cannot be detected.” ⁷⁴ Without effective internal enforcement—and external control, as the Duke of Portland demanded—there was no hope of stopping illicit naval trade.

Two incidents that rose to the notice of imperial officials at the beginning of 1737 illustrate the problems that naval participation in the illicit trade caused for British interests in the region. The man-of-war Kinsale accompanied a Jamaican trading vessel to Portobello and lay waiting for it just outside the port for several days, causing alarm among the inhabitants of the town. Word quickly reached the SSC factors in Jamaica. They wrote to the commander in chief of the naval vessels in Jamaica to express their fear that the Spanish would view the warship as “a terror to their commerce, if not an interruption,” and that “it will prove a damage to the Royal British Asiento Company, in the carrying on of their trade, and perhaps to the general commerce of Great Britain.” Meanwhile, the Spanish foreign minister complained through diplomatic channels, leading the Admiralty to issue a feckless reiteration of their orders prohibiting trade. ⁷⁵ Around the same time, his Majesty's ship Antelope purportedly happened upon a French warship harassing two Jamaican merchant vessels in a remote bay on the coast of French St Domingue. The merchants claimed to have been innocently repairing damage and replenishing their wood and water, but gossip in Jamaica suggested that the meeting of the British vessels had not occurred by chance: Antelope's Captain Bridge had purchased a cargo of 200 enslaved Africans before leaving port and returned without them. Rumor had it that he delivered the slaves to clandestine buyers in the nearby French colony, making a prearranged rendezvous with the two Jamaican merchant vessels to freight them with the sugar, indigo, and rum that he had received in exchange. Local French officials reported a similar story to their superiors, and the French secretary of state eventually lodged a diplomatic protest demanding explanation. ⁷⁶

The Antelope incident makes plain the fissures between centers of imperial authority that helped naval officers pursue their self-interest at the expense of national policy. The acting governor of Jamaica, John Gregory, learned of the affair (including the rumors) and asked Captain Bridge to provide him with more information under oath. Bridge bristled and refused, informing Gregory that his only obligation was to make reports via his chain of command to the secretary of state and the Lords of the Admiralty: “I have accordingly delivered to Commodore Dent an exact account of the business, it being my duty so to do and no further.” Gregory's subsequent inquiry to Dent received a similarly prickly and uninformative response. He thereupon consulted the Duke of Newcastle directly, apprising him of his suspicions even as he acknowledged apprehension about taking on the navy:

I am not Very fond of making complaints nor would I willingly create new enemies, and I have heard it is ticklish meddling with the Navy: however, I cannot help thinking they are sent here to protect us and not to steal any little trade from us. This island has suffered under many discouragements and the carrying on a trade in this manner and importing our own commodities upon us must be very injurious to the merchant, the planter, and seafaring part of this country. ⁷⁷

The relationship between naval officers and other imperial stakeholders in the Caribbean defies easy generalization; it is perhaps easier to say what it was not. Naval officers did not act as disinterested, professional representatives of an imperial apparatus that was responsive to the political interests of its constituents. Notionally, their role was to execute state policy: to perform the concrete tasks that would advance the nation's political desires as mediated through Parliament, ministry, cabinet, and Admiralty. They often did that. Sometimes they advanced the interests of local elites against those of the metropolitan state; at other times, the same officer might take actions that favored the South Sea Company and infuriated Jamaican merchants. They regularly defied the king's direct representatives—the colonial governors—by recognizing only the authority of the Admiralty Board, while simultaneously ignoring Admiralty regulations and Parliamentary statutes to engage in illicit trade or protection schemes. As a rule, the largely unconstrained judgment of officers on the spot governed the navy's activity on the imperial periphery more than anything else, and self-interest often inflected that judgment.

Naval officers’ energetic participation in the illicit trade thus was not primarily significant because of its impact on other traders, but because it illustrated a fundamental weakness in the British imperial state. Whatever policies and plans resulted from political contestation in the metropole, the means for realizing them on the ground in the imperial periphery were dysfunctional. Because its structures of internal discipline were essentially insulated from external supervision and control, the navy did not reliably service the state's peacetime priorities (even considering the very limited extent to which the bundle of authorities and interests referred to as “the state” was able to articulate clear priorities). In 1722, the state had decided to reinforce that naval participation in trade was unlawful and unacceptable; almost two decades later, at the beginning of the war with Spain, sea officers in the Caribbean seemed to be trading as vigorously as they ever had been. Because the officer corps lacked norms dictating observance of law and regulation and the suppression of personal interest in the performance of duty, the navy was an imperfect tool for serving a “public interest” defined by government decisionmakers. The imperial state could not execute a coherent policy in which its representatives at a distance coordinated efforts for a common objective. Whether the metropolitan government favored, opposed, or was indifferent to the illicit trade that was endemic among its subjects in the Caribbean, it was simply incapable of stopping it if desired, or even stopping its own servants from exacerbating it. That inability to remove or moderate the irritant that produced Spain's aggressive response was one important reason why the ministry was dragged into war in 1739 despite its reluctance.

Endemic naval trading in the Caribbean and especially the frequent complaints about it to the metropolitan government suggest, furthermore, that naval behavior regarding trade did not change because no meaningful pressure was applied to produce such a change. Many petitioners complained to someone in Whitehall about the navy—particularly colonial governors, council members, and assemblies writing to the Board of Trade. But none of these constituencies could generate sufficient influence on the process of policy generation in the executive to produce a change in the ministry's plans, or a policy that could apply pressure against resistance from within an executive department. Colonial governments and the Board of Trade had political roles; they contributed greatly to the generation of colonial economic regulations, for example. Yet they—and even colonial merchants, as distinct from metropolitan merchants trading to the colonies—had little influence on the ministry and executive with which to press contested political issues. To overcome the navy's inertia and the norms of the officer corps would ultimately require the involvement of a powerful metropolitan interest group that could generate political heat. ⁷⁹