The Archives

The ArchivesPlacesCartagena

Cartagena

The fortified Spanish treasure port and asiento slave market on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia, sacked in 1697 by a French royal squadron under the baron de Pointis with Saint Domingue filibusters as auxiliaries, and through the golden age proper a defended naval and judicial station that pirates avoided rather than attacked.

Also writtenCartagena de Indias (Spanish official usage, distinguishing it from Cartagena in Murcia); Cartagena (Spanish, unqualified); Carthagena (English state papers, naval correspondence and print, 17th and 18th centuries); Carthagene (French, including the title of Pointis' printed relation of the 1697 expedition); Cartagene (French variant spelling); Cartagena de Yndias (Spanish manuscript orthography on harbour plans); Calamari or Kalamari (indigenous settlement name transmitted by Spanish chronicle); Gobernacion de Cartagena (the Spanish administrative unit containing the city)

Cartagena de Indias is the walled Spanish city and the enclosed bay behind it, on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia. It must be distinguished from the Spanish peninsular port of the same name. English clerks wrote "Carthagena" for both, and the difference has to be taken from context: consuls and Mediterranean convoys mean the peninsular port, galleons and guarda costas mean the Indies city. Kew keeps both usages in the same State Papers holdings, listing "Cartagena: John Richards" among British consuls in Spain in a volume for 1722 to 1726 and dating an Admiralty letter of 1723 from "Cartagena Bay".1

The two mouths

The bay lies behind a screen of islands and sand. Two entrances. Bocagrande, the wide northern passage close to the city, silted; a stranding of Portuguese vessels on the bar there in 1640 is the moment usually given for its closure. Bocachica, the southern passage between Tierrabomba island and Baru, then carried everything. A Spanish plan of 1755 by Juan Manuel Curado charts the approach with soundings and names the Salmedina bank, the danger a stranger must identify before standing in. A hostile squadron had to force Bocachica first.2

Water and fever

The city has no river at the bay. It drank from cisterns and ate from the interior by way of the Canal del Dique, cut in 1650 to join the bay to the Magdalena at Calamar. A besieger who cut the Dique cut the city's stomach. Disease rather than gunnery destroyed European fleets here: yellow fever wrecked John Nevill's pursuing squadron in 1697 and Francis Hosier's blockading squadron in 1726 and 1727. Lord Vere Beauclerk, his bowsprit sprung, was refused the liberty of the port in 1723.

Spanish throughout

No foreign power held Cartagena at any point between 1690 and 1725. A royal governor and captain general ran the province, and the city answered judicially to the Audiencia of Santa Fe. A tribunal of the Holy Office is recorded here, one of three in Spanish America, and foreign Protestant seamen taken on this coast are said to have feared it.3

Pointis and the filibusters, 1697

The great event associated with Cartagena in this period was not piracy. In April 1697 a French royal squadron under Bernard Desjean, baron de Pointis, came off the port, with filibusters of Saint Domingue under Jean-Baptiste Ducasse serving as auxiliaries. Pointis's own printed relation has the whole fleet at anchor off Bocachica by noon on the fifteenth and the landing signalled that afternoon, the fort in French hands by the sixteenth and its governor retiring the next day. He puts that garrison at "about Three hundred Men, whereof Two hundred and Ten remain'd fit for Service", which is not the 139 that later writers give. The city capitulated in the first days of May, the day itself unsettled; Pointis required the governor to march out on the sixth and entered at the head of his troops the same day. The governor, whom he styles the Count de los Rios, marched out alive at the head of a garrison he reckoned at about 2,800 listed men, against the later accounts that have Diego de los Rios die defending the city. This was commissioned war under a royal warrant.4

Then the quarrel. Pointis plundered under his own regulation from 6 May, and his squadron left Bocachica at the beginning of the following month. At the end of May the filibusters, enraged at the smallness of the share allotted them, resolved to go back and plunder the city a second time; Pointis records their frigates standing back into the port and Ducasse's failure to stop them, and calls the act a capitulation broken by the King's army. That second act carried no royal warrant. On the value of the plunder no single number can be stated: his own relation gives what could not escape him as "near upon Eight or Nine Millions", records that Ducasse reckoned two of the eight millions to belong to the buccaneers, and says the signed estimate left Ducasse and the filibusters only about 40,000 crowns, while the ten to twenty million livres that later writers print are not his figures at all. Pointis had reason to understate the total, the filibusters the opposite. Figures for the second sack are not established at all.5

The slave port

Cartagena was the principal legal port of entry for enslaved Africans into Spanish South America. David Wheat's study of the port entry records counts 487 ships disembarking nearly 80,000 captives between 1570 and 1640. Borucki, Eltis and Wheat put the conclusion flatly: during the Iberian Union of 1580 to 1640 the city became the largest single entry point into the Americas for Africans.6

The traffic ran on the asiento, the royal contract to supply enslaved people to the Spanish Indies. By the contract signed by the King of Spain at Madrid in March 1713 and printed in England under royal licence that June, the subjects of Great Britain undertook to bring 144,000 enslaved Africans, piezas de India, into the Spanish West Indies over thirty years from 1 May 1713, at the rate of 4,800 a year, and were allowed one ship of five hundred tons a year to trade to the Indies. Cartagena is named in the contract alongside Portobello, Panama and Buenos Ayres. So an English commercial interest reached inside a closed Spanish port through the first golden age years.7

Wager's Action, 1708

Off Baru on 8 June 1708 Commodore Charles Wager took Expedition, Kingston and Portland into the Tierra Firme galleons under Jose Fernandez de Santillan. The Spanish flagship San Jose blew up with almost all her company. What was aboard her is reported at anywhere from seven to eleven million pesos, a range rather than a figure. The Colombian Navy found the wreck in 2015.

What the pirates did not do

The trade of these waters was a different one. An abstract of 29 April 1713 sets out "the case of privateers off Cartagena", a Dutch ship trading with the Spaniards taken by a Jamaican privateer. Captain Thomas Liell of HMS Bedford wrote to the Navy Board from Cartagena on 25 May 1716. Careening decided where a crew could live, and this bay had guns and walls as well as water, so crews scrubbed on the cays of the Main instead. For the men of Nassau and the sloops out of Port Royal, Cartagena was a name on a chart.8

What the sources cannot yet give is the Spanish and French paper that would settle 1697. The day the city fell and the size of the plunder stand as conflicts because the account of them is Pointis's printed relation, not the Audiencia de Santa Fe papers at Seville or the fonds Marine in Paris. Port and decade figures for enslaved Africans landed here between 1690 and 1725 have not been extracted. A National Archives catalogue search for Cartagena with pirates between 1700 and 1730 returned two hits, neither about the Colombian port, so the absence of a golden age pirate crew here is a negative result from limited searching, not proof that none exists; Colonial Office 137 and the Calendar of State Papers Colonial are where one would surface. The asiento terms are taken from the printed contract itself; the wider list of factory ports that later writers attach to it is not.

What the evidence does not settle

1697 siege chronology

  • Bocachica's fall date (15 or 16 April 1697) is unsettled
  • City's surrender date is unsettled, placed in early May

Pirate activity against Cartagena

  • Whether any pirate company attacked Cartagena between 1715 and 1726Unverified

Tribunal of the Holy Office

  • Founding date of Cartagena's Inquisition tribunal is undocumented

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. Cartagena de Indias is the walled Spanish city and enclosed bay on the Caribbean coast of what is now Colombia, and it must be distinguished from the Spanish peninsular port of the same name, since English documents of the 1690s to 1720s write "Carthagena" for both and The National Archives preserves the two usages side by side, a State Papers volume for 1722 to 1726 listing "Cartagena: John Richards" among British consuls in Spain while an Admiralty letter of 1723 is dated from "Cartagena Bay" on the Main. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Catalogue records: Discovery catalogue, The National Archives, Kew, consulted 2026, for the doubled usage and for the titles of SP 42/17/310 and the consular State Papers volume (Confirmed)
  2. The bay has two historic entrances, and Bocachica, the southern passage between Tierrabomba island and Baru, was the working entrance through the golden age because Bocagrande, the wide northern passage, had silted, the stranding of Portuguese vessels on the bar there in 1640 being the moment usually cited for its closure; the consequence for operations is that a hostile squadron had to force Bocachica before it could reach the city. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Heritage record and manuscript charts: "The Underwater Barrier of Bocagrande," Fortificaciones de Cartagena de Indias (Escuela Taller Cartagena de Indias and partners), consulted 2026, for the silting of Bocagrande, the 1640 stranding and Bocachica as the resulting deep water entrance (Confirmed for Bocachica as the working entrance, Probable for the 1640 stranding); Juan Manuel Curado, "Plano de la costa de punta de Canoa hasta bocachica...," 1755, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G5294.C3A1 1755.C8, LCCN 90682766, for the approach with soundings, the Tierrabomba channel and the Salmedina bank (Confirmed)
  3. Cartagena remained under continuous Spanish sovereignty throughout 1690 to 1725, governed by a royal governor and captain general of the province and falling judicially within the Audiencia of Santa Fe, with a tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition sitting in the city as one of three such tribunals in Spanish America; no foreign power held the place. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Heritage record and modern scholarship: "Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena," UNESCO World Heritage Centre, property 285, inscribed 1984, and Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500 to 1750, second edition (Routledge, 2016), for continuous Spanish control and the city's administrative and defensive character (Confirmed). The presence and jurisdiction of the Inquisition tribunal is Probable; and the Viceroyalty of New Granada was not yet in permanent existence in this window, so it must not be projected back into 1697. The claim as a whole stands at the level of its weakest element
  4. The taking of Cartagena in April and May 1697 was an operation of the French Crown under Bernard Desjean, baron de Pointis, with a contingent of Saint Domingue filibusters serving as auxiliaries under Jean-Baptiste Ducasse: commissioned war, not piracy. Pointis's own printed relation has the squadron anchor two leagues from the city on the thirteenth, come to anchor off Bocachica by the morning of the fifteenth with the whole fleet at anchor at noon and the landing signalled that afternoon, and the fort of Bocachica in French hands by the sixteenth, the governor retiring the next day. Pointis puts the fort's garrison at "about Three hundred Men, whereof Two hundred and Ten remain'd fit for Service", which is not the figure of 139 carried in reference accounts. The city capitulated in the first days of May; Pointis required the governor to march out on the sixth and entered at the head of his troops the same day, and the governor, whom he styles the Count de los Rios, marched out alive at the head of a garrison he reckoned at about 2,800 listed men, so that the reference statement that Diego de los Rios died defending the city in 1698 cannot stand. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Commander's printed relation: An Account of the Taking of Carthagena by the French in the Year 1697, Containing all the Particulars of that Expedition, By Monsieur De Pointis, Commander in Chief (London, printed for Sam. Buckley, 1698), read in the copy digitised by the Internet Archive from the British Library (Early English Books item bim_early-english-books-1641-1700_an-account-of-the-taking_pointis-jean-bernard-de_1698). For the garrison: "The Enemies Garrifon did confift of about Three hundred Men, whereof Two hnndred and Ten remain'd fit for Service; the reft were either kill'd or wonnded in the Bombardment, Cannonading, and Attack." For the surrender: "at length I acquainted him, That he muft pofitively march out upon the Sixth, and that on the fame Day I would enter at the Head of the Troops; which was accordingly executed. The Count Uegrez de los Rios, follow'd with his Garrifon, being lifted Men, to the number of about 2800, march'd out through a Lane of our Soldiers." Pointis is the commanding officer and an interested witness; the day of the capitulation itself, as distinct from the march out and entry on the sixth, and the identification of Sancho Jimeno de Orozco as the defender of Bocachica are not settled by this text. The text was read in a digitised scan; the long s and other letterforms are imperfectly rendered by the scan's optical text, and the quotations above reproduce that reading rather than a fresh transcription of the original type.
  5. Pointis plundered Cartagena under his own regulation from 6 May 1697, and his squadron left Bocachica at the beginning of the following month. At the end of May the filibusters, enraged at the smallness of the share allotted them, resolved to go back and plunder the city a second time; Pointis records the resolution, their frigates standing back into the port, and Ducasse's failure to stop them, and calls the act a breach of an authentic capitulation, so that the second sack carried no royal warrant. On the value of the plunder no single number can be stated: Pointis's own relation gives what could not escape him as "near upon Eight or Nine Millions", records that Ducasse reckoned two of the eight millions to belong to the buccaneers, and says the signed estimate left Ducasse and the filibusters only about 40,000 crowns. The totals of ten to twenty million livres printed in reference accounts are not his figures, every figure in the affair comes from an interested party, and nothing reliable is established for the second sack. Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Commander's printed relation: An Account of the Taking of Carthagena by the French in the Year 1697... By Monsieur De Pointis, Commander in Chief (London, printed for Sam. Buckley, 1698), read in the copy digitised by the Internet Archive from the British Library. On the second sack: "Upon the laft of the Month of May... the Buccarters being enrag'd at the fmall pare I gave them of the Baoty, had propos'd to boar and plunder the Srepter; but that afterwards they were come to the Refolution, to return and plunder Carthagena", and "what appears in fum of this Action, is a Capitulation... broken by the King's Army". On the money: "the Honour which his Majefty's Arms acquir'd in this occafion, befides near upon Eight or Nine Millions that could not efcape us"; "by his Calculation, Two of the Eight Millians belong'd to him"; "his and the Buccaniers Shares, amounted only to about 40000 Crowns". Pointis had a direct financial motive to understate the total and the filibusters the opposite motive, so no figure here is independent; the two million livres said to have been carried to Louis XIV is not in this text. The text was read in a digitised scan; the long s and other letterforms are imperfectly rendered by the scan's optical text, and the quotations above reproduce that reading rather than a fresh transcription of the original type.
  6. Cartagena was a slave port and for a long period the principal legal port of entry for enslaved Africans into Spanish South America, David Wheat's study of the port entry records counting 487 ships that disembarked nearly 80,000 captives there between 1570 and 1640, with Borucki, Eltis and Wheat stating that during the Iberian Union of 1580 to 1640 Cartagena de Indias became the largest single entry point into the Americas for Africans. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Modern scholarship: David Wheat, "The First Great Waves: African Provenance Zones for the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Cartagena de Indias, 1570 to 1640," The Journal of African History vol. 52 no. 1 (2011), pp. 1 to 22, doi 10.1017/S0021853711000119, for the 487 ships and nearly 80,000 captives (Confirmed); Alex Borucki, David Eltis and David Wheat, eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), for the largest single entry point statement (Confirmed). Port and decade level disembarkation figures for 1690 to 1725 have not been extracted
  7. The slave traffic to the Spanish Indies ran on the asiento, the royal supply contract. By the contract signed by the King of Spain at Madrid in March 1713 and printed in England under royal licence in June 1713, the subjects of Great Britain undertook to bring 144,000 enslaved Africans, piezas de India, into the Spanish West Indies over thirty years from 1 May 1713 at the rate of 4,800 a year, and were allowed one ship of five hundred tons a year to trade to the Indies. Cartagena is named in the contract alongside Portobello, Panama and Buenos Ayres, so that an English commercial interest reached inside the Spanish port in the first years of the golden age. Confirmed Directly supported by the record. Printed treaty: The Assiento, or Contract for Allowing to the Subjects of Great Britain the Liberty of Importing Negroes into the Spanish America, signed by the Catholick King at Madrid in March 1713, printed in London under royal licence given at Kensington 20 June 1713; read in the copy digitised by the Internet Archive (item cihm_28677). Article I: "One hundred and forty four thoufand Negroes, Piezas de India, of both Sexes, and of all Ages, at the Rate of Four thoufand and eight hundred Negroes, Piezas de India, in each of the faid Thirty years"; the annual ship article: "a Ship of Five hundred Tons Yearly". The contract does not name the South Sea Company, does not describe the transfer as made by the Treaty of Utrecht, and does not carry the earlier Portuguese and French contractors of the 1690s and 1700s or a factory-port list including Caracas, Havana and Veracruz; those remain unverified. The text was read in a digitised scan; the long s and other letterforms are imperfectly rendered by the scan's optical text, and the quotations above reproduce that reading rather than a fresh transcription of the original type.
  8. In the golden age proper Cartagena was a defended Spanish naval and judicial station rather than a pirate target: a catalogue search of The National Archives for records combining Cartagena with pirates in the years 1700 to 1730 returned two hits, neither concerning the Colombian port, while what the Kew records do carry for those waters is privateering and naval business, an abstract of 29 April 1713 setting out the case of privateers off Cartagena in which a Dutch ship trading with the Spaniards was taken by a Jamaican privateer, and Captain Thomas Liell of HMS Bedford writing to the Navy Board from Cartagena on 25 May 1716. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Catalogue records: Discovery catalogue, The National Archives, Kew, consulted 2026, for the searches performed and for the titles of SP 34/34/80 (29 April 1713, the case of privateers off Cartagena) and ADM 106/705/94 (25 May 1716, Captain Thomas Liell, the Bedford, Cartagena), both Confirmed. The searches performed are Confirmed and the general conclusion drawn from them is Probable; the negative result is a consequence of limited searching, not a demonstration that no instance exists, Colonial Office 137 and the Calendar of State Papers Colonial being where one would surface