Caribbean WRATH. . .

  the fate of our ancestors' vessels[1]

 

By Miriam Rivera Maldonado

Published by HGSNY  

In the summer of 1724, under another greedy act of exploitation, of the natural resources of the Indies, Spain had send two vessels to Veracruz, Mexico via Havana. These vessels were Conde de Tolosa, pride of Spain, and as its companion, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Their royal mission was to deliver a consignment of mercury. This mercury was used for refining purposes of the Spanish Empire’s gold and silver that was mined in Mexico.

            Combined these vessels carried 400 pounds of quicksilver. That was enough to supply the mines for a year. Aboard these vessels they carried more than 1,200 passengers and crew and an arsenal of 144 cannons.

            On the night of August 24^th, after the Guadalupe and the Tolosa had stopped in Puerto Rico to re-stack their provisions, a hurricane struck the galleons off Samaná Bay on the northeast coast of Hispaniola, known today as Dominican Republic and Haiti.

            Don Francisco Barrero y Pelaez, a silvermaster, was a senior officer aboard the Guadalupe in charge of valuable metals such as mercury. He thought that his last hours had come as mountainous seas began to ravage the Guadalupe, tearing the cannons from their lashing and destructively carrying away everything topside including the mast. The storm drove the ship aground in Samaná Bay. This was her final voyage.

            It seems that the quicksilver may have helped to save the Guadalupe from total disaster. The 250 tons of quicksilver added extra weight and stability, pinning the Guadalupe securely upright on a sandbar. The ship’s timbers held, and 550 out of 650 passenger and crewmembers managed to ride out the two-day storm and reach the shore alive.

            The Tolosa did not encounter the same luck that the Guadalupe had during the storm. She had separated from the Guadalupe early in the storm and was able to anchor on the mouth of the bay. It rode the tempest through the first night. At dawn her luck ran out. After the anchor lines parted she was swept into the bay, bouncing from shoal to shoal. The Tolosa was larger than the Guadalupe but somewhat lighter. That’s why she was unable to stand the jack hammering blows of the storm and finally was wrecked on a massive coral reef. Sadly, out of 600 people aboard fewer than 40 survived. By the time a ship arrived from Santo Domingo, only 7 had survived and they are described as a miracle.

            Eight men battled the sea and made it to the vessel’s mast were they took refuge in the rigging. They could see 3 miles away in the distance the capital of Santo Domingo but with the strong ocean’s current and the infestation of sharks feeding on bloated corpses of livestock and, sadly, their shipmates, they did not try to make it ashore. From these eight, only the seven mentioned above survived. They had spent 32 days living out of rainwater and the little food that drifted by.

            Many of the people that reached shore died soon after of hunger or exhaustion. Others were able to reach Cape Haitien, 240 miles away, in a Guadalupe lifeboat. Among the survivor we find Don Francisco and a Guatemalan woman seven months pregnant. She set out on foot to Santo Domingo, 200 miles along the coast. Don Francisco wrote in a letter to Spain, “it should be pointed out that the food was more appropriate to ending one’s life than to conserving it, for we were reduced to snails, palms, and grasses, which we acquired at great cost of strength.” 

            These acts of strong will and courage are what is keeping us intrigued and interested in what our ancestors went though to survive so we can be here today.   

On March 23^rd 1686, aboard Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, which departed from the Puerto de la Cruz de la Oratava in the Canary Islands, were Salvador González de Cabrera, his wife, Angela García de Melo and his children.  Salvador is my 8^th great grandfather.[2]  That’s the reason why I was really excited when a friend, also one of Salvador’s descendants, told me that the National Geographic had taken an assignment on researching what happened to this vessel and recover their treasures from the bottom of the ocean. It is so seldom that we can find the ship’s name and its history where one of our ancestors sailed in.   These findings make us understand and imagine the life in the vessel and what they had to encounter either by their choice of immigration or by order of the Spanish Crown to serve their duties.

            Two and a half centuries later, and with the permission of the Dominican Government, a crew of divers was ready for the exploration. The only clues of the whereabouts of the Guadalupe and Tolosa were their estimated positions found in the archives in Sevilla.

            When the Guadalupe was identified and the hull excavated from beneath tons of sand they found that the timbers were so massive and the construction so solid that this blocked the access to the lower hull where the mercury had been stored for all these years. Also, they found that the ship carried a huge cargo of iron ship fittings in her hull. This was for the construction of a full sized vessel in the New World.  By this time Spain had destroyed her own forests and had to turn to her colonies for the building of its Fleet.

            Gold jewelry, coins, buttons, crockery, silver and pewter flatware, olive jars, brass scissor handles, delftware, dice, religious medals, brass lanterns were found among the ship’s treasures. Four hundreds crystal drinking glasses were recovered intact; most of them engraved. This let the divers discover that most of the vessel’s cargo was smuggled goods since they were manufactured outside of Spain.  The origin of most of the goods is not certain but some of the patterns were distinctly Chinese although Spain, Bohemia and Germany were capable of producing this type of engraving.  Brass fittings and a bracket clock made by London’s firm Windmills were found among the wreckage. At this point England was one of Spain’s rival in the New World and Spain had a monopoly on trade with her colonies. All imports had to be from Spanish origin and in Spanish ships.

            After a year recovering the Guadalupe’s salvage (1976), it was time for the Tolosa. On June 1977 the Tolosa’s cannons were found with the use of a magnetometer.[3] The divers and researchers had their doubts because this ship was old. To proof that this was the Tolosa they wanted to find mercury. Three weeks have passed. Samples of pewter, fine glass, and pottery have been found. At this time a small barrel top emerged with what seems to be old drawings on how the Spaniards packed mercury aboard the ship. They were stored in leather sacks secured at the top with thongs, then they stowed the sacks singly in small casks. Soon they discovered that Tolosa’s treasure were as varied and fascinating as those in the Guadalupe. Also it showed, that although both ships carried similar cargo, no two people were prepared to begin life in the New World the same way. A gold medallion bearing the cross of the Order of Santiago framed by 24 diamonds, a cross with nine emeralds, a brooch with 37 clustered diamonds, a gold heart, ivory plates that combined the functions of sundial, compass and, moondial and about 1,000 intact pearls were the things found in the wreckage of the Tolosa.  The Cross of the Order of Santiago let us know that at least one passenger in the Tolosa was of enormous wealth or high position. Also, a bracelet with the script, “Da. Antonia Franco” was found.

            The ship carried 70 heavy cannons, 33 of which were visible inside the hull and a chest of hand grenades as part of their armament. Mercury was never found and at the time of its discovery in 1977, it had an estimated value of a million dollars.

If the crew of the Tolosa would have put both anchors down together, the night of the storm, two hawsers would have shared the strain and the ship might have survived.

The mercury was use in the process of amalgamation.[4] Without it, the refineries had to have been drastically reduced and without any doubt this had to affect the exportation of gold and silver from the colonies to Spain.

The Casas Reales Museum in Santo Domingo is the proud home off all these treasures and history.

Did don Francisco Barrero y Pelaez settle in the Dominican Republic? Did he go back to Spain? Did the pregnant Guatemalan woman give birth and was able to raise a family? Who was doña Antonia Franco? We will never know.

Once in 1686, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe carried passengers under the “Tratado de Sangre” or “Tratado de Familia” to Puerto Rico. Few decades later she lay in the bottom of the ocean stopped by a storm before it reached it destination. 

This same ship, which carried poor families from the Canary Islands to Puerto Rico hoping to increase the population there, now has taken her place in history. Until her discovery, she had sheltered for centuries, proof of the wealth, power and opulence of others.

Silver and gold had cost Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and the Conde of Tolosa their life.  

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