LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

A Transpacific Perfect Storm: The Arrest of George Washington Eayrs and the Oceanic Context of Late Spanish California

• In Event: Two Privateering Incidents in Hispanic Trade with Asia, 1810-1820

Abstract

The evolving geopolitical context of the early 19th century Pacific World, highlighted by the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, led to the seizure of the American trade ship the Mercury, captained by George Washington Eayrs, in 1813. I analyze how the Anglo-American conflict stirred Spanish concerns regarding American maritime activity in the Pacific. Due to British blockade of Canton during the war, US merchants focused on plying the Eastern Pacific and Spanish California for commercial opportunities. These activities, along with depredations by the U.S.S. Essex in the Pacific, contributed to political and economic tensions that resulted in the arrest of Eayrs on the California coast. In particular, I propose that South American merchant Nicolas Noe, who arrested Eayrs, was motivated by the activities of Essex's captain David Porter following his capture of the Peruvian privateer Nereyda in the spring of 1813. Meanwhile, the founding of the Russian Fort Ross in Alta California and the Mexican Revolution of the 1810s contributed to a geopolitical "perfect storm" that prompted colonial authorities to take action in the Eastern Pacific against foreign intrusions on the coast. Finally, I examine late Spanish attempts at the maritime fur trade and the environmental anxieties regarding sea otters that were expressed by the beginning of Mexican sovereignty in the 1820s. The decline of sea otter populations in Southern California during the 1810s is largely unrecognized by scholars as a byproduct of the era's colonial tensions.

Author

• Richard Ravalli, William Jessup University