A Political Ecology in The Early Spanish Caribbean

A Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean
Author(s): Molly A. Warsh

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Vol. 71, No. 4 (October 2014), pp. 517-548
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.71.4.0517
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A Political Ecology in the
Early Spanish Caribbean
Molly A. Warsh
I
N 1529 Spanish residents of the principal pearl-fishing settlements on
the Venezuelan coast, seeking to ban a dredge from adjacent waters,
emphasized the importance of human hearing to the process of oyster
harvesting. At the height of the dispute, they argued that whereas a dredge
moved blindly along the ocean floor, indigenous pearl-fishing crews could
identify oyster banks by listening for the noises oysters made under-
water—a sound Spaniards likened to “hogs rooting for acorns.” 1 This
description, surprising and implausible as it may seem at first glance,
reflected residents’ careful observation of the habitat that sustained them
even as they exploited it. As these witnesses elaborated on their pearl-fishing
practices over the course of the trial, they offered their own understanding
of how the marine ecosystem of the Pearl Coast (Costa de Perlas), as the
region came to be called, functioned in relationship to circum-Caribbean
patterns of commerce and labor. In this 1529 debate, as in others that sur-
rounded the introduction of similar devices over the course of the sixteenth
century, Spanish residents of the pearl-fishing settlements defended their
Molly A. Warsh is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.
The author would like to thank participants in seminars at the University of Oxford,
Stanford University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of California, Los
Angeles, for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. She is also indebted to
Jennifer Anderson, Laura Gotkowitz, Christine Keiner, Clyde McKenzie, Lara Putnam,
Brett Rushforth, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, and the anonymous reader for the William
and Mary Quarterly for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts of this piece.
1
For the original trial transcript, see “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes vecinos
de la ciudad de Sevilla con la Justicia y vecinos en la Nueva Ciudad en cadiz en la Isla
de Cubagua, sobre la forma en que aquel havia en hazer la pesqueria en perlas. En 2
piezas,” 1530, Justicia: 7, no. 4, Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville. For an overview
and partial transcript of the trial, see Enrique Otte, “El proceso del Rastro de perlas de
Luis de Lampiñan,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 47, no. 187 (July–
September 1964): 386–406. In addition to many articles and edited document collections
pertaining to early Spanish Venezuela, Otte authored the classic overview of the pearl
fisheries’ early years; see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cadiz de Cubagua (Caracas,
1977). More recently, Fernando Cervigón has produced excellent scholarship on the
region. See Cervigón, Cubagua: 500 años (Caracas, 1997); and Cervigón, Las perlas en la
historia de Venezuela (Caracas, 1998). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 71, no. 4, October 2014

DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.71.4.0517

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518 william and mary quarterly
vernacular practices of human and environmental management as superior
to royally sponsored mechanical interventions.2
In their repeated refusal to permit oyster-harvesting technology,
Spaniards outlined a regional political ecology comprising the relationship
among wealth creation (from the pearls themselves to the commerce they
enabled), the ecosystem at the root of that prosperity (the oyster beds), and
the costs and consequences of expertise (the regime of pearl diving). The
practices undergirding this political ecology challenged royal policies that
sought to apply administrative approaches honed in a European context to
the human, material, and natural wealth of the Pearl Coast. In providing that
challenge, the pearl fisheries furthered the Spanish Crown’s transition from a
focus on the peoples and products of its Holy Roman imperial territories to a
focus on the subjects and objects of its emerging Atlantic domains.
Jurisdiction over these settlements’ residents posed challenges to royal
policymakers, but so too did the question of how to cultivate and profit
from the region’s products. The crown’s early approach to pearls was to treat
them like precious metals, the products of underwater mines as opposed to
the creations of living creatures. But unlike gold or silver, pearls could not
be easily taxed or marked. Weight-based measures, such as the quinto (the
crown’s allotment of pearls, equivalent to a fifth of total production), were ill
suited to this maritime industry and its underlying ecosystem. In the pearl
fisheries, local custom produced the balance of exploitation and cultivation
that shaped the industry and the communities it sustained.3
Pearls were not the only valuable product of nature to generate dis-
putes between communities and crowns over proper custodianship and
2
I am not the first scholar to consider the proposed devices discussed in this article
(or sixteenth-century Spanish mechanical experimentation more generally), but earlier
treatments have emphasized distinct aspects of the resulting debates in the pearl fisheries.
Nicolás García Tapia touches briefly on a handful of pearl-fishing devices in his article on
technological innovation and conquest; see García Tapia, “The Repercussions of Spanish
Technology in the Discovery of the American Continent,” Icon: Journal of the Interna-
tional Committee for the History of Technology 5 (1999): 113–27. See also García Tapia and
Jesús Carrillo Castillo, Tecnología e Imperio: Ingenios y leyendas del siglo de oro: Turriano,
Lastaosa, Herrera, Ayanz (Madrid, 2002). For various Spanish attempts to mechanize
oyster harvesting, see Manuel Luengo Muñoz, “Inventos para acrecentar la obtención de
perlas en América, durante el siglo XVI,” Anuario de estudios americanos 9 (January 1952):
51–72. For the role of technology in sustaining the Spanish Atlantic conquests of the
sixteenth century, see Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína Bueno, “Los inventos llevados de España
a las Indias en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI,” Cuadernos de investigación histórica 7
(1983): 35–54. The Pearl Coast was so named on the 1500 map made by Juan de la Cosa, a
mariner who traveled with Christopher Columbus during his voyage through the region
in 1498. For a discussion of the elaboration of this map, see Ricardo Cerezo Martínez, La
cartografía náutica española en los siglos XIV, XV, y XVI (Madrid, 1994), chap. 7. For the
naming of the coast by explorers and the crown, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 93.
3
The royal tax levied on all precious metals mined in the New World was fixed in
1504 as a fifth of total production. See Murdo J. MacLeod, “Spain and America: The
Atlantic Trade, 1492–1720,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1, Colonial
Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, 1984), 341–88, esp. 359.

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a political ecology in the spanish caribbean 519
distribution. Timber harvesting, whaling, and salt production, among other
industries, generated controversies in numerous locales over many centuries.4
However, the particular challenges of oyster exploitation and cultivation,
combined with pearls’ slippery material qualities and a labor regime depen-
dent upon indigenous and African crews, presented a complex and unfamiliar
knot of issues. Site-specific knowledge of the environment—a knowledge
produced largely by non-European pearl divers—proved crucial to this indus-
try. This expertise underlay free residents’ steadfast resistance to royal inter-
vention in pearl-fishing practices and generated challenging alternative visions
of the role of diverse subjects in the creation and distribution of profit.
During the sixteenth century, pearl fishery fortunes waxed and waned,
but the Spanish Crown repeatedly turned to technology to mediate the per-
ilous intersection of labor, the natural world, and the creation of material
wealth. A closer look at the terms of royal concessions to these pearl-fishing
entrepreneurs, however, suggests that fishery inhabitants did succeed in
shaping the crown’s appraisal of the industry’s underpinnings. Though royal
policies initially sought horizontal control over the fisheries—the crown
being concerned with extractive profits and activities among people in the
settlements—free and unfree residents of the Pearl Coast made clear that
pearl harvests depended upon vertical control of this resource, with as much
attention given to the tides, the currents, and the oysters and their beds as to
the taxable wealth they produced.
The history of the Venezuelan pearl fisheries reveals environmental
considerations shaping early Atlantic imperial practice and asks us to con-
sider the distinct and yet mutually influential paces at which ecological
change, regional social and economic patterns, and imperial administration
evolved. As Antonio Barrera-Osorio has argued, inhabitants of the pearl
fisheries were “administrators” of nature as well as consumers of its products,
and this active engagement shaped their relationship with a distant crown.5
4
For the role of two natural commodities—salt and timber—in state building, see
David Goodman, Spanish Naval Power, 1589–1665: Reconstruction and Defeat (Cambridge,
1997), esp. 52–53. Goodman considers the relationship between forest conservation and the
construction of the Spanish naval fleet in the late sixteenth century a noteworthy parallel
case of royal interest in environmental custodianship running into local resistance and
other difficulties. Ibid., 68–108. He discusses the role that the salt tax played in funding
the Spanish naval fleet in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the controversies
that arose over attempts to raise this duty. Salt had long been considered part of the Cas-
tillian monarch’s patrimony (realengo, meaning royal jurisdiction), but just what natural
resources fell under this category was often disputed, as royal claims frequently conflicted
with long-standing custom. For more on salt and the Castillian understandings of crown
patrimony, see María Rosario Porres Marijuán, Las Reales Salinas de Añana (siglos X–XIX)
(Bilbao, Spain, 2007). On realengo, see Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New
World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 15–18.
5
Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and
the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, Tex., 2006), chap. 3, esp. 73–74 (“administrators,”
74). Barrera-Osorio discusses two sixteenth-century pearl-fishing inventions that I also
consider in this article (those of Juan de Cárdenas and Domingo Bartolomé) in the

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The history of these settlements brings to the fore local culture’s role in
shaping royal approaches to the stewardship of people and products of the
New World, and offers a window onto how these practices informed and
challenged claims to authority in the early modern period.6 Furthermore,
these approaches to the management of natural wealth that developed
along Venezuela’s Pearl Coast shed light on the lasting importance of the
Caribbean as a site of imperial experimentation.7 They underscore the
critical role of the maritime realm in shaping the Spanish Crown’s approach
context of mechanical devices designed for New World use. He makes the point that even
unsuccessful experiments provided the crown with useful knowledge about the nature of
the New World and helped to develop empirical procedures for evaluating new proposals.
Recovering this maritime chapter in Spain’s early Atlantic experiences adds to a growing
body of work on the relationship between the exploitation of the natural world and the
emergence of early modern empires (commonly associated with the rise of empiricism in
the seventeenth century and Enlightenment cultures of collection and knowledge produc-
tion in colonial and metropolitan Dutch and British contexts). Interest in the relationship
between natural resource exploitation and empire has been steady since the publication
of Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and
the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995); Richard Drayton, Nature’s
Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven,
Conn., 2000). For sixteenth-century English precedents for scientific modes of inquiry, see
Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution
(New Haven, Conn., 2007). More recent reflections on the theme, focused around the
exploitation of a single commodity, include Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire,
Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York, 2005); Kris Lane, Colour of Par-
adise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New Haven, Conn., 2010); Jennifer
L. Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).
6
For a discussion of how depictions and manipulations of nature and natural mate-
rials conveyed new authority to artisans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see
Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution
(Chicago, 2006). My findings also align with Tamar Herzog’s arguments about the nature
of subjecthood in the Spanish New World. She argues that the exercise of rights (as
opposed to legal or political declarations) shaped the boundaries of early modern com-
munities. See in particular Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early
Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, Conn., 2003). She revisits her point
that performance of rights determined how they were classified in Herzog, “Can You Tell
a Spaniard When You See One? ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic,”
in Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Main-
tain a Global Hegemony?, ed. Pedro Cardim et al. (Eastbourne, U.K., 2012), 147–61.
7
The Pearl Coast’s role as protagonist at a critical juncture in Spain’s emerging
Atlantic empire has been largely overlooked by a historiography that has empha-
sized the empire’s terrestrial focus and the importance of mainland conquests and
silver mines. Beginning with royal Spanish chroniclers in the sixteenth century and
continuing into the present, the historiography of the Spanish Empire has priv-
ileged stories of resource exploitation that occurred after the consolidation of an
imperial administrative bureaucracy in the mid-sixteenth century. For a prominent
recent example of this emphasis on the foundational importance of Spain’s main-
land silver mines, see John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in
the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham, N.C., 2011). For a discussion of the
trend to ignore the Antilles in the wake of the major mainland conquests of Hernán
Cortés and Francisco Pizarro in the 1520s and 1530s and the Caribbean’s historio-
graphical eclipse by the mainland, see Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the

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to New World governance, and they challenge narratives that situate the early
Iberian world outside modern attempts to harness nature’s resources to the
power of the state. The history of the pearl fisheries raises the question of how
we might develop a more integrated understanding of the influence of the
New World on European approaches to nature, imperial administration, and
the pursuit of scientific knowledge.8 Renewed attention to the pearl fisheries
also reflects the growing interest in historicizing the oceans and considering
people as “ecological actors” who both observed and altered the changing sea.9
Employing the term political ecology to denote the insights the pearl
fisheries produced regarding the nested relationships among profit, exper-
tise, and ecological consequences suggests that the local understanding of
this interdependence shaped the perceptions and exercise of power, both on
the Pearl Coast and by an emerging royal bureaucracy. In other words, the
political ecology of the pearl fisheries mapped a maritime circulatory system
of living, breathing parts that informed regional and distant understand-
ings of and approaches to this corner of the New World. The debates over
mechanized oyster harvesting illuminate the dynamic nature of both the
settlements and their dialogue with a Spanish Crown just coming to terms
with an unfamiliar maritime empire.10
Historiography of Early Spanish America,” Americas 63, no. 4 (April 2007): 587–614.
Even Enrique Otte, who seemingly compiled all archival data ever generated by the pearl
fisheries, lost interest after Cubagua’s profits faded in the mid-sixteenth century.
8
By considering the pearl fisheries as sites of scientific knowledge production,
I intend to contribute to recent explorations of the scientific revolution beyond a
seventeenth-century (and northern European) context, and to consider the contributions
and innovations that were developed in a sixteenth-century Iberian sphere. On the topic
of early Iberian science and natural histories, a burst of recent scholarship in Spanish and
English has made important contributions to the field, but Spanish marine science and
its impact on early imperial practices remain underexplored. James Delbourgo touches
briefly upon the topic in a 2011 article. See Delbourgo, “Divers Things: Collecting the
World under Water,” History of Science 49, no. 2 (June 2011): 149–85.
9
Christine Keiner, “How Scientific Does Marine Environmental History Need to
Be?” Environmental History 18, no. 1 (January 2013): 111–20 (quotation, 114). The January
2013 issue of Environmental History was a dedicated Marine Forum. Additional articles in
the forum that were particularly helpful in the framing of this piece were Michael Chi-
arappa and Matthew McKenzie, “New Directions in Marine Environmental History: An
Introduction,” ibid., 3–11, which reminds us that “marine environmental history situates
people and all their social and cultural baggage squarely within the wider nonhuman envi-
ronment” (ibid., 9); and Victoria Penziner Hightower’s consideration of pearl fishing in the
southern Persian/Arabian Gulf and how the concerns of pearl merchants shaped the indus-
try’s environmental sustainability in Hightower, “Pearls and the Southern Persian/Arabian
Gulf: A Lesson in Sustainability,” ibid., 44–59. W. Jeffrey Bolster makes a powerful case for
the need to consider maritime exploration and exploitation in a cultural context in Bolster,
The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).
10
Eric R. Wolf, “Ownership and Political Ecology,” Anthropological Quarterly 45,
no. 3 (July 1972): 201–5. Although there are multiple understandings of the term political
ecology, it is perhaps most commonly associated with neo-Marxist anthropologist Wolf
and his work on power structures and the relationship between humans and the envi-
ronment. My use of the concept is more in line with how it has come to be employed

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Although pearl fishing took place along the Venezuelan coast for centu-
ries, the sixteenth century saw the region’s most spectacular pearl bonanzas.
Indigenous inhabitants of the Pearl Coast had long harvested oysters—
Pinctada radiata—for their meat and pearls, but the scale of exploitation
changed dramatically with the arrival of Spaniards in the early sixteenth
century. These newcomers oversaw an intense assault on the region’s oyster
banks, the consequences of which illustrate how a dramatic shift in natu-
ral resource exploitation can transform an ecosystem and the relationships
among its inhabitants.11
The allure of pearls figured prominently in the earliest reports of
New World wealth, drawing friends and foes of the Spanish Crown to the
Pearl Coast and prompting new attention to global sources of the jewel.
Christopher Columbus brought back news of pearl-wearing Indians along the
South American mainland (likely Guayquerí from Margarita Island) after his
third voyage to the Indies in 1498, and word of the region’s rich oyster beds
spread quickly through Iberian port towns and beyond. In the decades that
followed, scattershot settlement, plunder, and profits sustained royal interest
in the Costa de Perlas without generating major crown intervention or any
sustained set of administrative privileges. In these early years of the sixteenth
century, royal attention was firmly fixed on Hispaniola, its gold mines, and
political and religious disputes. The Pearl Coast did figure in the charter decree
of Seville’s House of Trade (Casa de Contratación), which included distinct
clauses addressing the trade and exploration “of the islands where pearls are
found.” This suggests that maritime wealth informed the emergence of Spain’s
overseas imperial infrastructure. However, no fixed policy for settlement
emerged, and King Ferdinand continued to try to gain control of the Pearl
Coast through piecemeal contractual concessions. In the absence of an effec-
tive administrative strategy, various contending impulses shaped this imperial
outpost as royal bureaucrats, religious officials, and forced and free migrants of
various backgrounds forged a violent stewardship over the region.12
by critical geographers who examine the social and cultural structures that shape
humans’ relationship with nature. In addition to Wolf, see Aletta Biersack and James
B. Greenberg, eds., Reimagining Political Ecology (Durham, N.C., 2006); Matthew D.
Turner, “Production of Environmental Knowledge: Scientists, Complex Natures, and
the Question of Agency,” in Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political
Ecology and Science Studies, ed. Mara J. Goldman, Paul Nadasdy, and Matthew D. Turner
(Chicago, 2011), 25–30. The work of marine biologist Loren McClenachan on histori-
cizing marine ecologies has also shaped my understanding of the term. See for example
McClenachan, Francesco Ferretti, and Julia K. Baum, “From Archives to Conservation:
Why Historical Data Are Needed to Set Baselines for Marine Animals and Ecosystems,”
Conservation Letters 5, no. 5 (October 2012): 349–59.
11
For indigenous American traditions of pearl use, see Nicholas J. Saunders, “Biog-
raphies of Brilliance: Pearls, Transformations of Matter and Being, ca. AD 1492,” World
Archaeology 31, no. 2 (October 1999): 243–57.
12
For the January 20, 1503, decree establishing the Casa de Contratación, see Col-
ección de documentos inéditos de Ultramar (Madrid, 1890), tomo 5, 29–42, esp. 40–41,

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This violence increased as the European presence on the Pearl Coast grew
and became more permanent. Spaniards based in the Greater Antilles played
a critical role in furthering settlement and trade along Venezuela’s shores. In
1512, in recognition of the steady traffic among the islands, the king autho-
rized private pearl-trading voyages to Cubagua and adjacent territories from
Hispaniola. In 1513 the king granted permission to the governor of Hispaniola,
Diego Colón, to build a fort in las perlas (“the pearls,” an ambiguous phrase
that likely referred to the Venezuelan mainland near the island of Cubagua).
The standard tribute requirements that accompanied this endorsement of fur-
ther settlement yield a glimpse of crown expectations for the region: in return
for royal support, Spaniards were to pay one-fifth of the pearls they acquired—
the quinto—to the crown. That year, the crown began to receive modest
quinto payments from Cubagua, averaging one hundred marcos in weight (or
roughly fifty pounds) of pearls per year from 1513 to 1520.13
Rising pearl tributes reflected the efforts of a growing coerced labor
force. Trade between Europeans and pearl-fishing inhabitants of the
Venezuelan coast at first transpired peacefully: Spanish sojourners on
Cubagua exchanged plates, bells, wine, and foodstuffs for pearls gathered
by large clans of Guayquerí divers from Margarita Island. However, as
Guayquerí inhabitants of the Pearl Coast fell victim to disease and violence,
European settlers extended their predatory raids in search of a labor force
to dive for oysters. These rescate (forced trade or barter) missions wreaked
havoc on the native populations of the Greater Caribbean and the South
doc. 9 (quotation). My book in progress considers the changing significance of the Pearl
Coast settlements and their products in Atlantic and global contexts: Molly A. Warsh,
“American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700,” unpublished man-
uscript. For a discussion of the influence of these early pearl-hunting voyages on the
genesis of the Casa de Contratación, see Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main
(Berkeley, Calif., 1966), 161. For a detailed treatment of the Casa de Contratación and its
early history, see Kenneth R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–
1630 (New Haven, Conn., 1978), 54–57; Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, 35–37. For
a discussion of the Spanish Crown’s evolving approach to the governance of the Indies,
see Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel,
Modernity (Cambridge, 2003), 42–48. For details on King Ferdinand’s various attempts
to establish an asiento approach (meaning a contract, or individual license, granted to an
individual or company by the crown) for the Costa de Perlas from 1504 to 1511 and on the
triumph of rescate (forced trade or barter) instead, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 96–97,
102–7, 127–28.
13
The Pearl Coast’s ties to Hispaniola and the Greater Antilles would endure for
nearly two centuries: fierce Indian resistance on the mainland kept Cubagua and adjacent
islands in the orbit of the Caribbean and Spain more than of Caracas. When the pearl
islands were at last incorporated in the Audiencia de Santa Fé at the end of the seven-
teenth century, it marked at last a greater integration with the mainland. See Michael
Perri, “‘Ruined and Lost’: Spanish Destruction of the Pearl Coast in the Early Sixteenth
Century,” Environment and History 15, no. 2 (May 2009): 129–61, esp. 150. Otte discusses
both the introduction of the quinto into the fisheries and the pearl payments it generated
in its first years in Las perlas del Caribe, 52–54.

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American mainland. Some populations suffered greatly due to the per-
ceived needs of the fisheries: Spaniards believed Lucayan inhabitants of
the Bahamas to be particularly adept divers and brought so many of them
into the pearl fisheries in increasing numbers, leaving those islands nearly
depopulated by the end of the 1520s. The Spanish then carried on slave
raiding in Carib and Arawak settlements in the Lesser Antilles and along the
Caribbean coast up to the Yucatán. These indigenous peoples from around
the Caribbean joined a community consisting of a motley crew of Europeans
(men and a few women) who came and went from the pearl fisheries: among
them were New Christians from Spain and Portugal, German commercial
factors and their associates, Italian merchants, and Spaniards from all over
the peninsula, in addition to Moriscos (Christian converts from Islam) and
esclavos blancos (white slaves) from the eastern Mediterranean.14
The fisheries’ increasing reliance on coerced Indian labor (for a vari-
ety of tasks, in addition to pearl fishing) occurred in spite of the Spanish
Crown’s efforts to prevent such abuses in the Indies. In the wake of Antonio
de Montesinos’s 1511 condemnation of Spanish crimes against Indians on
Hispaniola, the crown issued the Leyes de Burgos in 1512, prohibiting the
enslavement of Indians in the New World. A few years later, Spanish king
Charles I (elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, ruling as Charles V) autho-
rized several religious missions to the Pearl Coast in hopes of maintaining
peaceful relations with its indigenous inhabitants. These met with only mod-
erate success, and it was the lawless nature of the Pearl Coast that later drew
the attention of religious reformers. In 1517 Dominican priest Bartolomé de
Las Casas successfully lobbied in Spain for permission to join the missions in
the fisheries, where he hoped to bring an end to Spanish encroachments in
the region. It was during his time there that he formed his enduring impres-
sions of the danger and brutality of pearl-diving labor regimes.15
14
On Spanish contact with the indigenous inhabitants of Margarita Island, see
C. S. Alexander, “Margarita Island, Exporter of People,” Journal of Inter-American Stud-
ies 3, no. 4 (October 1961): 548–57. For a description of pearl-fishing operations and
increasingly aggressive behavior by Spaniards on Margarita ca. 1520, see Otte, Las perlas
del Caribe, 173–76. For more on the Spanish presence and indigenous labor in the early
sixteenth century, see Morella A. Jiménez G., La esclavitud indígena en Venezuela, Siglo
XVI (Caracas, 1986), 162–99; Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 120–50; Perri, Environment and
History 15: 129–61. Bartolomé de Las Casas described the enslavement and sale of Lucay-
ans in Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, ed. Agustín Millares Carlo (Mexico City, 1951),
2: 353. See also William F. Keegan, The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory
of the Bahamas (Gainesville, Fla., 1992), 221–22. For individual pearl shipments and the
diversity of these private entrepreneurs, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 64. Las perlas del
Caribe focuses on the commercial circuits that pearls traveled from Cubagua and includes
a discussion of the various merchants who did business in the area; see ibid., 66–78. For
an overview of the island’s inhabitants, see also Otte’s section on early Cubaguan society:
ibid., 337–91.
15
For the crown’s evolving Indian policy and its effect on the Pearl Coast, see
Francisco Domínguez Compañy, “Municipal Organization of the Rancherías of Pearls,”
Americas 21, no. 1 (July 1964): 58–68. For a short history of Las Casas, see Lawrence A.

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The competing impulses that continued to shape the crown’s haphazard
approach to the Caribbean can be seen in its experiments with the supply of
labor to the region. In 1512 the king consented to a request from the secre-
tary of the Real Audiencia de Santo Domingo (royal court) on Hispaniola to
send more “esclavas blancas,” or white female slaves, to the Indies. However,
just a few years later, Spanish residents of the West Indies put pressure on
the crown to provide enslaved laborers directly from Africa. In a 1518 peti-
tion, Spaniards on Hispaniola argued that enslaved Africans would be less
likely to be rebellious than slaves brought over from Castile. That same year,
King Charles I indicated his support of this proposed change in the work-
force by licensing Lorenzo de Gouvenod, comte de Bresa, to deliver four
thousand black slaves to the Spanish Americas over a period of seven years.
The crown also authorized Dom Jorge, the illegitimate son of Portuguese
King Joáo II, to send four hundred African slaves to Hispaniola.16
These early royal experiments in supplying the region with enslaved
Africans underscore the initial appeal of the emerging Atlantic empire as a
new arena in which to pursue European alliances. So, too, does Charles V’s
willingness to grant the Augsburg-based Welser family administrative control
of Venezuela from 1528 to 1556, a concession that recognized the Welsers’
support of his successful bid for the title of Holy Roman Emperor.17 Like
Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Chichester, U.K., 2011).
For a brief discussion of the types of labor indigenous residents of Cubagua performed,
see also Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 360–61.
16
For the 1512 petition for esclavas blancas, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 122 n. 589.
The 1518 petition is discussed in Esteban Mira Caballos, “Las licencias de esclavos negros
a Hispanoamérica (1544–1550),” Revista de Indias 54, no. 201 (1994): 273–97, esp. 275.
As late as 1527, blancos ladinos (meaning acculturated whites, likely orthodox Christians
from the eastern Mediterranean) worked alongside enslaved indigenous and African
laborers in the Caribbean, one resident received a royal license to bring a woman and
a boy identified as such (in addition to “twelve black slaves”) to Hispaniola. The two
ladinos were later referred to as “slaves” as well; see “Real Cédula a Francisco de Frías
vecino de Salvatierra de la Sabana, dandole licencia para pasar doce esclavos negros y dos
blancos ladinos,” July 12, 1527, Indiferente General (IG): 421, legajo 12, fol. 168r, AGI
(quotations). Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-
Century Valencia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), provides excellent background on patterns of late
medieval Iberian slavery. For more on the influence of Iberian paradigms of slavery on
the early Spanish Caribbean in a slightly later period, see David Wheat, “Mediterranean
Slavery, New World Transformations: Galley Slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, 1578–1635,”
Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (September 2010): 327–44. For the early African slave trade
into Spanish America (including the Gouvenod license and the concession to Dom João’s
bastard son), see António de Almeida Mendes, “The Foundations of the System: A Re-
assessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries,” in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Data-
base, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 63–94. See also
José Luis Cortés López, “1544–1550: El período más prolífico en la exportación de esclavos
durante el s. XVI. Análisis de un interesante documento extraído del Archivo de Siman-
cas,” Espacio, tiempo y forma, ser. 4, Histora moderna 8 (1995): 63–86.
17
Charles V also granted the Welsers the slave trade asiento in 1528. The family’s
commercial connections facilitated the important German involvement in the Atlantic

45.63.6.177 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:44:51 UTC
the introduction of the quinto into the fisheries as a way of taxing and con-
trolling pearl circulation, these strategies point to the Spanish Crown’s initial
hope that practices forged in a European context would render productive
and familiar these promising but unruly outposts of its emerging maritime
empire. However, these early royal visions of wealth management failed to
encompass the realities of life in the pearl fisheries, where residents produced
distinct understandings of the relationship between economies on land and
ecologies at sea, as well as between the labor of diverse subjects and the
wealth of the empire.
The crown’s initial administrative initiatives fell short in revealing ways,

perhaps most obviously in the case of the quinto records. The most familiar
and dramatic sources of information on the fisheries’ heyday, these records
provide a powerful sense of the wealth produced in the region and the chang-
ing scale of resource exploitation even as they also present a distorted view of
the actual numbers of pearls being harvested. The quinto records point to the
particular accounting problems posed by the maritime jewel. Pearls were to
be assessed by weight and grouped into units called marcos, a measurement
equivalent to roughly half a pound and ill-suited to capturing the worth
of any particular pearl or batch of pearls. The marco was the same weight-
based measure used to assess silver bars, but pearls bore little resemblance
to precious metals. First, they were very small. Many contemporary sources,
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés among them, described Cubaguan
pearls as tiny, from two to five carats (with five carats equivalent to one
gram). Second, pearls existed in tremendous natural variety, and the worth
of any particular specimen reflected its shape, luster, and color in addition to
its size. A weight-based measure failed to account for the quality of any given
pearl; it reflected ideas about the nature of wealth born of experience with
gold and silver rather than an organic maritime product.18
Furthermore, the tax was easy to avoid at sea or on land by skimming
the best pearls off the top of the harvest before the quinto was assessed.
pearl trade in the sixteenth century. For more on the Welsers, see Alberto Armani, La
genesi dell’Eurocolonialismo: Carlo V e i Welser (Genoa, 1985).
18
The marco was a common measure for silver bars based on the mark of Cologne.
For a discussion of pearls’ physical qualities and assessments of their worth, see for
example Neil H. Landman et al., eds., Pearls: A Natural History (New York, 2001); for a
classic older work, see George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of
the Pearl: The History, Art, Science, and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York, 1908).
On the size of Pearl Coast pearls, see Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia
general y natural de las Indias, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela y Bueso (Madrid, 1959), 2: 204. To
put this size in perspective, more than sixteen thousand pearls were in a small lead chest
(measuring 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches) recently recovered off the Florida coast from the
wreck of the Santa Margarita, a Spanish galleon that sank in 1622. For more information,
see Associated Press, “Thousands of Pearls Found in Shipwreck,” Washington Post, June
15, 2007.

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Pearl-diving practices varied somewhat over the course of the sixteenth
century as the boats in which pearl fishing took place grew larger and
accommodated more enslaved divers, but the general pattern consisted of
divers descending to oyster beds and placing oysters in a basket or bag that
would then be hauled up to the vessel. Although in theory the oysters were
to be transported to shore, where they would be opened under the watchful
eye of a Spanish overseer, by the end of the sixteenth century there were
numerous complaints that divers were opening the oysters in the boats and
keeping many of the best pearls for themselves. Whether with small crews of
indigenous divers in the early decades of the sixteenth century or large boats
manned by enslaved Africans nearly one hundred years later, the private,
hidden nature of diving as well as pearls’ small size and immediate accessibil-
ity (they did not need to be altered in order to be rendered valuable) made
them a very difficult commodity to supervise. On-island dynamics further
complicated the issue of control, as inhabitants of all origins traded pearls
for sundry items. Merchants also committed fraud by sending unregistered
shipments back to European markets alongside registered ones. The regu-
lar arrival of pirates and foreign corsairs, who called on the fisheries to do
welcome or unwelcome business at predictable intervals throughout the six-
teenth century, further contributed to Caribbean pearls’ untaxed circulation
throughout and beyond Atlantic markets.19
Quinto records, thus, tell us only so much, as they account for none of
the above irregularities that plagued pearl harvesting. However, the quin-
to’s imprecision as a record of pearl harvests does not render it useless as a
marker of change in the pearl fisheries. The steady rise of quinto payments
over the second and third decades of the sixteenth century reflected the
development of the circum-Caribbean slave trade, and this expanding trade
in enslaved indigenous labor, like the failure of the quinto tax to accurately
19
For a discussion of how Venezuelan pearl-fishing practices and crew composition
changed over the course of the sixteenth century, see Molly A. Warsh, “Enslaved Pearl
Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 3 (September
2010): 345–62. For early piracy on Cubagua, see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 80–81; the
cedularios he compiled of documents pertaining to the Pearl Coast’s early years are also
littered with references to corsairs and fears of pirate attacks. The presence of Spain’s
imperial rivals in the pearl fisheries shaped the circulation of people as well as the flow
of pearls. For residents of Cabo de la Vela (in present-day Colombia) buying black slaves
from two men who had ejected French corsairs from the fisheries (and for royal con-
cern about the profits from their sale), see “Real Cédula,” Sept. 21, 1546, Audiencia de
Caracas (AC), Caracas 1, Legajo 1, fol. 111r, AGI. In the 1550s the Spanish Crown banned
residents of Margarita from buying Brazilian Indians from Portuguese merchants. See
Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de His-
panoamérica, 1493–1810, vol. 1, (1493–1592) (Madrid, 1953), p. 297, doc. 205, Dec. 17, 1551,
and p. 339, doc. 243, Sept. 21, 1556. Another sign that the circulation of pearls was related
to the presence of non-Spanish rivals in the fisheries is the Council of the Indies’ decision
to reward the treasurer of Cabo de la Vela with sixty marcos of pearls for his successful
defense of the settlement from French predators; see “Sumario de Consulta del Consejo
de Indias,” post-1550, IG: 737, no. 63, AGI.

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assess and deliver the region’s pearl wealth, underscored the severe limita-
tions of crown control over the natural and human wealth of the region.
Meanwhile, as gold production on the major Antillean islands declined and
pearl harvests increased dramatically in the early 1520s, the Pearl Coast’s
promise as a source of wealth transformed these settlements into a focal
point of the crown’s evolving New World strategy. In this context it is unsur-
prising that the crown welcomed technological proposals that promised to
simplify the activity at the heart of the region’s appeal: oyster harvesting.
The first extant license for mechanized pearl fishing dates to 1520 and
was granted to Juan de Cárdenas, a pilot and resident of Seville. The terms
of his agreement with the crown reflect the lingering influence of existing
ideas about pearls as booty and treasure—wealth to be taxed, rather than
cultivated—that informed the royal approach. The challenges that would
prompt later mechanical proposals once the full social and environmental
costs of the pearl fisheries’ operation became clear—deadly and heavily criti-
cized labor regimes, unorthodox on-island dynamics, and reduced oyster
hauls—were not yet apparent. Cárdenas’s license permitted him to arm two
caravels (sailing ships) to travel to the coast of Paria (present-day Venezuela)
in search of various types of material wealth: gold, silver, precious stones, and
slaves, as well as pearls. Although the license identifies Coche and Cubagua
by name and alludes to rumors of pearl wealth in the vicinity, neither island
had emerged as a clear center of pearl-fishing operations.20 Over time, the
contracts for mechanized pearl fishing granted to Cárdenas’s successors would
reflect not only greater geographic precision but also a grudging recognition
that the human, environmental, and economic relationships that sustained
the Pearl Coast reflected local practices with a living ecology at their heart.
Several aspects of Cárdenas’s contract suggest that Pearl Coast realities
were already shaping crown hopes for the region. Cárdenas was explicitly
instructed to conduct peaceful trade with the area’s native inhabitants in
exchange for goods. This directive spoke to rising concern about Spanish
treatment of the New World’s indigenous inhabitants and the harmful
persistence of violent rescate practices. Indeed, the autonomy of the Pearl
Coast’s indigenous residents is recognized in the crown’s description of
“the people who come to fish for pearls.” Already, it appears that part of
the appeal of Cárdenas’s device was its promise to facilitate independent
Spanish action by introducing technology, allowing oyster harvesting to
proceed without a reliance on these independent indigenous pearl harvest-
ers. Cárdenas claimed to have “had word” of pearls that could be found
20
“Licencia a Juan de Cárdenas para armar carabelas,” 1520, IG: 420, legajo 8, fols.
253v–55r, AGI. Cárdenas received his patent even before the 1524 establishment of the
Council of the Indies, the official body intended to oversee all government activity in
the Americas. For a discussion of Castile’s patent practices in the sixteenth century, see
Nicolás García Tapia, Técnica y poder en Castilla durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Salamanca,
1989), chap. 9.

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in depths beyond human divers’ reach—his technology would deliver the
otherwise inaccessible riches of these waters.21
Cárdenas’s invention disappeared from the historical record; it could
not compete in the face of the demographic transformations that reshaped
the pearl fisheries in the years immediately following his proposal. Part
of a wider pattern of increasing traffic to the Caribbean, the Pearl Coast
began to see growing numbers of new arrivals (indigenous and African,
as well as European) in the early 1520s, a development that reflected the
rise of Cubagua as a center of pearl-fishing operations and its growth as a
market for enslaved labor. In 1520 the island’s European population totaled
roughly 300, and the following year Spanish denizens of Santo Domingo on
Hispaniola founded the small city of Nueva Cádiz on Cubagua. By the mid-
1520s Cubagua’s European residents numbered close to 1,000 and the island
was home to almost 100 rancherías de perlas, or pearl-fishing settlements. By
the 1530s as many as 1,500 people lived on the island.22
As this demographic change generated more activity in the waters
around Cubagua over the course of the 1520s, climbing quinto payments
sketch the outlines of aggressive oyster harvesting. In 1521 the number of
Cubaguan pearls sent to the crown in payment of the quinto rose dramati-
cally to more than 200 marcos (approximately one hundred pounds of pearls),
double the average yearly payments of the preceding seven years. This fig-
ure more than tripled the following year, and from 1522 to 1526 the average
annual quinto payment totaled more than 700 marcos of pearls. In 1527, the
apex of Cubagua’s pearl harvests, the crown received more than 1,200 marcos
of pearls—six hundred pounds of the minuscule jewel—from the island.23
These were impressive numbers of pearls, but there are clear indications
that the crown suspected that plenty were going uncounted. An edict issued
in 1527 by Charles V reveals royal attention to pearl harvests as well as the
king’s suspicion that harvests were in fact bigger than those reported. The
decree specified how to tax and ship pearls to Spain so as to maximize crown
profit, and it prescribed harsh punishments for offenders. Furthermore, in
recognition of the marco’s inadequacies, Spaniards attempted to refine the
process of assessment by creating numerous and evolving qualitative descrip-
tors of pearls that would facilitate their taxation. By the 1520s, a taxonomy of
21
“Licencia a Juan de Cárdenas para armar carabelas,” 1520, IG: 420, legajo 8, fols.
253v–55r, AGI (quotations).
22
For population statistics, see Perri, Environment and History 15: 135.
23
Cubagua’s output fell markedly in the years following 1527, to an average of 600
marcos from 1528 to 1531, slightly more than 300 in 1532, an average of 200 from 1533 to
1536, and less than 100 from 1537 to 1540. These numbers reflected the depletion of the
oyster banks closest to Cubagua; pearl harvests from the region remained large due to the
discovery of new oyster beds near the neighboring island of Coche. For quinto figures,
see Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, 52–54. For a discussion of the value of pearl imports, see
Huguette Chaunu, Pierre Chaunu, and Guy Arbellot, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504–1650
(Paris, 1957), esp. 7: 613–24.

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pearls emerged that aimed to better capture the inherent variety of the nat-
ural jewel and the resulting profound variation in any individual specimen’s
perceived worth. Indeed, the word elenco, one of the Latin words employed
by Pliny the Elder to describe pearls, came to signify in Spanish the very
notion of catalog or index. The lingering conceptual influence of another
category born in the pearl fisheries, barrueca (baroque, referring to a mis-
shapen or irregular pearl), is evident in the term’s evolution into a metaphor
for the complex aesthetic and governing styles of the age.24
In addition to this new language of overseas wealth administration, the
assault on the Pearl Coast’s marine ecology engendered long-lasting changes
in the region’s environment. The numbers of oysters it took to produce the
record pearl hauls of the 1520s are difficult to comprehend. The estimates of
marine biologists who have studied the Venezuelan fisheries suggest that on
average a single pearl was found for every ten oysters opened. Using these
estimates as a guide, it would have taken an annual harvest of approximately
40 million oysters during the Cubaguan ﬁsheries’ most lucrative decades to
produce the pearls reported in the quinto records. These numbers indicate an
estimated harvest of 1.2 billion oysters in less than three decades.25
Although the immense numbers of pearls harvested in these early
decades might suggest that Spanish residents cared little for the industry’s
sustainability, that was not the case. Territorial settlements and submarine
24
For Charles V’s 1527 decree, see “Ordenanza que el Señor Emperador D. Carlos
Quinto hizo,” II/2892, fols. 148r–53v, Biblioteca Real, Madrid. For a brief discussion of
categories in circulation in the 1520s, see also Otte, Las perlas del Caribe, chap. 1. For
Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco’s fascinating meditation on the multiple meanings
of elenco, see Horozco, Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Española. . . . (Madrid, 1611),
by which point the word had already come to signify “catalog” or “index” in Spanish.
See also the classic work of José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a
Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis, Minn., 1986,) originally pub-
lished in 1975. For more recent reflections on the meanings and origin of the concept of
the baroque, see Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New Worlds:
Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham, N.C., 2010). I consider the
transition from barrueca as a pearl to barrueca as a cultural and political style in Warsh,
“American Baroque.” Allison Bigelow’s forthcoming book, with the working title “Cul-
tural Touchstones: Mining, Refining, and the Languages of Empire in the Early Ameri-
cas,” promises to shed new light on the mutually influential roles of the natural world,
resource exploitation, and imperial vocabularies. She examines the conceptual synergies
between early modern metallurgical vocabularies and colonial scientific ideas and prac-
tices concerning race.
25
For a scientific consideration of these early pearl harvests and their effects on the
oyster population, see Landman et al., Pearls: A Natural History, 17, 21. Marine biologist
Aldemaro Romero is even more conservative in his estimates (assuming the highest pos-
sible productivity and lowest number of oysters extracted per pearl), but he also comes
up with an estimated harvest of more than a billion oysters in less than thirty years;
see Romero, “Death and Taxes: The Case of the Depletion of the Pearl Oyster Beds in
Sixteenth-Century Venezuela,” Conservation Biology 17, no. 4 (August 2003): 1013–23, esp.
1019. See also Clyde L. MacKenzie Jr., Luis Troccoli, and Luis B. León S., “History of
the Atlantic Pearl-Oyster, Pinctata imbricata, Industry in Venezuela and Colombia, with
Biological and Ecological Observations,” Marine Fisheries Review 65, no. 1 (2003): 1–20.

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habitats—and the administrative bureaucracy intended to administer
both—reacted to changing circumstances at different paces, and the full
impact of the sudden upswing in boat traffic and bodies in the water on the
bivalve’s environment was not immediately apparent. For example, oysters
feed by particle suspension, and all of the tossed-up sand and rock caused
by increasing numbers of vessels and people likely interfered with the food
particles upon which the oysters depended. Furthermore, as more and
increasingly large ships began sailing through the waters around Cubagua
(often during the oysters’ spawning season), either in pursuit of pearls or en
route to other American ports, the choppy waters and increased sediment
circulation may have made it more difficult for oyster larvae to find the clean
surfaces they need for settlement and growth. Without undue disturbance,
the larvae can grow from settlement size to full size within fourteen months,
with an average life span of five years. But the circumstances of ecological
stress that accompanied Spaniards’ arrival in the region made it harder for
the oyster population to reproduce and recover from overharvesting and
facilitated the proliferation of other bivalves that were better adapted to sur-
vive and that do not produce pearls.26
Difficult to observe though these harmful trends may have been, the
1529 debates surrounding a pearl dredge proposed by Luis Lampiñan, an
Italian nobleman and inventor resident in Seville, highlight the emerging
tensions between Pearl Coast management of fishery wealth and alternate
approaches devised in Europe. They also indicate that Spanish inhabitants
of the pearl fisheries did indeed pay attention to maritime ecology even at
the height of their oyster-harvesting frenzy. While the crown continued to
turn to non-Spanish concessionaires who promised mechanical solutions
26
The dominant pearl-producing mollusks of the western Atlantic belong to the
P. radiata species and are found on the Atlantic coast of the United States as far north
as Virginia, in the Caribbean, and along the northern coast of Brazil. Banks are found
along the warmest places within the western Atlantic zone. Pinctada shells measure
between 5 cm and 7 cm in length and are very thin. The pearl oyster has a relatively long
spawning season, and in the Caribbean reproduction takes place throughout the year but
is most intense when water temperatures are warmest. Most setting occurs from May
to November, when waters are warmest; see MacKenzie, Troccoli, and León S., Marine
Fisheries Review 65: 3. For a discussion of the pearl oyster’s biology and the likely impact
of increased activity along the Pearl Coast, see Romero, Conservation Biology 17: 1020. For
gemologist Elisabeth Strack’s comprehensive overview of marine bivalve biology and pearl
production, see Strack, Pearls (Stuttgart, Germany, 2006), esp. 44–49, 86–97, 113–23. For
marine biologists’ perspective on the ecological impact of the early Spanish pearl fisheries
and additional discussion of the biology of the species, see Aldemaro Romero, Susanna
Chilbert, and M. G. Eisenhart, “Cubagua’s Pearl-Oyster Beds: The First Depletion of a
Natural Resource Caused by Europeans in the American Continent,” Journal of Political
Ecology 6 (1999): 57–78. Mindful of currents, winds, and the hurricane system, Spanish
ships heading toward Cartagena de Indias (the route of the Tierra Firme fleet, formally
established in the 1560s) predictably entered the waters near Margarita Island in the early
fall, after a mid- to late summer departure from Seville. For a discussion of Spanish sail-
ing patterns, see Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies
Fleets in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Carla Rahn Phillips (Baltimore, 1998), 9–11.

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to maritime wealth exploitation, free residents of the fisheries advocated
for their own understandings of resource husbandry. The Spaniards, who
sought to discredit Lampiñan and his device, carefully monitored the effects
of tides, temperatures, and water currents on oyster reproduction and
growth. Over the course of the trial generated by Lampiñan’s intrusion into
their maritime domains, Spaniards parsed the political ecology of the region
into its interdependent parts. Witnesses called to testify in the trial illumi-
nated the relationships among different subjects and between these various
subjects and the environment from which they and the crown profited.
Lampiñan’s case caught the Spanish Crown at a crossroads, torn between
the demands and interests of its European territories and subjects and the
challenges of a far less familiar New World empire. On the one hand, the
crown’s concession to Lampiñan reflected its established willingness to
engage non-Spaniards in the exercise of empire—from contracting out the
administration of new territories to granting individual merchant conces-
sions. Lampiñan was a minor noble with influence in a region at the center
of Spain’s Italian ambitions, and it is possible that the crown thought the
royal grant to the Milanese nobleman (and his two Italian partners) would
potentially build allegiance within powerful factions in Spain’s ever-fragile
Holy Roman imperial territories. Yet the terms of Lampiñan’s contract also
reflected the crown’s growing desire to reclaim the prerogatives it had ceded
in the early years of administering unfamiliar territories. Granted a monopoly
on fishing for pearls for six years in the vicinity of Cubagua, Lampiñan prom-
ised to deliver a third of the haul to the crown. This was a higher percentage
than the standard fifth and perhaps reflected an awareness of just how much
wealth the fisheries could produce in light of the decade’s pearl bonanzas.
Nonetheless, the terms of his agreement adhered to a vision of crown prerog-
ative based in the administration of metals rather than maritime wealth.27
In spite of these lingering European influences on Lampiñan’s contract,
the appeal of the Italian’s invention undoubtedly reflected the realities of
the pearl fisheries. The debates surrounding his dredge occurred at the apex
of the settlements’ most lucrative and destructive decade and in a moment
of growing concern about both the depletion of the oyster banks and the
toll of these profits on the pearl divers. Just a year before the crown granted
Lampiñan’s contract, Bartolomé de Las Casas began composing his History
of the Indies in which he assailed the labor regime of the pearl fisheries. Las
Casas wrote that the brutality of this industry was so great that there was
27
For negotiations between Luís Lampiñan and the Spanish Crown, see Otte, Cedu-
lario de la Monarquía Española Relativo a la Isla de Cubagua (1523–1550) (Caracas, 1961),
1: 50–52 (Jan. 10, 1528), 63–64 (Apr. 4, 1528), 64–65 (Apr. 4, 1528), 90 (Sept. 19, 1528),
97 (Jan. 22, 1529), 99–101 (Feb. 7, 1529), 81–83 (Sept. 12, 1528). On Spanish politics in
Italy, see Michael Levin, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2005); Thomas James Dandelet and John A. Marino, eds., Spain in Italy:
Politics, Society, and Religion, 1500–1700 (Leiden, 2007); Stefano D’Amico, Spanish Milan:
A City within the Empire, 1535–1706 (New York, 2012).

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“no hellish and hopeless life on this earth that may be compared with it,
however hard and terrible taking out the gold in the mines may be.” The
fisheries had already emerged as a symbol of New World mismanagement,
and Lampiñan’s device spoke directly to these concerns. Royal chronicler
Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas noted that the Italian’s dredge was appeal-
ing because of its promise to retrieve “larger and more” pearls “without
there being a need for Indians or slaves to dive to the bottom of the sea” to
get them. The machine’s successful introduction would spare the crown the
headache of dealing with this controversial labor system without sacrificing
pearl profits. In this context, the crown’s desire to introduce mechanical
devices into the fisheries cannot be interpreted as a reflection of uncertainty
over how and where to harvest oysters, as had been the case with Cárdenas.
Instead, Lampiñan’s license reflected an attempt to address a problem in a
profitable but problematic part of the empire.28
The case also revealed the emerging autonomy of Cubagua within a
Spanish Caribbean whose administration was increasingly consolidated on
Hispaniola. In particular, the case highlights the tension between the man-
date of the regional court—the Audiencia de Santo Domingo, located on
Hispaniola—and the power and independence of residents of Cubagua. As
soon as Lampiñan arrived on the Pearl Coast, Cubaguan residents protested his
intervention, and just nine months after the original grant the king responded
to their petition by revising the depths at which Lampiñan could operate his
dredges. Realizing that the new depth restrictions would limit his potential
profits, Lampiñan fought back, taking his case to the Audiencia de Santo
Domingo in late January 1529. Though Lampiñan concentrated his appeal
efforts on Hispaniola, it was on Cubagua itself where the case was most fully
discussed, overseen by the island’s council and prominent residents.29 Distinct
claims to authority, rooted in knowledge of place and particular practice, per-
sisted within the changing geography of overseas imperial administration.
As the trial unfolded, Spaniards familiar with pearl-fishing practices on
the Pearl Coast justified their jurisdiction over a large swath of Caribbean
waters through their demonstration of knowledge about the coast’s land and
seascapes—knowledge generated in large part by the labor of New World
subjects. The witnesses made the case to the crown that free and unfree
28
Bartolomé de Las Casas, An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the
Indies with Related Texts, ed. Franklin W. Knight, trans. Andrew Hurley (Indianapolis,
Ind., 2003), 62–63 (“no hellish”). Lampiñan’s device was described by Antonio de Her-
rera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierrafirme del
mar oceano, ed. Mariano Cuesta Domingo (Madrid, 1991), 2: 645–48, decade 4, chap. 9
(“larger,” 2: 648). For Las Casas’s description of pearl fishing, see Las Casas, Historia de las
Indias, 2: 402–3.
29
For the Lampiñan trial, see “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, Justicia:
7, no. 4, AGI; for an overview of Spain’s evolving New World administration, see J.
H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New
Haven, Conn., 2006), 120–27.

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residents of the Pearl Coast were the region’s essential administrators and
that their practices—rather than some Italian interloper’s—were central to
its productivity. Spaniards did not point solely to indigenous wisdom to
make their case: they bolstered their claims by citing their own experience
on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. All the men called to testify had been
in the American pearl fisheries for some time, and many also referenced a
knowledge of dredges gained while working in Iberia.
Even as they invoked the European context to bolster their claims to
authority, the Spaniards’ testimony emphasized to the crown that the pearl
fisheries were a new setting that demanded innovation and the skills of new
subjects. Indeed, a central aspect of the witnesses’ attention to the region’s
marine ecology was their emphasis on the indigenous divers’ critical role
in exploiting and caring for the oyster banks. Trial testimony revealed that
Spaniards paid close attention to the knowledge that informed divers’ prac-
tices. They noted the centrality of sea grass to oyster reproduction patterns,
the deleterious effects of raking the ocean floor, and the care divers took to
harvest only full-sized specimens. Spaniards’ incorporation of indigenous
knowledge was further demonstrated in witnesses’ employment of the
Taíno term xaguey, meaning the deep underwater depressions where good
pearl-bearing oysters were found. The success of the pearl fisheries and
the regional economy they sustained depended upon expertise. The oyster
habitat required careful, informed custodianship, as did the divers, who,
Spaniards observed, needed rest days if they were to be productive.30
A critical component of managing this industry was attention to the
soundscape of the reefs. Among the many insights generated by the Lampiñan
case were the frequent references to the underwater noises (attributed by wit-
nesses to oysters, although they may have been mistaken) that allowed divers
to locate rich beds. Spaniards’ descriptions of fleets of twenty to thirty canoes,
manned by indigenous divers, identifying oyster banks by listening for the
bivalves’ “rooting” requires that we consider not just the perceptions of the peo-
ple in the boat but also the world beneath the waves. Could underwater noises
be heard in the pearl-fishing boats, approximately twenty to sixty feet above the
ocean floor? Spaniards marveled at the phenomenon, writing that experience
had taught them that it was indeed possible, “although . . . [the water] be 20
fathoms deep,” to hear from the pearl-fishing canoes “the great noise” that oys-
ters made “grazing” on the seagrass below.31
30
See “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, Justicia: 7, no. 4, AGI. A lengthy
description of oyster reproduction, its relationship to currents and depths, and the
dissemination of oyster spat is quoted in Otte, Boletín de la Academia Nacional 47:
395, 401. For the meaning of xaguey, see Manuel Alvar Ezquerra, Vocabulario de Indi-
genismos en las crónicas de Indias (Madrid, 1997), 216. See also William F. Keegan and
Lisabeth A. Carlson, Talking Taíno: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2008).
31
Quoted in Otte, Boletín de la Academia Nacional 47: 396. References to the size
of pearling crews are sprinkled throughout the trial testimony; see for example “Don Luis

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It is helpful to remember the immensity of these oyster reefs, composed
of more than a billion bivalves in the early sixteenth century. The range of
species that populated Venezuela’s vast oyster reefs at that time is a line of
inquiry beyond the scope of this article, but we can think productively about
sounds generated in biodiverse reefs by considering modern Atlantic oyster
beds. Today’s oyster reefs are noisy and dynamic habitats—one marine biol-
ogist likens them to apartment complexes or shopping malls, full of species
of all sorts that honk, purr, grunt, and snap. Mud, stone, and swimming
crabs all can crush oysters or crack them along their growth edges, gener-
ating sound. Small fish such as gobies, blennies, and oyster toadfish all feed
and nest around Atlantic oyster habitats and make noises that could sound
like snorting. So do members of the fish family Scianedae, such as Atlantic
croaker and spot, which move over reefs with the tide and use them as their
feeding habitat. Snapping shrimp are another likely candidate for such
noises in today’s reefs: they hunt by using one claw to generate an under-
water sonic boom that stuns their prey and allows the shrimp to emerge
from their shells and grab their quarry.32
It is also possible that it was, in fact, the oysters themselves that
revealed their locations to fishing crews, as Spaniards alleged. The “root-
ing” sound (which one witness attributed to the oysters opening to “receive
water from the tide” and “eat[ing] it”) could correspond to pressure waves
caused by the movement of water over an uneven, corrugated bottom. The
movement of water caused by incoming boats might cause such waves, but
it could also have been generated by oysters shutting their valves, which
they do periodically. The forceful expulsion of water from the bivalves’
mantle cavities makes a clapping noise and might also have generated
waves, adding to the sound of the valve closure. Perhaps the oysters acti-
vated this clapping mechanism (the shutting of their valves caused by the
rapid constriction of their adductor muscles) in response to shifts in sound
and light caused by incoming boats.33
Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, Justicia: 7, no. 4, fol. 75, AGI. Fernando Cervigón writes
that today’s oyster banks exist at a depth of between fifteen and twenty meters, or fifteen
and sixty feet, with younger oysters preferring greater depths; see Cervigón, Cubagua: 500
años, 62. This assessment is in keeping with sixteenth-century estimates about the depth
of oyster banks. See Warsh, Slavery and Abolition 31: 349, 352.
32
Juli Harding, email correspondence with author, June 27, 2014. An audio clip
of snapping shrimp on an oyster reef is available at http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Oct14
/warsh.html. Audio clip courtesy David Eggleston and Ashlee Lillis, NC State University,
Department of MEAS. More audio files are available at http://cmast.ncsu.edu/cmast
-sites/soundscapes/Home.html.
33
References to the rooting noise made by oysters are sprinkled throughout the trial
testimony; see for example “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, Justicia: 7, no. 4, fol.
75, AGI (quotations). The Otte partial trial transcription also contains many references
to the rooting noise; see Otte, Boletín de la Academia Nacional 47: 386–406. I owe my
hypotheses about underwater noises to the conversations I had with several generous and
expert marine biologists, though any possible misinterpretations of their insights are my

45.63.6.177 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:44:51 UTC
It is impossible to say with certainty just how direct the connection
was between the noises generated in the oyster banks and the arrival of
pearl-fishing boats. However, the sounds that Spaniards attributed to the
oysters—whether they came directly from the bivalves themselves or more
generally from within the reef ecosystem—remind us of the rich, loud, and
changing habitat that existed below the surface of the water, of which divers
(and Spaniards) were very much aware.
Given the numerous possible explanations for the sounds Spaniards
reported hearing above the oyster reefs, it is worth considering not only the
various species that inhabited the reefs but also the range of complex and
interlocking biological processes gestured to by these noises. For example,
could the oysters have shifted their location in response to a disruption of
their ecosystem? Pearl oysters are immobile once they are mature adults;
they attach to their particular substratum, or reef bottom, by a filament
called a byssus that they secrete upon setting. Young pearl oysters, however,
can move short distances by detaching their “foot” (an oblong organ that
has locomotive capacity) and severing the existing byssus before generating
a new one in their next setting place. Bivalve mollusks are also sensitive to
light. Could oysters in early stages of development—particularly as Spanish
harvesting practices intensified and mature specimens were removed, leav-
ing behind primarily young specimens—have elected settlement sites in
response to the commotion caused by boats and divers? Unlikely, perhaps,
but not impossible.34
Furthermore, if the oysters were contributing to the din by opening
and shutting their valves, it might also offer a partial explanation for
the extraordinary number of pearls produced by the Pearl Coast oysters.
Perhaps increased valve activity in response to the roiled waters and the
resulting movement of underwater sediment and species increased the
frequency with which oysters’ mantle tissues were damaged, leading to
natural pearl formation. A natural pearl is formed when a wound to an
oyster’s mantle is surrounded by a pearl sac, which then produces secre-
tions and, later, nacre (the outer coating of pearls). The growth time of
a pearl depends on water depth, temperature, quality, and a variety of
own. A conversation with Standish K. Allen Jr., Professor/Director of the Aquaculture

Genetics and Breeding Technology Center at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science,
prompted me to take the reports of rooting more seriously. W. Jeffrey Bolster later put
me in touch with Ray Grizzle at the University of New Hampshire School of Marine
Science and Ocean Engineering; Grizzle in turn introduced me to Sandra Shumway at
the University of Connecticut’s Department of Marine Sciences; Juli Harding in Coastal
Carolina University’s Department of Marine Science; Roger L. Mann at the Virginia
Institute of Marine Science; and David B. Eggleston from North Carolina State Universi-
ty’s Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences.
34
For young oysters’ ability to move short distances in search of more favorable loca-
tions, see Paul C. Southgate and John S. Lucas, eds., The Pearl Oyster (Amsterdam, 2008),
41, 87, 165. On bivalve mollusks’ sensitivity to light, see Strack, Pearls, 94.

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other factors; studies of modern cultured pearl growth in P. radiata sug-
gest that pearls in the smaller range of what was reported on Cubagua (2
mm to 3 mm) can form in three to four months, and larger ones (6 mm
to 7 mm) in fifteen to eighteen months. The kind of injury that produces
a pearl can be caused in a variety of ways (including the classic grain of
sand)—by little stones, broken bits of shells, small crabs, or parasites,
just to name a few possibilities. Such injuries may well have become
more common as the growth of the pearl-fishing settlements stirred up
the waters and seabeds where oyster spat (juvenile oysters) tried to settle
and grow. One witness in the Lampiñan case recalled a Canarian man (a
noteworthy illustration of the diversity of the fisheries’ early labor force)
diving into the water and returning to the boat with a handful of oysters.
According to the witness, each of these contained so many large and small
seed pearls that the men got tired of counting them. The oysters them-
selves were enormous—he likened them to the size of a hen’s egg—and so
covered with pearls that the men could barely manage to chew the oyster
meat. If the Cubaguan oysters did indeed produce more pearls as a result
of the shifting submarine landscape, it would suggest that the Canarian’s
comments were something more than the standard trope of New World
wonder.35 It is possible that the oysters’ response to the sea changes of
the early sixteenth century may in fact have served only to intensify that
assault—the more pearls created as a result of disruption in the reefs, the
more attention the oyster banks drew.
When the trial’s judges finally sent all testimony to the Council of
the Indies in Spain, they included a damning assessment of the proposed
dredge’s potential impact on the region’s political economy. Their statement
linked pearl fishing and the pearl trade with regional commerce and the
35
Recent pearl culture experiments with P. radiata in Tamil Nadu state in India saw
a high growth rate and generated the statistics cited here. See Strack, Pearls, 594. Fer-
nando Cervigón finds that Venezuelan pearl oysters grow at a rate of 2–4 mm a month,
depending on the quality and quantity of food available, and can live up to five years.
See Cervigón, Cubagua: 500 años, 62. Elisabeth Strack notes that the rate of pearl growth
is linked to the growth rate of the shell and depends on the season. Slightly cooler tem-
peratures (by 2–3 degrees Celsius) during the Little Ice Age may have slowed the growth
rate somewhat; see Strack, Pearls, 120. For more on Caribbean water temperatures during
the Little Ice Age, see Tadamichi Oba, Tsuyoshi Watanabe, and Amos Winter, “Seasonal
Changes in Sea Surface Temperature and Salinity during the Little Ice Age in the Carib-
bean Sea Deduced from Mg/Ca and 18O/16O Ratios in Corals,” Marine Geology 173, nos.
1–4 (March 2001): 21–35; Winter et al., “Caribbean Sea Surface Temperatures: Two-to-
Three Degrees Cooler than Present during the Little Ice Age,” Geophysical Research Letters
27, no. 20 (October 2000): 3365–68. For a discussion of pearl formation, see Southgate
and Lucas, Pearl Oyster, 274–75; Strack, Pearls, 116–17. Strack writes that pearls from P.
radiata rarely grow more than 7 mm and are usually from 3 to 4 mm; see Strack, Pearls,
194. For a transcription of the Canarian man’s testimony, see Otte, Boletín de la Academia
Nacional 47: 386–406, esp. 403. On the trope of New World wonder, see Stephen Green-
blatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 2007).

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wealth of the empire: “[The dredge] would destroy the said island, its house-
holders [veçinos] and residents, and the trade and fishing of pearls would
cease, which would cause great damages to his Majesty’s revenue and royal
dues [derechos reales] and to the said householders, residents, and traders on
the said island, and not only to them, but also to those islands with which
they trade, because commerce and trade between them would cease.”36
Throughout the trial, witnesses spoke to the proposed dredge’s effects
on tax revenue as well as to its impact on the region’s trade. Each witness
was asked to confirm that “the interest and benefit that accrues to the
crown from these realms if their villas and towns are inhabited, paying
the taxes they owe to his majesty, are far greater than the profits [provecho]
that would result from dredging in the said island and surrounding areas
[comarcas].” The representatives of the councils of Santo Domingo and
Salvaleón de Higüey on Hispaniola added their voices to the chorus of
complaints about the device, stating that inhabitants of the surrounding
region came to Cubagua to sell their food products in exchange for pearls.
Their testimony was followed just days afterward by statements from
additional residents of Cubagua and San Juan, all of whom asserted that
their livelihoods depended on their commerce with Cubagua, a commerce
that would cease if the islands were to be abandoned due to the introduc-
tion of the Italian’s dredge.37
Cubagua residents successfully defeated the interloper. Charles V
revoked his agreement with Luis Lampiñan and went on to pass several pro-
tective measures that reflected the information generated by the Italian’s case.
A number of laws aimed at protecting pearl divers addressed the depth of
dives and the maximum duration of shifts in the pearl canoes. Furthermore,
in the 1530s the crown passed a series of preventive bans intended to protect
the oyster banks. These included a system of rotation whereby different
oyster banks were fished for a certain period of time and then left dormant;
36
For a clear transcription of this explication, see Otte, Boletín de la Academia
Nacional 47: 386–406 (quotation, 405–6). (“Sy el dicho rastro oviese de pescar e pescase
en los límites, mares y comarcas de la dicha ysla que por el dicho conçejo e vesinos della
en el dicho proçeso están espresados en an pescado e pescan e pueden pescar, que sería
destruyr la dicha ysla y veçinos e avytantes en ella, y el dicho trato y pesquería de perlas
çesaría, de que venría mucho daño a las rentas e derechos reales de su magestad e a los
dichos veçinos e moradores y contratantes en la dicha ysla, y no solamente a ellos, pero a
estas yslas que con ella contratan, porque çésaría el comerçio y contrataçión que con ella
tienen, por ser como es la dicha ysla la segunda destas yslas e de donde se a avydo e cada
día a y espera aver mucho provecho, e questo hera e es su paresçer, para que sobre todo su
magestad mande y provea y aclare lo que fuere servydo.”)
37
See “Don Luis Lampiñan y consortes,” 1530, Justicia: 7, no. 4, fol. 74, AGI. A
clear transcription is provided in Otte, Boletín de la Academia Nacional 47: 386–406 (quo-
tation, 398). (“Yten sy saben que es mucho más el ynteresse e provecho que se sygue a la
corona real de estos reynos que las dichas villas e pueblos estén pobladas, pagando como
pagan los derechos a su magestad devidos, que el provecho que se puede seguir de rastrear
en la dicha ysla e comarcas con los dichos rastros, e digan los testigos lo que çerca desto
saben.”)

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pearl fishing was also prohibited in certain months, presumably to protect
breeding and young oysters during the rest of the year.38
In spite of the lessons learned in the Lampiñan case and reflected in the
protective measures passed in its wake, the Italian’s defeat did not signify
an end to royal attempts to mechanize pearl fishing. It proved easier for the
crown to alter its approach to environmental custodianship than to shift its
policies on the role of different types of subjects in the administration of
the wealth of empire. The crown continued to sponsor mechanical devices
periodically, and the terms of these contracts reveal both a recognition of the
need for expertise in pearl fishing and a reluctance to admit that this know-
how was most often found in the fisheries. The Costa de Perlas, meanwhile,
experienced a turning point in the 1540s and 1550s, as its relative position in
the changing landscape of overseas empire continued to evolve. A tropical
storm wiped out Cubagua’s town in the early 1540s. Although pearl-fishing
settlements continued to spread along the Costa de Perlas, drawing land,
water, and peoples into their exploitative pursuit of the jewel, the conquests
and profits of the mainland (in particular the major silver deposits found at
Potosí in Upper Peru in 1545 and Zacatecas in New Spain in 1547) eclipsed
the profits fished from the sea. The Caribbean pearl fisheries experienced
bursts of productivity at various points (and in various places) over the next
couple of centuries, but they never again reached the heights of the 1520s and
1530s. However, throughout the second half of the sixteenth century the pearl
fisheries continued to be at the center of debates over how to harness the pro-
ductivity of subjects and the sea to political power.39
This was in part because the social and economic context in Spain
changed in the mid-sixteenth century in ways that served to sharpen percep-
tions of the pearl fisheries’ significance. As many scholars have established,
the crown’s 1557 bankruptcy generated a pervasive sense that the wealth of
the Indies was undermining the moral and financial health of the kingdom.
In this context, the pearl-fishing devices proposed in the second half of the
century were often cloaked in terms of recovery and restoration: obtaining
pearls as a form of lost wealth alongside items lost in shipwrecks. Again, the
crown incorporated some, but not all, of the information the fisheries had
38
For examples of early awareness of oyster bank depletion in the wake of
Lampiñan’s trial, see Otte, Cedulario de la Monarquía Española Relativo a la Isla de
Cugagua, 1: 214 (Dec. 30, 1532), 2: 94 (Sept. 5, 1537), 2: 172 (Mar. 10, 1540). For more on
the reproduction cycles of pearl-producing mollusks, see Strack, Pearls, 96; MacKenzie,
Troccoli, and León S., Marine Fisheries Review 65: 3. These seasonal proscriptions may
have been misguided in any event: the female pearl oyster sheds her eggs when the water
temperature is highest, but when water temperatures do not fluctuate dramatically, as is
the case in the Caribbean, several breeding seasons may take place during one year.
39
On the storm that wiped out Cubagua and the creation of new settlements along
the coast, see Manuel Luengo Muñoz, “Noticias sobre la fundación de la ciudad de Nues-
tra Señora Santa María de los Remedios del Cabo de Vela,” Anuario de estudios americanos
6 (1949): 755–98; Pablo Vila, “La Destrucción de Nueva Cádiz: ¿Terremoto o Huracán?”
Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 31, no. 123 (July–September 1948): 213–19.

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generated over the previous half century about the interlinked functioning
of these settlements’ component parts. And again, the crown tried to sepa-
rate indigenous and African subjects from the exploitation of this resource.
The crown did recognize that oyster harvesting required human skill: unlike
earlier dredges, the new pearl-fishing machines no longer attempted to
replace human labor altogether. Instead, they promised to substitute one
kind of subject for another.
This rethinking of the role of diverse subjects in the imperial project
reflected realities beyond just the fisheries. In territories only recently
incorporated into royal domains in Europe and beyond, the Spanish
Crown wrestled with the question of how to govern unfamiliar lands
and people. How could the crown promote orthodoxy in an empire
whose continued growth depended upon collaboration (however uneasy
or forced), with an increasingly heterogeneous set of subjects? Although
the monarchy vigorously persecuted suspect populations within its own
realm in the name of a crusading Catholic homogeneity, by the mid-
sixteenth century the Spanish Crown had gone to great lengths to estab-
lish alliances with (and sovereignty over) peoples from northern Europe
to the Americas and the Philippines. Throughout these varied domains,
the question of how to husband human and material capital was para-
mount as new resources were discovered and new combinations of sub-
jects were brought together under a single ruler.40
Thus, in the crown’s concessions to pearl-fishing entrepreneurs in the
1550s and 1560s, European approaches continued to coexist alongside a
recognition of New World realities. These contracts continued to license
Europeans (both Spaniards and non-Spaniards) in the contractual develop-
ment of the Indies, while acknowledging that these new outposts of empire
often depended upon the skills of unfamiliar peoples. For example, the trade
in enslaved Africans, increasingly essential to the pearl fisheries’ operation, was
gaining speed by midcentury, and the licenses to pearl-fishing entrepreneurs
from these years reflect this growing Atlantic commerce in human beings.
In 1565 the crown sponsored Pedro de Herrera, who received a license
from the Council of the Indies, to employ his invention to get “from under-
water anything silver gold pearls that might have fallen into the sea.” His
patent did not make any mention of a labor force, which likely hastened its
failure. Roughly ten years after Herrera received his license, the king granted
a license to a Portuguese merchant, Captain Antonio Gómez de Acosta, to
introduce “a number” of canoes and “up to 100 black slaves” into the pearl
fisheries. The terms of Gómez de Acosta’s license dealt explicitly with the
link among different types of labor, expertise, and the subjecthood of various
40
On Spain’s crisis of conscience, see Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxi-
ety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago, 2010). For a discussion of
Spain’s mid-sixteenth-century transformations, see Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature,
31–32.

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actors involved in pearl fishing. The contract specified that no one was to
interfere with the merchant’s venture because of his Portuguese origin, and
although he was prohibited from employing Indians against their will, he
was allowed to employ anyone who “understood” about pearl fisheries.
This was remarkable recognition that a knowledge of pearl fishing conveyed
authority to the people who possessed it. However, Gómez de Acosta’s
license stopped short of recognizing explicitly what fishery residents had
been saying for more than fifty years, which was that the people who best
understood the industry were the enslaved pearl divers. A year later, in 1568,
amid concern over the treatment of Indians in the pearl fisheries along the
Venezuelan coast, the crown granted permission to a trio of men (Antonio
Luis de Cabrera, Diego de Lira, and Antonio de Luna) to introduce into the
fisheries a new “device to fish for and retrieve from underwater pearls gold
and silver and things from sunken ships.” Their grant from the council also
included a license to bring with them one hundred black slaves, though the
exact labor they were to perform was not specified.41
The increasing presence of enslaved Africans—who by mid-
century labored alongside indigenous divers in the pearl fisheries—com-
plicated a challenging landscape of jurisdiction over people and products.
Furthermore, in spite of half a century of protective measures intended to
prevent the abuse of the Indies’ indigenous inhabitants, in the 1570s and
1580s varied and disturbing evidence emerged from the Pearl Coast suggest-
ing that Spaniards continued to flout these regulations. An official visita
(inspection) in 1570 to the Cabo de la Vela pearl fisheries produced horri-
fying tales of the enslavement and abuse of indigenous pearl divers, which
can only have compounded crown concerns about the management of these
territories. A woman identified as Inesica, or “little Ines,” testified that she
had been brought to the fisheries as a small girl; all she could remember
of her journey from the Valley of Upar (modern Valledupar, Colombia) to
the fisheries was that she cried a great deal along the way. Women and men
recounted dreadful beatings and privations, and a man named Dominguito
affirmed that he said the Christian catechism at night for his soul and that
all pearl divers prayed because they were “losing their souls beneath the
water.”42 This visita testimony may not have circulated widely, but, coming
41
For Pedro de Herrera, see “Licencia para poder sacar oro de devajo del agua,”
1565, IG: 425, legajo 24, fol. 228, AGI (“from underwater”). For Gómez de Acosta’s license
and the reference to people who “understood” about pearl fishing, see “Real Cédula,”
1567, IG: 427, legajo 30, fols. 186v–87v, AGI (“number”). (“Traer las demas personas q
entienden a las dha. pesquería.”) For de Cabrera, de Lira, and de Luna’s grant, see “Capit-
ulación,” 1568, fols. 424v–27v, AGI (“device to fish”).
42
The testimony of various indigenous pearl divers of diverse origin is quoted
and discussed in Eduardo Barrera Monroy, “Los esclavos de las perlas: Voces y rostros
indígenas en la Granjería de Perlas del Cabo de la Vela (1540–1570),” Boletín cultural y
bibliográfico 39, no. 61 (2002): 3–33 (quotation, 24). Complaints about the treatment of
Indians in the fisheries at Río de la Hacha on the Guajira Peninsula generated a royal

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in the wake of the publication of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s An Account,
Much Abbreviated of the Destruction of the Indies in 1552, it served to heighten
royal concern about the pearl fisheries. Meanwhile, steady investment in the
region continued. Spaniards supplied materials for (ever larger) pearl canoes
from Spain, while “Indians from Brazil” and “blacks from Guinea” contin-
ued to be brought to the fisheries by various bearers.43
Amid these troubling reports and following a burst of pearl profits from
oyster banks near Margarita in the 1570s, a number of crown-sponsored
observers traveled to the fisheries to chronicle practices on land and at sea and
to recommend ameliorative legislation. The visitors also paid close attention
to the marine biology that sustained these settlements, providing remarkably
accurate (for the times) descriptions of the reproductive patterns of oysters.
Even as this detailed knowledge revealed the fisheries to be sites of careful,
if exploitative, custodianship of their sustaining industry, the reports instead
focused on what the visitors viewed as social and economic disarray. Their
reports lamented that pearls “ran from hand to hand,” evading regulations,
and revealed an obsessive impulse to impose order on the pearl fisheries
through their careful parsing of pearls into category and worth. The royal
agents further singled out practices that challenged crown prerogative, such as
drilling pearls (which was forbidden) and “marrying” pearls of different cate-
gories by stringing together mismatched varieties.44
The reports suggested that the fisheries’ unorthodox ways reflected
the influence of the pearl divers themselves. Crown bureaucrats chronicled
fraternization among the fisheries’ free and unfree residents and noted the
remarkable autonomy exercised by enslaved black pearl divers. The most
worrisome of the customs described by these official reporters were the auc-
tions called caconas (a word that later came to refer to the highest-quality
pearls). The cacona stands as an additional example of site-specific practice
shaping the vocabulary of pearl fishery administration, as well as of vernac-
ular understandings of the relationship between labor and profit. The cacona
(defined in one report as being an “Indian word, from when the Spaniards
bartered with them just as they now do with the blacks of the canoes”) was
the practice by which, once or twice a month, “depending on how the fishery
visita in 1540. This was followed by a major investigation into ill treatment of Indians
in the pearl fisheries at Río de la Hacha in the mid-1560s: see “Tratos a los indios,” 1564,
Patronato Real: 195, Ramo 27, AGI. A second visita to Cabo de la Vela took place in 1570;
it is also discussed in Barrera Monroy, Boletín cultural y bibliográfico 39: 3–33, esp. testi-
mony on 13, 18, 23.
43
For “blacks from Guinea” working alongside “Indians from Brazil,” see H. Nec-
tario María, May 13, 1592, Audiencia de Caracas (AC), tomo 2, Isla Margarita desde 1.553
hasta 1.604, doc. 147, AGI. (Tiene en la pesquería de las perlas de esa Isla una canoa con
treinta esclavos buzos y de servicio negros de Guinea e indios del Brazil.) For the prices of
slaves from Cabo Verde and Guinea sold on Margarita, see Nectario María, Mar. 17, 1589,
AC, tomo 2, doc. 121; Las Casas, Account, Much Abbreviated of the Destruction of the Indies.
44
Barrera Monroy, Boletín cultural y bibliográfico 39: 3–33, esp. 21.

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[was] doing,” enslaved divers would be called to a boat owner’s house and
shown an array of goods ranging from imported clothing and shoes to wine
and cards. They would be told to take whatever they most desired. In return,
the boat owner would ask the divers for all the pearls the divers had retained
for themselves over the previous two or so weeks, “which experience show[ed
were] the best.” According to the author, the pearls gathered from this cacona
were often “worth more than the fishery [haul] of twenty or thirty days.” He
concluded that the pearls obtained from the cacona were “the principal source
of profit of the lords of the canoe because they are best and most oriental that
are extracted.” Even as they criticized prevailing practices, the reports con-
veyed to the crown that the region’s pearl wealth depended upon imperfect
local stewardship.45
In the face of such continued challenges to royal jurisdiction over sub-
jects and objects, it is no surprise that the crown welcomed new proposals
to streamline the operation of the pearl fisheries. The devices licensed in
the 1570s and 1580s reflected a clear desire to distinguish the machines from
earlier related inventions, even as notions of pearls as treasure persisted. Each
machine’s patent emphasized its novelty and cited eyewitness testimony as to
its effectiveness. These devices reflected accumulated knowledge about oyster
harvesting in ways that were implicit (in that they recognized the need for
human skill), but they explicitly spoke to concerns over the role of different
types of subjects in the process. The new inventions attempted to limit this
expert engagement to Europeans—and sometimes to Spaniards alone. The
devices would obviate the need for pearl divers by allowing the operator of
the invention to walk under water. When Francisco Soler successfully sought
a license in 1573 to operate his device for “going under water and getting
whatever treasure is found there,” the contract emphasized that his machine
was “different than those invented by other people”; when, four years later,
Cristóbal Maldonado received permission to use his “machine to walk under
water and fish for pearls,” the contract highlighted that the machine in ques-
tion had “never been used in the Indies or in these realms” before.46
In 1583 yet another foreigner, a Frenchman named Domingo Bartolomé,
proposed a solution and received a license to operate his machine called the
45
For these reports, including a description of the cacona, see “Memorial ansi de las
perlas en la concha como de la manera de pescarlas,” ca. 1580, IG: 1805, AGI, esp. fols.
4–5 (quotations). For a partial transcription of this report, see Barrera Monroy, Boletín
cultural y bibliográfico 39: 25–33. William F. Keegan and Lisabeth A. Carlson state that
“cacona” was a Taíno word meaning “reward”; see Keegan and Carlson, Talking Taíno, 23.
46
For Francisco Soler, see “Real Cédula,” 1573, IG: 426, legajo 25, fols. 256r–57r,
AGI (“going under water”). (“Ingenio para poder entrar bajo del agua.”) For Cristóbal
Maldonado, see “Real Cédula” 1577, IG: 426, fols. 107v–9v, AGI (“machine”). (“Ingenio
para andar debajo del agua y pescar perlas”); see also “Real Cédula,” 1577, IG: 426, legajo
26, fols. 59–60v, AGI (“never”). For a discussion emphasizing the novelty of these later
devices and the crown’s skepticism about the proposed devices’ likelihood of success, see
Luengo Muñoz, Manuel anuario de estudios americanos 9: 64–66.

45.63.6.177 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:44:51 UTC
tartana. His contract made explicit the device’s appeal: it promised to replace
black divers. But Bartolomé failed, as had his predecessors: fishery residents
adamantly protested his intrusion into their waters and ultimately succeeded
in ousting him from the region. Heavily invested in and dependent upon their
skilled enslaved African divers, Cubagua’s most powerful residents insisted that
no device could manage this natural resource as skillfully as the divers did.
Bartolomé and his device, like other men and their machines before him, dis-
appeared from the historical record. The conditions that accompanied Italian
Jusepe Bono’s device, licensed by the council in 1584, were even more explicit
regarding who should operate the equipment. Bono’s diving bell—which
accommodated two men—was only to be employed by natives of Castile, a
clear attempt to distinguish among subjects and correlate these distinctions
with certain types of labor. The absence of a paper trail beyond this initial
license suggests that Bono’s elaborate invention also foundered.47
After nearly a century of aggressive pearl fishing on the Venezuelan
coast, residents of the fisheries vehemently resisted any interference with the
labor system they believed central to their sustainable exploitation of the
oyster banks upon which their livelihood depended. Enslaved indigenous
peoples from the circum-Caribbean continued to labor alongside enslaved
Africans, but the latter now were the principal pearl divers. In the last decade
of the sixteenth century, when Portuguese merchants sold enslaved African
men into the fisheries at a price of twenty-four ducados each, an anonymous
traveler (likely a sailor with Francis Drake’s late-1580s raiding expeditions)
noted this labor regime, depicting large pearl “canoes” (in truth, large multi-
masted boats) manned solely by black pearl divers. This manuscript attests
to the knowledge produced by non-European practices in the Americas.
A second illustration in the same series captured these divers’ critical role
in revealing the many wonders of this unfamiliar natural world: the artist
depicted a conch shell containing fibers that black pearl divers allegedly used
to relieve pain in their eardrums caused by excessive dives.48
47
For Domingo Bartolomé, see Enrique Otte, Cedularios de la Monarquia Española
de Margarita, Nueva Andalucia y Caracas, 1553–1604 (Caracas, 1967), 1: 218–21; and docu-
ments collected in Nectario María, June 29, 1592, AC: tomo 2, docs. 149–52. For Jusepe
Bono in 1584, see “Campana para sumergirse,” IG: 740, no. 297, AGI. A drawing of this
diving bell is reproduced in García Tapia, Icon 5: 117.
48
Ruth S. Kramer, trans., Histoire Naturelle des Indes: The Drake Manuscript in the
Pierpont Morgan Library (New York, 1996), fol. 47, 2 of 2 (“canoes”), 261 (translation).
On Drake’s 1586 raids on Santo Domingo and Cartagena, see Alejandro de la Fuente,
Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 72–73. The
illustrations appear in an anonymous guide to the New World, entitled the Histoire
Naturelle des Indes and known as the Drake manuscript. The text that accompanies the
illustration of the conch shell says, “It grows where one fishes for pearls. In this conch is
found a certain hair like human hair the color of gold and it is very excellent for people
who have an earache or who are somewhat deaf. They dry it in the sun and then put it in
their ears and immediately feel its benefit. The negroes often use it, their ears being hurt
by frequent dives.”

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Who were these enslaved peoples upon whom Spanish residents relied—
whose centrality to the region’s economy regularly frustrated attempts to police
their activities within and beyond the fisheries? The sale in the 1590s of a pearl
canoe (the term having come to stand for all related human and material prop-
erty that went into fishing for pearls, including associated divers, “service slaves,”
animals, and equipment) offers a glimpse of the identities of some of these
pearl divers. Their surnames—ethnic toponyms—suggest origins from Sierra
Leone (those divers identified as Zape or Çape) and Senegambia (those divers
identified as Nalu) as well as Angola, São Tomé, Cape Verde, and the kingdom
of Kongo. Accompanying the Santa Catherina, a “pearl canoe” sold along with
its nets, ropes, anchors, and a smaller boat called a piragua, were “Anton crio-
llo, captain of the said canoe; Hernando from Çape lands; Sebastian Congo;
Alonso Soço; Anton Na[lu]; Pedro Congo; Juan Angola; Gaspar Çape; Gaspar
Çape; Domingo Çapes; Francisco Angola; Anton Mario [unitelligible]; Simon
Çape; Favian creole of Santhome; Sebastián Angola; Anton Angola; Ximon
creole, the page of the said canoe; Melchor from Nalu lands,” and “three black
women in the service of the said canoe; Mariana [Fora]; Luisa Soço; and Luisa
Anjico.” Working alongside these laborers were additional enslaved people who
were identified as being “blacks in the service of the ranch.” Another boat, the
San Matheo, was captained by one “Xpoval Campos” and crewed by “Francisco
Bram, Xpoval jelofe, Juan Primero, Matheo creole of San Thome, Francisco
Baliente, Antono Carcheche, Pedro Biafora,” and nine other men, all of whom
were identified as “black pearl [fishers] of this canoe.” These men and women
and all additional pearl-fishing materials sold for 13,000 ducados.49
After a century of back-and-forth with fishery residents about the living
components at the heart of the Pearl Coast’s political economy, the crown
only partially embraced the vision of human and natural wealth husbandry
that emerged from the region. Oyster ecology could be learned and imper-
fectly managed; the role of crown subjects in the custodianship of this envi-
ronment remained contentious. However, in spite of the numerous attempts
to replace divers with devices, by 1600 the divers’ importance to this partic-
ular natural industry was incontrovertible. That year, the crown recognized
the centrality of the enslaved divers to the region’s identity and their role
within the empire by placing them in the center of the coat of arms granted
to Margarita Island. The king described the coat of arms as a shield with a
partially blue background, “with a canoe in the middle and the blacks of the
fishery, and on the bottom the depths of the sea . . . and on top of the said
49
For the sale of the pearl canoes, pearl divers and “service slaves,” and related
supplies, see “Autos de Mariana de Castellanos, vecina de Sevilla, viuda de Diego núñez
Beltrán, con los bienes de Pedro de Peralta y Mariana de Castellanos su mujer, ausentes
en Riohacha, sobre cobranza del importe de una escritura de venta de canoas de pescar
perlas,” 1595, Casa de la Contratación: 738, no. 2, AGI (quotations).

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shield a crown, from which a pearl is suspended.”50 Enslaved Africans and the
pearls they harvested were among the most difficult subjects and objects to
control in an empire whose nature was in flux, yet they were also critical sym-
bols and sources of the natural and human wealth of its overseas domains.
Margarita’s coat of arms stands as yet another attempt by the crown to sub-
sume a deeply challenging set of social and economic relations and place
them—through a visual metaphor of political power—under its aegis.
Over the course of the sixteenth century, Pearl Coast residents repeat-
edly made the case to the crown that pearl fisheries were not merely underwater
mines, whose products could be regulated like those of their precious metal
producing counterparts on land. They were a marine resource whose renewabil-
ity depended upon careful attention to an intricate maritime ecology as well as
the cultivation and exploitation of skilled laborers. As a result of resistance from
Pearl Coast residents over the course of one hundred years, the crown learned
what maintaining this source of imperial wealth entailed: avoiding dredges,
paying attention to the seasonality of oyster reproduction, and rotating among
oyster banks. This knowledge, delivered to the crown by Spanish residents of
the settlements, was largely produced by the pearl divers themselves, whose
labor disrupted and defined the equilibrium of the Pearl Coast on land and at
sea. The critical role of the pearl divers proved hard for the crown to assimilate.
Even as Pearl Coast residents elevated unfamiliar and unfree subjects to a rank
of central importance within the empire (their enslavement notwithstanding),
the crown consistently delegated oyster harvesting to Europeans. Nonetheless,
residents’ repeated explication of the region’s political ecology forced the crown
to consider the nature of its overseas empire and the human and environmental
relationships at its core. Even as pearl profits declined, pearl fishery practices of
exploitation and cultivation continued to call attention to the nature of Spain’s
American territories and the limits of royal control.51
50
“Concesión de escudo de armas,” Patronato: 293, no. 22, Ramo 51, AGI. See also
a transcription in Otte, Cedularios de la Monarquía Española de Margarita, 1: 322 (quota-
tion, Nov. 27, 1600). (“Y por la presente hago merçed a la dicha çiudad de la Asumpçión
de la dicha isla Margarita de que agora y de aquí adelante aya y tenga por sus armas un
escudo, la mitad del campo açul, con una canoa en medio y los negros de la pesquería,
y en el hueco hondas de mar, y en lo alto del escudo a los dos lados dél San Felís y San
Adaut, que son avogados de la dicha çiudad, y ençima del dicho escudo una corona, de
la qual penda una perla que llegue hasta el campo azul, y por los dos lados unas letras
que digan Sicut Margarita preçiosa, segund ba pintado en esta escudo, las quales doy
a la dicha çiudad de la Asumpçión por sus armas.”) A modern rendition of this coat
of arms can be seen in the Museo de Nueva Cádiz in La Asunción, Margarita Island.
51
This stands in contrast to today’s dominant views of natural resource man-
agement, in which scientific knowledge and folkways are often considered opposite
approaches to custodianship of the environment. Two recent works in particular shaped
my understanding of this tension. For the assertion that modern states do not pay atten-
tion to local knowledge, see Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French

45.63.6.177 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:44:51 UTC
Figure I
Shell middens on Coche, May 2010. Photo by Molly Warsh. .
A visitor today to the site of these former pearl-fishing settlements

encounters the ghosts of this industry alongside some distorted reminders
of its former imperial importance. The island of Margarita is less famous
for its pearls than for its beaches and malls, easily accessible via a short
plane ride from Caracas. Together with the tiny islands of Cubagua and
Coche lying to its south, Margarita forms the small Venezuelan state of
Nueva Esparta. Pearls and pearl fishing still loom large in public memory
as a historic symbol of Venezuela’s exploitative approach to its natural
resources, although the oyster harvesting that placed the islands at the cen-
ter of Spanish royal concern five hundred years ago is now just a minor part
of the islands’ economy.52
Colonial New Orleans (Chicago, 2008). For a discussion of the political and environmen-
tal debates shaping the recent history of oyster harvesting in the Chesapeake, see Chris-
tine Keiner, The Oyster Question: Science, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay
since 1880 (Athens, Ga., 2010).
52
In addition to Venezuelan scholars’ research on the pearl fisheries, the 1931 novel
Cubagua (a fictionalized account of indigenous insurrection and environmental destruc-
tion on the island in the 1520s) by Enrique Bernardo Núñez is a part of Venezuela’s
twentieth-century literary canon; see Núñez, Cubagua (Paris, 1931).

45.63.6.177 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:44:51 UTC
Now oil is the controversial commodity, rather than pearls, and the
oyster banks are regulated by the Venezuelan government, fished just a few
months out of the year. Still, some traces of the oyster’s former significance
remain. The island of Coche remains partially covered by shell middens, not
dissimilar to those that were there half a millennium earlier, and less than a
quarter mile east of Cubagua the oyster banks continue to sustain limited
seasonal harvesting (Figure I). The reefs, however, are a pale shadow of their
sixteenth-century predecessors, which were far less protected and far more
prolific. Desolate, dry Cubagua has only occasional residents, fishermen who
occupy tiny, tin-roofed shacks during their stays on the island. The violent
human bustle and the putrid smells of rotting oyster flesh that accompanied
the pearl fishery’s boom years are long gone. In the tourist season, party
boats serving cheap booze deliver sunbaked tourists to the island’s sandy
shores. Mud baths, lazy swims in the cerulean sea, and brief walks through
cactus paths along Cubagua’s low cliffs amuse most of these day-trippers;
the adventurous can attempt to swim with pods of dolphins or snorkel
above the wreckage of a ferry that sank in flames in the 1970s. The ruins of
the sixteenth-century city of Nueva Cádiz lie on the island’s eastern shore,
inaccessible to tourists unless they cadge a ride in a fisherman’s skiff. If it
were not for the entrepreneurial hawkers who stroll the beaches with strands
of plastic “pearls” they swear are from the surrounding waters, it would be
entirely possible to leave the islands without any sense of their pearl-fishing
past. Yet this past played a critical role in shaping expectations and practices
of maritime empire in Spain and beyond, as the region’s human and natural
wealth produced extraordinary profits and enduring lessons in the challenges
of managing a new world.

45.63.6.177 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 19:44:51 UTC

A Political Ecology in The Early Spanish Caribbean

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A Political Ecology in the Early Spanish Caribbean

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William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 71, no. 4, October 2014

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The crown’s initial administrative initiatives fell short in revealing ways,

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own. A conversation with Standish K. Allen Jr., Professor/Director of the Aquaculture

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A visitor today to the site of these former pearl-fishing settlements

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