Violent Encounters: Franco-Spanish Aggression in the Early Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

Age of Revolutions

Feb 6

By Cindy Ermus

The following is largely an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my new book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, February 2023). which explores how the Plague of Provence (1720-22) unfolded in the European overseas colonies, paying special attention to the port city of Fort Royal, Martinique – at this time, the richest French colony, and an important administrative center for the French Antilles – and to interactions between the French and Spanish in the Americas. The following exceprt focuses on anti-French violence by Spaniards in the Caribbean.

Few regions in the eighteenth-century world were as interconnected as the European colonies, where colonial governors, intendants, merchants, and others networked, interacted, and struggled to balance the demands and expectations of the metropoles with broader colonial realities. And in the colonial world of the early eighteenth century, perhaps no relationship was more intertwined, or more contentious, than that between France and Spain. During the Plague of Provence of 1720-1722 (also known as the Plague of Marseille), Franco-Spanish encounters in the Caribbean stood in stark contrast to what officials in France hoped to achieve in the Atlantic.

Numerous confrontations, some of them extremely violent, took place between the French and Spanish in the colonies, prompting French colonial officials to file complaints against the numerous "violences" committed against the French. Although their letters cited excessive leniency from the metropole in these matters and sought punishment for the wrongdoers, officials in Paris, including the regent and the Marine Council, repeatedly responded not with calls or plans for justice but with warnings against responding too harshly to the Spaniards of the Americas, lest they be deterred from visiting the French colonies.

Two incidents that unfolded in the summer of 1720 – one off the coast of Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti), and the other off the coast of Venezuela – provide an instructive look at the kinds of confrontations that took place, and how both local and metropolitan officials responded.[1] On September 16, 1720, two of the men involved, both from the port town of Saint-Pierre, Martinique, sat down before Governor-GeneralFrançois de Pas de Mazencourt, marquis de Feuquières (c. 1660–1731) in Fort Royal (known today as Fort-de-France) to give an official account of the terrible ordeal they had suffered at the hands of Spaniards two months earlier. The first, Artus Le Baube, captain of a schooner (goélette) named La Forbanne, recounted that on January 28, 1720, he departed Saint-Pierre with his crew and headed for the coasts of Pointe de Spade (Punta Cana) in Spanish Santo Domingo to fish for carret, or hawksbill sea turtle (Testudo imbricata). They sojourned off the coasts of Hispaniola for months, fishing in several different spots without incident, that is, until July 27 when the crew spotted some Spaniards on land who appeared to have been hunting (for "boeufs marons") armed only with spears and accompanied by their dogs. It is unclear how, but one of the Spaniards soon came on board and asked the captain for wine under the pretext that their parish priest needed it to celebrate the mass. Although Le Baube had only one bottle, he handed it over, asking in return for the Spaniard to bring him and his crew some tobacco the next day.