Thousands of letters seized from Spain in the 18th century by the English come to light

Thousands of documents, including much correspondence with Americafrom Spanish ships captured by the United Kingdom in the 18th century will be able to be consulted on the internet from Friday, the organization that stored them, the National Archives, announced in London.

The documents relating to 35,000 ships, captured between 1652 and 1815, are beginning to be cataloged and the intention is to put them all online in the coming years, setting the year 2037 as an initial goal.

“We don’t know how many of those ships were Spanish. It was the second country with the most arrests after France”explains one of the researchers on the subject at the National Archives, Oliver Finnegan, to AFP.

“Due to the many disputes with the United Kingdom, a twenty% “Of those ships could be Spanish, but it cannot be guaranteed,” Add.

The first work that has been done on those thousands of Spanish ships has focused on about 130 that were captured by the British during the War of the Seat (1739-1748) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748).

The first was a conflict between Spain and the United Kingdom for control of the colonies and trade in America, in which the former fared better.

The second was a contest that involved the majority of the powers of Europe, motivated by the ineligibility of the Archduchess María Teresa to succeed her father Charles VI in the various crowns she held, because the Salic law prevented the royal inheritance of a woman. .

That conflict ended with a Solomonic treaty for both parties, leaving Maria Theresa as archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary, but Prussia maintained control of Silesia.

Reproaches against husband in Mexico

One of the ships captured by the United Kingdom in those two wars was “The Nymph” which transported more than a hundred letters sent from Spain to Mexico.

In one of them, Francisca Muñoz, from Seville, reproaches her husband, Miguel Atocha, in Mexico, for his lack of news.

“I would like to know the reason for having written you thirteen letters and not having received a response from any of them. I would like to know if there is no paper or pens or ink there to even have written one.”says Francisca Muñoz in a letter that her husband never read.

The Spanish Elena Barroso, a doctor in Preventive Document Conservation, who also works on the project with the National Archives, cannot explain how hundreds of thousands of documents can be preserved.

“The navies asked the ships to throw everything into the water or destroy it when they sighted the enemy. They carried gold, silver, cocoa…”, Explain.

“The letter that moved me the most of those I have read is from an Andalusian man, from Las Alpujarras, writing to his mother, announcing that he has become a priest in Peru and is sending her the ribbon that the bishop gave him,” adds Elena Barros.

“It was the first letter I translated. He said ‘I leave her with a broken heart because I am not going to serve her again, nor see her again.’”explains the researcher.

The National Archives has hundreds of thousands of documents to catalog, but none before 1652.

“The British Admiralty was founded around that time. That is why perhaps there are no documents of the ships seized before by the United Kingdom.”Spanish researcher Alejandro Salamanca, who is working on the project, explains to AFP.

Archives of Spain

In Spain, a similar project may be more complicated, since the United Kingdom has all these documents in the National Archives.

“For example, Spain captured more ships than England in the War of the Seat, but the documentation may be more distributed in Spain”adds Salamanca.

The first digital copies of the papers of the more than one hundred ships captured by the United Kingdom in those conflicts will now be available from Friday in a database, the Prize Papers Portal.

Prize was the English name given to the ships captured by the British. A collaboration between the University of Oldenburg, in Germany, and the National Archives has meant that these first Spanish documents are being digitized.

But investigators are already working on the hundreds of thousands of documents in twenty languages ​​from the 35,000 ships seized by the United Kingdom, contained in 4,088 boxes.