Foreigners in Puerto De La Cruz in 17th Century

University:
Arizona State University
Course:
HST 200 | Historical Themes
Academic year:

2024
Views:

111

Pages:

2
Author:

Thuyoul US

FOREIGNERS IN PUERTO DE LA CRUZ IN THE THIRD QUARTER OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Establishing the list of foreigners who settled in Tenerife throughout the seventeenth century is an enormously complicated task, as we lack a registration or census that relates them and therefore allows us to know with certainty how many there were, what their names were, their origin, during what period they stayed on the island and what they did. It is true that we have some fragmentary reports, such as some reports prepared by the Canarian Inquisition, but these reports are not exact either and also refer onl to a specific moment. Thus, in 1654, the Holy Office of the islands wrotel to the Supreme Court pointing out the presence of 1500 English and Dutch heretical foreigners in Tenerife. The figure is obviously very exaggerated, but it serves as an example of the importance that the foreign colony had on the island of Tenerife around the middle of the seventeenth century. The work we present is part of a much more ambitious project that aims to study foreigners in Tenerife in the second half of the seventeenth century and as an approximation we have begun the study of the foreign presence in Puerto de la Cruz in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The data we have obtained come almost entirely from the Notarial Protocols existing in the Provincial Historical Archive of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (hereinafter AHPSCT), and therefore we must be aware that they are incomplete, since the deeds only reflected some of the many activities that these foreigners carried out. Other data have been obtained from the reports issued occasionally by the commissioners of the Holy Office of the island of Tenerife that are kept in the National Archive (AHN), of the General Military Archive of Segovia (AGMS). A second added problem is found in the significant deterioration of many of these protocols, which makes them difficult to read, to the point that several of them are removed from the consultation. We must also be aware that there was, and we have evidence of this in some report of the commissioners of the Canary Islands Inquisition, a considerable number of foreigners who, because of their condition as servants or servants, were never listed in the deeds signed by the merchants, so that the figures of foreigners present in Tenerife in each period that we find, They should be taken only as an approximation of reality and always as minimum values. We will carry out the analysis of the data we find from various points of view, as we intend to quantify the number of foreigners present in the period between 165l and 1675, to know their names, to discover their origin, to know their trades and, most importantly, to study what they did. We will also analyse the variation of the colony over the period considered, trying to rationalise the causes of its increase or decrease and its degree of settlement. Finally, it should be noted that the conclusions obtained from this work are only an approximation and in order to know their general validity it is advisable to wait for a broader study to be carried out extending it to other parts of the island.