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.

*

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.

The Cloth-Wine Context

David Ricardo (1772-1823), in his musings on the benefits of free trade, used the relationship between Portugal and Britain to demonstrate the principle of comparative advantage. In the early modern era, Portugal could potentially produce enough fabric to clothe its own people, but since it could produce wine comparatively cheaply, the Portuguese would benefit more by specializing in and exporting wine, and using the proceeds to buy English cloth. More people could obtain more cloth in this way, Ricardo argued, than by relying on home production; the British, in turn, would gain access to a lake of cheap Iberian wine.

David Ricardo (I think)

 

The economist Cahal Moran recently demonstrated that Ricardo's observation was grossly incomplete and ahistorical. Cloth, a necessity, was much more valuable in the aggregate than wine (a luxury), and a nation that exclusively traded the latter for the former would eventually run a trade deficit and lose hard currency. This was, in fact, the purpose of the 1703 Treaty of Methuen, which lowered Portuguese import tariffs in return for British naval protection. Portugal had an abundance of specie to cover the deficit: in 1693 prospectors had discovered gold in the southern interior of Brazil. The ensuing gold rush eventually drew several hundred thousand peninsulares from Portugal to Brazil, and accelerated the forced transport of enslaved Africans to South America. It also offered an irresistible temptation to stronger nations - either to steal Brazilian gold through smuggling and piracy, or to extract precious metals from the Portuguese through uneven trade agreements, backed by military force.

Britain didn’t need to push Portugal that hard. The two nations were already bound by dynastic ties: the reigning British monarch’s step-aunt was Catherine of Braganza, regent of Portugal. And, in return for its colonial wealth, Portugal obtained from Old Albion much that the ruling classes wanted and that ordinary people needed. In October 1710, T. LeFevre informed the Earl of Dartmouth that the Brazilian fleet had just arrived in Lisbon, bearing gold bullion, tobacco, and sugar to the value of 1.8 million pounds sterling - about 270 million GBP (US$345 million) in today’s currency. All of this, wrote LeFevre, already belonged to British merchants who had sold on credit “all the dyed cloth” and 75 percent of the wheat consumed in the port city and its dependencies. Portugal’s elite thus obtained, admittedly at a high price, the luxuries they wanted (fine textiles and American beaver hats), and the necessities their depopulating country found harder to produce, and not least important, the British naval protection their overloaded merchant fleets required.

Some of the gold, at least, went for architecture.

British merchants, meanwhile, grew wealthier. There was usually a good market for tobacco and sugar in Britain, and there was always a market for gold. The latter often never even touched Portugal’s shores, instead sailing east with a British convoy and transshipping in Lisbon harbor to English merchantmen. There is a name for commerce built on stolen labor, channeled by armed ships, and structured to build up a surplus of gold in the dominant trading partner’s homeland, and that name is not “free trade.” What British traders and diplomats in Lisbon had instead created was a very successful example of mercantilism. What David Ricardo created a century later was a very influential example of economic propaganda. A lot of that going around, actually.

Sources: Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 1: 298 (Eyre & Spottiswood, 1887); (CR Boxer, “Brazilian Gold and British Traders in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (Aug. 1969): 454-72, esp. 459-60; Timothy Walker, “Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic World,” in Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 60-75.

Your Trash, Our Treasure: The Salzburg Refugees

 

The princely state of Salzburg, in present-day Austria, had in the early-modern era a Catholic majority and a small but visible Protestant minority. The Protestants’ visibility was not so much social as topographical: most lived in independent farmsteads on the heights above Salzburg town, leaving on occasion to work for wages in neighboring states (where pastors had introduced many of their ancestors to Lutheranism). Salzburg’s ecclesiastical rulers tolerated this heretical population throughout the 1600s, but in the second quarter of the eighteenth century Prince-Archbishop Leopold von Firmian identified them as a stain on his principality. After a failed attempt to convert the mountain-dwellers to the One True Faith, in 1731 Leopold invoked the doctrine cuius regio, eius religio and expelled his Protestant subjects. He relented only to the extent of allowing the expellees a little extra time to sell their lands and property before deportation. In the spring and summer of 1732, thirty thousand men, women, and children went into permanent exile from their homeland.

 

Konstantin Cretius, The Salzburgers Received,1860

The other princes of the Holy Roman Empire did nothing to stop Leopold, for in challenging him they might undermine their own prerogatives. Moreover, some of these potentates wanted the subjects the prince-archbishop was discarding. One third of the expellees settled in Holland or Hanover, or in the new colony chartered by and named for the Elector of Hanover (in his capacity as King of Great Britain), Georgia. Most of the Salzburg Protestants, however, sought refuge in the far east of Germany, near the Prussian city of Konigsburg. King Frederick William, pleased to enlarge his kingdom’s future base of taxpayers and army recruits, offered the refugees land, travel funds, and a temporary tax abasement, and twenty thousand of them accepted his offer. To their new homeland they followed a clockwise route around the mountains: west to Ulm, north to central Germany, then east to Prussia. King Fred-Bill personally greeted the first emigrant party outside of Berlin, and joined them in prayer and song. He doubtless saw the arrival of so many new subjects as providential, while understanding that the migration was entirely the work of men - in particular of two men, a religious bigot and the constructive opportunist the king so frequently saw in his mirror.

 

Sources: Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulson and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cornell UP, 1992); Julie Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia (U. Georgia, 2005), 106-107.

Colder Connections

 

As he plied his loathsome trade in the summer of 1751, the slave-ship captain Henry Ellis paused to engage in a little scientific exploration. En route to Jamaica, in the vicinity of latitude 25 North, Ellis lowered into the ocean a sealed bucket with controllable valves, able to take and hold samples of seawater from multiple depths. To the probe’s designer Ellis reported his success in taking samples from exceptional depths, up to a mile below the surface. His findings surprised him: from a surface temperature of about 25 Celsius, the seawater rapidly chilled with increasing depth, falling to a low of 5-10 C, then rising again below 1300 meters to a maximum of 12 degrees Celsius. The deep, cold water also proved more salty than expected. A practical man - slavers weren’t idealists - Captain Ellis used the chilled water samples to refrigerate his supply of wine.

 

Slaver Ellis wasn’t conducting oceanographic investigations for a laugh. He considered himself a natural philosopher, having served as de facto science officer on an expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1746-47. After his return Ellis published a book on the voyage, describing the explorers’ reconnaissance of Greenland, trade with the Inuit, and eventual failure to find an ice-free channel beyond Hudson Bay. The voyage and book ingratiated Ellis with a number of scientifically-inclined noblemen, who doubtless helped him raise the capital for his trade in human beings. One high-born friend, Lord Halifax, later appointed Ellis royal governor of Georgia, a colony that had recently legalized slavery. Ellis helped negotiate a stable peace settlement with the neighboring Muskogee Creeks, doubtless thinking himself a humanitarian for doing so. (See Julie Sweet, Negotiating For Georgia (2005), 188 on his governorship.) Illness drove the governor from Savannah after a year, but Ellis eventually returned to American office in Halifax, as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.

Detail from Ellis’s 1746-47 voyage

 

The results of Captain E’s deep-sea experiment remained little-known until the 1790s, when Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, theorized that the mass of cold, salty water Ellis discovered was a current of cold seawater, analogous to the Gulf Stream nearer the surface. In the twentieth century, oceanographers concluded that both warm and cold Atlantic currents comprised a great conveyor-belt extending from the Antarctic to the Arctic, powered by heat and the transfer of salts - the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In our own time, climate scientists have expressed concern that the accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, the flow of low-salinity water into the polar zones of the AMOC, and the disruption of thermohaline circulation will shut down the whole circuit. Since the warming Gulf Stream is part of the AMOC, this will spell pretty bad news for Europe. For parts of North America, too: the Gulf Stream deflects a substantial volume of seawater from the East Coast, and its dissipation will cause the relative sea level to rise, contributing to the inundation of low-lying communities.

 

Careful readers will note that the Atlantic Overturning currents also tie together many of Henry Ellis’s ports of call and places of residence: Greenland, whose melting ice caps now threaten to shut down the Gulf Stream, and the coastal cities of Savannah and Halifax, which are likely to experience considerable flooding if the Atlantic basin sloshes slightly westward. Ellis himself lacked the notional birds-eye view needed to make these connections, or to observe that he had helped make the Atlantic both a web of human-made connections and an avenue of human misery. If he’d made these observations, though, I doubt that they would have changed his behavior. One didn’t rise to high rank in the British Empire on the strength of humane sentiments.