Search

Following the return to Spain of the remnant from the Magellan-Elcano voyage around the world (1519–22), various other Spanish voyages attempted to find the elusive return route eastward across the...

This chapter describes Spain’s relationship with the sea over the years 1570 to 1870. The article concentrates on the reported numbers of sailors working in Spanish fleets and discusses their lives; characteristics; culture; origin; salaries and recruitment process. Also discussed in the chapter is the involvement of the government; group formation and striking; and mobility between seafaring careers.

From the fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the ducal house of Medina Sidonia held exclusive rights to fish for Bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) in south-western Spain. Framed by recent theories about the privatization of access to natural resources, this essay explores the history of successive royal grants to the house of Medina Sidonia. It then examines statistical evidence for the tuna catch over the long term, especially in the late sixteenth century, when the annual catch reached a peak and then suddenly declined. The ducal house may have contributed to that decline by overfishing. During the long term, however, ducal control may unintentionally have aided in the conservation of tuna stocks in times of population pressure, both by not fully exploiting their exclusive rights to fish, and by preventing all others from doing so.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Spanish shipping, and the mariners employed therein, functioned in a global oceanic context that included the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pacific and the South China Sea. During the period in which Habsburg kings ruled Portugal as well as Spain – from 1580 to 1640 – that context also included the Indian Ocean. Trade and defence for both of the Iberian empires required ships, mariners, merchants, soldiers, bureaucrats, and civilian purveyors of food and equipment in staggering numbers. Mariners of all ranks might serve in a variety of venues in the course of their lives at sea, and they might alternate between mercantile or military fleets, and sailing vessels or galleys. Maritime bureaucrats might serve on land or sea, as the occasion demanded, and soldiers might serve on sailing ships or galleys as well as on land. To demonstrate the wide variety of Spanish maritime service, this chapter will begin with a brief discussion of the fluctuating demand for ships and men during the early modern period. Then it will turn to wages, individual career trajectories and venues for maritime labour, focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1 The combined labour of tens of thousands of individuals on land and sea played a crucial role in developing, maintaining and defending the Spanish empire.2