Smuggling

Seven Centuries of Contraband

Simon Harvey

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781780235950
• eBook ISBN: 9781780236278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A cellar door creaked open in the middle of the night, or a hand slipping quickly into a trenchcoat—the most compelling transactions are surely those we never see. Smuggling can conjure images of adventure and rebellion in popular culture—Han Solo knew all about it, as did Al Capone—but as Simon Harvey shows in this fascinating book, smuggling has had a profound effect on the geopolitics of the world. Shining a light onto seven centuries of dark history, he illuminates a world of intrigue and fortunes, hinged on outlaw desires and those who have been willing to fulfill them. Harvey tells this story by focusing on the most coveted contrabands of their time. In the Age of Discovery, these were silk, spices, and silver. During the days of western empires, they were gold, opium, tea, and rubber. And in modern times it has been, of course, drugs. To the side of these major commodities, he looks at a wide array of things that have always been in smugglers' trunks, from guns to art to—the most dangerous of all—ideas. Central to this story are the (not always) legitimate forces of the Dutch and British East India Companies, the luminaries of the Spanish Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Nazis, Soviet trophy brigades, and the CIA, all of whom have made smuggling, at one point or another, part of their modus operandi. Beneath this, Harvey traces out the smaller-time smugglers, the micro-economies of everyday goods, precious objects, and people, drawing the whole story together into a map of a subterranean world crisscrossed by smugglers' paths. All told, this is the story of the unrelenting drive of markets to subvert the law, of the invisible seams that have sewn the globe together.

PART ONE

SMUGGLING EXPLORATIONS

ONE

GREAT AMBITIONS

Smuggling in the Age of Discovery

In the spring of 1568 Francis Drake, then a young and unknown sea captain, lieutenant to and cousin of the privateer and slave trader John Hawkins, sailed towards the South American colonial town of Riohacha at the neck of New Granada’s desolate Guajira Peninsula. As he neared the town at the helm of his small warship Judith, accompanied by another, Angel, he pondered his mission: a ‘contrabanding’ one to circumvent the monopoly on Spanish goods.¹

Riohacha today is a sleepy place in Colombia, the last substantial town at the edge of an expanse of desert known primarily over the centuries as smuggler territory. Then as now, smuggling was the main form of trade in the area, and as recently as ten years ago renegade ports dealt almost entirely in the illicit import of untaxed wares, particularly hi-fis and other electronic goods, as well as brand-name fashions and alcohol. It is still an important zone for smuggling cocaine, which transits either by sea from remote coves or by air out of the numerous hidden airstrips.²

The Guajira is an area that I will come back to repeatedly in this part of the book because it offers continuity. It is a corner of the old Spanish Main that has had a very particular relationship with smuggling from the time of the early New World Empire through the Bourbon period and to the present day. The petty contraband trading of the Elizabethan English with Spanish colonists and Wayuu indigenous people in this part of the Caribbean bears comparison with what has been going on in the peninsula in more recent times. For instance, we find (or more likely don’t detect) arms shipments beside more everyday contraband. We can’t necessarily read into this any kind of state involvement, although of course in the case of Drake and his compatriot Hawkins – privateers and contracted traders backed by noblemen and merchants back home, even by the queen – we might discern aspects of smuggling as a directed project. A lot of modern smuggling on the peninsula is petty and everyday but questions about broader influence still arise here: what, in aggregate, is the importance of extensive petty trading? Does it become a counterstate project if it infiltrates significantly into society? If smuggling has become a new norm, shouldn’t more formal entities such as nationstates be paying more heed to this trend that, in the Guajira, has evolved over six centuries? I am surely getting ahead of myself here: we are after all only talking, in the case of Drake and Hawkins, about precarious probing of as yet unformed markets.

Drake’s cargo, like shipments in and out of today’s Guajiran informal ports, was a mixture of the abject and the ordinary – slaves on the one hand, iron and linens among other commodities on the other – and he assumed that the town’s citizenry would comply with his ‘strong-arm’ trading overtures as they had done during Hawkins’s 1564 contrabanding voyage along this coastline.³ However, this time the town treasurer Miguel de Castellanos refused to comply and the future pirate and national hero was welcomed with a hail of gunfire, to which he responded with his own bombardment, blowing up the governor’s house in the process. He sacked the town with the loss of just one man, Thomas Surgeon, before carrying out his smuggling mission, threatening further pillage and hostage-taking should the settlement not acquiesce. Drake, of course, was to go on to bigger things – the circumnavigation of the globe, to national adulation, opening up new possibilities for trade. But for this trip, and many others that have since gone down in history as voyages of discovery, contrabanding was the bread and butter.

Geopolitical Smuggling

The Age of Exploration was by now well under way and offered exciting opportunities for men like Drake who were interested not so much in finding new lands as in filling their ships’ holds with new ‘species’ – rapaciously sought-after commodities like gold, silver and spices. This was not just a time of exploratory circumnavigations, of rounding land masses and crossing oceans, but of other new circulations, of free and forced migrations of people and goods, both licensed and contraband, although often it was difficult to tell which was which. Although in his smuggling efforts Drake might have been thinking mostly about immediate profit, perhaps on occasion giving momentary thought to his backers at home in England, he was nevertheless a man of his times. When acting as an illicit trader, he was pioneering a new geopolitics.

Expansive exploration began in the 1440s when the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator and his associates tentatively explored the western coastline of Africa. It surged further afield with the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, which coloured in the map, from a Western perspective, over a period of 200 years or so. Exploration diminished in the early part of the eighteenth century, after which most of the world’s coastlines were deemed to have been discovered. This was a period of intense mercantile rivalry between the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Venetians, Genoese and English, and it opened up new trade routes, particularly for spices. However, whoever declared a monopoly on a particular route faced a challenge from each of the other powers, both as a way of obtaining a measure of the spoils and as a strategy to usurp the position of top dog.

Was Christopher Columbus a trafficker? He hardly fits the profile of the crafty smuggler habitually crossing leaky borders with bags full of salt or cloth. Nevertheless with the onset of European exploration we might imagine a much larger theatre for smuggling. One must go back to Columbus’s predecessors in world exploration in order to speculate about this possible defamation of the reputed discoverer of the Americas. When the Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, reaching as far as the Great Fish River, or Rio do Infante, a few hundred miles up this eastern African Contra Costa, his motive was related to smuggling: it was to undermine the Gujarati, Malabari (western coast of India), Arab (particularly Mamluk Egyptian) and Venetian stranglehold on the spice trade. Spices came to Europe in a relay of land and sea transports from the east, often via the Arabian Gulf or the Red Sea. But if a maritime route could be established all the way to India and beyond, then, paradoxically for a free trader, a new Portuguese monopoly was a possibility.

It might be argued, then, that the first smugglers on a global scale were the Portuguese. Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape in 1497 and made it to India, although on this first trip he came back empty-handed. His second trip, spanning 1502–3, proved more fruitful but in June 1501 a fleet led by Pedro Alvarez Cabral had already arrived back in Lisbon laden with spices, which at that time were a fabulously precious commodity.

Of course, this is a distorted reading of some of the early heroes of the Age of Exploration. Nevertheless when Columbus pitched his venture to Queen Isabella of Castile to discover a western passage to the East Indies, five years earlier than da Gama’s flanking manoeuvre, he had had a similar motivation, although at that time his intention was not only to undermine the Venetians but to pre-empt the Portuguese. There is a less mercenary way of looking at this overlap of smuggling and exploration: one thing smuggling had and has in common with exploration is a desire to discover and try out new things.

The cloak-and-dagger nature of the spice trade cannot be denied. The Portuguese were great seafarers rivalling the Vikings and the Basques, and even better navigators. Piecemeal experience and rough chartings of distant seas were worked over in the royal repositories of knowledge to produce magnificent but classified maps. One such map became known as Cantino’s world chart after an Italian agent, Alberto Cantino, managed to smuggle a copy out of Lisbon in 1502, delivering it to his paymaster, the Duke of Ferrara. It showed Brazil and the Caribbean but the southern part of the Americas was a bit vague, perhaps encouraging others to keep probing for that elusive western route to the Spice Islands. The Americas, a great barrier, got in the way of this passage and a route was not to be sailed until Ferdinand Magellan found a way, later named the Straits of Magellan, between mainland South America and the island of Tierra del Fuego. On reaching a calm sea that he called, descriptively, the Pacific, he set a course for the Spice Islands. His voyage handed the Spanish an interest in the spice race but the Portuguese had already gained an advantage on the eastern route by this time.

This game of smuggling by exploration continued with the rounding of Cape Horn at the tip of South America by Isaac Le Maire and Willem Shouten from Hoorn in Holland in their ship Eendracht in January 1616. Thus the intermittent colonial thrust, throughout early modern history, in the trafficking of new commodities played out simplistically across a bare map. It opened up oceans and new worlds, offering possibilities both for the control of trade routes and commodities and also, at least at first, for state-sponsored smuggling of spices.

Quite how simplistically initial colonial exploration was mapped out can be seen in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which carved up the world for Spain and Portugal. An imaginary meridian line was drawn some 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain would own all the lands to the west of it and Portugal those to the east. It gave the Americas, minus the South American bulge of Brazil, to Spain, while Asia, including the spice lands, was to go to Portugal.

How did this potentially hugely profitable world look to the smugglers and proto-free traders of the early sixteenth century? The partially regulated marine mercantile worlds of India, Indonesia and beyond were now of as much interest as the ancient terrains of the Silk Route. Insular, inland territories like China, Mesopotamia, Arabia, the Levant and Anatolia were bypassed as Europeans rounded new peninsulas and surfed into the lagoons of exotic islands that they had heard were the source of spices. They quickly began to think of establishing trading factories along the new maritime corridors – repositories of pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace and cloves in what would become the great entrepôts of East Asia.

How far can we go with this logic of considering smuggling a part of exploration, a contributor to the early geopolitics of colonialism? On the one hand it seems to be an important factor to take into account. Although many of these early smuggling projects were uncoordinated, speculative and haphazard, they did have some backing from the state and sovereign. Smuggling did play a part on the ground, and its effects indicate just how important it could potentially be, as a counterpart to monopoly building, in the reordering of the world. It was just the beginning of an ongoing covert redistribution of economically crucial contraband that would include not only spices but silver, opium, tea, rubber and diamonds, as well as art and technology, and it would change the geopolitical configuration of the world. Smuggling’s relationship to statecraft, economic development and scientific advancement would become particularly complicated and entangled during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On the other hand, perhaps exploration as smuggling sounds a little speculative, a bit too abstract. Maybe smuggling during the early modern period should not be thought of as quite such a strategic activity. In this vein, one only has to look at the Spanish Main to survey, on a smaller scale, something much more grounded that was a part of everyday life. The question here becomes: what importance did this bottom-up informal trading have on the larger geopolitical picture? Did it simply create alternative contraband-fed communities that survived apart from the broader context?

Contrabandista Caribbean

Peru and Mexico were now under the yoke of the conquistadores. But all along the Spanish Main, outside of the massively fortified towns of Veracruz in northern New Spain (a territory bounded by what is now California in the north and Costa Rica in the south), Portobelo in Tierra Firme (what is now the Panama isthmus) and Cartagena (Colombia, then part of New Granada), there were vast swathes of nominally Spanish coastline that were either unconquered or had Spanish outposts that were happy to buy into the alternative, contrabandista Caribbean. The desperate or defiant inhabitants of often neglected communities like Caraballeda, Coro and Burburata in what is now Venezuela, La Yaguana and Santo Domingo in Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), or Manzanillo in Cuba, looked not so much to the viceroys for their vital commercial supply as to small, barely colonized islands with exotic names like Margarita and Tortuga (off New Granada) and tiny islets such as Mona and Saona (which on the map look like flies buzzing off Hispaniola). These unruly islands fed the crews and careened the ships of the smuggling marauders coming in increasing numbers from England, Holland, Portugal and France. Even if these small settlements practised contrabanding out of necessity, for the sake of their own internal communities, taken together they do paint a picture of extensive informal trading patterns that in sum were a significant irritant to the Spanish colonial authorities.

The Spanish Main and Caribbean.

Portuguese Attempts at Monopolizing the Spice Trade

It is hardly credible to suggest that nascent imperial powers might fully control vast and diverse territories and seas around the world: countless archipelagos of island potentates and unassailable regional fiefdoms had traded together for thousands of years. Nevertheless, with its superior ships, Portugal made the early running in the spice race from a European point of view. Under the stewardship of Manuel, whom the French called the ‘Grocer King’, Portugal had moved quickly to fill its sacks with spices, and soon he was also known as the ‘Pepper Potentate’. But a cursory look at the second phase of exploration towards the spice lands shows us how insecure this dominion was.

A series of adventurers took up Vasco da Gama’s flame, often quite literally as they burned and bullied their way across southern Asia from the Straits of Hormuz, over the Arabian Sea, all down the Malabar coast of India and as far as Melaka in southern Malaya. This port commanded the Malacca Straits, a fearsome channel on the spice route that then as now was plagued by piracy. It was situated halfway between India and the Moluccas and Bandas (which together make up the Spice Islands). The Portuguese strategy was to attempt to control the oceans and ports, and so when in 1505 Francisco d’Almeida was named Viceroy of Estado da India his vicereality was largely an expanse of water.

The key moments in this Portuguese phase of the spice race were the taming of the Malabari ports of Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon (although another local power, Calicut, successfully resisted), the establishment of a colony at Goa that was to be a dominion for another 450 years, and the storming of Melaka in 1511 by Affonso d’Albuquerque. Later that year a mission heading eastwards under Antonio d’Abreu set out from this important port. It was comprised of three ships and a supply junk and rounded Borneo and the Celebes (Sulawesi) before planting the grocer’s flag in the fragrant and semi-mythical lands of spice.

The race was won, so it seemed, and in 1522 a formal Portuguese monopoly was declared on cloves from the northern Moluccas, on nutmeg and mace from the southern islands (Bandas), and on all cinnamon from India and Sri Lanka and further to the east. Was this the end of the spice race, a foreclosure of the possibility of smuggling/exploration by other powers muscling their way around the region?

The monopoly lasted just seventeen years, until 1539, and was porous from the outset. One of the reasons why the Portuguese were able to make some initial...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION: Romance, Rebellion and Rower
• PART ONE SMUGGLING EXPLORATIONS
• PART TWO SMUGGLING EMPIRES
• PART THREE A SMUGGLING WORLD
• POSTSCRIPT
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX