Devastations of Osorio

Situation of the island of Hispaniola during the Devastations of Osorio, 1605-1606

First page of the royal decree issued by Philip III of Spain, ordering Antonio de Osorio to carry out the devastations. The seven-page decree is registered in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Andalusia, Spain.

In the history of the Dominican Republic, the Devastations of Osorio is the term used to describe the order given by King Philip III of Spain to the governor of Hispaniola, Antonio de Osorio, to depopulate the western and northern regions of the island (by force if necessary) in order to end the smuggling that flourished in those areas. The Devastations took place between 1605 and 1606.

The Spanish crown believed that depopulating the western part of the island would put an end to the smuggling that so severely impacted the royal coffers. Unfortunately, the devastation made possible everything it had sought to prevent: the establishment of individuals from another nation in the western part of the island. The devastations were the event that allowed the French to establish themselves in western Hispaniola. The Spanish tried to expel the French from the western part of the island on several occasions, but were unsuccessful.

Under the leadership of Bertrand d'Ogeron, the bands of French buccaneers and filibusters that had swarmed across the west of the island were transformed into sedentary communities, officially becoming subjects of the French crown in 1660. Shortly afterwards, the French West India Company began purchasing vast numbers of black slaves from central and west Africa, bringing them to the west of the island to work in the planting and cultivation of coffee, cocoa, cotton, indigo and sugarcane plantations. The French were so successful in seizing the western part of the island that they were already planning to take over the entire island and take it from Spain. However, the Spanish managed to prevent this plan thanks to the swift execution of the Santo Domingo Repopulations.

Ultimately, the Spanish concluded that it was already impossible to remove the French and (their formidable mass of African slaves) from the western part of the island. Finally, the Spanish ceded the western part of the island to the French in the Treaty of Rijswijk of 1697. However, this treaty did not establish a border between the two colonies, which led to territorial disputes between the Spanish and French. Finally, to maintain peace, France and Spain decided to establish a definitive border in the Treaty of Aranjuez of 1777.

History and causes

Map of the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, before the devastations were carried out, when the island of Hispaniola was entirely Spanish (1492-1604). To the west can be seen the old Spanish towns of Lares de la Guahaba, Puerto Real de Bayajá, Villanueva de Jáquimo (or Aquino), Salvatierra de la Sabana, Santa María de la Yaguana and Santa María de la Verapaz. The map shown above is based on the original map of the island charted by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera in 1516.

First map of the Caribbean Sea made by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera in 1511 (or 1514). In the center of the map, the island of Hispaniola can be seen undivided and without borders, all under Spanish sovereignty.

In 1604, the King of Spain, Philip III, observing the growing lack of Crown control in the north and western parts of the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, granted Governor Antonio de Osorio and Archbishop Agustín Dávila y Padilla the power to take whatever action they deemed prudent in order to stop the incursion of foreign contraband as well as contact between Catholic subjects of the Crown and heretics. The origin of the problem was that the residents of Puerto Plata, Montecristi, Bayajá and Yaguana traded their products (especially cured meat and hides) with the French, the English and the Dutch, and received contraband goods in return.

This traffic had been carrying on from the middle of the 16th century and kept growing year by year. The king's order forced the officials to carry out the depopulation of the regions in which smuggling was rampant, so that the Crown’s subjects could be moved to a location closer to the capital of the island, Santo Domingo. When the people of the northwest first heard about this order, the town councils began to raise petitions in which they requested the abolition of the measure. However, Governor Osorio, who upon the death of the archbishop Dávila y Padilla had to face the situation alone, decided to comply with the letter of the royal ordinance. In mid-February 1605, royal representatives left for the northern part of Hispaniola to proclaim that the people of the area would be forgiven crimes committed against the Spanish Crown resulting from the practice of trafficking with foreigners and heretics, but only under one condition: that they would collect all their personal belongings, slaves, cattle and other property, and move to the southeast, to locations pre-determined by the royal authorities of Santo Domingo. (Some officials of the Spanish audiencia tried to suppress the royal order, since their own smuggling interests would also be affected.)

The population of the north resisted and Osorio had to ask for reinforcements to comply with the royal order. The help came from the governor Sancho Ochoa de Castro, who in September of that same year 1605 sent an infantry company to Santo Domingo to help out the forces of Hispaniola. The contingent, composed of 159 soldiers under the command of Captain Francisco Ferrecuelo, went to the north of the island, where the orders of Osorio were forcibly imposed, and the residents of the region obliged to abandon their farms and homesteads. In order to achieve their objective, the soldiers destroyed sugar plantations, burned huts, ranches, haciendas and churches, and dismantled everything that the villagers needed to live in those places. The main depopulated areas were Puerto Plata, Montecristi, Bayajá and Yaguana. At the end of January 1606, Antonio de Osorio wrote to the king, communicating that the devastation had ended and that he only needed to go through the herds of cattle of the north, and those of Santiago, San Juan and Azua. The process was however delayed until the middle of the year. Eventually, the governor established a border that stretched from Azua in the south all the way to the north coast, and prohibited the Hispanic inhabitants from crossing it. The inhabitants of Bayajá and Yaguana were concentrated in a new town that received the name of Bayaguana, and the inhabitants of Montecristi and Puerto Plata were relocated to Monte Plata.

Consecuences

Fall into poverty

The destruction of some 120 cattle ranches, totaling more than 100,000 head of cattle, including cows, pigs, and horses, proved disastrous. Only 15% of the cattle could be moved to the new settlements, while the rest were abandoned. Within a short time, these herds became wild. Furthermore, the destruction of the sugar mills and sugar mills accelerated the decline of the sugar industry, which, combined with the loss of livestock and sugarcane and ginger plantations, increased poverty on the island and pushed Santo Domingo to the margins of colonial trade.

The depopulation of the western and northern areas of Hispaniola was exploited by runaway blacks who, fleeing their masters, created communities in those regions. The runaway blacks came not only from the island itself but also from the neighboring captaincies of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Dominicans who could afford to leave the island did so, going to Cuba, Puerto Rico, New Spain, or New Granada. Only those Dominicans who, due to lack of resources, could not emigrate, or those who, due to close ties and obligations, could not abandon it, remained on Hispaniola.

The misery that followed the Devastations of Osorio also affected Hispaniola's tax revenues, to the point that they were no longer enough to cover public expenses or the salaries of the soldiers in the Santo Domingo garrison.

In response, King Philip III ordered the authorities of the Viceroyalty of New Spain to allocate a portion of their tax revenues to financially assist Santo Domingo. This allocation of money, officially known as "situado," came directly from the Royal Treasury of Mexico City. Unfortunately for the Dominicans, this economic aid took longer than expected to reach Santo Domingo, sometimes even months late, resulting in misery and reducing economic activities to the simple exchange of the scarce goods produced on the island.

Loss of Territories

The devastation had catastrophic political, economic, and social consequences; however, the most disastrous consequence of all was, without a doubt, the irretrievable loss of the territories in the west of the island. Unfortunately, the depopulation of western Hispaniola did not prevent these abandoned territories from falling into oblivion, as the Crown would have wished. Instead, following the devastation, adventurers from various countries attempted to take over the western part of the island.

French occupation of the west of the island

Map of Hispaniola in 1656 showing the territories of its (previously) unpopulated western part already occupied by the French.

" In the early days, many of them wandered to the neighboring islands, but others ventured deeper into the Caribbean waters and ended up in a tropical paradise that had one advantage over the biblical one: hundreds of thousands of cattle and pigs roamed through rich grasslands and forests crisscrossed by crystal-clear rivers. This was the western part of Hispaniola. ".

The French occupation of the unpopulated western part of Hispaniola began with a group of English and French adventurers who had previously settled on the island of Saint Christopher under the leadership of the English explorer Thomas Warner and the French privateer Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc. By 1620, all the Caribbean islands were still Spanish territories, including Saint Christopher.

In 1629, a fleet of Spanish warships commanded by Fadrique de Toledo was sent to the island to destroy the Anglo-French adventurers occupying it. The Spanish attack was devastating; many of these adventurers were captured or killed. Others managed to save their lives by escaping to other parts of the Antilles.

Thus, this first group of Anglo-French fugitives ended up in the abandoned western part of Hispaniola in 1630, first making landfall on the mainland on Tortuga Island. Days later, they crossed to the northwest coast of Santo Domingo Island (known among them as Grand Terre or Grande Ile) and there they discovered astonishing numbers of wild cattle—cows, pigs, horses, and mules—grazing in areas where not a single person had lived.

They decided to settle on Tortuga, as the island's topography made it a natural fortress.

The invaders organized themselves into "classes" based on their activities:

• Buccaneers: They hunted wild cows, mules, and horses to sell their furs to English and French ships in the area. They hunted pigs for their smoked meat. These were the majority group, due to the abundance of cattle.
• Filibusters: who were essentially pirates, raided Spanish ships that crossed near the island in skiffs.
• Inhabitants: They dedicated themselves to farming, fishing, and lumbering.

Similarity to Florida expedition

A similar situation occurred in Spanish Florida. In the middle of 1601, Philip III, observing the difficulties in maintaining the sparse population of Spanish settlers in the face of continued attacks by the native Indians (and also noticing the limited amount of agricultural and livestock production), ordered the governor of Havana, Juan Maldonado Barnuevo, to send an expedition northwards. The expedition, composed of soldiers and friars under the command of Captain Don Fernando de Valdés, was to perform an inspection and determine the cost to the Crown of maintaining the province. Although the expedition found places in Florida that could have been better utilized for colonial establishments, the Captain warned that the abandonment of San Agustín could harm Spain to the benefit of her enemies. Finally, the combined efforts of Fernando de Valdés and other officials such as Alonso de las Alas, Bartolomé de Argüelles, Juan Menéndez Marques and the friars who accompanied the expedition (who believed that the Indians of Florida provided bountiful opportunities for conversion to Christianity) proved to be successful in averting the abandonment of Florida.

The Osorio Devastations signified the beginning of the strengthening of the Spanish military presence in Hispaniola, since, to put the order into practice, the support of 159 soldiers from the garrison of San Juan Bautista was requested from Puerto Rico. The terrible economic impact of the royal order eventually caused a change in the financing of Hispaniola, transferring it from the viceroyalty of New Spain to that of viceroyalty of Peru. However, from the 1680s onwards, the growing threat of buccaneers as well as that of French forces meant that Hispaniola and Cuba became major recipients of economic resources from New Spain, primarily for military purposes.

Historians conclude that the Devastations of Osorio constituted an error that brought no benefits to the colonists nor to the Spanish Crown. Instead, it left the economy of the island in a state of crisis and stagnation that lasted several decades. In addition, it presented an opportunity for foreigners and enemies of Spain to settle the abandoned territory, who later formed the French colony of Saint-Domingue. From the 18th century, thanks to its productive sugar and coffee plantations, it became one of the strongest economies of the Caribbean and the principal colony of France.

See also

• Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy
• Bertrand d'Ogeron
• François Levasseur
• Exquemelin

In fiction

• The Devastations form the backdrop of Antonio Benitez-Rojo's short story "Windward Passage" in the collection A View from the Mangrove
• The Spanish-Dominican writer Carlos Esteban Deive published a novel in 1979, Las devastaciones, which won the Premio Siboney
• Juan José Ponce Vázquez, a Spanish historian at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa has published a monograph dealing with this period, titled Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (2020).

Licence

 This article incorporates text by Rafal Reichert available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.