Volcano Wine

 

The Canary Islands, or rather the easternmost of them, were twice depopulated in the early modern era. Spanish exploitation and disease wiped out most of the islands’ indigenous Guanche population in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Earth itself drove Spanish colonists from the island of Lanzarote in the 18th century. Following a series of premonitory earthquakes, on 1 September 1730 magma began to erupt into the western region of Lanzarote. It continued to do so, from what eventually grew into ten different sites, until sometime in late 1735 or early ‘36. In some cases the eruptions formed cinder cones; in others lava simply poured onto the island’s surface, destroying fields and villages. Lava fields eventually covered a quarter of the island, and a thick layer of ash accumulated everywhere. The inhabitants stayed put through the initial eruptions, but cleared out after six new vents and cones formed in early 1731. They would not return for five years.

Upon their return, Lanzarote’s settlers realized that while the volcanic episode had destroyed their farms, it had also left them with a new resource: millions of magma pebbles, or lapilli, that could serve as an excellent inorganic mulch. Lanzarote was (and is) an arid land whose soil was unable to retain much moisture, but a thin layer of lapilli trapped water vapor from daytime onshore breezes, allowing plants to flourish. The island’s farmers began cultivating new crops, particularly grapes, raising them in sunken circular beds surrounded by low stone curbs. These beds protected crops from both excessive sunlight and wind, while ash and pumice mulch helped them retain water. By the second half of the century the island became an exporter of wine, including Malvasia Volcanica, a sherry for which it is still famous. Lanzarote's post-volcanic farms also produced vegetables, potatoes, and maize, thirsty crops for an island that sometimes gets less than 6 inches of rain per year.

 

There were limits, however, to how little rainfall the island's crops and farmers could survive. The agricultural boom on Lanzarote caused the island's population to double in thirty years, from 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. Then in 1768 a severe drought caused crops to fail and families to starve. Spanish officials responded by relocating settlers from Lanzarote to other parts of Spain's empire, including the colony of Texas. There Canarians became some of the first white settlers in San Antonio, exchanging the natural dangers of their old homeland for the manmade perils (like Comanche raids) of the new. Empire is not as immediately disruptive as rivers of fire and showers of ash, but in the longer term it is equally indifferent to humans’ well-being.

Sources: “The Legacy of Lanzarote,” Volcano Cafe, 23 Oct. 2021; Carol Greentree, “Lanzarote: Agriculture as Art,” Pacific Horticulture (n.d.); Fred Pearce, "How Volcanoes Launched Lanzarote's Bizarre Agricultural Revolution," Beacon Broadside, 5 June 2018; Valentin Troll et al, “Volcanic Particles in Agriculture and Gardening,” Geology Today 33 (July-August 2017: 148-54.

The Villasur Expedition

The story of Pedro Villasur’s last expedition can begin, as so many contemporary European military stories began, with a royal inheritance. More precisely, it stemmed from the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718-20), and the determination of Elizabeth Farnese, royal consort to King Philip V of Spain, to secure a territorial legacy for her sons, who stood in the line of succession behind the children of Philip’s first marriage. The Treaty of Utrecht had obliged the Spanish Bourbons to give up most of their kingdom’s holdings in the Mediterranean. Farnese proposed to find out how vigorously the other European monarchs were prepared to defend that treaty clause. A Spanish invasion of Sardinia and Sicily followed. Britain, France, Austria, and Holland declared war; the first two of those kingdoms pursued it vigorously enough. France, in particular, sent troops into northern Spain and seized the overseas Spanish outposts of Pensacola and Los Adaes.

French expansion in North America had in previous years become a matter of some concern for officials in Madrid and Mexico. The new colony of Louisiana had driven a wedge between the older Spanish provinces of Florida and Texas, threatening Spain’s control of both. Up the Mississippi River, from their settlements in Illinois, French traders reportedly did business with the Pawnees and Apaches (Nde) on Mexico’s northern frontier. Those nations could, in turn, resell French guns and ammunition to the Comanches, a nation recently arrived in the southern Plains whose warriors had raided Spanish outposts in New Mexico. With France and Spain now at war, the possibility that French agents might directly arm and incite Comanche raiders became one that local Spanish officials could not dismiss.

In the spring of 1720 the governor of New Mexico ordered Pedro Villasur to take a body of troops into the northern Plains and arrest or expel any French traders he might find. The general set out in June, riding several hundred miles northeast of New Mexico to the Platte River in modern Nebraska. His command included a dozen Nde scouts, 40 light Spanish infantry, and sixty Pueblo warriors captained by Jose Naranjo. Villasur invited local Pawnee leaders to a parlay, but they declined. When one of his messengers failed to return, the general decided he was over his head, and began his withdrawal. Too late: early on August 14 a party of Pawnee and Oto-Missouri warriors, armed with guns and bows, attacked the Spanish camp near the Platte-Loup River confluence. Fifty of the defenders, including Villasur, were killed; a few Spaniards with horses, and most of the Puebloans (who had been in a separate camp) escaped. The northern Plains remained Native ground. 

“We are Unfond of Pedro Villasur,” unk. artist.

Survivors of the battle reported that they had seen European-style shelters on their route of march, and believed the French had been nearby when the battle began. Certainly the Pawnees and Otos had acquired their firearms from French traders. One may therefore consider this engagement to have been a late and minor battle of the War of the Quadruple Alliance. 

The Loup River battle had no impact on that larger conflict, but it did leave an unexpectedly large historical footprint. Following the Spanish defeat, an unidentified artist painted the battle, or at least New Mexicans’ memory of it, on bison hide. A generation later, Father Philipp von Segesser von Brunegg sent the painting back to Europe; art historians subsequently named the painting for the priest. The Segesser painting included white men in European dress fighting alongside the Pawnees. Apparently, the artist believed that French colonists had taken part in the battle. Native American memories of Villasur’s incursion similarly acquired, over time, an element of fiction. Four decades after Villasur’s death the English explorer Jonathan Carver, visiting a Ho-Chunk community in present-day Wisconsin, heard a story from chief Ekharrimonyk about a Spanish silver caravan his people had overwhelmed 40 years earlier. The timing of the account, and the absence of other contemporary Spanish parties in the area, indicates the “caravan” was probably Villasur and his companions. Carver added that the Ho-Chunks, not then familiar with silver, had traded the captured bullion to the French for a pittance. That part of the story may have been true, but Ekharrimonyk had misheard or misremembered an important detail: none of his countrymen had taken part in the 1720 battle. Other sources suggest the Ho-Chunks obtained the plunder as a gift or trade good from their Iowa or Oto allies, which seems the likeliest explanation. It would seem that the victorious Otos and Pawnees placed little value in silver coin and plate - certainly not compared to the glory they won defending their homeland - and that the ripple effects of this fairly isolated battle extended into the Great Lakes region and half a century into the future.

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Sources: Jeremy Black, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I (Ashgate Publishing, 2014), esp. 87, 108-12, 116-19; Thomas Chavez, “The Segesser Hide Paintings: History, Discovery, Art,” Great Plains Quarterly 10 (Spring 1990): 96-109; Alfred Thomas, ed., After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696-1727 (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1969); John Parker, ed., The Journals of Jonathan Carver (Minnesota Historical Society, 1976), esp. 80-81.