ABSTRACT
The Caribbean, the central sea of the Americas, had been the site of the first impact of Europeans on the aboriginal cultures of the hemisphere. It was to remain the region where precedents were set in patterns of conflict, but the collapse of Amerindian populations in the larger islands was so dramatic that power games were increasingly played out between rival European groups. Spanish authority was challenged by the French, Dutch, and English, partly because of the comparatively weak and incomplete nature of Spanish colonisation in parts of the Caribbean, especially after Spanish attention began to focus on the great conquests which were achieved in Mexico and in South America. Islands which had experienced comprehensive ecological, political, and demographic disaster, and whose limited resources of precious metals had been exhausted, simply were not worth further massive investments of Spanish state resources, even in the Greater Antilles; while many of the numerous islands in the Lesser Antilles had never been brought under Spanish sway, especially those with a population of fiercely independent Carib Indians. Here was an opportunity for infiltration by other Europeans. In addition, the clockwise flow of shipping through the Caribbean which assembled the precious metals to be despatched to Spain proved fatally attractive to freebooters, as did the thought of the bullion fleets which eventually sailed from Vera Cruz via Havana to round the tip of modern Florida before they swung northwards into the Atlantic. In practice, it was not necessary for a ship to have piratical intentions to be deemed a corsair by the Spaniards. The Spanish corsario means no more than 'one who cruises'. Any ship and crew or any individual crew member who sailed in the Spanish Indies without holding a licence from the Casa de The West Indies, <italic>c.</italic> 1680 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315845753/88acaac1-ce43-45dd-9c88-35a9c0888448/content/fig00007_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
