Female staggered mobility across the Spanish Atlantic: The Bertodano-Kneppers in the early eighteenth century

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the “new mobilities paradigm” and contemporary migration studies, this article offers an approximation to the experiences of mobility of María Juana Knepper y Trippel and her five daughters. Their staggered geographical trajectories from Flanders to the Pyrenees, Andalusia, the Spanish circum-Caribbean and back to the Iberian Peninsula are reconstructed through a longitudinal approach, revealing patterns that a focus on one woman or on movement between just two places would miss. Their physical movement is situated in the context of representations of relocation in the royal service as a burden and a sacrifice, before turning to an analysis of the networks and strategies constructed and obstructed by their mobility. Their movement was always intertwined with that of their male relations. Nonetheless, they played key roles in furthering their family’s political and economic interests, creating bonds that linked together distant parts of the Atlantic world, and articulating the Spanish empire.

KEYWORDS:

• Ongoing mobility experiences
• mobile women
• family and empire
• family networks
• Atlantic migration

Introduction

The digitalisation of archival sources and finding aids, the availability of search engines and machine-readable texts and the ease of accessing all these resources through the Internet allow historians to trace mobile lives in a way that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. In the case of the early modern Spanish world, reconstructing the trajectories of itinerant royal officials is a relatively straightforward task. Letters patent, official correspondence, certified service records, and the documentation produced in support of requests for new appointments, promotions, and rewards in the field of honour enable us to trace their geographical movement and even provide insight into the ways in which they presented their experiences in order to garner further favour. However, these sources often obscure the role and presence of individuals who moved alongside royal officials, allowing us only passing glances at the trajectories and experiences of their wives, children, servants and enslaved people. Nonetheless, these individuals played key roles, simultaneously affecting and being affected by the mobility of the invariably male and white royal officials. Occasionally, however, we are lucky enough to be able to reconstruct the trajectories of some of these individuals, catching glances of their actions, character, relationships and perception by others, that allow us to infer certain aspects of their experiences of mobility.

This article reconstructs the highly mobile geographical trajectories of six women whose lives spanned the Spanish world in the transitional years between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. They were all part of the same family and we are able to trace their movement thanks to the abundant documentation produced by their husbands, brothers and children who, collectively, proved extremely successful at converting royal service into increased social status.¹ The documentation available offers little insight into how these women perceived themselves or their experience of staggered migration. Nonetheless, the traces we have are enough to begin to understand the multiple roles they played: furthering their family’s political and economic interests; seeking to advance, but sometimes obstructing, the careers of their menfolk; creating bonds that linked together distant parts of the Spanish world; and articulating an empire that was built by more than just men moving from one place to another in the service of the Spanish crown.

In trying to reconstruct the mobile experiences of María Juana de Knepper y Trippel (1666–1727) and her five daughters, this article draws on insights from both the “new mobilities paradigm,” particularly as interpreted by cultural geographers, such as Tim Cresswell,² and new approaches to migration studies proposed by sociologists, such as Shanthi Robertson and Rosie Roberts.³ At the same time, it recognises that both the chronological distance separating us from the times of Knepper and her daughters, and the extent to which their gender obscured their presence in the archive, pose significant challenges to our enterprise.

Cresswell’s suggestion that “mobility can be thought of as an entanglement of movement, representation and practice” is a good starting point.⁴ The documentation available to us allows for the reconstruction in detail of the geographical trajectories drawn by the lives of our six subjects, “the fact of [their] physical movement.”⁵ However, we know less about the representations of movement that gave “shared meaning” to their experiences.⁶ We have hardly any surviving accounts produced by the women that could provide a frame of reference; women’s long-distance geographical movement, moreover, seems to have attracted little, if any, commentary at the time, and remains a significantly understudied subject amongst historians.⁷ Nonetheless, we are able to situate their mobility within the representations that englobed their father’s, brothers’, husbands’, and sons’ movement in the service of the Spanish crown. As we will see, these representations prioritised length of time spent in a place over distance travelled to reach it; they also tended to present long-distance relocation in the service of the crown as a sacrifice on the part of those moving, often involving significant expense, inconvenience, and risk to one’s health, family and property. Finally, although the complete absence of personal correspondence, memoirs, or any other kind of introspective documentation prevents us from directly accessing these women’s “experienced and embodied practice of movement,”⁸ this article argues that we are still able to catch occasional glimpses of what their experience was like. We can do this, particularly, by thinking about the power dynamics they were involved in because of their gender, age, marital status, class, and ethnicity, and because of the roles played by their menfolk in the governance of the Spanish world. In this sense, we can situate the mobility of these women, with their specific power relations, within the same “constellation of mobility” – that is, a set of “particular patterns of movement, representations of movement, and ways of practising movement that make sense together” – in which the lives of early modern Iberian itinerant royal officials operated.⁹

Cresswell’s emphasis in understanding movement, its representation and embodiment as intrinsically enmeshed in power dynamics, and his acknowledgement that these patterns are geographically and historically contingent and subject to change over time, are welcome correctives to some of the shortcomings that historians have found in the “new mobilities paradigm.”¹⁰ However, his approach is still too focused on movement itself and tries to cast too wide a net by purporting to be applicable to a range of instances of mobility “from the micro-movements of the body to the politics of global travel.”¹¹ At the same time, like much of the work that falls under the umbrella of the “new mobilities paradigm,” it seems to be primarily preoccupied with understanding movement between point A and point B. As such, it offers relatively little in terms of furthering our understanding of “ongoing,” successive or staggered instances of long-distance movement over an individual’s life.

In this regards, recent migration studies’ use of longitudinal, biographical and narrative approaches to the study of “people’s mobile pathways and practices over their lives” offers a suitable complement.¹² It allows us to understand mobility as an ongoing “complex matrix of interactions and connections over time and space, rather than a linear and permanent migration.”¹³ This perspective emphasises a broader understanding of the socially connected dimension of mobility. Thus, it is particularly concerned with “the extent to which mobility is determined by existing familial and social connections; [the] extent to which [it] creates ‘new’ networks of reciprocity and relationality; and how these relationships with both mobile and immobile ‘others’ shape ways of experiencing social and place attachment.”¹⁴ In some ways, this approach works better with the sources we have: genealogical documentation, judicial records and the occasional notarial document allow us, at least partially, to reconstruct the social connections of our subjects at different points (and places) in their lives. Thus, they offer glimpses of how these networks both affected and were affected by our subjects’ movement.

Moreover, recent migration studies’ emphasis on the non-linear, multidirectional and unpredictable nature of individuals’ movement over time¹⁵ invites a more sophisticated understanding of mobility as a process that is ongoing or incomplete throughout an individual’s life. It is in this sense that I refer to the experiences of individuals whose lives were spent in multiple sites of empire, remaining for a few years in one place before moving on to another, as instances of staggered mobility.¹⁶ By doing so, I seek to highlight the often contingent nature of an individual’s presence in any one place, the frequently uncertain duration of each sojourn, and the unpredictability of the time, direction and motive of subsequent instances of long-distance relocation. I also aim to recognise that each instance of staggered migration built on previous experiences despite its taking place in different contexts and under different conditions. Thus, the driver for an individual’s movement may change from one instance of long-distance relocation to the next as the result of both unforeseen or unforeseeable accidents and the individual’s access to resources and choice. Simultaneously, this perspective allows us to recognise that the individual’s freedom to choose and availability of resources are not constant over time and that they do not always change in the same incremental or decreasing direction.

Adopting a longitudinal approach when considering female movement and mobility across the Atlantic world also allows us to explore a dimension of women’s experience which has received relatively limited attention from early modern Atlantic and global historians. Although nowadays women feature quite prominently in the historiography and the roles they played in building and maintaining empires, businesses, families, and knowledge are widely recognised, there is still a tendency to think of women as more static or less mobile than their male counterparts. We know much about the roles played by women who remained behind, on either side of the Atlantic, as their husbands and children travelled or relocated across the ocean,¹⁷ as well as about the commercial networks they built and the important roles they played in maintaining the bonds of empire.¹⁸ But we still tend to focus predominantly on women who remained in one place, even if acting as the articulating centre of communication networks, while their brothers or spouses moved from one place to the next;¹⁹ or our analysis of their mobility is frequently limited to single instances of movement, often between just two places or in a single direction, creating the impression that, when travelling overseas, women were overwhelmingly permanent settlers.²⁰ With few exceptions, the historiography for the early modern period would seem to suggest that women did not lead “colonial lives” or experience movement through “imperial circuits” until the nineteenth century or outside of the British Empire.²¹

Of course, women moved across the Atlantic less frequently and in smaller numbers than men. Amelia Almorza Hidalgo estimates that, at the peak of Spanish emigration to Spanish America, between 1560 and 1630, women represented at best between 20 and 30 percent of Spaniards crossing the Atlantic.²² Similarly, for the first half of the eighteenth century, Isabelo Macías Domínguez calculated that, out of 8,203 Spaniards who travelled legally between Cadiz or Seville and Spanish America, only 623 were women, representing less than 8 percent of the total.²³ Nonetheless, for this same period, women constituted the majority of relatives travelling alongside men who crossed the Atlantic to take up a royal appointment. The 1,596 imperial administrators, both civil and ecclesiastical, whose departure from Spain was registered by royal authorities took with them 307 female relatives – including wives, daughters, nieces, sisters, mothers and sisters-in-law – compared with only 206 male family members. Thus, women represented almost 15 percent of the individuals travelling to Spanish America in the royal service between 1701 and 1750.²⁴

Still, the emphasis placed by studies of early modern migration on flows between one side of the Atlantic and the other has contributed to obscuring the often staggered nature of female mobility, both before and after the transatlantic journey. Unquestionably, throughout the early modern period, crossing the Atlantic was a major undertaking both financially and in terms of physical risk and discomfort. Similarly, the Spanish crown sought to control and regulate the transatlantic movement of people much more than it did movement between its different European or American territories.²⁵ Yet, by focusing exclusively, or predominantly, on the transatlantic voyage we fail to place these experiences within the broader context of the mobile lives often led by individuals who ventured to cross the Ocean Sea. Although this is an issue that affects the way we have approached both male and female experiences of mobility in the early modern Atlantic, we know a lot more about the staggered migration of men than we do of women.²⁶ Yet, experiences of female staggered mobility appear everywhere in the Atlantic world as soon as we start to keep an eye out for them.²⁷

Thus, in the following pages I begin by offering a reconstruction of the geographical trajectories outlined by María Juana Knepper and her daughters’ lives. I then offer some reflections on the representation of the kind of staggered, long-distance relocation experienced by them, largely because of their menfolk’s careers as itinerant royal officials. A third section considers how they practiced and embodied movement. A final section considers the ways in which, through their successive relocations, these six women contributed to the development, transformation, creation and destruction of familial and social networks and relations. Overall, the article argues that adopting a longitudinal approach to these women’s lives allows us to reconstruct trajectories of “ongoing” or staggered mobility that would remain invisible if we focused exclusively on their movement between one place and another. Considering these six women’s lives collectively also allows us to see their movement in the context of shared instances or “constellations” of mobility as experienced by a broader group of men and women. Finally, I argue that while often obscured or overshadowed by the movement of the men in their lives, the staggered mobility of these six women was key to their family’s strategies and to the politics of the early Bourbon Spanish world.

Trajectories

María Juana de Knepper y Trippel – see Figure 1 for a graphic representation of her life-trajectory – was born in Luxembourg City in 1666; it was also there that she married Alberto Bertodano, a Navarrese officer in the Spanish garrison of the city, in 1683.²⁸ When Luxembourg was captured by the French the following year, Knepper and her husband relocated to Brussels, where their first daughter, Elena Juana Bertodano y Knepper (see Figure 2), was born.²⁹ Because Alberto Bertodano had lost his right arm while resisting the French attack on Luxembourg, in 1687 he was allowed to travel to Spain to seek a new appointment more suitable to his physical limitations.³⁰ Thus, the family left Spanish Flanders, relocating shortly afterwards to the Aragonese Pyrenees, where Bertodano served as the commander of a small fortress near the French border.³¹ The couple’s second daughter, Teresa Cecilia (see Figure 3), was born there, in Ainsa, in 1691.³² Three years later, they all relocated to Seville, after Bertodano was appointed commanding officer of the militias of Coria del Rio.³³ The family lived in Seville until 1706, by then they had had four more children: Petronila Paula (see Figure 4), María Josefa (see Figure 5), Carlos Alberto and Josefa Escolástica (see Figure 6).³⁴

Figure 1. Life-trajectory of María Juana Knepper y Trippel (Luxembourg City, 1666 - Cartagena de Indias, 1727).

Figure 2. Life-trajectory of Elena Juana Bertodano Knepper (Brussels, 1686 - Madrid, ca. 1759).

Figure 3. Life-trajectory of Teresa Cecilia Bertodano Knepper (Ainsa, 1691 - Madrid, 1754).

Figure 4. Life-trajectory of María Josefa Bertodano Knepper (Seville, ca. 1695 - Caracas, ?).

Figure 5. Life-trajectory of Petronila Paula Bertodano Knepper (Seville, ca. 1700 - Santo Domingo, ca. 1727).

Figure 6. Life-trajectory of Josefa Escolástica Bertodano Knepper (Seville, 1706 - Cadiz, ?).

Two years earlier, Bertodano had been appointed governor of Cumana in north-eastern South America.³⁵ After several delays, the family relocated overseas in 1706 leaving their eldest and youngest daughters behind. By then, Elena Juana had married Jerónimo del Moral, a clerk in the central administration of the monarchy’s finances, and the couple had settled in Madrid.³⁶ Josefa Escolástica, only months-old at the time, remained behind in Seville, presumably in a convent or in the care of friends of the family.³⁷ The rest of the Betodano-Kneppers lived in Cumana until 1713. During that time, the couple’s last child to reach adulthood was born: a son named Andrés Jerónimo. Meanwhile, their second eldest daughter, Teresa Cecilia, married Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera, a resident of the Island of Margarita and relocated to La Asuncion, the island’s main settlement.³⁸

At the end of his tenure in Cumana, the Council of Indies fined Bertodano an amount almost equivalent to one and a half years’ his pay as provincial governor.³⁹ Faced with financial ruin and no prospects of further employment in the royal service, Bertodano travelled back to Spain, while María Juana and their children remained in La Asuncion with Teresa Cecilia and her husband.⁴⁰ Bertodano’s journey to Spain rendered fruit and in late 1714 he sailed back across the Atlantic with a new letters patent – naming him interim governor of Caracas – and with Elena Juana, her husband and two daughters, and Josefa Escolástica in tow.⁴¹ Meanwhile, in Margarita, Cristóbal de la Riba had passed away, leaving Teresa Cecilia a widow with two infant daughters and complicating the situation for María Juana and the rest of her children.⁴²

Early in 1715, and for about 18 months, the entire family reunited in Caracas. Shortly afterwards, Teresa Cecilia married for a second time.⁴³ Her new husband was Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu, a Canarian jurist who had arrived from Spain on the same ship as Bertodano to oversee trade between the Iberian Peninsula and northern South America.⁴⁴ A few months later, her sister María Josefa also married in Caracas.⁴⁵ Although born in Spain, her husband, Juan de Vega Arredondo, was a long-time resident of northern South America with strong links to Caracas, Barquisimeto and Cumana.⁴⁶ Towards the end of the summer of 1716, Bertodano, María Juana, their two youngest daughters and their two sons left Caracas for San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Bertodano would serve as interim governor until 1720.⁴⁷ Elena Juana, Teresa Cecilia, and María Josefa remained behind in Caracas, where their husbands held important appointments in the fiscal and commercial administration of the province.⁴⁸ While her parents were in Puerto Rico, the family’s fourth daughter, Petronila Paula, married Juan López de Morla, a former governor of the island and a well-connected merchant/soldier from Hispaniola. The couple settled in Santo Domingo.⁴⁹

Bertodano’s last stint as Spanish American provincial governor took place in Cartagena de Indias, between 1720 and 1724. He travelled there from Puerto Rico in the company of his wife and their three youngest children.⁵⁰ Shortly afterwards, their youngest daughter, Josefa Escolástica, married a Spanish naval officer, Segismundo Medrano, and set sail back for Spain; the marriage would not last long as Medrano passed away shortly afterwards.⁵¹ In Cadiz in 1723, Josefa Escolástica wed for a second time, to Alejo Gutiérrez de Rubalcava, an up-and-coming official in the administration of the Spanish navy.⁵² The couple initially settled in Cadiz.⁵³ In the mid-1720s Petronila Paula and López de Morla passed away in Santo Domingo leaving behind a young orphaned daughter.⁵⁴

Although Bertodano’s tenure in Cartagena de Indias ended in scandal – both he and María Juana were accused of engaging in illicit foreign trade –,⁵⁵ the couple remained in the city for the rest of their lives. María Juana died there in February 1727.⁵⁶ Barely a month after her passing, her eldest son, Carlos Alberto married a local woman and settled permanently in the New Granadan city;⁵⁷ María Juana’s youngest child, Andrés Jerónimo, also married a Cartagenera, but relocated to Cadiz shortly afterwards.⁵⁸ In 1729, Elena Juana and Jerónimo del Moral, left Caracas for Cartagena de Indias when he was promoted to an office in the region’s fiscal administration.⁵⁹ Elena Juana’s reunion with her father and brother, however, was short-lived as del Moral’s office was suppressed only a few months after their arrival in the city. By the early 1730s, the eldest of the Bertodano-Kneppers, her husband and their nine children had all relocated back to Spain.⁶⁰

Meanwhile, Teresa Cecilia and her children had also left Caracas around 1729 and returned to Spain. There, she reunited with her husband, who had left South America in November 1722.⁶¹ After spending some time in Madrid, he had settled in Cadiz in 1727, when he was appointed one of the judges of the Casa de la Contratación (the institution that oversaw trade between Spain and Spanish America).⁶² Once Teresa Cecilia arrived in the Iberian Peninsula, the family lived together in Seville for around a year.⁶³ Finally, in 1731, they moved to Madrid, when Álvarez de Abreu was appointed to a seat in the Council of Indies.⁶⁴ Roughly at the same time, Josefa Escolástica and Gutiérrez de Rubalcava relocated from Cadiz to Cartagena de Levante, in Murcia, when he was appointed chief administrator of Spain’s Mediterranean naval forces.⁶⁵

Teresa Cecilia and Álvarez de Abreu settled permanently in Madrid, where she passed away in 1754, several years after her husband had been granted a title of nobility and had become the dean of the Council of Indies.⁶⁶ Elena Juana and del Moral also settled in Madrid, where she passed away, already a widow, in the late 1750s.⁶⁷ After nearly ten years in Cartagena de Levante, where she gave birth to at least six children, Josefa Escolástica and Gutiérrez de Rubalcava moved back to Cadiz, where he served as president of the Casa de la Contratación from 1742 until his death in 1747.⁶⁸ Unfortunately, we do not know what happened to Josefa Escolástica after becoming a widow. For her part, María Josefa Bertodano y Knepper spent the rest of her life in Caracas, except for a brief sojourn in Barquisimeto.⁶⁹ She was still living in the Venezuelan capital, as a widow, in 1741.⁷⁰

Thus, and as Figures 1 through 6 and Table 1 show, all six women travelled across the Atlantic at least once in their lives, and three eventually returned to Spain. As was frequently the case with Spanish women who emigrated to Spanish America, none of them crossed the ocean more than once in each direction.⁷¹ Between them, these six women lived in at least 14 different towns and cities spanning the Spanish world, from Flanders to New Granada. After the family left Seville in 1706, and except for a period of about 18 months in Caracas, the six women were never again in the same place at the same time. By the same token, however, there was almost always a place where at least two of them were living simultaneously, even after all the daughters had left the parental home. The pairings, however, changed over time, suggesting that family bonds, rather than affinity between specific individuals was probably what drove them.

Table 1. Places of residence of María Juana Knepper y Trippel and her daughters.

Read across, the table indicates where all six women were at any point in time. The height of each cell does not correlate with the time each woman spent in that place, but with the movement of the other five women while one remained in the same place.

Of all six women, María Josefa led the least mobile life, living in only five different places and spending over half her life in Caracas. María Juana, the mother, was the most mobile: relocating at least nine times throughout her life and never settling twice in the same place. Elena Juana, Teresa Cecilia and Josefa Escolástica – the three that crossed the Atlantic in both directions – also experienced frequent instances of staggered migration, each resettling at least seven times but, unlike their mother, they all lived twice in at least one city. Even Petronila Paula, despite her short life, at the time of her death had lived in six different locations.

Although their relocations were almost invariably driven by the careers and fortunes of their father and husbands, all six women spent at least a few months of their lives, and in some cases several years, living apart from their immediate menfolk. Josefa Escolástica spent the first five years of her life apart from her parents, as she was left behind in Seville while they went to Cumana. She spent some time on her own again, probably in Cadiz, after the death of her first husband and before her second marriage. Similarly, after Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera passed away, María Juana, Teresa Cecilia, María Josefa and Petronila Paula all lived on their own – with Knepper’s two sons who were still children – in La Asuncion, Margarita, for about a year, while Bertodano was in Spain seeking appointment to Caracas. María Josefa would then spend some time in Caracas without her husband, while Vega Arredondo was taking the residencia of her father’s successor in the governorship of Cumana.⁷² Elena Juana, also spent some time in Caracas without her husband around 1720, while Jerónimo del Moral travelled to Spain in search of an appointment in the city’s fiscal administration.⁷³ Finally, Teresa Cecilia remained in Caracas for close to seven years after her second husband returned to Spain in 1722. In these last three cases, however, the women were always in the company of two of their sisters and their husbands. In this regard, the experience of the Bertodano-Knepper’s was not atypical. Across the early modern Spanish world, married women often spent significant amount of time apart from their husbands, managing the affairs of their households and families.⁷⁴ Households led by women, either widowed, married or single, often comprised large part of the population of many towns and cities in the Spanish Atlantic and beyond.⁷⁵

Although separated by nearly 300 years, the lives of the Bertodano-Knepper women followed complex trajectories, marked by ongoing movement similar to those of the contemporary migrants studied by Roberts and Robertson et al.⁷⁶ Their relocations, although usually linked to key events in their menfolk’s lives and careers, were often marked by serendipity or misfortune rather than by deliberate choice. Often at the unpredictable mercy of royal favour and the complex central bureaucracy of the Spanish Monarchy, it is difficult to see their trajectories as primarily the product of a calculated plan or strategy. Nonetheless, the trajectories of the six women reflect a pattern of successive settlements of unpredictable duration that was common amongst those connected to the middling sectors of the Spanish imperial administration but which historians are only now starting to analyse systematically.

Representations

The trajectories outlined in the previous section constitute but one of three entangled aspects of mobility: the “fact of physical movement.” However, simply reconstructing the paths followed by our subjects throughout their lives “says next to nothing about what these mobilities are made to mean or how they are practiced.”⁷⁷ Thus, the second of the three entangled aspects of mobility are the “representations of movement that give it shared meaning.”⁷⁸ As mentioned before, we have no letters penned by any of the six Bertodano-Knepper women that explicitly addresses their ongoing movement or the meaning they attributed it. The closest we come to this are a handful of notarial records and petitions that acknowledge and document their and their menfolk’s physical movement.

Amongst the latter is a petition submitted to the Council of Indies on behalf of Teresa Cecilia Bertodano Knepper requesting a pension for herself and her two infant daughters after the passing of her first husband. The claim rests on the services of Teresa Cecilia’s father and her late husband, as well as on the former’s inability to support her and her daughters because of his own numerous family members and debts incurred in the royal service.⁷⁹ In support of her case, Teresa Cecilia provided Cristóbal de la Riba’s certified service record, a copy of her father’s letters patent as governor of Caracas, and the statements of three witnesses who had known her husband and were familiar with her situation as a widow.⁸⁰

As other similar documents do, Teresa Cecilia’s file provides us with some idea of how relocation in the royal service was represented at the time. The summary of the file, produced by a clerk in the office of the secretary of the Council of the Indies, offers further detail regarding how the crown perceived physical movement in the careers of its officials. Although the focal point of service records tends to be the length of service, often counting down to a day the time an officer held a certain rank or the length of an official’s posting in a particular place, they also carefully record the locations where services were provided. In the case of soldiers, this normally means identifying the region where their unit was stationed, any fortresses they garrisoned, battles they fought in, and the location where any other meritorious actions took place.⁸¹ In the case of government officials, it usually comes down to the province in which they served or the city in which they were based. Travel from a provincial capital to the interior of the province is normally only mentioned when the official’s presence in the place was noteworthy because his predecessors had not normally visited, because it resulted in an extraordinary service to the crown, because it involved taking an uncommon risk, or because it threatened the individual’s health or property.⁸²

Officials themselves normally presented their travel as a sacrifice made out of loyalty and obligation to the crown. They stressed misfortunes experienced while travelling,⁸³ the costs involved in relocating, especially if they had large families,⁸⁴ and the negative impact of their destinations’ climate on their and their loved ones’ health.⁸⁵ Although some officers explicitly asked to be allowed to return home,⁸⁶ most asked to be sent elsewhere, often suggesting a few desired destinations, thus indicating their willingness to continue to risk their lives and fortunes in the service of the monarchy.⁸⁷ Therefore, staggered migration is presented as a burden, undertaken out of fealty, often at great personal risk and expense.

In this regard, the arguments presented in support of Teresa Cecilia’s request for a pension, and the interpretation of them provided by the Council’s clerk, are typical. The summary of the services rendered to the king by Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera stresses how he frequently “passed” from his home island of Margarita to other locales: to the island of Trinidad to fend off French ships; to serve in the garrison of the fortress of Saint Francis in St Thomas of Guyana; to deliver official correspondence to the governor of Cumana; or to transport royal monies from Caracas. The account also stressed the sacrifices made by Riba Herrera, “risking his life and losing a ship of his own.”⁸⁸ Similarly, summarising Bertodano’s services, the Council’s clerk stressed the 27 years spent in the army in Flanders and Spain, participating in multiple operations and “losing an arm in one of them,” before being appointed to Cumana and then to Caracas. Furthermore, the clerk commented on the debts incurred by Bertodano in paying for his voyage from Cadiz to Caracas, which rendered him unable to succour his widowed daughter.⁸⁹ Finally, the summary’s only reference to Teresa Cecilia’s own mobility, stresses how Riba Herrera’s death had left the young widow and her daughters “in such poverty that they were forced to pass [from the island of Margarita] to the province of Caracas.”⁹⁰

These same themes are present in the only document contained within the file penned by Teresa Cecilia herself. On 5 September 1715, the young widow petitioned the Marqués de Mijares, alcalde ordinario (first instance magistrate) and deputy captain general of Caracas, to take and certify statements from three witnesses who could speak to her situation. The witnesses were to answer a series of questions submitted by Teresa Cecilia. The first two questions were meant to establish her identity and relationship with her parents, late husband, and daughters. The third and fourth questions aimed to demonstrate that “poverty” and “exposure” (desabrigo) had been the reasons why she had left La Asuncion and joined her parents in Caracas. In both the latter questions, Teresa Cecilia clearly stated that, for her, La Asuncion was a “foreign land” (tierra extraña), as was Caracas for her parents, implying that their very presence there made them vulnerable, as it cut them off from the support networks they would have otherwise been able to rely on. The fifth and last question aimed to establish that her father was in Caracas only because of the appointment he held. It clearly indicated that serving as interim governor of Caracas was both a reward for his merits and long years of service as well as a burden willingly undertaken out of loyalty to the king. In fact, Teresa Cecilia implied that service overseas was a sacrifice, similar to her father’s loss of a limb in the battlefields of Flanders. After all, the trip from Spain to Caracas had landed him in significant debt, making it impossible for him to support her and her young daughters on top of his own “large family of wife and children, most of whom are still infants.”⁹¹

Thus, the multiple, long-distance relocations of the six women analysed here should be placed in this context. Although the women themselves did not move in the service of the king, their mobility was included in the sacrifices made by their menfolk out of loyalty to the crown. Like the men they travelled with, they emphasised the risk to their life and health and, because of their gender, they were perceived as being particularly at risk of falling into poverty and destitution. The movement of itinerant royal officials and their families was coded as a necessary encumbrance undertaken by the individuals affected for the benefit of the monarch and the realm.

This representation of long-distance movement as a burden, as something individuals undertook only out of great necessity or obligation, contrasts with the assumption underlying much of the work done under the “new mobilities paradigm”: that mobility is fundamentally desirable. Thus, for instance, Cresswell’s claim that “mobility is a resource that is differentially accessed,” while essentially fair, rests on the explicit assumption that “[w]e are always trying to get somewhere. No one wants to be stuck or bogged down.”⁹² The notion that immobility is never a choice, but rather the result of lack of freedom or resources, is problematic. While it makes sense when talking about micro-mobilities –movement of the body or even movement within a town or village –, the assumption that every individual has a desire to move long-distance is perhaps too rooted in contemporary western culture.

However, by the same token, the coding of long-distance mobility as a burden, a sacrifice made out of loyalty or forced by misfortune, may be partly responsible for obscuring female instances of staggered mobility in the early modern Atlantic world. In the summary presented to the Council of Indies, the description of Teresa Cecilia’s relocation from Margarita to Caracas as forced upon her by the state of destitution entirely omits the fact that this was her fourth instance of long-distance relocation. This is significant as the clerk writing the summary was well aware of at least her last two resettlements. The witness statements Teresa Cecilia submitted to the Council alongside her petition made it clear that she had arrived in Cumana with her father and that she had moved to Margarita only after her marriage to Riba Herrera.⁹³ Yet, if one read the clerk’s summary alone, one could only guess that Teresa Cecilia was not a native of Margarita because of the references to her father’s career in Spain.

A similar situation is evident, in relation to Elena Juana Bertodano Knepper, in a letter from the Audiencia (high court) of Santo Domingo to the king dated 17 August 1719. The explicit aim of the letter was to complain about Jerónimo del Moral’s travels through the Caribbean, seemingly without having undergone a residencia (end of tenure judicial enquiry) for the time he served as interim accountant of the royal exchequer in Caracas. When del Moral arrived in Santo Domingo “from Cumana, having called at the island of Puerto Rico,” the Audiencia noted that “this individual had been wandering from port to port, without legal justification for it, particularly while his wife and children remain in the city of Caracas.”⁹⁴ The Audiencia’s negative interpretation of del Moral’s mobility contrasts sharply with the argument made by the governor of Santo Domingo – and by del Moral himself – in explaining why he travelled from Caracas to Madrid in 1719.⁹⁵ This suggests that just as those “forced” to move in the royal service saw long-distance mobility as a sacrifice, royal authorities often saw the mobility of those who were not explicitly moving for the benefit of the king or the realm as undesirable.⁹⁶

But more significant for our purposes here is the Audiencia’s reference to Elena Juana and her children as remaining in Caracas while del Moral “wandered” through the Caribbean. The letter is ambiguous as to whether Caracas was Elena Juana’s and del Moral’s place of origin: it makes no reference to the family crossing the Atlantic in 1714 and its description of del Moral’s activities in the Venezuelan capital also fails to indicate with any clarity whether he had travelled there before his appointment or not.⁹⁷ However, by pointing out that del Moral was traveling without his wife and children, the Audiencia made reference to Spanish legislation discouraging married men from leaving their wives and children behind, particularly when travelling from Spain to Spanish America.⁹⁸ This preoccupation with women left behind was manifest in the witness-statements individuals seeking a licence to travel from Cadiz or Seville to Spanish America were required to provide at the Casa de la Contratación.⁹⁹ The same concern lay behind the crown’s insistence that provincial governors should make married men living in their jurisdictions without their wives return to their homes.¹⁰⁰ Implicit in these concerns is an assumption that women stayed behind while men travelled and relocated, which may well reflect an element of social practice,¹⁰¹ but which also helped obscure the experiences of women like the Bertodano-Kneppers, who relocated repeatedly throughout their lives in and outside the company of men.

Embodied practices

Having dealt with both “the fact of physical movement [… and] the representations […] that give it shared meaning,” we now turn to the third entangled aspect of mobility: “the experienced and embodied practice of movement.”¹⁰² The specific ways in which individuals practice and embody mobility are ultimately determined by the power structures within which they exist, that is to say, they are eminently political and experienced differently based on gender, ethnicity, age, class, etc.¹⁰³ Although the sources we have often provide little information and detail about each individual instance of mobility, this section offers some reflections on how the gender, age, marital status, ethnicity and class of the Bertodano-Knepper women affected their movement, which become visible when considering their experiences jointly and longitudinally.

When it comes to understanding how individuals experience movement, the “new mobilities paradigm” has often stressed the difference between “being compelled to move and choosing to move.”¹⁰⁴ In this regard, it would be easy to think that María Juana and her daughters relocated repeatedly, particularly while the latter were young, led by the direction in which Bertodano’s career moved, having no say on when and where they moved. Later on in their lives, instances such as the description of Teresa Cecilia’s relocation from Margarita to Caracas as forced on her by her poverty, would still suggest they had little say in their movement. However, we should remember that representations like those discussed in the previous section often constitute arguments crafted to curry favour with the crown, rather than factual descriptions of cause and motivation.

Thus, it would be inaccurate to assume that the women we are studying were always compelled to move while their menfolk more often chose to do so. This, in many ways, is a false dichotomy and needs to be analysed in more detail. It is easy to assume that men always made the choice to seek or accept an appointment that would see them and their family move homes. However, it is also possible that a decision to move, or not, was made jointly by a couple or a family group.¹⁰⁵ María Juana Knepper y Trippel’s last will and testament, written in Cartagena de Indias shortly before her death in 1727, states that since the earliest days of their marriage it had been her who managed Bertodano’s wages, and that she had done the same for her sons.¹⁰⁶

The practice, at least as far as a wife handling her husband’s income goes, was not uncommon in the early modern Spanish world, particularly in the case of husbands who were frequently, or for prolonged periods, away from the family home.¹⁰⁷ Thus, it is possible that María Juana began managing Bertodano’s income while he was a prisoner of the French following the siege of Luxembourg.¹⁰⁸ For whatever reason, they seem to have continued the practice after they left Flanders, even though during their time in Ainsa Bertodano did not see frequent military action or spend much time away from the fortress of San Bartolome. After the family relocated to Seville, from where Bertodano frequently travelled the relatively short distance to Coria del Rio and where he once again participated in military operations during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), leaving María Juana to manage the family’s resources would again have made sense.¹⁰⁹ Thus, if for over two decades she had managed the family’s finances, it seems reasonable to think that she may have also been involved in other key decisions affecting their future, such as Bertodano’s requesting an appointment to the Indies in 1704 after the crown abolished his post as commander of the militias of Coria.¹¹⁰

María Juana, moreover, was not the only one of the six women whom we know played a significant role in managing the affairs of their respective nuclear families. As discussed earlier, we know that Teresa Cecilia had petitioned the crown for financial support for herself and her young daughters after her first husband died and that she had personally initiated at least some of the bureaucratic procedures. While her petition at the time was fruitless, fourteen years later, in 1729, she received from the Crown an annual grant to be drawn for the rest of her life from the funds of the Casa de la Contratación. The stated purpose of the annuity was to help support her large family and to complement the “small salary” her husband earned as one of the Casa’s judges.¹¹¹ The grant, secured around the time of her return to Spain from Caracas, may have influenced her decision to migrate, and in all likelihood played an important role in allowing the family to settle down in Madrid shortly afterwards. More significantly, because the grant was made explicitly to her, it increased her personal assets and ensured that, should she become a widow again, she would be able to support her children regardless of whether she was living in a tierra extraña or not. Similarly, there is reason to believe Elena Juana had a say in her family’s affairs throughout her marriage to Jerónimo del Moral. After all, in July 1753, her husband – who was bedridden and unable to write – granted her a power of attorney authorising her to write his final will and testament for him. Elena Juana did so on 30 October 1753, shortly after del Moral’s passing.¹¹² Thus, as in the case of their mother, it seems likely that women who were actively involved in managing their families’ affairs would also have had a say in decisions to relocate long-distance.

Similarly, we should not forget that, as recent migration studies have stressed, staggered migrants’ pathways are often contingent or serendipitous, or the individuals who experience ongoing mobility perceive them as such.¹¹³ The movement of itinerant royal officials in the early modern period was frequently propelled by unforeseeable circumstances; accidents and the often unpredictable course of the Spanish bureaucracy meant that even the officials themselves were restricted in the choices they had regarding when and where they moved. There is no doubt, for example, that Bertodano’s decision to travel back to Spain in 1713 to deal with the fine imposed on him by the Council of Indies and to seek a new appointment was not part of his – or his and his wife’s – original plans. Instead, Bertodano had to undertake the expensive and risky trip to revive his career and the family’s finances.¹¹⁴ The decision that María Juana and her children would remain behind in Margarita with Teresa Cecilia and her husband may have been forced on the family by financial constrains or may actually reflect a longer-term strategy, as discussed further in the next section.

Similarly, Jerónimo del Moral and Elena Juana’s decision to return to Spain from Cartagena de Indias in 1730 was also not a choice planned by either; instead, it was forced upon them by the Crown’s decision to suppress del Moral’s office.¹¹⁵ The fact that del Moral sought further appointments to American offices at least twice upon the family’s return to Spain, suggests that their plan had not been to settle back permanently in Madrid.¹¹⁶ Thus, one might ask why they decided for the whole family to leave Cartagena de Indias together in 1730 when, ten years earlier, Elena Juana and their children had stayed behind in Caracas while del Moral travelled to Spain to seek a new office. Could it be that Elena Juana’s experience of that instance of immobility in Caracas made her unwilling to stay behind again in 1730? Thus, it would seem that gender alone did not deny women choice within an established marriage, but rather that decisions to relocate were often forced on the family unit by unexpected events, or taken jointly, drawing on previous experiences and expectations.

By contrast, there is little doubt that age, particularly in relation to legal minority which extended until a child’s marriage or their 25th birthday,¹¹⁷ significantly constrained their say on whether to move or not. It is significant that with only one exception, all of María Juana’s children, as long as they remained single and under the age of 25, moved only and always when their parents relocated. The one exception, as we saw before, was Josefa Escolástica who, only months old at the time, was left behind in Seville while her parents and siblings sailed for Cumana in 1706. In most cases, however, it was marriage that led the Bertodano-Knepper children to migrate independently from their parents for the first time. It is unclear, however, how much say they would have had, particularly the daughters, either in the marriage itself or in their subsequent relocation. Thus, Elena Juana’s marriage to Jerónimo del Moral in 1705 led to her relocation from Seville to Madrid, although this could almost be read as an instance of immobility considering her parents and siblings simultaneous moved across the Atlantic. The timing of the marriage, about a year after Bertodano had secured his appointment to Cumana and while he was making arrangements for leaving Seville, suggests the union may have been arranged as a strategy to ensure the family retained links to Spain and, particularly, to the court in Madrid.¹¹⁸

Similarly, Teresa Cecilia’s first marriage involved relocation from Cumana to La Asuncion; Petronila Paula’s marriage saw her move from San Juan to Santo Domingo; and Josefa Escolástica’s first marriage involved her leaving Cartagena de Indias for Cadiz. Moreover, in all three cases resettlement followed seemingly sudden marriages to men that were essentially strangers and who were significantly older than their brides. Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera and Juan López de Morla were much closer in age to Bertodano than they were to Teresa Cecilia and Petronila Paula respectively, and in neither case is there evidence to suggest the men had been close acquaintances or friends of the family before their weddings.¹¹⁹ We do not know what the age difference between Josefa Escolástica and Segismundo Medrano might have been, but by all indications, their marriage also took place without much previous interaction and involved, perhaps, the most drastic instance of relocation far from the parental home of any of the Bertodano-Knepper children.¹²⁰

Although canon law required the consent of both parties before a marriage took place and marriages in early modern Hispanic society were normally negotiated, taking into account the child’s prefernces,¹²¹ it seems likely that in these cases, the young brides would have accepted, rather than chosen, their nuptials and subsequent relocations. These circumstances contrast significantly with those under which some of the other marriages of the six women took place. In the case of the parents, for instance, Bertodano had been in Luxemburg City for about a year before his marriage to María Juana, so it is at least possible that the couple had met and courted before their weeding took place;¹²² moreover, the age difference between the two was barely six years and they did not leave Luxemburg until the city fell and Bertodano was taken prisoner a year later.¹²³ Teresa Cecilia and her second husband, Álvarez de Abreu, were also close in age, had known each other for a little over a year before their wedding, and after the marriage they continued to live in the same city as her parents and sisters.¹²⁴ Additionally, as a widow, Teresa Cecilia would have had much more of a say as to whether to remarry or not and, according to Álvarez de Abreu, the marriage had been agreed between him and his bride-to-be without her father being involved at all.¹²⁵

The death of a husband could also constitute a sudden, unexpected driver for mobility. However, the decision to actually move – as when a recently-widowed Teresa Cecilia relocated from Margarita to Caracas in 1715 –, or not to do so – as when Josefa Escolástica’s first husband died and she stayed in Cadiz and eventually married for a second time – could, to an extent, be a fully “free” choice or one compelled by economic necessity, depending, amongst other things, on the financial situation the widow was left in and the support networks she could access. Although widows enjoyed certain protections under Spanish law, women living on their own, especially if they had children, were very much at risk of falling into poverty.¹²⁶ It is in this light that we should interpret Teresa Cecilia’s decision in 1715 to leave Cumana with her mother and siblings and – at her father’s request – re-join the parental home in Caracas.¹²⁷

Thus, the reasons why these women relocated, and the say they had in their movement, varied. They were influenced by their gender, age, and family relations, but their reasons to move were more complex than simply being forced to do so alongside men who chose to. In this context, we might understand “compelled,” as opposed to chosen, movement or immobility as not simply determined by power relations and financial considerations, but also by affective connections or perceived obligations. More significantly, perhaps, we should think free and compelled movement as the extremes of a continuum, rather than as two only options when analysing an individual’s reasons to move.

At the same time, gender, class, and ethnicity influenced directly how the six Bertodano-Knepper women moved across the Spanish Atlantic world. As was often the case for Spanish women,¹²⁸ the six of them first crossed the Atlantic as part of a family group led by their father. Moreover, in all instances in which we know exactly when and how they travelled, not just when crossing the Atlantic, they did so in the company of a male relative or a male agent appointed for that purpose. Thus, when María Juana, Teresa Cecilia and their children travelled from La Asuncion to Caracas, they did so in the company of Vega Arredondo, whom Bertodano had despatched specifically for the purpose of escorting his family to join him.¹²⁹ Similarly, Elena Juana – and her two young daughters – travelled from Spain to Caracas in the company of both her father and husband. The latter accompanied her and her children from Caracas to Cartagena de Indias and from there back to Spain. Josefa Escolastica, who had remained in Seville when the family first travelled to Cumana, only crossed the Atlantic when her father returned to Spain; she then travelled in his company from Caracas to Puerto Rico and from there to Cartagena de Indias, before travelling with her first husband, Segismundo Medrano, from the New Granadan port to Cadiz. The one apparent exception would be Teresa Cecilia’s return journey from Caracas to Spain around 1729. However, the dates allow for her voyage to have coincided with her younger brother and his first wife’s relocation from Cartagena de Indias to Cadiz. In this regard, their experience – no doubt a result of the perceived vulnerability of women at sea – contrasts significantly with the experience of male members of the family who often travelled on their own, both within Spanish America and across the Atlantic.

Their gender and class also help explain why, as far as we can tell, no Spanish authority sought to prevent or challenge their movement at any point. On departing from Spain, the fact that they were the family of newly appointed provincial governor and a high-ranking military officer was enough for them to be allowed to travel without having to provide evidence of their marital status or their pure Christian ancestry, as servants and would-be-migrants from lower social classes were invariably required to do.¹³⁰ Servants constituted the single largest category of people legally emigrating from Spain to Spanish America in the early eighteenth century,¹³¹ thus providing evidence of one’s eligibility to embark across the Atlantic would have been an element of the average transatlantic migrant’s experience that the Bertodano-Kneppers were exempt from on account of their father’s status and calidad. While the cost of providing these informaciones seems to have been relatively accessible,¹³² the need to provide them constituted an additional burden on would-be-travellers and could, on occasion, result in a person being denied a licence.¹³³

The Bertodano-Knepper’s wealth and status would also have eased the family’s movement at other points in their staggered mobility. During the navigation between Spain and South America, given Bertodano’s position as a provincial governor, the whole family would have undoubtedly travelled in a cabin and eaten their meals at the captain’s table, rather than sleeping on deck and eating with the crew.¹³⁴ Similarly, when Jerónimo del Moral received his promotion from Caracas to Cartagena de Indias, he was in a position to lease a ship to transport his wife and nine children to their next posting.¹³⁵ While the trip would not have been easy, as the winds and currents made the voyage East from Caracas particularly slow and difficult, it would still have been much easier to undertake by sea than by land, particularly including several young children. As del Moral himself admitted, leasing a ship also meant the family did not have to wait until someone else decided to sail between both ports. Thus, their social status, derived in part from their menfolk’s role in the Spanish imperial administration and from the financial resources the family could draw on, played an important role in removing obstacles and facilitating their movement compared to those of other Spaniards.

The experiences of mobility of the Bertodano-Kneppers were also marked by their ethnicity. The majority of women crossing the Atlantic in the early eighteenth century would have done so in bondage. Enslaved African women, although fewer in number than enslaved men, significantly outnumbered European women arriving in the Americas.¹³⁶ The conditions of travel experienced by the Bertodano-Kneppers would have been incomparably better than the gruesome middle passage experienced by enslaved men and women from Africa.¹³⁷ For the latter, even movement as part of a Spanish household would have been significantly different as a result of their ethnicity and legal status.

We know, for example, that over the years the Bertodano-Kneppers owned a number of enslaved Africans who were forced to move, or not, at different points in time regardless of what they, and sometimes even what their enslavers, would have preferred to do. For example, while in Caracas, Bertodano’s household included eight enslaved individuals.¹³⁸ Four of them were adults: Antonio and María were a married couple; Francisco had been born in Africa; and Esteban had died before August 1716. A further four were young children: Jerónimo, aged four, had had a twin brother who died in the spring of 1716; Pedro José was five or six; and Elena was seven.¹³⁹ Except for Francisco’s, their place of origin is unknown, but considering the Bertodano-Kneppers had only been in Caracas for some eighteen months it would not be surprising if their enslaved servants had been purchased in Cumana or Margarita and had arrived in the Venezuelan capital from La Asuncion with the rest of the household. None of them, however, travelled with their enslavers to Puerto Rico as the six who were still alive in the late summer of 1716 were seized, with the rest of Bertodano’s property, as part of the investigation into the role he played in obstructing the trade of the Honduras Company.¹⁴⁰ Thus, enslaved men and women’s status as chattel could clearly determine or restrict their movement beyond their own and even their enslaver’s will. Their experience contrasts significantly with the ways in which the Bertodano-Knepper women were able to move across the Spanish Atlantic because of their white and free status.

Finally, without personal correspondence or memoires, it is practically impossible to know how these women “felt” about their mobility or what emotions it generated.¹⁴¹ There are instances, however, in which we can make educated inferences. For instance, it would not be difficult to imagine the shock eight-years-old Josefa Escolástica must have felt in 1714 when her father, by then an old man in his fifties, whom she had never met before, suddenly showed up in Seville and told her he was taking her across the Atlantic to live in Caracas. Of course, whether the shock led to excitement and hope or anxiety and pain is impossible to know. Similarly, it seems plausible that for Teresa Cecilia, relocating from Seville to Madrid in 1731 was a bittersweet experience. Upon their arrival in Spain from Caracas around 1729, Teresa Cecilia’s two daughters from her first marriage, Jerónima and Manuela de la Riba Herrera, had professed as nuns in a Cistercian convent in Seville (and in doing so renounced their share of their mother’s inheritance).¹⁴²

Given its timing, the decision may be interpreted as a move to consolidate resources and settle both young women, who were by then in their late teens, at a point in time when their stepfather’s finances might not have been best suited to find them appropriate husbands in Spain.¹⁴³ But it also meant both of them stayed behind when their mother, stepfather and stepsiblings relocated to Madrid. Eight years later, however, both sisters transferred from Seville to a convent in Madrid. Álvarez de Abreu justified the request for his stepdaughters’ relocation on the grounds that the climate in Seville was detrimental to their health. However, it is possible that the decision to have them move – which must have been significantly expensive as it required, amongst other things, a papal dispensation –, was driven by their mother’s desire to be closer to them once settled at court and when the family’s fortunes were on better footing.¹⁴⁴

Thus, the paucity of documentation available puts certain limits on our ability to access the embodied practice of these women’s mobility. By looking at their experiences collectively and longitudinally, however, we are able to gain some insight as to how their gender, age, marital status, class and ethnicity affected their ability to choose whether to move or not, the obstacles they encountered when moving, and the emotions that movement might have generated.

Family strategies and imperial governance

Adopting a collective and longitudinal perspective also allows us to gain a better understanding of the socially connected dimension of these women’s mobility, of how it contributed to family strategies, to the careers of their menfolk and to the development of networks that articulated the early modern Spanish world. When looking together at the movement of these six women over time, we are able to see how their mobility was simultaneously “determined by existing familial and social connections,” and the catalyst for the creation of “‘new’ networks of reciprocity and relationality.”¹⁴⁵ Three examples illustrate this particularly well: the cross-Caribbean network created through the marriages and relocations of all five of María Juana’s daughters; the role attributed to María Juana herself in illicit trade in Puerto Rico and Cartagena de Indias, and the impact it had on Bertodano’s career; and the role played by Elena Juana, Teresa Cecilia, and María Josefa in hiding their father’s assets from being seized in Caracas in 1716, thus protecting the family’s interests.

Looked at together, the marriages of the Bertodano-Knepper sisters celebrated while their father served in the Caribbean seem to suggest a family strategy articulated around the creation of a well-anchored, commercial, and political network. Teresa Cecilia’s marriage to Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera, while her father was governor of Cumana, gave the family access to ships operating out of the island of Margarita, an almost unavoidable calling port on the way in and out of Cumana and the gulf of Araya.¹⁴⁶ Moreover, Riba Herrera was a close associate of the incumbent governor of Margarita and probably still had links to Trinidad and Guyana, where he had served and traded in the past.¹⁴⁷ Similarly, María Josefa’s marriage to Vega Arredondo created strong links with various parts of the province of Venezuela, particularly Caracas, Cumana and Barquisimeto, where he had well-established personal and patronage connections.¹⁴⁸

Petronila Paula’s marriage to López de Morla extended the family’s reach from Caracas and Puerto Rico to Santo Domingo, where he retained strong political and social bonds. The marriage also granted them access to a small flotilla of ships capable of navigating between the Antilles, which López de Morla had often used for trading and privateering, and ensured that, after Bertodano’s tenure in San Juan came to an end, the family still retained good links to the islands.¹⁴⁹ By providing access to vessels capable of sailing across the Atlantic, and a direct link to Cadiz, Josefa Escolástica’s marriage to Segismundo Medrano would have been the capstone of a family network that, at that point in time, connected at least Caracas, Santo Domingo and Cartagena de Indias.¹⁵⁰

It can be no accident that the profiles and careers of Riba Herrera, Vega Arredondo and López de Morla bore strong similarities to each other: they had all served in various parts of the Spanish circum-Caribbean, had travelled frequently while on the royal service, while in all likelihood engaging in commercial activities alongside their official business. Moreover, whether born in the Americas or in Spain, all three men had well established links with more than one province in the region. Medrano seems to be a little different, in that he was a naval officer based in Cadiz, but his involvement with the Carrera de Indias – sanctioned trade between Spain and Spanish America – would have nonetheless provided good opportunities for carrying out commercial activities on the side; and while he did not own any vessels that we know of, his command of royal ships, particularly avisos – ships sailing on their own and transporting correspondence –, was probably even more valuable.

We know that, at least occasionally, Bertodano had engaged in cacao trade across the Caribbean since his tenure in Cumana, and it is likely that the network built through his daughters’ marriages and relocations allowed for trade on a greater scale.¹⁵¹ Equally significantly, we know the network was used for political purposes and that the connections built could be used to facilitate travel and help advance the careers of its members. The letter from the Audiencia of Santo Domingo to the king cited earlier, in which the justices complained about Jerónimo del Moral’s “wanderings” through the Caribbean, offers us a glimpse of how the network created by the Bertodano-Kneppers worked. We know del Moral’s voyage from Caracas to Spain resulted in his appointment as treasurer of the Royal Exchequer in the Venezuelan province. The Audiencia’s complaint, however, sheds light on his itinerary and on the political levers he was able to pull to aid his purpose. Del Moral left Caracas shortly after Vega Arredondo had returned from Cumana and taken back the office of accountant of the Royal Exchequer, which his brother-in-law had served in his absence.¹⁵² At that same time, Álvarez de Abreu’s influence in the province was rising through his collaboration with the viceroy of New Granada.¹⁵³

The Audiencia’s letter, however, shows del Moral’s first calling port upon leaving Caracas was Cumana, which represented a detour if his destination was the Iberian Peninsula, but made sense from a commercial and in some ways a political perspective. As a province, Cumana was entirely independent of Caracas, although trade and fiscal concerns had created strong bonds between both territories. Since the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada, Cumana had become politically subordinate to Santa Fe, instead of Santo Domingo, and its ties to Caracas had strengthened as much of the communication from the viceregal capital went through the latter city. There was, moreover, a strong link between the family and Cumana, not only because of the time Bertodano had served as its provincial governor, but because of the interests that Vega Arredondo retained in the city, which could have only been strengthened during his recent sojourn to take the residencia of Bertodano’s successor.¹⁵⁴

From Cumana, del Moral sailed for Puerto Rico, where Bertodano was still serving as provincial governor. Maritime connections between Cumana and Puerto Rico were not infrequent and they often involved a stop at Margarita, as Bertodano had learned during his tenure in the former province. Moreover, although there was no political or fiscal connection between the two, there was an important ecclesiastical bond linking both provinces: Cumana fell under the jurisdiction of the bishop of San Juan in Puerto Rico. Having received a licence to travel to Santo Domingo from his father-in-law, del Moral proceeded from Puerto Rico to Hispaniola, where the Audiencia became wary of his travelling from port to port seemingly without a justifiable motive.¹⁵⁵

Although the Audiencia then ordered the governor of Santo Domingo to detain del Moral in the city, the governor granted him further licence to leave for Spain, provably through López de Morla’s influence.¹⁵⁶ Having lost its jurisdiction over the affairs of Caracas with the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada, the Audiencia had intended to delay del Moral’s departure while it informed its counterpart in Santa Fe of its misgivings about the former acting accountant of Caracas. But the informal political network of the Bertodano-Kneppers seems to have allowed him to outmanoeuvre the Audiencia.

Thus, del Moral was able to benefit from political protection through the network created by the marriages of the Bertodano-Kneppers, eventually reaching Madrid and securing a further appointment to Caracas.¹⁵⁷ In this light, it is easy to see the marriage and settlement patterns of the Bertodano-Knepper sisters as the result of a strategy to articulate a family network that linked multiple ports in the Caribbean, although this probably overplays the extent to which any such network is fully the result of calculated decisions. More significantly, perhaps, whether created deliberately or not, the network they became part of – linking Caracas to Cumana, Margarita, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo and Cartagena de Indias – highlights the informal bonds that tied together the Spanish world beyond and across the official channels of royal, ecclesiastical and fiscal administration.

It is perhaps within the context of this same network that we should interpret the accusations of involvement in illicit trade made against Bertodano and María Juana Knepper in Puerto Rico and Cartagena de Indias. In 1723, authorities in Madrid received almost at the same time Bertodano’s residencia as governor of Puerto Rico and some worrying reports from Cartagena de Indias. The judge who led the enquiry into Bertodano’s tenure in Puerto Rico found reason to suspect that Bertodano had been actively engaged in illicit trade. The ninth charge brought against him accused Bertodano of tolerating the trade of cattle and pork from the interior of the island for foreign goods and of engaging in the sale of the latter inside San Juan through several accomplices.

The accusations also included María Juana: by some accounts, her name was used to legitimise the sale of foreign textiles by Bertodano’s agents, claiming they were her licit property; by others, she was directly involved in the operation, instructing her husband’s associates what to buy and what price to sell it for.¹⁵⁸ Around the same time as the record of Bertodano’s residencia trial from Puerto Rico reached Madrid, Andrés de Pez, the president of the Council of the Indies and secretary of state for American affairs, received reports from merchants recently returned to Cadiz from Cartagena de Indias claiming that María Juana and Bertodano had continued to engage in illicit activities in their new posting. Allegedly, María Juana had been acting as an intermediary between her husband and foreign merchants, particularly British and Dutch ships whose captains were able to purchase the governor’s acquiescence to unload illicit goods through his wife.¹⁵⁹

As is often the case with accusations of involvement in illicit trade, there is no way to prove whether Bertodano and Knepper were guilty. But there is plenty of reason to believe they were. Bertodano had first been accused of tolerating and profiting from illicit trade shortly after the start of his tenure in Cumana.¹⁶⁰ During his time in Caracas, at least one person had accused Teresa Cecilia’s second husband, Álvarez de Abreu, of knowingly allowing his brother and associates to offload contraband goods from New Spain and the Canary Islands into the city with the governor’s connivance.¹⁶¹ Thus, it is not surprising that the judge in Bertodano’s residencia trial in Puerto Rico should suspect both the governor and his wife of participating in illicit trade, or that the couple should have been accused of engaging in the same practices in Cartagena de Indias.

In the latter port, moreover, there are other indications that the family remained strongly linked to contraband trade even after Bertodano’s tenure as governor came to an end: María Juana’s will, written shortly before her passing, was witnessed by two members of the Nárvaez y Berrio family, relatives of the Conde de Santa Cruz de la Torre, an influential member of Cartagena’s elite, rumoured to control an important network distributing foreign contraband from the port to the New Granadan interior.¹⁶² Only months after María Juana’s passing, her eldest son would marry a niece of Santa Cruz de la Torre.¹⁶³

In the end, although the accusations made against María Juana in Cartagena de Indias fit well with the couple’s track record and with the network built through their daughters’ marriages, the case against her fell apart: of the two key local witnesses, one died before a formal enquiry was launched and the other took refuge in a monastery to avoid ratifying his statement.¹⁶⁴ By then, however, the damage had been done. Whatever its material benefits may have been, María Juana’s alleged involvement in foreign illicit trade ultimately hindered more than helped Bertodano’s professional career in the royal service. The accusations made against the couple in Puerto Rico and Cartagena de Indias, although never legally proven, were part of the justification used by the Council of Indies to remove him from office in 1724, effectively ending his career as a soldier and provincial governor.¹⁶⁵

If, as it seems likely, María Juana was involved in illicit trade, mediating between foreign merchants and her husband, perhaps facilitating the funnelling of British and Dutch goods through the network articulated by her daughters’ marriages, she would have simply been engaged in an activity that was endemic to the region and, by some accounts, a lifeblood for some of the more isolated places in northern South America and the Caribbean.¹⁶⁶ Illicit inter-imperial trade bound the circum-Caribbean region together well across the territories claimed by different European powers. The activities and connections built by the Bertodano-Knepper women suggest that we need to further stress the role women played in these activities.

Finally, when Bertodano’s assets were seized in Caracas in 1716 as part of the investigation into his role in obstructing the trade of the Honduras Company, his daughters and their husbands played a key role in protecting his property. Teresa Cecilia claimed ownership of a silver tea service Bertodano used regularly in his role as interim governor. The set, it was argued, had actually belonged to Riba Herrera and constituted part of his daughters’ inheritance; Teresa Cecilia allegedly had lent it to her father, as she had no immediate use for it.¹⁶⁷ Whether the claim was true or not, it prevented the most valuable item in Bertodano’s household from being seized.

Similarly, when Bertodano’s property was first inventoried, the agents of the Honduras Company noticed there were no enslaved persons listed, despite the governor’s household including, as we have seen before, eight of them. Eventually, further investigations resulted in Bertodano claiming that one of his enslaved servants had recently died, two more had been given as part of María Josefa’s dowry upon her marriage to Vega Arredondo, a further bondsperson had been given as a present to Elena Juana and Jerónimo del Moral to help them settle in Caracas, and one more allegedly belonged to the governor’s eldest son, who was barely a teenager at the time.¹⁶⁸ The judge who had ordered Bertodano’s property seized, was unconvinced by the claims and suspected that all the enslaved individuals, who until recently had served in Bertodano’s house, were actually his property. However, claiming he did not have time to investigate the matter further, he delegated the enquiry into the former governor’s assets while continuing his work investigating the obstacles faced by the Company.¹⁶⁹

Whether the claims that María Josefa’s marriage and Elena Juana’s relocation from Madrid to Caracas had led to a redistribution of the family’s assets were true or not, Bertodano’s daughters played a key role in an attempt to protect their father’s – or the family’s – property from seizure. Under Spanish law, women, even when married, were entitled to own property and their dowries, even if administered by their husbands, enjoyed special legal protection.¹⁷⁰ Bertodano’s sons-in-law also played a key role in protecting those resources. The person appointed to further investigate whether Bertodano had hidden any other assets was Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu, whose marriage to Teresa Cecilia Bertodano Knepper had not yet been made public.¹⁷¹ Álvarez de Abreu conducted a perfunctory investigation that, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to find any other concealed property.¹⁷²

The claim that most of the surviving bondspersons belonged to Bertodano’s children was rejected, and the enslaved men, women and children were seized. However, at the request of Jerónimo del Moral, who acted as Bertodano’s agent, they were handed over, along with the rest of his possessions, to Vega Arredondo who, as accountant of the Royal Exchequer, would administer them while the Council of the Indies reviewed the case.¹⁷³ Thus, regardless of whether the silver tea set and the enslaved Africans were Bertodano’s property or his daughter’s, the claim that they were the latter, in combination with the political manoeuvring amongst Bertodano’s sons-in-law, prevented some of the family’s assets from being confiscated while ensuring the rest were properly looked after by a relative who shared the owner’s financial interests rather than by a stranger appointed by the local authorities.

Together, these episodes indicate the six Bertodano-Knepper women, through their repeated relocations across the Spanish world, played significant and ongoing roles in furthering their family interests, protecting their property, and building key commercial and political networks. They also show that not all their efforts were successful and that their activities could have unforeseen, detrimental effects. This intricate landscape, however, only becomes evident when we look at the trajectories and activities of the six women jointly. Because of the paucity of archival evidence, a focus on a single woman, a single place, or on the politics of a single instance of mobility between two points, would not allow us to grasp the significance of their roles in their entirety.

Conclusions

Adopting a collective and longitudinal approach to these women’s lives allows us to reconstruct trajectories of staggered mobility that would have been invisible if we focused simply on instances of movement between two places. Moreover, by looking collectively at the trajectories of these women, we can see their movement as part of the same constellation of mobility within which the lives of itinerant royal officials developed. Although, at least partly due to their gender, their experiences are obscured in the archive, we can still reconstruct some of the embodied practices that characterised their movement across the Spanish world and which were influenced by their gender, age, marital status, class and ethnicity. By looking simultaneously at several life trajectories, we are able to catch glimpses of how these women experienced their mobility, recognising both the power relations within which they lived, but also the contingent, unpredictable and multidirectional nature of their staggered relocations.

By considering their life-trajectories as a whole, thus moving away from the emphasis historians of early modern Atlantic migration have put on the transatlantic voyage, we are also able to see the ways in which staggered female mobility was crucial to the experiences and strategies of their menfolk and, simultaneously, to the articulation of the early modern Atlantic world. Alison Games argued two decades ago, that instances of “repeat migration” – what I have called staggered mobility – amongst English settlers in the Atlantic world created “families that were themselves Atlantic in interest and experience.”¹⁷⁴ The networks and circulation of members of these families came to articulate the British Atlantic, making it “impossible for any part of the colonial world to evolve in isolation.”¹⁷⁵ Until very recently, historians of the Spanish Atlantic have paid much less attention to the lives, experiences, networks and movements that linked together different parts of the Spanish world in much the same way. The mobile lives and experiences of María Juana Knepper y Trippel and her five daughters demonstrate that staggered mobility was an important articulating and integrating mechanism in the Spanish Atlantic of the early eighteenth century.

More significantly, perhaps, they demonstrate that women played key roles in this process. Imperial administrators were a more significant presence in the Spanish American territories than elsewhere in the Atlantic. And while we do not yet fully understand the dynamics and implications of their staggered mobility, the fact that their careers, particularly in the eighteenth century, often saw them serve in multiple sites of empire is well documented.¹⁷⁶ The experience of Bertodano’s family, however, is a salutary reminder that in understanding how these men moved we should not lose sight of the fact that said movement rarely happened alone. Instead, it was always connected to the movement and immobility of others whose experiences may be more difficult to piece together but are no less significant in understanding how the Spanish Atlantic was articulated.

Finally, there is no doubt that the way in which the Bertodano-Kneppers moved across the Spanish world – the extent to which they exercised choice, the conditions under which they moved, the obstacles (or lack thereof) they faced, and the emotions that accompanied their movement – were rooted in their privileged position and reflected the status and profession of their menfolk. In this sense, theirs were not the experiences of the typical female migrant moving across the Atlantic world. But recognising the role women like them played in the construction and integration of the Spanish empire should invite us to consider other female life-trajectories from a similar perspective: as a whole, identifying, in as much as the archive allows us to, their experiences of staggered mobility as a way of furthering our understanding of the Atlantic world.

Acknowledgements

This article presents part of the results of the AHRC-funded project “Trajectories of Reform in the Spanish World: Careering, Networks and Empire under the Early Bourbons (1700–1759)”; thanks are due to the AHRC and the University of Manchester for their support. I am particularly grateful for the comments and suggestions made by Pablo Hernández Sau on many of the ideas that went into this piece and an early draft of the text. Thanks are due also for the feedback received on a previous version of this material presented at the 2021 Society for Latin American Studies Virtual Conference as part of a panel on “Experiences of Mobility in Bourbon Spanish America.” The ideas, discussions and suggestions exchanged during the international symposium “‘Ongoing’ Mobilities in the Early Modern World: Sojourners, Mobile Settlers, Itinerants, Staggered Migrants and Other Lives on the Go” influenced much of what this piece tries to do. I am also very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Atlantic Studies whose insightful comments were extremely helpful. All remaining shortcomings are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council under Grant AH/S012192/1.

Notes on contributors

Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso

Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso is a political historian of Early Modern Spanish America and the wider Spanish world, particularly interested in the first half of the eighteenth century. His first monograph, The Spanish Monarchy and the Creation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717–1739) (Brill, 2016), explores the Trans-Atlantic dynamics behind the most salient reform introduced by the early Bourbons in Spanish America. It stresses the importance of thinking reform in the context of the changing balance of power in Spain, the geopolitical situation at the time, and the hierarchical and asymmetrical nature of interactions across the empire. Frank is the PI in the AHRC-funded project (AH/S012192/1), “Trajectories of Reform in the Spanish World: Careering, Networks and Empire under the Early Bourbons (1700–1759).”

Notes

1 Ortega-del-Cerro, “Trayectorias familiares,” 55–58, despite some factual inaccuracies, offers a useful overview of the careers of the men in the Bertodano family and their collective social mobility.

2 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 17–31.

3 Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar, “Mobile Transitions,” 203–217; Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories.

4 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 17.

5 Ibid., 19.

6 Ibid.

7 A notable exception in Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas.”

8 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 19.

9 Ibid., 18.

10 Ibid., 18–19.

11 Ibid., 17.

12 Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, 2.

13 Ibid., 3.

14 Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar, “Mobile Transitions,” 212.

15 Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, 17, 20.

16 Games, Migration, refers to these instances of mobility as “repeat or return migration.” However, these terms minimise the importance of such instances of relocation subordinating them to the initial, transatlantic migration. Because the latter is at the heart of Games’ argument, she seems to imply that subsequent instances of movement are simply a continuation or reversal of the initial voyage. Both Games’ “repeat” and my “staggered” migration refer to something fundamentally different from “chain” migration. The latter refers to the phenomenon by which an immigrant, once established in a new place, attracts other individuals from the same place of origin to follow their example and emigrate. Staggered migration refers to the pattern followed by a single individual (or a group) who moves from one place to another interspersed with significant periods of residence in each locale. On the meaning and history of chain migration, see, Yu, Chain Migration Explained; for the existence and importance of chain migration in the early modern Atlantic, see, amongst others, Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 22.

17 See, for instance, Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations; Poska, An Ocean Apart.

18 See, amongst others, Vicente, Clothing the Spanish Empire; Romney, New Netherland Connections.

19 See, for example, Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires.

20 See, for instance, Poska, “From Peasants to Slave Owners.” Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas” deals with “return migration and re-emigration” in just over three pages (48–51), focusing almost exclusively on women who returned from Spanish America to Spain; the movement of immigrant women within Spanish America is only discussed as part of the journey towards their originally intended destination (116–127).

21 For examples of the “Colonial Lives” approach to women in the nineteenth-century British Empire, see, McLeish, “Sunshine and Sorrows” and Thomas “Mary Curzon.”

22 Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 20–21, 57–62.

23 Macías Domínguez, La llamada del Nuevo Mundo, 66–67.

24 Ibid., 23–24. These calculations exclude servants as Macías Domínguez does not offer a breakdown of this group by gender (35–38).

25 Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 73–91.

26 Although rarely analysed systematically, male experiences of staggered mobility have long been acknowledged and recorded in the historiography, starting with the lives of Spanish conquistadors. See, for an early example, Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca, particularly 22–26 and 44–52, 54–64.

27 See, for instance, the case of Bathsua Scott, as analysed by Games, Migration, 200–201; or the well-known story of Catalina de Erauso, recently revisited by Pérez-Villanueva, The Life of Catalina de Erauso. Significantly, these experiences were not limited to white European women, as demonstrated by, for example, the case of Catalina Pipil, an indigenous woman studied by van Deusen, Global Indios, 14–16, 71, 134; Paula de Eguiluz, an enslaved woman from Santo Domingo, as studied amongst others, by McKnight, “Performing Double-Edged Stories”; or Mariana Josefa de Guzmán, born in Constantinople, enslaved near Belgrade, and sold in Italy, Cadiz and Tenerife before being taken to Caracas, as seen in witness statement by Mariana Josefa de Guzmán, Caracas, 7 October 1716. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter AGI), Escribanía 693A, Pieza 4, ff. 73–75.

28 “Mat. filia advocati Knepper,” Luxembourg, 13 September 1683. Archives Ville de Luxembourg, LU – Ville de Luxembourg, I – Moyen Age–Tempsmodernes, 32 – Etat Civil: Paroisses, Garnison, 13 – St Nicolas: Naissances, Mariages, Décès 1674–1714, f. 282. María Juana is undoubtedly the Hispanised version of her name. Unfortunately, we do not know what name she went by in Luxembourg as all the sources from her hometown are either in Latin or have been translated into Spanish. Her marriage record, written in Latin, refers to her as “Maria Joanna.”

29 Baptism record for Elena de Bertodano i Knepper, Brussels, 25 June 1686. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (hereafter AHN), Órdenes Militares (hereafter OM), Religiosas-Calatrava, Exp. 19, Doc. 19.

30 Service record of sargento mayor Alberto Bertodano, Madrid, 21 June 1704. AGI, Indiferente, 136, N.170.

31 Ibid.

32 Baptism record for Teresa Cecilia Bertodano y Knepper, Ainsa, 23 November 1961. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 20, f. 12r.

33 See the source in note 30.

34 Bertodano to Manuel de Aperregui, Seville, 30 September 1704. AGI, Indiferente, 136, N.170; Pablo Ramírez to Casa de la Contratación, Seville, ca. 19 February 1706. AGI, Contratación, 5462, N.21; Baptism record for Carlos Alberto Bertodano, Seville, 23 January 1705. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072, ff. 92–93r; Baptism record for Josefa Escolástica Bertodano, Seville, 15 February 1706. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736, ff. 58v–59r.

35 Council of the Indies to king, Madrid, 11 September 1704. AGI, Santo Domingo, 585.

36 Velación record for Jerónimo del Moral and Elena Bertodano, Madrid, 14 June 1706. AHN, OM, Religiosas-Calatrava, Exp. 19, Doc. 14.

37 Baptism record for Josefa Escolástica Bertodano, Seville, 15 February 1706. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736, ff. 58v–59r; Pablo Ramírez to Casa de la Contratación, Seville, ca 19 February 1706. AGI, Contratación, 5462, N.21; Alberto Bertodano to Casa de la Contratación, Seville, 17 September 1714. AGI, Contratación, 5468, N.1, R.27.

38 Witness statement of Domingo de Goyri y Cadalzo, Caracas, 13 September 1715. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618; Witness statement of Juan de Vega Arredondo, Caracas, 14 September 1715. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

39 On the fine, see Juan Ortiz de Bracamonte to Félix de la Cruz Ahedo, Madrid, 8 January 1711. AGI, Santo Domingo, 597; on the salary of the governor of Cumana, see Eissa-Barroso, “Las capitanías generales,” 137.

40 Bertodano to king, [Madrid], [May 1714]. AGI, Santo Domingo, 682; Witness statement of Juan de Vega Arredondo, Caracas, 14 September 1715. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618; “Autos y diligencias,” Caracas, 17 August 1716. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, ff. 56–59.

41 Licence for Bertodano and his family to sail from Cadiz to Caracas, Seville, 17 September 1714. AGI, Contratación, 5468, N. 1, R.27.

42 See the sources in note 38.

43 Velación record for Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu and Teresa Cecilia Bertodano, Caracas, 9 September 1716, in Venezuela, registros parroquiales y diocesanos.

44 On Álvarez de Abreu’s career, see Viera y Clavijo, Noticias de la historia, IV, 518 onwards; on his trip to Caracas, see Borges, Alvarez Abreu y su extraordinaria misión en Indias.

45 Andrés Alonso Gil to king, Caracas, 29 May 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 724.

46 Service record of Juan Vega Arredondo, Madrid, 3 August 1726. AGI, Indiferente, 143, N.38; Licence for Vega Arredondo to travel from Cadiz to Cumana, Seville, 23 October 1714. AGI, Contratación, 5468, N.1, R.13; Witness statement of Juan de Vega Arredondo, Caracas, 14 September 1715. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

47 Jerónimo del Moral to Cobián y Valdés, [Caracas], [23 October 1716]. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 78–79.

48 Antonio José Álavarez de Abreu to king, Caracas, 5 November 1721. AGI, Santo Domingo, 698.

49 María Juana Knepper’s last will and testament, Caratagena de Indias, 17 February 1727. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072, “Instrumento fehaciente No. 5.”

50 Antonio Paris Negro to Francisco Danio Granados, San Juan, 8 February 1721. AGI, Escribanía, 129A, “Pieza No. 1,” ff. 80r-81r.

51 Alejo Antonio Gutiérrez de Rubalcava and Josefa Escolástica Bertodano’s marriage record, Cadiz, 7 August 1723. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736, ff. 29v-30r; Crespo Solana, La Casa de Contratación 197, n.179. Medrano sailed from Cadiz for Cartagena de Indias in October 1720.

52 Alejo Antonio Gutiérrez de Rubalcava and Josefa Escolástica Bertodano’s marriage record, Cadiz, 7 August 1723. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736, ff. 29v-30r.

53 Baptism record for Joaquín Antonio Gutiérrez de Rubalcava y Bertodano, Cadiz, 28 September 1729. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736, ff. 29r-v.

54 María Juana Knepper’s last will and testament, Caratagena de Indias, 17 February 1727. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072, “Instrumento fehaciente No. 5.”

55 José Patiño to Andrés de Pez, Cadiz, 14 April 1722. AGI, Santa Fe, 374.

56 See the addendum to the source in note 54.

57 Carlos Alberto Bertodano y Knepper and María Magdalena Narváez y Berrio’s marriage record, Cartagena de Indias, 25 March 1727. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072, “Instrumento fehaciente No. 2”; Julian de Arriaga to Pedro Mesia de la Cerda, Madrid, 21 April 1763. Archivo General de la Nación, Bogota (hereafter AGN-C), Sección Colonia – Milicias y Marina (hereafter SC.37), 16, 36; Fernando Morillo Velarde to Pedro Mesia de la Cerda, Cartagena de Indias, 24 January 1766. AGN-C, SC.37, 21, 61.

58 The exact date and circumstances of Andrés Jerónimo’s relocation are unknown. His brother’s marriage record (cited in the previous note) lists him as witness to the wedding. By September 1729, however, he was in Cadiz serving as witness to the baptism of his sister Josefa Escolástica’s first son by Gutiérrez de Rubalcava. Baptism record for Joaquín Antonio Gutiérrez de Rubalcava y Bertodano, Cadiz, 28 September 1729. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736; Baptism record for Miguel Bertodano y Marzan, Cartagena de Levante, 14 August 1733. España, registros parroquiales y diocesanos, indicates Andrés Jerónimo was married to Antonia Marzan de Ysasi, originally from Cartagena de Indias.

59 Jerónimo del Moral to governor and captain general, Cartagena de Indias, ca. 4 August 1730. AGI, Indiferente, 140, N. 104.

60 Ibid.

61 Service record of Antonio José Alvarez de Abreu, Madrid, 25 January 1724. AGI, Santo Domingo, 725; Álvarez de Abreu to king, in Alvarez de Abreu, Victima real legal, n.p.; Baptismal record for Juan José de la Vega y Bertodano, Caracas, 11 September 1724. Venezuela, registros parroquiales y diocesanos, shows Teresa Cecilia was still in Caracas in September 1724.

62 Álvarez de Abreu’s letters patent as ministro asesor of the Casa de la Contratación, Buen Retiro, 9 March 1727. AGI, Contratación, 5786, L. 2, ff. 50–51.

63 Baptism record for Jaime Alberto Álvarez de Abreu y Bertodano, Seville, 26 April 1730, in Melgar Jiménez, Historia de una ilustre familia, 242; Jaime Alberto was his parent’s fifth child and the first of two born in Spain; the previous four children had been born in Caracas before 1722, confirming the couple spent most of the 1720s apart. Last will and testament of Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu and Teresa Cecilia Bertodano, Madrid, 13 November 1743. Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid (hereafter AHPM), 16125, ff. 434–435v, mentions Teresa Cecilia’s daughters from her first marriage, Manuela and Jerónima de la Riba Herrera, had become nuns in the convent of San Clemente, in Seville, late in 1729, further indicating that Teresa Cecilia and her children relocated to Spain in the late 1720s.

64 Bernard, Le Secrétariat d’État et le Conseil Espagnol des Indes, 217.

65 Pérez Fernández-Turégano, “La secretaria del despacho de Marina,” 66, 67; Baptism record for Antonio Gutiérrez de Rubalcava y Bertodano, Cartagena de Levante, 28 May 1731. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736.

66 Burial record for Teresa Cecilia de Bertodano, Marquesa de la Regalía, Madrid, 11 November 1754, in Melgar Jiménez, Historia de una ilustre familia, 178; Felices de la Fuente, La nueva nobleza titulada, 245–246; Viera y Clavijo, Noticias de la historia, 520.

67 Jose Gabriel del Moral y Bertodano’s application for admission to Madrid’s Seminario de Nobles, Madrid, 12 October 1731. AHN, Universidades, 667, Exp. 115; Agua de la Roza, La infancia en Madrid a finales del antiguo régimen, 125, indicates that by 1743 Jerónimo del Moral was still in Madrid and had succeeded his father as “contador” of the Royal Orphanage of Madrid. Elena Juana, using a power of attorney, filed Jerónimo del Moral’s last will and testament in Madrid in 1753; by 1760, she had passed away: Jerónimo del Moral’s last will and testament, Madrid, 30 October 1753. AHN, OM, Religiosas-Calatrava, Exp. 19, Doc. 15; and Teresa del Moral y Bertodano’s last will and testament, Madrid, 25 April 1760. AHN, OM, Religiosas-Calatrava, Exp. 19, Doc. 3.

68 Alejo Antonio Gutiérrez de Rubalcava’s letters patent as intendente general of the navy and president of the Casa de la Contratación, Aranjuez, 8 April 1742. AGI, Contratación, 5786, L. 2, ff.132–133v; Baptism record for Laureano Gutiérrez de Rubalcava y Bertodano, Cartagena de Levante, 7 July 1741. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736; Baptism record for Francisco Gutiérrez de Rubalcava y Bertodano, Cadiz, 28 September 1743. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 3736; Marqués de la Ensenada to Francisco de Varas y Valdez, Madrid, 15 October 1747. AGI, Contratación, 5786, L. 2, f.167v.

69 Service record of Juan de Vega Arredondo, Madrid, 3 August 1726. AGI, Indiferente, 143, N. 38.

70 Merced granted to María Josefa Bertodano in Caracas, Madrid, 25 July 1741. Archivo General de Simancas, Dirección General del Tesoro (hereafter AGS, DGT), Inv. 24, Leg. 181, f. 294.

71 Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 50.

72 Jeronimo del Moral’s service record, Madrid, 2 April 1720. AGI, Indiferente, 140, N.104; Vega Arredondo was in Cumana from January to June 1718.

73 King to audiencia of Santo Domingo, San Lorenzo, 5 August 1721. AGI, Escribanía, 722A, “Pieza 2,” ff. 41r-42v; Juan Vega Arredondo to king, Caracas, 7 November 1721. AGI, Santo Domingo, 698. Del Moral had left Caracas some time in 1719 and did not return until July 1721.

74 See, for instance, Pascua Sánchez, Mujeres solas; Poska, Gendered Crossings; Fajardo Spínola, “Las viudas de los emigrantes canarios.”

75 Monzón Perdomo, “Ni solteras, ni casadas, ni viudas … ”; Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 75–76; Gasch-Tomás, The Atlantic World, 23, 39–42.

76 Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories; Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar, “Mobile Transitions,” 203–217.

77 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 19.

78 Ibid.

79 Anastasio González Remírez de Zarate to king, [Madrid], ca. 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

80 Teresa Cecilia de Bertodano’s petition to the Council of Indies, n.p., ca. 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

81 For typical examples, see Antonio de Benavides’s petition, in king to count of Frigiliana, Madrid, 12 October 1714. AGI, Panamá, 172, R.V, Doc. 109; the source in note 30.

82 See, for instance, Antonio de Benavides to José Patiño, San Marcos de Apalache, 8 February 1732. Biblioteca Nacional de España (hereafter BNE), Mss 19508, ff. 131–132; Antonio de Benavides to king, [Tenerife], [ca. 1762]. AGS, Guerra Moderna, Expedientes Personales (hereinafter GM, Exp.Pers.), L.7, f. 35.

83 Service record of Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu, Madrid, 26 January 1721. AGI, Quito, 125; see, particularly, the description of his failed trip to Trinidad in f. 5.

84 See the source in note 59.

85 Antonio de Benavides to conde de Salazar, St Augustine, 15 October 1728. Stetson Collection, P.K. Younge Library, University of Florida, Gainsville, Bnd 5243.

86 See, for instance, Antonio de Benavides to king, Veracruz, 6 February 1740. AGI, México, 2844, ff. 103–115.

87 See, for example, Alberto Bertodano to king, Caracas, 3 July 1716. AGI, Caracas, 63.

88 Secretary’s summary of Teresa Cecilia de Bertodano’s petition to the Council of Indies, [Madrid], February 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid.

91 Teresa Cecilia de Bertodano to Marqués de Mijares, Caracas, 5 September 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

92 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 21.

93 Juan de Vega Arredondo’s statement on behalf of Teresa Cecilia Bertodano, Caracas, 14 September 1715. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

94 Audiencia of Santo Domingo to king, Santo Domingo, 17 August 1719, quoted in king to Audiencia of Santo Domingo, San Lorenzo, 5 August 1721. AGI, Escribanía, 722A, “Pieza 2,” ff.41r-42v.

95 Ibid., for a summary of the governor’s rationale for granting del Moral a licence to travel from Santo Domingo to Spain see the source in note 72.

96 For Spanish authorities’ concern with preventing vagabonds and other individuals of no fixed residence from travelling to the Americas, see Jurado Jurado, “Forasteros y transeuntes en América.”

97 See the source in note 94.

98 Konetzke, “La emigración de mujeres españolas a América,” 124–135, 140; Pascua Sánchez, Mujeres solas, 34–35; Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations, 73–77; Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 83–91.

99 See, for instance, the witness statements provided on behalf of José de Ribas, Seville, 19 February 1706. AGI, Contratación, 5462, N.21.

100 An assessment of the extent to which provincial governors complied with their obligation to compel married men living apart from their wives to return to the marital home became a standard item in residencia trials. See, for instance, question 33 in the secret enquiry into Bertodano’s tenure in Caratagena de Indias, in AGI, Escribanía, 626A, “Pieza 2.”

101 On women who remained behind, see the secondary literature in note 75; Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 127–146, looks in detail at the experiences of women whose husbands emigrated first, and who later followed them overseas.

102 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 19, 20.

103 Ibid., 21–22.

104 Ibid., 22.

105 On Atlantic migration as a negotiated decision within family structures and the role of women within them, see, Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 23, 137–146.

106 See the source in note 54.

107 See, for instance, Coolidge, Guardianship, 61–63; Poska, Women and Authority, 147–150.

108 See the source in note 30.

109 Ibid.

110 Ibid.

111 It is not clear whether Teresa Cecilia or her husband secured the grant. It is notable, however, that it was issued in her name and for her life. King to Casa de la Contratación, Seville, 17 November 1729. AGI, Contratación, 5786, L. 2, ff. 61v-62.

112 Jerónimo del Moral’s last will and testament, Madrid, 30 October 1753. AHN, OM, Religiosas-Calatrava, Exp. 19, Doc. 15.

113 Roberts, Ongoing Mobility Trajectories, 20, 57.

114 Alberto Bertodano to Mateo Ruiz del Mazo, Cumana, 3 June 1712. AGI, Escribanía, 715B; King to Casa de la Contratación, El Pardo, 24 August 1714. AGI, Contratación, 5468, N.1, R.27.

115 See the source in note 59.

116 See the source in note 72. Annotations on the margin, made by the clerks of the Council of the Indies, indicate del Moral sought and secured appointment to the fiscal administration of Santa Fe de Bogotá in 1730 and then to Veracruz in 1732. As far as we know, he never took up either post.

117 Altman, Emigrants and Society, 136.

118 On the importance of retaining links to the court for transatlantic migrants, see, Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 128–129. When the Council of Indies first fined Bertodano at the end of this tenure in Cumana, it was Elena Juna’s husband, Jerónimo del Moral, who appealed to have the fine rescinded. Only after his efforts failed did Bertodano opt to travel back to Spain to plea the case himself. Jerónimo del Moral to Council of Indies, Madrid, 22 June 1712. AGI, Santo Domingo 597.

119 Juan López de Morla to king, San Juan, 30 October 1707. AGI, Indiferente, 137, N.51 suggests López de Morla was born in 1666; Service record for Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera, La Asuncion, 24 February 1713. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618, does not give Riba Herrera’s age, but the fact he first received a letters patent as alférez 1684, suggests he was born in the late 1660s.

120 Crespo Solana, La Casa de Contratación, 197, n.179; Ayala, Diccionario de gobierno, IV, 307. Medrano left Cadiz for Cartagena de Inidas October 1720 and it seems that by March 1721 he was already back in Spain.

121 Seed, To Love, Honor and Obey, 228–230.

122 See the source in note 30.

123 Baptism record for Alberto Bertodano, Tudela, 13 December 1660. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072; Baptism record for María Juana Knepper y Trippel, Luxembourg, 17 October 1666. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072.

124 Baptism record for Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu, Santa Cruz de la Palma, 15 February 1688, transcribed in Melgar Jiménez, Historia de una ilustre familia, 48; Baptism record for Teresa Cecilia Bertodano Knepper, Ainsa, 23 November 1691. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 20.

125 Álvarez de Abreu to king, Caracas, 5 September 1716. AGI, Escribania 693B, ‘Pieza No. 19,’ ff. 24–25.

126 Altman, Emigrants and Society, 149; Altman, Transatlantic Ties, 152; Perry, Gender and Disorder, 172–173.

127 Teresa Cecilia de Bertodano to Marqués de Mijares, Caracas, 5 September 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618; on the sense of obligation that often prompted parents and siblings to encourage female relatives left behind to relocate and join them in a new locale and which would have prompted Bertodano to make arrangements for Teresa Cecilia to join him in Caracas, see Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 134–135.

128 Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pubeblo sin ellas,” 71–73, 137–142.

129 See the source in note 93.

130 Licence for Bertodano and his family to sail from Cadiz to Cumana, Seville, 20 February 1706. AGI, Contratación, 5462, N.21; the source in note 41.

131 Macías Domínguez, La llamada del nuevo mundo, 35–36.

132 Almorza Hidalgo, “No se hace pueblo sin ellas,” 78, n.123.

133 See the cases of Alonso Salvador Portilla y Gálvez and José González Rancaño, in Licence for Antonio de Peralta y Córdoba and his family to sail from Cadiz to Veracruz, Seville, 14 July 1719. AGI, Contración, 5470, N. 1, R. 47.

134 On the conditions for passengers on board ships crossing the Atlantic from Spain in the early eighteenth century, see, Macías Domínguez, La llamada del Nuevo Mundo, 148–156.

135 See the source in note 59.

136 According to “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” approximately 52,623 enslaved Africans disembarked in Spanish American ports between 1700 and 1750. Of these, about 45 percent were women. Compare these numbers with those provided for Spaniards by Macías Rodríguez, La llamada del Nuevo Mundo, and discussed above in notes 23 and 24.

137 “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” suggests about 33 percent of the enslaved Africans embarked for Spanish America between 1700 and 1750 died in the middle passage. As far as we know, no member of the Bertodano-Knepper family died while moving across the Atlantic or between Spanish territories in Europe or the Americas, although the couple had five children who did not reach adulthood.

138 Amaro Rodríguez Felipe and Tomás Croquer to Antonio Cobián y Valdés, Caracas, ca. 17 August 1716. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 55r-56r.

139 Statement of Juan de Vega Arredondo, Caracas, 18 August 1716. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 60r-61v.

140 Seizure of the ensalved people in Bertodano’s household, Caracas, 20 August 1716. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 65r-66v.

141 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” 25.

142 Last will and testament of Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu and Teresa Cecilia Bertodano, Madrid, 13 November 1743. AHPM, 16125, ff. 434–435v.

143 Viera y Clavijo, Noticias de la historia, 518–521. Under the patronage of, first, the Duque de Ripperdà and, later on, José Patiño, Álvarez de Abreu’s career and fortunes had certainly taken a turn for the better around 1726. However, he was still far from the heights he would reach in the early 1730s and he had four children of his own to plan for.

144 See, Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu to Council of Orders, Madrid, ca. 6 December 1737. AHN, OM, Religiosas-Calatrava, Exp. 279.

145 Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar, “Mobile Transitions,” 212.

146 Service record for Cristóbal de la Riba Herrera, La Asuncion, 24 February 1713. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618; witness statement of José de Alcántara, Caracas, 14 February 1714. AGI, Santo Domingo, 618.

147 See the sources listed in the previous note.

148 Service record of Juan Vega Arredondo, Madrid, 3 August 1726. AGI, Indiferente, 143, N.38; Service record of José Ramírez de Arellano. AGI, Indiferente, 132, N. 82; Alberto Bertodano to king, Cumana, 17 October 1708. AGI, Santo Domingo, 597.

149 Service record of Juan López de Morla, AGI, Indiferente, 137, N.51.

150 Segismundo Medrano to governor and captain general, Cartagena de Indias, ca. 24 June 1720. AGN-C, Sección Colonia – Aduanas (hereafter SC.2), 13, D.39; Instructions for Segismundo Medrano to follow on his voyage to Cartagena de Indias, Cadiz, 4 January 1720. AGI, Arribadas, 7A; Crespo Solana, La Casa de Contratación, 197, n.179. Very little is known of Segismundo Medrano’s career. He had reached the rank of teniente de navio and had travelled from Cadiz to Cartagena de Indias, in command of a ship of the royal navy, at least twice between 1718 and 1721.

151 Bertodano to king, Cumana, 18 August 1708. AGI, Santo Domingo, 597.

152 See the source in note 72; Service record of Juan Vega Arredondo, Madrid, 3 August 1726. AGI, Indiferente, 143, N.38.

153 Service record of Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu, Madrid, 26 January 1721. AGI, Quito, 125.

154 See the source in note 94; Service record of Juan Vega Arredondo, Madrid, 3 August 1726. AGI, Indiferente, 143, N.38.

155 See the source in note 94.

156 Ibid.

157 See the source in note 72.

158 See, list of charges brought against Alberto Bertodano in his residencia trial, San Juan, 9 February 1721. AGI, Escribanía, 129A, “2a Pieza,” ff. 324r-325v; Sentence passed by the Council of Indies against Antonio Juan González as a result of Alberto Bertodano’s residencia trial, Madrid, 5 October 1723. AGI, Escribanía, 1193, f. 5.

159 See the source in note 55.

160 José Ramírez de Arellano to king, Cumana, 26 August 1707. AGI, Santo Domingo, 724.

161 Andrés Alonso Gil to the governor, judges and oficiales reales of Veracruz, Caracas, 29 May 1716. AGI, Santo Domingo, 724; Hernández González, Los canarios, 267, 288, 466.

162 See the source in note 54; José García Luna to prince of Asturias, Cartagena de Indias, 12 October 1722. AGI, Santa Fe, 374.

163 Carlos Alberto Bertodano y Knepper and María Magdalena Narváez y Berrio’s marriage record, Cartagena de Indias, 25 March 1727. AHN, OM, Caballeros-Santiago, Exp. 1072, “Instrumento fehaciente No. 2.”

164 See the enquiries made by Luis de Aponte, as part of Bertodano’s residencia as former governor of Cartagena de Indias, regarding the letters written by Juan de Herrera Sotomayor, Francisco Baloco Leygrave, Alfonso de Guzmán, and José García Luna, Cartagena de Indias, starting 26 April 1724. AGI, Escribanía, 626A, “Pieza 1,” ff. 67r-85v.

165 Council of Indies to king, Madrid, 15 September 1723, AGI, Santo Domingo, 555; and king to Council of Indies, n.p., 12 November 1723, AGI, Santo Domingo, 555.

166 See, for instance, Grahn, The Political Economy of Smuggling; Cromwell, The Smugglers’ World.

167 See the source in note 138; Cobián y Valdés’ second search of Bertodano’s residence, Caracas, 17 August 1716. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 56r-59v.

168 See the sources cited in the previous note and the documents following in the same bundle, which describe Cobián y Valdés’ efforts to figure out where the men, women and children enslaved to Bertodano had ended up and his visits to Vega Arredondo’s house.

169 Cobián y Valdés’ appointment of Álvarez de Abreu to continue the enquiry into the whereabouts of Bertodano’s assets, Caracas, 17 August 1716. AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 59r-60v.

170 Ots y Capdequi, “Bosquejo histórico de los derechos de la mujer en la legislación de Indias (II),” 162–182.

171 See the sources in notes 169 and 43.

172 See the statements collected by Álvarez de Abreu from his brothers-in-law and a few other witnesses and his conclusion that other than the enslaved individuals and the silver tea set, nothing else had gone missing in AGI, Escribanía, 693A, “Pieza No. 5,” ff. 60r-65v.

173 See the source in note 140.

174 Games, Migration, 205.

175 Ibid., 191.

176 Eissa-Barroso, “Las capitanías generales,” 126–136, 151.