Sinking Forts, Floating Fortresses, and the Politics of Preservation in the Orinoco Littoral in the Eighteenth Century

• In Event: Re-envisioning Maritime History as Environmental History

Abstract

This paper highlights various relationships between sea power, coastal environments, and imperial defense strategies at the edges of empire through an analysis of Spanish military tactics in the lower portions of the Orinoco River Basin. The focus is a massive forestry and shipbuilding initiative that supplanted decades of failed attempts (1700s–1750s) to control the river via forts on the Orinoco’s banks. Between the 1760s and 1790s, Spanish officials recognized that the region’s fertile soils and tropical climate produced timber reserves capable of outfitting a fleet of warships; they developed strategies for harnessing its tides and seasonal floods to transform the delta into a hydraulic shipyard; and, they re-envisioned the Gulf of Pariah as a harbor for Spanish ships patrolling the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Despite this creativity and ambition, ranking officers ultimately aborted the project, because it could have enticed seaborn invasion. Rather than draw attention to the lower Orinoco—by dismantling forests, converting trees into a flotilla, and establishing a new naval hub—these officers opted to conserve the region’s dense woodlands and deltaic waterscape. Their logic entailed maintaining it as an “insuperable barrier” to protect the Crown’s geopolitical interests as it had for centuries. Using colonial records, shipbuilding manuals, pilot guides, sailing charts, and maps, this paper argues that although officials understood the risk of losing control of the Orinoco Basin and considered refashioning its littoral zone as a maritime enterprise, the Crown made a calculated decision to keep the lower Orinoco a coastal “desert” as a means of defending the empire. As such, it draws maritime, environmental, and imperial histories together by presenting the Orinoco’s littoral zone as a juncture of naval, forestry, and military interests.

Author

• Matthew Ryan Nielsen, Carnegie Mellon University