It is common for great discoveries to be made by chance. In this case, it has been the control that the United Kingdom courts subjected to the seizures of privateers on the high seas, which has allowed the conservation and treatment of thousands of objects and documents confiscated from Spanish ships in the 18th century. These seizures had to demonstrate the legality of the assaults – only permitted against ships from enemy countries – but over time they have become an enormous source of information for historians, who have decided to make them available to the public, centuries later, through “The Prize Papers”.
The documents, published on its website, date back to the Seat war (1739-1748) and War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748), two conflicts in which Spain and France allied themselves against the United Kingdom. During that period, the English captured about 130 Spanish ships loaded with tons of silver and hundreds of inventories, navigation logs, language books and private letters sent to relatives on both sides of the Atlantic. In this correspondence, the migrants who had moved to America told their loved ones about a world that was totally foreign to them without knowing that, centuries later, their stories would become historical material of priceless value.
Daily life
“This type of correspondence is very difficult to find in archives, which normally contain more bureaucratic documents such as wills, lawsuits or records,” explains the Spaniard. Alejandro Salamanca, associate researcher of the project. “These letters tell us fragments of people’s daily lives, which have a very great valueand they help us know more about migrations at that time: how they tried to contact their families“, how they sent money or what happened to them when things didn’t go the way they wanted,” he adds.
The cards hide thousands of stories that never reached their recipients: that of a man who tells his mother how, after leading a bad life in Spain, he is ordained a priest in Peru; that of a woman on the verge of destitution who reproaches her husband for abandoning her family or that of a young man who tells some friends how she almost drowned after falling into the water in the port of Havana. “The majority of migrants show their fear of a world they don’t know “and they feel the need to contact the loved ones they have left behind,” says the project director, Dagmar Freist.
“One of the things that caught my attention the most is how describe the unknown: from the celebration of rituals that they had not seen before, to fruits that we all know today. In one letter, a woman describes a pineapple like a very heavy flowerpot”, explains Freist, who highlights the value of the stories of ordinary people, many of them from humble origins. “When we think about colonialism we usually think of soldiers or members of the administration, but this collection shows how behind all this there are also people with ordinary lives who cross the world in search of a better future. And it’s not just men: there are also women and entire families.”
Maritime routes
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In addition to stories about the daily life of Spanish emigrants in America, the extensive archive also includes larger documents, such as military instructions sent on behalf of Philip V to the governor of the Philippines in 1742, Gaspar de la Torre, to grant refuge to Danish ships, or volumes with careful illustrations seized by British privateers from the galleon Our Lady of Covadongawhich covered the route across the Pacific Ocean between Acapulco and Manila loaded with silver and ammunition.
The documents in Spanish are only part of the ‘Prize Papers’, which include more than 160,000 letters intercepted all over the world, as well as the personal files of passengers, ship documents, passports, jewelry or textile samples. Some objects seized from more than 35,000 ships between 1652 and 1815 and which include books and letters written in twenty languages, including Basque and Catalan. The project, promoted by the Gottingen Academy of Sciences and Humanitiesin Germany—in collaboration with German and British entities—aims to digitize 3.5 million documents by 2037.