Bayamo and the Caribbean in the Sixteenth Century

Bayamo is situated on the southeast side of Cuba, inland from the Gulf of Guacanayabo. The gulf provides many inlets and coves, perfect for foreign merchants to tuck into when avoiding Spanish ships patrolling the coasts.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite Bayamo’s location ten leagues inland from the gulf, the Cauto River, which meets the Caribbean at the port of Manzanillo, passed through the town and gave Bayamo’s denizens access to the sea.Footnote ¹⁵ This geographic positioning allowed them access to maritime trade, while also shielding them from the raids that affected the rest of the Caribbean in the sixteenth century. While the nearby city of Santiago suffered punishing attacks throughout the sixteenth century, Bayamo was rarely invaded, and those few invasions were easily repelled.Footnote ¹⁶ One such raid in 1586, when two French vessels came to raid Bayamo, resulted in the killing of eight Frenchmen and the subsequent execution of another nine.Footnote ¹⁷

Map 1

Map of the Gulf of Guacanayabo, c. 1720. Courtesy of Leiden University Libraries

Source: Unknown. De Zuijd kust van t eyland Cuba geleegen in Westindia vertoonende de Mançanilla met alles dessels caye en reeven door capt. Jongerhelt uyt de Westindies mede gebragt en coureek bevonden [map]. [1720?]. Scale not given. Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections, accessed May 12, 2025, https://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:130455.

Like other ports in Jamaica, the southern coast of Puerto Rico, and the northern coast of Hispaniola, Bayamo’s prosperity relied on its hato (cattle ranching) economy. Early settlers left cattle throughout the Caribbean, and bovine (as well as porcine) populations exploded.Footnote ¹⁸ Settlers could eat feral pigs if they liked, but foreign traders wanted hides taken from beef cattle. Bayamo’s geography and the long stretches of fertile valleys and grazelands between settlements in eastern Cuba meant that there was ample land for the cattle industry to grow. Vast tracts of land were allocated by the cabildos (town councils) of both Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo, enabling cattle barons to flourish in this period. A local oligarchy emerged that enriched itself in the hide trade, a seeming gift of nature. Despite their best efforts to corral Cuba’s abundant cattle, many animals escaped and ran free, known as ganados cimarrones. These wild herds were a kind of commons, periodically proving lucrative for runaway slaves, small-time cattle rustlers, and other transient populations that involved themselves in the hide trade as well.

French, English, and Dutch merchants purchased thousands of hides from ports across the Spanish Caribbean, and especially the town of Bayamo. Hides almost served as currency, one that gained in value with rising preindustrial demand. As Alejandro de la Fuente has noted, the price of hides rose 30 percent in Seville between 1580 and 1595. It was a booming market, thanks in large part to military demand; the rise of professional armies required the outfitting of soldiers and their baggage trains. Horses needed saddles, tack, and harnesses. To boot, major European cities had a thriving leather industry.Footnote ¹⁹ Cattle also provided meat, of course, which could be salted and sold for long transatlantic voyages, plus tallow to make candles and soaps.Footnote ²⁰

Bayamo was situated in a fertile valley whose ample grass was fed by the nutrient-rich soil of the Cauto River, which provided food for cattle and also allowed for the cultivation of sugar. By the early seventeenth century, there were already eleven ingenios (sugar mills) owned by nine different proprietors. The mills were horse-powered and staffed by some enslaved laborers to supplement the hard work of processing the sugar. It was estimated that between the eleven ingenios in Bayamo and the twenty-six in Santiago de Cuba, eastern Cuba could produce 28,000 arrobas of sugar annually.Footnote ²¹

These products were traditionally sent to Havana as part of Cuba’s insular trade, as well as to the cities of Cartagena and Nombre de Dios. The report on Bayamo’s sugar industry specifically mentioned that their destination was Tierra Firme, with which the town already had significant trade already.Footnote ²² Alejandro de la Fuente also has shown that, from 1578 to 1610, Bayamo exported goods worth 319,301 reales through the port of Havana. In Cuba, Bayamo was therefore the largest exporter to Havana.Footnote ²³ Most of these goods likely were hides, given that Havana had a growing sugar industry of its own and did not need Bayamo sugar. Records show that Bayamo alone was sending 35,000 to 40,000 hides to Havana annually by the end of the sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ Spain in the sixteenth century began to move slaughterhouses to the outskirts of towns, but the sheer quantity of cattle around Bayamo most likely overwhelmed the few butchers who lived there.Footnote ²⁵ John Hawkins noted in his second voyage that the cattle rustlers often killed cows in the fields, leaving most of the meat to rot in the hot Caribbean sun.Footnote ²⁶

Bayamo was thus an economically dynamic and important town in the second half of the sixteenth century. During the 1570s, it was larger than Havana and was the preferred place for secular and religious officials to live.Footnote ²⁷ It had eclipsed Santiago de Cuba, the former capital of the island, which had lost its prestige and inhabitants as Bayamo and Havana rose to prominence. Although Havana outgrew Bayamo in the 1580s because of its importance as the final stopping point for the annual fleets, Bayamo remained the second most important and prosperous settlement on the island. Scholarship has undervalued Bayamo’s importance within the Spanish empire due to its orientation toward insular and regional trade networks rather than Atlantic and imperial ones.Footnote ²⁸ The Chaunus only record one instance of a ship from Bayamo heading directly to Seville in the sixteenth century, and no ships from Seville arriving to Bayamo.Footnote ²⁹ This has given the impression that it was neglected by the metropole. The focus on the Seville monopoly gives the false impression that these ports were neglected and impoverished, furthered by complaints from officials and residents alike in their correspondence, but these regional trade networks were a foundational part of Caribbean trade.

Licensed trade was accompanied by a proliferation of unlicensed trade, which blurred the lines between the two for residents, who saw it all under the single umbrella of trade.Footnote ³⁰ Bayamo’s booming cattle and sugar industries made it an attractive market among many in the early Spanish Caribbean.Footnote ³¹ Although there was ample legal trade within Cuba, over half of the merchant houses in Cuba were illicitly buying goods from the eastern half of the island by the last quarter of the sixteenth century.Footnote ³² Merchants in Havana could avoid paying import taxes for hides because they conducted trade with other Cuban settlements by sea, as they did with other ports throughout the Caribbean.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, foreign merchants also began to make themselves known in the Caribbean, trading especially with Bayamo. Unlicensed trade in Bayamo was already underway by 1569, and it was well-known that French and English merchants were trading with the local townsfolk in the port of Manzanillo.Footnote ³⁴ Although investigations came in cycles, often during periods of unrestrained trade with foreign merchants, these cyclical reminders of royal authority would often stem the tide of unlicensed commerce but not stop them completely.

By the last two decades of the sixteenth century, foreign presence in the Caribbean reached a fever pitch. The Portuguese, who had been in the region since the early sixteenth century alongside other foreigners, mostly French and Italians, expanded their presence in the Indies following the unification of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns (1580–1640).Footnote ³⁵ Constant hostilities between the Spanish and French throughout the sixteenth century meant that French mariners were frequent visitors to the Caribbean, but the declaration of war between the two crowns in 1595 led the French king to give his subjects the implicit approval of their sovereign to engage in acts of private naval warfare against Spanish targets in the Caribbean.Footnote ³⁶ Compounded by the Dutch revolt (1568–1648) and the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), there was a sharp increase in the quantity of foreign interlopers. Although there had been significant and costly fortification projects throughout the Caribbean following Sir Francis Drake’s 1585–86 voyage, marauders continued to disrupt coastal and intercolonial trade by taking individual ships, or prizes, after they left port.Footnote ³⁷

Although increased foreign presence brought with it the fear of raiders, it also brought more opportunities to conduct unlicensed trade. With the Iberian Union between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in 1580, the last decades of the sixteenth century marked a watershed moment in the proliferation of trade with foreign merchants across the Caribbean.Footnote ³⁸ In 1595, Portuguese merchants received the asiento de negros, a contract system that gave them exclusive rights to trade enslaved Africans in the Americas, and they used this not only to rapidly expand slave trading networks but also to illicitly sell goods and captives.Footnote ³⁹ Coupled with the death of Philip II in 1598 and the prohibition of Dutch trade in the Iberian peninsula that same year, conditions were perfect for an explosion in unlicensed trade with ports across the Caribbean. This lucrative trade brought silks, linens, wines, and slaves to Bayamo. In the absence of large amounts of currency, the townsfolk would trade in hides, salted meat, tallow, or sugar instead. This made Bayamo an ideal stopover for foreign merchants. Although they could obtain a license from the Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade) based in Seville or work through a merchant in Seville as an intermediary, few of the foreign merchants coming to Bayamo in this period had permission to trade there. They therefore skirted around the collection of the almojarifazgo (import tax), which was customarily done by local treasury officials at the port after performing an inspection of the ship and looking at the list of registered goods.Footnote ⁴⁰ For this reason, this essay uses the term “unlicensed trade” instead of other alternatives because it best reflects that it was conducted without permission from Seville and without the payment of the almojarifazgo.Footnote ⁴¹

Although terms like contrabando (contraband) would be popularized later in the seventeenth century, officials in this period used the term rescate. The term came from captive-taking practices in the late medieval Mediterranean and is typically defined as meaning “barter” or “ransom,” but it took on an implied meaning in the Caribbean.Footnote ⁴² Irene Wright argues that “colonists were accustomed to claim that they were forced” by foreign merchants to trade with them, with the implication of having done so under duress.Footnote ⁴³ The typical story was that the townsfolk only traded with outsiders because the alternative was having the foreigners’ cannons turned on the town itself. Similarly, it could be used to pay the ransom of Spaniards who had been captured by the raiders. This claim was not necessarily unfounded; foreign marauders often took prisoners and would keep them aboard the ship until they could potentially ransom them. A group of French raiders in 1586, for instance, took four Spaniards prisoner for the entirety of Lent, traveling around the Caribbean before the French were captured and taken prisoner in Bayamo.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although it offered a degree of deniability, royal officials quickly caught on to the lie. For that reason, the term rescate came to mean any form of unlicensed trade conducted in the Caribbean, with Spanish colonists labeled rescatadores (barterers) for their participation.

With the opportunity for trade and plunder, foreign ships arrived at the Caribbean in droves from Europe. Throughout the sixteenth century, French merchants were the most prolific. Expeditions were funded by merchants in Rouen, who would offer their linens in exchange for hides.Footnote ⁴⁵ Additionally, from 1589 until 1602, there were 159 individual and privately funded voyages from England that trawled around the Caribbean.Footnote ⁴⁶ Queen Elizabeth was hesitant to further inflame tensions with Spain, but she would nonetheless invest in some of these ventures as a shareholder.Footnote ⁴⁷ Vessels would arrive in the Caribbean and join with other English ships on expeditions, but the profit motive meant that they were also direct competitors with each other. Stockholders expected a return. The Dutch surpassed the French in numbers by the final years of the sixteenth century and had twenty ships displacing 200 tons and 1,500 men dedicated to trading with the Caribbean to help their growing leather industry. The trade was mostly concentrated in Bayamo, and was said to have brought in 800,000 florins annually.Footnote ⁴⁸ Despite the different circumstances that brought each group to the Caribbean, there was significant overlap on the ships themselves. Investors for a Dutch voyage could come from France, England, or even Genoa, as happened in 1602 when Pompilio Cataneo in Genoa and John Williams in London funded a Dutch voyage to Hispaniola. Cataneo belonged to a prominent banking family in Genoa, but he became an important intermediary between the various foreign merchants circulating around the Caribbean.Footnote ⁴⁹

The nonnational aspect of this commerce made it difficult for Spanish officials to succinctly describe the vessels sitting in the port of Manzanillo. Aside from the different sources of funding for voyages, the crews themselves could include people from across Europe and, depending on whether it was a slave voyage or not, from parts of West and West-Central Africa as well. The documents often refer to “navíos de flamencos, françeses, yngleses” (Flemish, French, English ships), an acknowledgment of the multinational character of these vessels.Footnote ⁵⁰ Because of the size and quantity of these ships, there was a concerted effort to eliminate this unlicensed trade, which they saw as an endemic inconveniente (problem).

The Arrival of Pedro de Valdés

At around sixty years old, Pedro de Valdés was named governor of Cuba in 1602 and ordered to make his way to Havana immediately.Footnote ⁵¹ He was a man of the sea, having served alongside Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, his father-in-law, in the 1565 conquest of Florida, in which over 100 French Huguenots were executed for trying to settle the region. This accomplishment earned him the title of knight in the Order of Santiago in 1566, among one of the highest honors awarded in Spain. He, like many other governors of Cuba, received this title for his military experience. Following this, he served as an admiral of the Andalusia squadron, commanding eight galleons in the ill-fated Spanish Armada. After its defeat in 1588, Valdés was taken captive and paraded around the English court before his ransom was paid.Footnote ⁵² Valdés brought these diverse experiences with him as he left Seville for Cuba.

Valdés arrived in the city of Havana on June 19, 1602, after a grueling sixty-two-day journey (nearly twice the standard length). While in Puerto Rico, Cuba’s new governor realized that he was being pursued by a vessel displacing over 300 tons. After outrunning the ship, Valdés stopped in Santo Domingo before continuing up along Hispaniola’s northern coast, preventing contraband trade from being conducted in the town of Monte Cristi. After the French merchants involved abandoned their vessel, Valdés and his men found 600 hides loaded onto the ship, which presumably had traded elsewhere already. This offered the new governor more insight into the smuggling operations that were being carried on throughout the Caribbean, as well as the island he was sent to govern. By the time he arrived in Havana there were orders to investigate trade in Bayamo and Puerto Príncipe, another den of unlicensed trade. Valdés received word that a Flemish vessel, along with the sargento mayor (sergeant major) of Santo Domingo, had been conducting trade there.Footnote ⁵³ Set within this context, he immediately began to investigate the situation on the island.

Pedro de Valdés’s tenure as governor (1602–08) was among the most tumultuous periods in Cuba’s already troubled seventeenth century. He quickly became aware of the scale of unlicensed trade arriving in the port of Manzanillo which made its way to Bayamo every year, and he set about remedying it. His early investigations left him with the impression that over two-thirds of Cuba’s population was foreign-born, though that was clearly an exaggeration.Footnote ⁵⁴ Like many officials throughout the Caribbean at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he singled out the large Portuguese population that lived throughout Cuba without a license.Footnote ⁵⁵ He saw Portuguese settlers as the reason for the proliferation of unlicensed trade. He alleged that they would enter the Indies as sailors and desert once they got into port, disappearing into Cuba’s tierra adentro (interior).Footnote ⁵⁶ From there, they would marry into local families and become vecinos (landholding town citizens), which would also allow them to begin the process of naturalization as Spanish citizens. Valdés alleged that, while living in Cuba, the Portuguese would often operate shops where they would sell goods that had been introduced illegally. Valdés further argued that they enriched themselves and defrauded the king in the process. Although he later acknowledged that there were many impoverished Portuguese people in Cuba, especially those living in and around Havana, he construed the Portuguese as the wealthy elite of the island. Valdés specifically mentioned a Portuguese man whose name was Mota. He was a pilot who had married a woman from Puerto Príncipe, but operated out of Bayamo, where he had a ship manned by foreigners of all nations and captained by a French man. With this ship, Mota had been making regular trips to Bayamo for the purpose of conducting unlicensed trade since 1599.Footnote ⁵⁷

In late 1602 (it is unclear exactly when, but probably around September or October), Pedro de Valdés gave a commission to Licenciado Melchor Suárez de Poago to go to Bayamo and investigate claims of contraband in the area. Suárez de Poago left with forty soldiers from Havana, twenty of whom stayed with him, while the other twenty went to the copper mines in Santiago del Prado and to the city of Santiago de Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although Santiago de Cuba had lost its importance by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the copper mines of Santiago del Prado were one of the most important economic industries in eastern Cuba.Footnote ⁵⁹ To an extent, this investigation was also about protecting the copper mines from any raiders.Footnote ⁶⁰ Suárez de Poago most likely brought with him all the signs of royal authority: the decree authorizing him to undertake this comisión (special investigation), a vara de justicia (staff of justice), the aforementioned soldiers, and a cohort of ministers to assist in doing his due diligence.Footnote ⁶¹ An investigation of this scope required him to gather witness testimonies, review local records, and visit the port of Manzanillo to understand the situation better. He would then have the right to imprison anyone found guilty, and send them back to Havana for justice to be meted out.

The description that Pedro de Valdés received from his lieutenant portrayed Bayamo as a microregion of its own as well as a microcosm of the broader Caribbean. Bayamo was a space in which people from across the Atlantic world came together to trade. The Spanish crown did not invest in the port of Manzanillo. While there was an embarcadero (pier or dock), there were no defensive structures to protect against foreign invasion. Suárez de Poago discovered that, instead, the foreign merchants had developed the area themselves. They brought artillery onto land for defensive (or offensive, if necessary) purposes, and created a more efficient port authority than had previously existed in the area.Footnote ⁶² This artillery was likely captured from ships that they had plundered elsewhere in the Caribbean. Foreign factors or junior trading partners operated in the area, peddling goods and outfitting ships for further voyages to other ports in the Caribbean.

The most infamous of the named factors were Pompilio Cataneo, who made his way to Manzanillo from the port of Guanahibes in northwest Hispaniola; two Frenchmen named Cavallon and Captain Arceo; two Flemish merchants named Abraham and Jacques; a handful of Portuguese men including Mota; and two Englishmen who had plundered ships heading to Havana to then resell in Bayamo.Footnote ⁶³ Pompilio was especially prolific; in 1602 before Suárez de Poago was dispatched, Pompilio had already offloaded eight ships full of cargo.Footnote ⁶⁴ Suárez de Poago nonetheless found that Pompilio was in good company. The scale of unlicensed trade in Bayamo had supposedly grown exponentially since 1595. Between 1598 and 1602, at least fourteen large, circa-300-ton ships had arrived in port and taken 12,000 hides each.Footnote ⁶⁵ This averaged out to 42,000 hides loaded onto foreign vessels from Bayamo alone, outstripping what had been sent to Havana in the same period, about 35,000 to 40,000 hides a year.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although the lieutenant claimed that fewer hides were sent to Havana by the beginning of the seventeenth century—a paltry sum of 2,000—this was most likely an exaggeration, and trade had continued, though perhaps on a reduced scale, between the two Cuban settlements.

The volume of trade flowing out of the port of Manzanillo made it attractive to people from across eastern Cuba. While some would arrive by sea from other Cuban ports like Baracoa and Puerto Príncipe, Pedro de Valdés alleged that crowds of buyers would also arrive by land.Footnote ⁶⁷ The flat terrain between Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba, tucked within the valley of the Sierra Maestra, meant that not only could the townsfolk from Bayamo easily reach the port, but colonists in Santiago could also be there in a matter of hours. Foreign factors built and operated shops so that people could look at the various wares that had been brought. The port became an important part of life within eastern Cuba; according to some observers, women and children would even come to take part. An external official claimed later in the decade that not only were the Spanish colonists great rescatadores, but their slaves also participated.Footnote ⁶⁸ Reports abounded of even slaves wearing silk because of the wealth that was accumulating in Bayamo.Footnote ⁶⁹ There were doctors who would provide medical care for the Spanish colonists. For recreation, there was even an area to play bolos, an early form of bowling.Footnote ⁷⁰ This created not only a trade depot for townsfolk, but an entire social space. In these ways, the port of Manzanillo became its own microregion which could directly compete with major Caribbean port cities like Havana and Santo Domingo.

While this trade proliferated, Pedro de Valdés and other officials across the Caribbean made no distinction between foreign merchants and the marauders who had plagued the Caribbean throughout the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the terms corsario (corsair) and pirata (pirate) could mean someone who arrived in port for the purpose of plundering or to trade peacefully.Footnote ⁷¹ The usage of these terms is hotly contested, not only by N. A. M. Rodger for reasons of avoiding anachronisms, but also because scholars disagree on whether merchants and marauders were the same individuals in different contexts. If commerce was founded upon mutual trust, the act of raiding a settlement would therefore breach the trust of the townsfolk and close future opportunities to conduct trade.Footnote ⁷²

In eastern Cuba, the local townsfolk did have merchants with whom they preferred to trade. Written contracts between French pirates and the local parish priest in the town of Baracoa were discovered by Suárez de Poago in his investigations.Footnote ⁷³ The bishop of Cuba also learned in his own investigations that people would wait to baptize their children until foreign merchants arrived in port so they could serve as the children’s godparents.Footnote ⁷⁴ This demonstrates the extent to which personal relationships formed between individual foreign merchants and the townsfolk. Foreign and local merchants constructed kinship networks to build trust and ensure exclusive business ties that benefitted the parties involved and excluded competitors.Footnote ⁷⁵

Some historians argue that the “peaceful trader and the aggressive pirate … were often the same person at different times.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Throughout the investigation, Pedro de Valdés alleged that these foreigners would plunder ships to then turn around and sell the stolen goods in Bayamo. They often targeted ships off the coasts of the Canary Islands, Panama, and Honduras.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the case of Honduras, the French and English made annual raids in the area. Pedro de Valdés more than likely referred to a joint venture by the English and French in February 1603 in which they sacked Puerto de Caballos along the northern coast of Honduras and immediately took the goods, among them two large pieces of bronze artillery, to both Bayamo and the port of Guanahibes (modern-day Port Gonaïves) in northwest Hispaniola to sell.Footnote ⁷⁸ Considering these circumstances, both arguments make sense from different perspectives. Foreigners wanted to form commercial and social bonds with local townsfolk in specific port towns that they would never attack, but they could also raid in other parts of the Caribbean to procure the goods to sell in the first place. This would be unlikely to draw the ire of the townsfolk; as Casey Schmitt has argued, regional competition meant that people in Bayamo might not care what happened in Honduras because the former benefitted from the latter’s misfortunes.Footnote ⁷⁹

The close relationships that foreigners forged with Spanish colonists in Bayamo greatly concerned the governor. Unlicensed trade brought foreigners into proximity with Spanish colonists, creating both social and economic concerns. At its core, contraband threatened the trade monopoly in Seville and the sovereign’s right to taxes that were collected from commerce between the Americas and Spain.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although this was an important consideration during a time of vast wartime expenditures, Pedro de Valdés was equally worried about how sustained contact with foreigners might breed disloyalty. The main worry was that foreign merchants who spent extended periods of time in the area would learn the best places to launch a future invasion of Cuba.Footnote ⁸¹ The geography of the Gulf of Guacanayabo, with its many inlets, would be difficult to defend once marauders properly understood it and could travel down a lesser-protected channel that the local soldiers or militia men would otherwise not patrol.

The issue of religion became a significant talking point as well. With so many merchants from Anglican England and the Calvinist United Provinces entering the port of Manzanillo, there was a serious concern about Protestants proselytizing not only among the Spanish colonists but among the indigenous and African populations across the island as well.Footnote ⁸² Such fears were not unfounded. Suárez de Poago discovered that some of the merchants brought along small books with prayers translated into Spanish which they would give out as gifts. Pedro de Valdés argued that it would be dangerous if enslaved Africans and indigenous laborers living far away from major settlements were to clandestinely convert to Protestant religions.Footnote ⁸³ The governor expressed this most plainly in voicing his fear that Bayamo was becoming “another La Rochelle.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In doing so, he referred not only to the Calvinist underpinning of La Rochelle, but also the firebrand resistance that it gave to Henri IV well beyond the end of the French Wars of Religion (1562–98). At the time Pedro de Valdés made the comparison, La Rochelle was still firmly Huguenot alongside a handful of other stalwart cities. Bayamo in this parallel was not only Protestant, but it was in a state of rebellion as well.

The topic of heresy was a prominent boogeyman conjured up by secular and ecclesiastical figures alike in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The fact that people would baptize their children and have foreign merchants serve as godfathers implies a degree of belonging within the Catholic Church itself—the godparent had to also be Catholic.Footnote ⁸⁵ Furthermore, although English and Dutch visitors were often Protestants, the French were more complicated. Famous corsairs like Jacques de Sores and François Le Clerc were Huguenot firebrands from before the 1558 treaty of Cateau-Cambresis whose plundering of ships and settlements had often been done for religious reasons, but the lesser-known and smaller-scale marauders and merchants may not have been so ardent in their convictions. Many of the later marauders left the towns intact, because their only purpose was to extract loot.Footnote ⁸⁶

French raiders caught at the port of Manzanillo in 1586 suggest a very different portrait of the average marauder a generation after the military exploits of Sores and Le Clerc. Although Inquisition officials had limited time to interview the raiders before they were summarily garroted, their testimony alongside that of their Spanish prisoners shows the marauders in a different light from the one in which Pedro de Valdés cast them. The only French prisoner who gave testimony swore he was Catholic, which was corroborated by the Spanish colonists who were kept prisoner aboard the vessel. The Spanish colonists said that during Lent the French had abstained from eating meat on Fridays, knew the Ave Maria and the Salve Regina prayers, and only a handful of the raiders showed any animosity to the pope or the saints. In sum, it was suspected even by Inquisition officials that only three or four of the French raiders were Huguenots. Although there were several Protestant Bibles found on board, it is unclear if they were brought for personal use or for the purpose of distribution in Bayamo.Footnote ⁸⁷ Given that they were intending to pillage the town, it mostly likely was the former.

Regardless of these realities, the result of Suárez de Poago’s investigation vexed the governor. Whether they were Catholic or not, this unlicensed trade was operating at a scale previously not known. Pedro de Valdés expected there to be punishment, and his lieutenant governor was the one expected to exact it.

The 1603 Bayamo Rebellion

After completing his investigation, Suárez de Poago was ready to make his move. Around December 1602, he imprisoned eighty of Bayamo’s inhabitants, who were all condemned to death and the confiscation of half their bienes (goods).Footnote ⁸⁸ The lieutenant does not mention most of them by name, only singling out Lieutenant Antonio Maldonado de Andrade for not prosecuting the townsfolk for their crimes and being one of the largest rescatadores.Footnote ⁸⁹ He had hoped to arrest more of the colonists, but 200 people deserted the town, disappearing into the mountains. Considering that population estimates place Bayamo at around a maximum of 3,000 souls in 1610, this would have been a mass exodus to escape royal justice.Footnote ⁹⁰ The lieutenant kept the twenty-four principal contrabandists under constant watch by the soldiers who accompanied him to ensure that they did not try to escape.Footnote ⁹¹ They were held in Bayamo’s city jail, located in the cabildo’s building, which would have likely been cramped for so many prisoners. The lieutenant’s security measures were not without reason. At some point, though still unclear in the documents themselves, two large, 500-ton Dutch ships arrived at Manzanillo to continue trading. Despite the situation with the prisoners already having occurred, some of the townsfolk nonetheless went to the port to trade as they had done before. Suárez de Poago went to the port as well, where he stole one of their lanchas (a small sailing vessel) to engage them in a battle, killing three, taking six or seven additional men prisoner, and forcing another two to flee by sea. A Spaniard who had accompanied the raiders in this attack also escaped into the wilderness of Cuba’s interior on mule. Suárez de Poago returned to Bayamo with clothing and a book, which detailed all the trade that had been conducted between the foreign merchants and the local townsfolk. The information in the book was verified by several residents, aiding the lieutenant’s investigation.Footnote ⁹²

As the dust settled, Suárez de Poago realized he had a problem. He had come down hard on the townsfolk, offering them no appeals to their sentences, and now had several foreign raiders in his custody. He only had tenuous control over the situation in Bayamo, the jail was far too small for so many prisoners, and many were likely on house arrest. His only option was to have them brought to Havana. Although this was transpiring at the beginning of winter, Cuba’s dry season, the overland paths were still muddy and inaccessible. Many of the “roads” were in fact just dirt paths that would flood during the rainy season and quickly become overgrown with vegetation if not properly maintained. The so-called royal roads in Cuba’s interior were especially poorly maintained.Footnote ⁹³ For this reason, it was usually preferable to travel by sea to reach many of the ports in eastern Cuba. Unfortunately for the lieutenant a fleet of foreign vessels was blocking the port of Manzanillo, preventing any Spanish ships from passing. There were at least two urcas (hulks, trade vessels between a frigate and a galleon in size), two patajes (pataches, a light sailing vessel), and three lanchas, though there likely were more.Footnote ⁹⁴ Like the various merchant vessels that entered the port of Manzanillo, this fleet was comprised of English, Dutch, and French ships with equally multinational crews.

Diverse documents reveal that the foreigners themselves represented a cross section of the lesser-known voyages that characterized this period of trade and plunder in the Caribbean. Pedro de Valdés makes vague mention of a group of raiders who had been plundering off the coast of Castilla de Oro (which would later be considered Panama and Tierra Firme) participated in this blockade.Footnote ⁹⁵ While there are uncorroborated mentions of a French pirate named Gilberto Girón being present, there is no firm evidence of this.Footnote ⁹⁶ The pinnace Elizabeth and Cleeve, captained by Christopher Cleeve, is the only vessel which can be confirmed to have been part of this blockade. Cleeve, a gentleman from the coastal village of Reculver in Kent, was a small-time mariner. On May 26, 1602, he was named an assistant to Thomas Harfleete of Ashe in the latter’s commission to serve as “scoutmaster for the Lathe of St. Augustine’s.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Appointed by Henry Brooke, baron of Cobham and lord warden of the Cinque Ports, they had jurisdictional authority over a historical region along the coast of Kent and in the port of Dover and district of Thanet, which was directly part of the English Channel. This no doubt gave Cleeve considerable knowledge of maritime ventures, and he outfitted and funded his own expedition a year later which launched in March 1603. Although it is unclear where he first went, most of his year-long voyage was spent in and around Cuba and the northwestern part of Hispaniola, so he may have already known about the riches to be found at the port of Manzanillo and decided to go straight there.Footnote ⁹⁸ During this time, he may have met up with fellow English shippers as well as other foreigners, formed relationships with them, and likely learned more about the situation at hand with Suárez de Poago.

With both the land and sea routes inaccessible, Suárez de Poago was forced to remain in Bayamo until the overland route could be cleared. For this reason, he stayed in the town for six months until May. During this period, the prisoners were penning complaints against the lieutenant and having them sent to the audiencia in Santo Domingo.Footnote ⁹⁹ They most likely would have been handed off to the foreigners, given that it would have required getting past the blockade, then brought to locals on Hispaniola with whom they were also trading.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These complaints mostly alleged abuses that the lieutenant had committed, overstepping his authority and not allowing them to appeal their sentences. In appealing to the audiencia, they were sidestepping the authority of Pedro de Valdés, who was only a governor, and partially under the jurisdiction of the audiencia itself. His military decisions, for example, could not be appealed to the court.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The audiencia was nonetheless the most powerful institution in the Caribbean, and was almost entirely independent from the viceroy of New Spain.Footnote ¹⁰² In this way, the townsfolk in Bayamo were taking advantage of overlapping jurisdictions in the Caribbean so they could continue their unlawful, but customary, activities.

Map 2

Map of the Caribbean, Including the Settlements of Havana, Bayamo, Santiago de Cuba, and Santo Domingo, 1608. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

Source: Abraham Ortelius. [top] Culiacanae Americae Regionis, descriptio. [bottom] Hispaniolae, Cubae, aliarumque insularum circumiacientium, delineation [map]. 1608. Scale not given. John Carter Brown Library, accessed May 12, 2025, https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/s/57a98q .

In early May, Suárez de Poago left Bayamo and made the roughly 130-km trip to Santiago de Cuba.Footnote ¹⁰³ Most likely he thought conditions were finally right to make the overland trip and had to act quickly before the rainy season began in June. There were still the twenty additional soldiers posted in Santiago de Cuba and the nearby copper mines. He might have been hoping to muster the soldiers to assist in bringing the prisoners to Havana. When Suárez de Poago left Bayamo, the twenty soldiers he had brought with him remained in the town to watch over the prisoners. Soon after he left, the 200 people who had fled into the mountains reappeared and overwhelmed the small military force, seemingly without resistance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ They freed the prisoners from the jail before they headed to the port of Manzanillo, giving a signal for Cleeve and other ship captains to pursue the lieutenant. That same day, the two urcas, two patajes, and three lanchas quickly made their way to the port of Santiago de Cuba. The Spanish in Santiago were caught by surprise, and the city was soon occupied by the foreign raiders, who went door-to-door looking for Suárez de Poago. The lieutenant had been warned by the owner of the copper mines, Francisco Sánchez de Moya, about the imminent threat, so he stayed away from the city. In the meantime, the raiders pillaged the church, taking chalices and stabbing a sculpture of the Virgin in the chest. They did no further damage to the city, in part because their goal was to apprehend the lieutenant, not destroy the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The raid nonetheless showed the tenuous control that the Spanish had of Santiago de Cuba, the island’s former capital, which was situated directly along the coast and was poorly defended. Furthermore, residents of Bayamo likely did not approve of how the marauders ransacked the cathedral, but this was the risk they took by associating them. By all accounts, they had lost control of the situation when the raiders left the port of Manzanillo.

As Cleeve and the other marauders sailed away, off to raid Jamaica, Suárez de Poago was summoned before the audiencia in Santo Domingo. The audiencia demanded that Poago be sent to them as a prisoner for not following the laws of his comisión and for having inflamed the situation he was meant to diffuse, resulting in two assaults upon eastern Cuban settlements taking place in a single day.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Pedro de Valdés was furious with the audiencia’s decision. He argued that it was instead the audiencia that was to blame. Rather than sending a ship to take the prisoners to Havana, “they let them stay in the jail in Bayamo, turning them over to the justice of the land,” referring to the rebellion itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He followed by arguing that the prisoners were among the wealthiest in the land, people who had the financial means to load five or six ships full of goods to then sell to foreign merchants. He closed by saying, “Nonetheless, I will carry out these orders.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In reality, he never sent Suárez de Poago to Santo Domingo. Instead, after the lieutenant returned to Havana, he boarded a ship for Seville to speak before the Council of the Indies directly and to argue his case.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He was cleared of all charges and sent back to Cuba, but the order from Santo Domingo not to proceed with the punishment of the townsfolk in Bayamo remained in effect. They would have to be tried again.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In August 1603, Suárez de Poago was aboard one of the Spanish fleet’s ships which separated from the main convoy to head toward Havana, alongside a ship that had the governor of Florida, Pedro de Ybarra, aboard. On August 28, 1603, Christopher Cleeve, who had been prowling around the northern coast of Cuba, caught both ships in the Old Bahama Channel. Between May and August 1603, Cleeve had captured two prizes around the coast of Cuba, and had joined with the other English vessels the Neptune and the Dispatch.Footnote ¹¹¹ While Pedro de Ybarra was able to escape in a smaller vessel and arrived in Havana thirty days later, Suárez de Poago had all his possessions stolen. The frigate that the lieutenant was aboard contained goods valued at 100,000 ducados which belonged to his household. So much was taken that he was said to have been “robbed down to the shirt.”Footnote ¹¹² These goods were taken to the Cuban town of Baracoa and then the Hispaniolan port of Guanahibes to be fenced.Footnote ¹¹³ Cleeve finally found the man he had been looking for, but three months later and under different circumstances.

This serendipitous event was but one of the many things discussed in Pedro de Valdés’s reports as he attempted to clear his name of the complaints brought against him. The vagueness of his three reports has resulted in significant confusion regarding the chronology of both the rebellion and the raid on Santiago. He offers no dates for any of the events and often speaks out of order. For instance, in one of his 1604 reports, he mentions the robbing of Suárez de Poago first, despite its happening last and having not been mentioned in his previous report, written in July 1603.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Furthermore, the raid on Santiago is mentioned first before the rebellion, which would not otherwise make sense. Suárez de Poago lived in Havana and had no other commission to be in Bayamo, so the mention of his presence in both Bayamo and Santiago del Prado in the 1603 report would make no sense unless it was within the context of the crackdown on contraband.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The fact that Christopher Cleeve and his men were specifically looking for the lieutenant, and only damaged the church, also speaks to the connection between the two events.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He was not intending to sack the city itself, but rather to apprehend Suárez de Poago. Although he admitted the lack of damage done to Santiago de Cuba, Pedro de Valdés nonetheless employed a rhetorical strategy in his reports to defend his lieutenant for his behavior in Bayamo. He began by relating a personal attack against Suárez de Poago in the robbing of many of his possessions, followed by an account of the raid and how the marauders were profaning Santiago’s church, before finally talking about the rebellion in Bayamo. Valdés’s constructed narrative was intended to demonstrate that Suárez de Poago was justified in his actions because of the threat that foreigners posed to Spanish colonization in the region as well as to show the extent of the townsfolk’s collaboration with these foreign marauders, not to suggest that the lieutenant’s own actions brought about most of the situations described in the report. By defending Suárez de Poago, Pedro de Valdés also justified his own actions before the audiencia and the Council of the Indies. Just as Bayamo’s residents played different jurisdictions against each other, the governor was wielding the inherent flexibility of Spanish American legal standards to diminish the complaints levied against him and avoid serious punishment.Footnote ¹¹⁷

This situation points to broader conceptions about rebellions in the Iberian world, which Pedro de Valdés was aware of when he penned his reports. The Bayamo rebellion was only one of many that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries within the Spanish empire, a composite monarchy whose subjects had vastly different expectations of the sovereign. From Mexico City to Palermo, Évora, and Catalonia, many Spanish subjects chafed under the monarchy because of perceived changes to the status quo which threatened customary practices.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Situating Bayamo within this context helps us to better understand the aims of the rebellion and how different institutions responded to it.

None of these rebellions were revolutionary in nature. Often, they focused on specific officials as the subject of their ire rather than the system itself. There was often an individual concern that the rebels took issue with; they sought a return to a status quo ante rather than advocating for something novel. These issues were often economic in nature, whether responding to some form of shortage, high taxes, or attempting to enforce trade monopolies, as happened in Bayamo. The townsfolk’s unrest often created visible forms of resistance.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Buildings like jails or the cabildo symbolized the local authority that they were resisting. The jail, housed in the cabildo, became a powerful image for the rebels in Bayamo.Footnote ¹²⁰ However, as Angela Ballone argues in describing the 1624 uprising in Mexico City, “there was never any intention to do away with the king’s authority.” Indeed, many participants saw the officials as failing to adequately represent the king.Footnote ¹²¹ For this reason, the townsfolk in Bayamo not only rose up in rebellion to resist Suárez de Poago’s imprisonment, but they also wrote directly to the audiencia for support and legitimization. By appealing to a higher authority, they demonstrated their continued loyalty as subjects of the king.

At its core, the aftermath of the Bayamo rebellion was a matter of competing and overlapping jurisdictions. The audiencia was often eager to interfere in local affairs, which drew the ire of governors like Pedro de Valdés, who wrote to the Council of the Indies to complain of the court overstepping its jurisdiction.Footnote ¹²² These conflicts between local and regional institutions nonetheless reinforced the centrality of the king, wherein the Council of the Indies was the final arbiter in all legal matters related to the administration of Spanish America.Footnote ¹²³ The townsfolk of Bayamo understood these dynamics, and they used it to their advantage. At its core, they were loyal subjects, but they simultaneously wanted to be left alone to continue to trade with foreign merchants as they had done for the past few decades.Footnote ¹²⁴