The Galeones and Flotas and the English ‘Annual Ship’, 1713–1720

By the time Don Antonio de Echeverz y Subiza’s little fleet of galeones had reached Cartagena, the War of the Succession was already at an end. As a by-product of the terms of the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 the considerable French influence on the Indies trade was destined shortly to give way to strong British pressures on the Spanish colonial markets. Just as the commercial interests of the nations had been largely the cause of the war, so too were they of importance in the pattern of the peace. Britain’s illicit trade with the Spanish-American colonists at Portobello, Cartagena and all along the Tierra Firme coast, built up during the later years of the seventeenth century, had continued almost without interruption throughout the first half of the war.1 While the galeones of the Conde de Casa Alegre were lying in harbour at Cartagena in 1707, the British were dispatching trading vessels to Portobello under the protection of men-of-war.2 In May 1708, even while the trading with the galeones was in progress on the Isthmus, ‘20 odd sail of [British] trading sloops [were] at Porto Bell under Convoy of a 60 gun ship’.3 But by 1708 the optimum moment was already past. By then British trade to the coasts had already begun to decline, for it was reported that ‘... [our traders] can hardly sell the goods for what they cost them, but however it is supposed to be for the advantage of the trade to keep it afoot, for fear the French or any else should undermine us in it’.4