Miscellaneous Race

To channel W.E.B. Dubois, the problem of seventeenth century England and Spain’s competition for transatlantic empire is often the problem of the color line. In this post, I link this reflection to the following question: How do manuscript miscellanies in early modern England speak to race-thinking and colonial desire in private networks of circulation? And can the (enslaved) Black subaltern speak through these documents?

While the scholarship on Anglo-Spanish literary relations has considerably grown, much of the attention has focused on “public” genres of writing such as drama, polemical pamphlets, and histories. However, manuscript miscellanies also need to be studied as a memory making project with alternate networks of circulation that speak to different aspects of Anglo-Spanish racial imaginaries and literary circulation. In this post, I will be discussing V.b.303, which is titled “A maniscript containing seuerall Discourses” and dated to 1641. I am interested in this miscellany as a document copied into it references enslaved Black workers in the Spanish empire. Composed on the eve of the English Civil War, the Miscellany speaks to how moments of inter-imperial conflict shaped memories of earlier Anglo-Spanish conflict through the collection, compilation and translation of private individuals.

The document from this miscellany that I want to focus on is titled “A discourse of the West Indies written by Batista Antonia the king of Spaine’s Surveyor in these partes, 1596.” The handwritten document presents itself as an English translation of a Spanish report sent to Philip II about fortifications and coastal defenses of Spain’s Atlantic colonies following England’s 1596 attack on Cádiz led by the Earl of Essex and Lord Admiral Howard. The context of Anglo-Spanish naval war and transatlantic competition is made clear by the subtitle: “A relation or discourse of the Portes, Harbours, Fortes, & Cities which hath bin surveyed, edified, finished, made and mended, with those which hath bin mended and builded in the Survey, by your Maiesties direction and commandement.” The report mentions “the English pirate” (Francis Drake) several times, making it clear that the original Spanish document was produced in the context of Philip’s II’s fortification of coastal areas and naval bases in the Americas in response to English piracy in the Atlantic and the aftershocks of Anglo-Spanish war in Europe following the 1588 Armada.

However, what is intriguing is that the handwriting of the English document is decidedly not a late sixteenth century hand—it matches several other documents from the miscellany which are dated to the mid seventeenth century. In other words, the English translation and transcription of the Spanish report was not made in the aftermath of the 1588 Spanish Armada but rather, over 66 years later, on the cusp of a civil war that would eventually culminate in Oliver Cromwell’s victory and eventually, Cromwell’s Western Design and the English colonization of Jamaica.

The document also draws our attention to its translation politics. While the document accurately reproduces several of the Spanish Habsburg secretarial conventions, it also has several intriguing mistakes. Following the title and sub-title of the report, the document offers the following abbreviation in large scrawling letters: S.C:R:M::/::s. This appears to correspond to the conventional invocation of the Spanish Habsburg Monarch as “Sacra, Católica, Real Magestad.” The transcription of the surveyor’s name, Batista Antonia, is clearly an error, departing from Spanish (and for that matter, Italian) name conventions for masculine first names or patrimonial family names. The English report instead appears to be referencing Bautista Antoneli, an Italian engineer who was Philip’s most important military architect for the Spanish Caribbean fortification system. Antoneli belonged to a family of Italian engineers that was long patronized by the Habsburg court. It is then likely perhaps that the source of the English translated document is Antoneli’s 1608 manuscript (which is now held at the National Library of New Zealand, MS-0096), Letters, instructions and decrees of His Majesty, and fortifications made by the engineer Bautista Antoneli  [Cartas, instruciones, y cedulas de Su Majestad. I fortificaciones echas por el ingeñero (sic) Bautista Antoneli], which collected his correspondence with Philip II and the maps and plans he made for fortifying Spain’s colonies in the Americas from English attack.

Nevertheless, this raises up a new set of compelling puzzles. Why would the English translator-copier misspell Bautista Antoneli’s name as Batista Antonia? The English translator-copier even signs the document “Batista Antonia” in large cursive script at the end. Moreover, Antoneli’s manuscript was produced in 1608 and gifted to Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquess of San Germán and member of Philip III’s War Council. After Mendoza’s death, it passed into the library of the Count-Duke of Olivares, who was Philip III’’s powerful valido. Officially, Antoneli’s manuscript did not circulate in London until 1879, when it appeared as part of the holdings of Bernarnd Quaritch’s bookstore (Zuleta Carrandi et. al 26). Does this circa 1641 English document then suggest that the owner of the miscellany had access to a copy of Antoneli’s manuscript earlier, sometime during the English Civil War and Interregnum? Would this access have been gained through diplomatic relations or espionage networks? And what kind of access did the English miscellany collectors have to the original document? For example, Antoneli’s original included elaborate maps and visual designs, which are not reproduced in the English translation.

Anglo-Spanish competition for the colonization of the Caribbean and the Americas influenced the institutions of transatlantic enslavement of Africans, along with emergent ideas of race and labor. The English translator-copyist organizes the document by writing in the blank margins and paragraph heads the names of the ports, harbors and cities that are to be fortified, followed by detailed descriptions of their geography, natural resources, military advantages and fortification needs. These locations include: Santa Marta (Colombia), “Carthagena” (Cartagena, Venezuela); “Porto Bello” (Portobelo, Panama); and others. Against the landscape of European inter-imperial competition emerge references to the enslaved Africans who would need to be brought to the Americas to build and strengthen Spanish fortifications against England. Under the entry of “Carthagena” the English translator-copyist offers his rendering of Antoneli’s request:

The passage speaks to the skill and knowledges of enslaved Africans who were being mobilized all across the Spanish Habsburg empire to fortify its defenses against English pirates and privateers. Many of the English pirates (like John Hawkins) were also involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Antoneli acknowledges the role of enslaved Africans with specialized skills in military engineering and constructions. Indeed, the “masons from Spain” themselves may likely be Black, given peninsular Spain’s employment of enslaved and free Blacks in a wide range of occupations (Jones 50 and 156).

While Antoneli’s projects for Philip II relies on Black builders, craftsmen, and engineers, these skilled Black workers will get none of the glory. Instead, after fortifying Spain’s colonies in the Americas from the English, they are fed back into the voracious machine of capitalism-slavery.¹ Antoneli concludes his call by observing: “And those fortifications after they ended and all finished, then the negroes may bee sold to great proffitt, for a Negro that is of any occupation is sold for 600 or 400 pesos.”

Race is a set of strategic power relations and dehumanizing discourses that reverberate across time and space. It shifts and moves with the currents and eddies of transnational print circulation between metropoles. Antoneli’s reinvention as “Batista Antonia” speaks to the color line of Black enslavement embedded in the 1588 Armada and its aftermath, as Spain and England competed for global power. But what does it mean for the English translator-copyist of the miscellany to translate and transcribe Antoneli’s appeal for Black skills and workmanship over fifty years later in the time period of the English Civil War and leading towards the English colonization of Jamaica? On the one hand, the translated document speaks to the racial logic of reducing Black people to the commodity of labor. On the other, it also testifies to Spanish dependence upon Black skills and workmanship in engineering, military technology, fortification and more. This enables us to speculate on the ways in which English miscellany makers in the years leading up to the English colonization of Jamaica were taking notes from Spanish practices of Black enslavement and exploitation in the Habsburg empire.

Works Cited

Dubois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery, Third edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Zuleta Carrandi, Joaquín, Christophe Pollet, and Alfredo Prieto. “Presentation of Letters, instructions and decrees of His Majesty, and fortifications made by the engineer Bautista Antoneli.” Colonial Latin American Review 34, no. 1 (2025): 25-57.