Sea Control - Sea Control 518 - The Royal Navy and Caribbean Contraband Trade with CDR Ryan Mewett, Ph D

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

Links1. “It is ticklish meddling with the navy”: The British navy and Caribbean contraband trade, c. 1713–1750, by Ryan Mewett, International Journal of Maritime History, December 10, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today's guest is Commander Ryan Mewitt, PhD, and he's going to be discussing a paper he wrote on the Royal Navy and its role in the Caribbean contraband trade. This episode was edited and produced by Johan Porisch. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Commander Ryan Mewitt, Ph.D., and we're going to discuss his article, It is Ticklish Meddling with the Navy, the British Navy and Caribbean contraband trade from 1713 to 1750. So Ryan, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Hi, Jared. Thanks for having me. So I am an active duty Naval officer and a professor at the Naval Academy. I'm a permanent military professor, which means the Navy has sent me to get my PhD in my case in history. And then I'll be at the Naval Academy for a good long time, about 10 years as a professor there. I graduated from the Naval Academy in 2001 and was a submarine

officer for about 17 years before I was selected to go get my PhD. And then I spent four years at Johns Hopkins and arrived at the Naval Academy in 2022. So I'm in my second year teaching there. While at Hopkins, I specialized in the history of Britain and the British Atlantic world. So early America and the rest of the British Empire and British colonies in primarily the 18th century, about the 17th to the early 19th century. And my specific research is about the Royal Navy and the relationship between the Royal Navy and merchants and how the merchants helped to shape the Royal Navy as an institution in the long 18th century, the period from about 1688 to about 1815.

Well, thank you again for coming on. as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed today are our own and not representative of any of the institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. So Ryan, we'll start with why does this period in the Caribbean seem to hold a unique place in popular culture? I think part of it is because the Caribbean was geographically marginal for a lot of the european world that is most of the european empires the the powerful european empires all had a presence in the mediterranean and it was sort of like if you think about the place that the old west occupies in american history i think to the british and the spanish and the french and

the dutch the the caribbean in the 18th century and the 17th century was sort of like the old west and it was on the fringes people thought of it as a place where there was economic opportunity where you could go and make a new life and that sort of thing even though it was geographically marginal it was really vitally important but economically it was the Caribbean colonies were by far the most important colonies in the world for each of those European empires and so they had very important colonies very important uh sort of extractive economic systems in the colonies there was imperial power there in that especially the british and the spanish had significant naval presence and uh armies and imperial governors and that sort of thing there

customs officers tax collectors but they were so far from home that they in a way were sort of running their own show there were rules they were supposed to follow it was really hard to supervise and so they they were sort of making their own way and they had opportunities to to be pretty loosey-goosey with the rules and so i think out of this uh out of this sort of setting we've got a couple real efflorescence efflorescences of not just sort of marginal not following the rules kind of stuff but big outbreaks of piracy in the 1700s there had been a significant amount of piracy in part sponsored by the the british empire but there were a lot of pirates in the in the 1600s and then they sort of went away for a little while and then

in the period after the war Spanish succession from 1713 for about 10-15 years there was another outbreak of piracy and so especially you know we get this pirates of the Caribbean that people are generally interested in pirates and I think that helps to to make this the Caribbean in this period that's a significant part of what people think of it in popular culture as well. How did the British Empire exercise command and control over its holdings in the 1700s? Well, the first thing to consider, obviously, that we mostly don't think about is there's no telecommunications, so everything moves at the speed of a letter and letters moved at the speed of a ship. The geography of the world is also a lot different. Instead of sort of pointing

ship in a straight line and going as the crow flies. Transportation happened according to the prevailing winds and currents. So the Caribbean was actually in some ways closer to Europe than North America. It was on the way to North America from France or Spain, but it was still a good long ways away. It was often two months to get to the major Caribbean islands from Europe. And different parts of the caribbean actually once a ship sort of got into caribbean sea the the western parts of the caribbean were quite a bit farther away against the winds than the eastern part of the caribbean but command and control essentially happened uh by writing letters it was ultimate authority was held at the metropolitan level each of the empires had colonial officials governors

and so forth governors who were uh representatives of royal authority they had delegated powers of the king in some cases but there wasn't a real clear and well-defined chain of command there weren't uh there wasn't an org chart with a lot of horizontal dotted lines on it and so forth so the fact that there were folks at a distance who worked for somebody back at home but they didn't all work for the same people back at home meant that they could, in a sense, ignore each other. So naval officers, for example, looked to their bosses in the admiralty. The head of the admiralty was a sometime cabinet secretary named the first lord of the admiralty. When they got in disputes with governors, they would say, well, my authority comes from the king. Your authority

comes from the king, I don't have to defer to you. And the governors would often say, well, no, that's not how it works. My authority comes from the king and your boss's authority comes from the king. So you do still have to listen to me. But that was something that over and over and over again, you see naval officers and governors arguing with each other. But even within sort of the civil side of things, governors and customs officers arguing with each other over authority. And the thing that made it worse is that many of these people are compensated through perks, essentially, that their salary is really minimal, but they will get, they'll be paid fees as a result of when they do their job. Say, for example, a customs collector,

every time he seizes a cargo that's illegal, he gets paid a chunk of that. And the governor's supposed to get paid a chunk of it. And depending on where the seizure happens and who by, whether it's a customs officer or the governor's naval officer that dictates who gets what piece. And there are over and over again, arguments breaking out over this sort of thing, because most of the incentives are aligned with self-interest. And so the informality and the fuzziness of these lines of authority lead to really, really recurring disputes over almost everything. And they almost always come down to self-interest of who is going to get, you know, who's going to get a check at the end of the day. Where did the West Indian colonies rank in importance amongst British

overseas possessions? They were really important. They weren't the oldest British possessions, The oldest permanent possession in the Americas for the British was in Virginia. Jamestown was established in 1607, and then most people know the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts in 1620. It wasn't until in the 1620s the British settled in Barbados and several other smaller islands in the Caribbean. And by the 1650s, they captured Jamaica from the Spanish. Jamaica eventually became the seat of British power, English and then British power, in the Caribbean and their most important island colony. So certainly by the early 18th century, after plantation economies with exploitative slave plantation economies built around primarily sugar, These colonies became economically the most important.

The way that they were economically important is, of course, the imperial government or the royal government doesn't run these colonies, excuse me, doesn't run these plantations. But there is a set of economic regulations in the British case called the navigation laws that say that the produce of any British colony has to be carried on ships that are owned by British people, that are crewed by British sailors, that are built in Britain. And for a certain list of enumerated commodities, particularly the most profitable plantation produce, things like sugar and tobacco, anything grown in the colonies had to be taken first to England before it could be taken somewhere else. So it was fine for Jamaican grown sugar to get sold in the Netherlands, for example, but it had to get loaded on a ship in Jamaica, get carried to England, have import taxes paid on it, and then get carried out again to get sold in the Netherlands. So the government benefited from this in the payment of export duties. That was a substantial fraction of government revenues, somewhere between 30 and 50% for

most of the 18th century, came from taxes on overseas trade that was sort of just, that was a benefit to the government gain. And so as a result, it was beneficial to the government to provide for naval protection because that ensured that more of that trade got through and more of that trade got tax paid on it and contributed to government revenue. But yes, They will remain. It's really all the way up until American independence and beyond it. In terms of economy, the West Indian colonies are the most important, even though the North American colonies provided an important source of demand for British manufacturers. But from an overall economic perspective, the sugar colonies were the most valuable to Britain. so you mentioned the netherlands and france in the course of our conversation here but most

the article was actually about spanish and british trade how did trade between britain and spain evolve in this time period yeah the uh the spanish were really the first show in town from a european perspective and the americans all together right the spanish crown sponsored columbus's voyage in 1492 and so the spanish had a strong foothold in the americas before any of the other european empires really settled there at all so they built over the course of the very end of the 15th century in the early 16th century a really powerful extractive empire that was primarily based around mining gold and silver in south and central america on the south american mainland and so in mexico and in peru those places were particularly

important for the extraction of gold and silver and they were gaining an incredible amount of wealth from this empire they were mining this stuff sending it back as bullion and just feeding that straight into their economy spain became the most powerful country uh in europe as as a result of their colonial exploitation they only only after that started to develop the islands um in the caribbean they they had settled there fairly early on but they were comparatively unimportant colonies compared to say mexico and peru but really all the other european empires that came into the americas in the 1500s and 1600s they sort of looked to spain and thought we'd like to replicate what they're doing the the english expedition that went to virginia

was essentially a bunch of venture capitalists invested money and they went and they they hoped to mine gold in virginia and they didn't find gold there and they barely hang on and kept this uh kept this colony going and then they eventually adapted and grew tobacco and that worked out well for them but spain once it settled there it claimed control over all of the americas and all of the seas in and around their colonies and claimed to be able to exclude the european empires the other european empire so they they claimed that uh the british and the french and and the Dutch that they were all interlopers. And there are some scholars who have conceived of this as the British Empire as being a parasite on the Spanish Empire, basically on just hanging on

around the edges and taking advantage of the existence of the Spanish Empire to profit out of that, first by having English buccaneers and privateers who were feeding off of Spanish trade among their colonies and for their colonies back to europe and the early british colonies were really attempts to do not much more than that just to establish footholds to have kind of like privateering bases against the spanish and they eventually developed as they failed to find you know real uh like precious metals resources that they could exploit they did set up these plantation colonies by the 1600s and uh and went forward with an economy that looked like that but from the beginning the british are trying to horn in on a spanish world and then the second priority

once they kind of establish a foothold and once they started looking at how they could approach this beyond just stealing from the spanish uh trying to open a trade with spanish colonies even though the Spanish government wanted to keep that trade entirely in Spanish hands. So according to Spanish law, all the way up until the middle of the 1700s, it was illegal for Spanish colonists to trade with anybody who was not the Spanish flota or galeones, which were these two great fleets that went to either Portobello or Veracruz that would go several times a year. And that was the only, that was the official Spanish convoy that carried goods to the Americas. And that was the only, uh, people that, that the

Spanish colonists were supposed to trade with, but they weren't able to supply the colonists with everything that they needed. So a variety of other Europeans, uh, built up illicit trade starting in the later 1700s with many Spanish colonies, the Dutch, um, the Island of Curacao, which is just off the coast of what's now Venezuela. Um, that was a really important, colony that existed almost entirely for the purpose of contraband trade with the Spanish. You know, there's no particular natural resources in Curacao. It's just right off the coast of the Spanish main. And so it was a really great foothold for smugglers. Jamaica, a huge part of Jamaica's economy became connected with shipping, both enslaved people and all sorts

of other goods like British textiles, but sometimes British manufactured goods, food products like flour. A lot of Spanish colonies couldn't even feed themselves. And so the Spanish colonial markets became really, really important to particularly Jamaica and other British islands to a lesser degree. And so by the time we get to the period after 1713, after the Treaty of Vitecht that ended this war of Spanish succession, this is where we are, that for a long time there has been a really important contraband trade, but it is still illegal. And both states claim to recognize that their subjects are not allowed to trade with each other in the Americas. Now, you had mentioned the confused nature of the command and control environment earlier.

Were there any specific checks and balances between the various merchants, governors, naval officers, and heads of department that were operating in the Caribbean? Um, there, there were in theory, but in practice, um, they ended up, uh, operating very sort of arbitrarily. It, it really depended on how much attention somebody back in the metropole in Europe ended up giving to any particular case. So there were cases where, based on complaints from other people in a colony, a governor was fired and returned to Britain to be tried. There were cases where naval officers were court-martialed for things that they did in the Caribbean. But they were exceptionally rare, shockingly, shockingly rare, especially given the amount of kind of malfeasance and disputes and bad behavior that were going on. So naval officers had in their orders, usually they were responsible for reporting to and taking orders from the senior captain, the commander of the squadron that was based in Jamaica. There was usually somewhere less than about half a dozen ships based in Port Royal in Jamaica near Kingston.

And they had in their orders that they should consult with the governor in the assembly when sort of figuring out how they were going to act. It didn't tell them to listen to the governor, to take orders from him. And so we see them hashing out what their interpretation of consult with the governor means, what the various governors' interpretation of their responsibility to consult, what that meant to them. the governors very often took a much more expansive interpretation of what consultation should mean. And there had been earlier periods where the governors had been granted more explicit and more expansive authority over naval officers earlier in the 1700s. And they were sort of constantly working with the king and with the secretary of state to try and get that back from the Admiralty to, for example, give them the authority to give specific orders to naval

officers, but they were never able to get that back again. Mostly what you get is in extreme examples, some particular complaint catching somebody's ear and that getting followed up on, but it happens so rarely that it's hard to even really call that checks and balances. In fact, I can think of off the top of my head, one naval officer, maybe two naval officers being court-martialed for anything that they were complained about by a governor in the whole period from 17-teens to the 1760s in Jamaica. And there are probably two or three cases where a governor is sent home, not directly based on disputes with the Navy usually. But so there wasn't much that there wasn't much ability to get other people who weren't sort of you know

on this non-existent org chart who didn't work directly for you to hold them accountable in any meaningful way and and a big part of this is while the colonies were very important and and while the west indian colonies were far and away the most important to the british in the metropole the the people who ran Britain didn't really spend much time thinking about them. They were in the remit of, like I said, Britain had two secretaries of state. These positions emerged, they were two of the most important cabinet positions. They emerged as His Majesty's principal secretaries of state. There were two of them, one for the Northern Department and one for the Southern Department. And the one for the Southern Department was responsible for much of Western and Southern

Europe and all of the colonies. So he's responsible for foreign affairs, but also some domestic stuff and the colonies are part of his job. So this guy has one of the biggest jobs in the British government and the colonies are just one of the things he has to worry about. We think of modern government organizations as having huge staffs and a bunch of subject matter experts. But the fact is that even these guys had just a handful of secretaries and not even any real like technocratic sub-ministers that worked for them in most cases. They had one or two assistants and a handful of clerks and not much else. So they're trying to bear this huge load and they've only got so much sort of bandwidth to pay attention to this. There was also a board of

trade and plantations that worked for the secretary of state in a sense. Their remit was to deal with colonial affairs and so they received letters from governors and things like that but at the end of the day that in terms of people who actually could had like decision authority and could do stuff in the british government they just didn't really have the attention for very much stuff that was going on in the colonies there's a quote that i can't remember if it's in this article in the 1730s the first lord of the admiralty a guy named Admiral Charles Wager says to one of his cabinet colleagues in a letter something to the effect of is it too much to ask that in a year we should spend an hour or so talking about the colonies

I'm not sure it is too much to ask but it kind of seems like it is so that sort of gives some insight into just into why this is allowed to get out of hand in a way because they're just totally consumed with other stuff, the people back in the Metropole who are making the decisions. So how did Royal Navy officers deal with the ambiguous political and economic regulatory environment in the Caribbean? Well, mostly they weighed up all of these different ways that they could act given the vague guidance that they had. And they usually chose to act in the ways that benefited them personally the most that is that that's sort of the overriding thesis of this particular article is that they they have a few different constituencies that they're responsible

for they're supposed to consult with the governor and at least have an eye to what the colonial government cares about they are supposed to obviously follow the orders of the senior officer on the station in Jamaica, that is another naval officer. There are colonial elites in the colonial assemblies that theoretically they are, um, they should at least be paying some attention to that their orders refer specifically to the governor and council, which is the governor and sort of the colonial equivalent of a, of an upper house or a kind of Senate in the, in the legislature of colonies and then the assembly which is like a house of representatives equivalent they're very very powerful in a number of colonies and they are often locked in long-standing

political disputes with the governor they often represent the power of landed interests in the colonies so like the sugar planters in jamaica and they will often be pulling and pushing for different things than the governor is exactly so naval officers are hearing about what kind of the planters and the assembly cares about they're hearing about what the governor is and its council cares about they're taking orders directly from their own senior officer in jamaica there are metropolitan merchants that is merchants back in london and bristol and liverpool who trade with the colonies and who trade with the west indies who have their own interests that that are slightly different

from the colonial actors themselves. And so there is this whole, there are a whole variety of different constituencies, all have slightly different interests, all are gonna make more money than the others if certain policies are pursued. And the officers are basically told, go there and kind of do what you're supposed to do

without very, very specific orders as to how to prioritize. what they're being asked to do so sometimes they will convoy jamaican ships that are bound for the spanish main to go um you know sit off venezuela and trade illicitly with the spanish empire the the british king has signed a treaty with the spanish king that says i will ensure that none of my subjects and especially my navy is not promoting illicit trade the spanish colonies in america but naval officers are doing it and in fact the navy has never given orders to them not to do that as far as they're concerned these are british subjects their job is to defend british subjects at sea and defend british trade at sea and that's what they're doing so sometimes they

will be escorting them at other times other british naval officers will be loading cargoes aboard their own ships and trading with the spanish main or with cuba or with panama on their own account and thereby competing with the jamaican merchants whose kind of market opportunities they're stealing so there's this whole sort of set of different courses they can pursue each one of which is going to benefit a different constituency and it seems that they very often just choose the one that is going to make them the most money so we see royal navy officers over and over again pursuing their self-interest and it's hard to get at through the archives because of course they don't write letters back to their bosses that say

oh yeah in this case it was going to make me more money so i decided i wasn't going to convoy them i was going to carry my own goods or here i convoyed them but i but i charged them each five percent on the sale of their cargos as you know a gift for me to do my job stuff like that happened all the time but mostly the way that we see it is through these miscellaneous complaints that bubble up from different people in the caribbean usually through the governor and and make their way in sideways complaints and letters and and have to compare evidence from the navy itself uh and sort of do some detective work to try and make sense of which one of these uh looks like it actually happened and and is not just the result of somebody being

sour but the fact is that if you dig most of them look like they can be substantiated so yeah we we see a lot of let's say uh corruption and malfeasance is those are both modern terms that don't really don't really fit exactly because they didn't conceive of it in that way precisely. The way that we think about professionalism, the way that we think about the clear lines about what's allowed and what's not allowed as a servant of the state, these things were only just in the process of forming in the British Navy. And so part of my contention in my larger work, not specific to this article, is that this interaction between merchants in the Royal Navy and the state that happened throughout the 18th century,

that these interactions were critical to actually forming this idea of what's appropriate for a professional officer, that acting on behalf of the state and the state's political constituencies in ways that align with what your bosses back in Britain want you to do, because some representative political process has made a determination about it. We think very clearly that's what a naval officer's job is now. We don't really have any question about that, but it wasn't clear 300 years ago and it got worked out through this process. So in a way, the way that we think today about what a naval officer is and what a naval officer should do was formed as a result of British naval officers behaving badly in the Caribbean in the early 18th

century. Well, I'm sorry, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Ryan Mewitt. Ryan, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So you can find me on the Naval Academy website for the history department. You can reach me through my email that's posted there. I'm on Twitter though, extremely rarely these days at R-E-Mewitt, M-E-W-E-T-T. But email is usually the most reliable way to get in touch with me by finding me on the USNA website. And in terms of what I'm working on, my primary concern right now

is revising my doctoral dissertation into a book that I hope to publish in the next couple of years. So I'll be working primarily on that, and I've got a couple of side articles, but largely continuing with this research about the British Navy and merchants within the British Empire

in the middle of the 18th century. And is that the subject of the book as well? It is, yeah. This particular example of the Caribbean in the first half of the 18th century is sort of a subset of the larger work, which is basically about the period between 1713 and the late 1760s, 60s in which we see basically the professional British Navy that we associate with Admiral Nelson and the great victories over the French at the end of the 18th century, how this Navy of the Caribbean in the 1710s and 1720s turned into that Navy that we have by about the time of the

American Revolution. Well, that sounds fascinating. As you get closer to publication there, please reach back out, we'd love to bring you back to discuss it once the book is out there but thank you again for joining us to the listeners, thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time thanks very much, this was great © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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