Over the course of the sixteenth century, a unique and fluid labour regime, based at first upon Indian labour and later upon African labour, developed in the Spanish-controlled Caribbean pearl fisheries. As pearl profits decreased, the complexity of life and labour in the fisheries increased. By the end of the century, African, Indian, and European inhabitants engaged in constant negotiation over the control and management of pearls as well as the social boundaries of the Caribbean communities built around the pursuit of this commodity.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish-controlled pearl fisheries in the Caribbean were among the most dynamic and destructive settlements in the Americas. The Caribbean pearl trade generated immense profits and remarkable encounters between Indians, Europeans, and Africans, but the history of the fisheries remains largely unexplored. This article focuses on one aspect of this complicated human landscape: the experiences of enslaved pearl divers on Margarita and Cubagua islands during the fisheries' first and most productive century of operation. While Caribbean pearl harvests decreased over the course of the century, the complexity of the relationships between the fisheries' diverse inhabitants increased. The hunger for pearl profits and the evolving labour regime of pearl fishing created an unusual climate of coercion and collaboration between the fisheries' free and unfree residents. 1 The Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, sent Columbus west in search of a new route to the rich markets of the east and their supplies of 'oro, plata, y perlas' -gold, silver, and pearls. Although the admiral failed to reach Asia, and did not live to see the discovery of major deposits of gold and silver, he did encounter a new source of pearls on his third voyage to the Caribbean in 1498, along the southern and eastern coasts of Margarita Island, and to the south and east of the small islands of Cubagua and Coche, off the coast of present-day Venezuela (see Figure 1). 2
Patterns of pearl cultivation and circulation reveal vernacular practices that shaped emerging imperial ideas about value and wealth in the early modern world. Pearls’ variability and subjective beauty posed a profound challenge to the imperial impulse to order and control, underscoring the complexity of governing subjects and objects in the early modern world. Qualitative, evaluative language would play a prominent role in crown officials’ attempts to contain and channel this complexity. The book’s title reflects the evolving significance of the term barrueca (which became “baroque” in English), a word initially employed in the Venezuelan fisheries to describe irregular pearls. Over time, this term lost its close association with the jewel but came to serve as a metaphor for irregular, unbounded expression. Pearls’ enduring importance lies less in the revenue they generated than in the conversations they prompted about the nature of value and the importance of individual skill and judgment, as well as the natural world, in its creation and husbandry. The stories generated by pearls—an unusual, organic jewel—range globally, crossing geographic and imperial boundaries as well as moving across scales, linking the bounded experiences of individuals to the expansion of imperial bureaucracies. These microhistories illuminate the connections between these small- and large-scale historical processes, revealing the connections between empire as envisioned by monarchs, enacted in law, and experienced at sea and on the ground by individuals.
This chapter traces how the Caribbean fisheries were embedded in global Iberian merchant networks that spanned the Atlantic and stretched into the Indian Ocean and beyond, connecting traders, laborers, and religious missionaries from the Americas to Asia. In the first four decades of the Venezuelan pearl-fishing settlements’ existence (their most lucrative ones), residents put forth their vision of an emerging American political economy, one which had a living ecology at its heart. The expertise of Warao, Guaquerí, and Arawak communities profoundly shaped vernacular practices of wealth husbandry along the Pearl Coast. So, too, did the skills of enslaved West Africans and indigenous peoples from around the Caribbean basin, all of whom labored in increasing numbers and various capacities alongside the motley assortment of European who came to settle, trade, and conduct slave-raiding in the region.
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