In the early days of 1694, tireless traveler Gregorio de Robles arrived at a bay on the northern coast of Hispaniola, where the town of Puerto Plata once stood. He journeyed on the ship of an asiento slave merchant, and once ashore, he encountered two Dutch sloops and an English one full of goods and openly trading. Locals had prepared 1,000 hides and the English and Dutch sailors went ashore “as if it was their own land,” ready to exchange their wares for all kinds of agricultural products. Robles suggested that this port needed to be better defended and that the city of Santiago should have a “good commander” because vigilance was crucial to protect the region. If Gregorio de Robles suspected that the local militias were involved in allowing this illicit trade, he was correct. Less than a century after the depopulations, the northern residents of Hispaniola had once again restored their transnational mercantile connections with the complicity of local militias and officials.

This book focuses on the peoples of Hispaniola and their deep, intimate, and persistent embrace of smuggling, and situates their story at the crossroads of the fields of colonial Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic history. Hispaniola residents traded extralegally in order to circumvent the increasingly marginal space the island occupied within the Spanish colonial system, one which left them on the fringes of lawful commercial connections. During the long seventeenth century (which I define as the years between the 1580s and 1690s), the Atlantic world was a growing network of interconnected port towns and cities and their hinterlands that developed simultaneously to the integration of those port cities into their own imperial systems. With this twin dynamic in mind, I argue that the inhabitants of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola overcame their peripheral status within the Spanish empire by embracing the possibilities that the people, networks, and goods of the nascent new Atlantic world provided. Elites wove themselves into the fabric of the trade and dominated it as they could; other residents also made their lives through the trade.

This chapter focuses on the rise of the contraband culture in Hispaniola in response to the economic challenges the island faced during the last decades of the sixteenth century. Smugglingexisted in some measure throughout the earlier years of the colony, but contraband as a widespread phenomenoninvolving all social groups of the island’s inhabitants appeared during the second half of the sixteenth century and had its origins in the lack of official trade and the search by local residents for alternatives to the Sevillian trade. By the early seventeenth century, contraband had become an intrinsic part of Hispaniola’s culture, and that of many other parts of the Spanish Caribbean. Thisraised the suspicions of some authorities and members of the clergy who feared the consequences that such close relations with foreign Protestant traders might have for the economic and spiritual life of the local residents. These concerned observers made no distinctions between French or English merchants. They were all seen as a threat to the economy of the island and the faith of its residents. This chapter also reveals the complete inability of Spanish bureaucracy to curve illicit trading.