Free Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez Page A

developer of a resinous treatment for sail thread that made early sixteenth-century Spanish sails, with their greater flexibility in cold weather and resistance to rot, the envy of European mariners. See
The Advent of European Power
by Hu-Li Huang;
Galician Sailcraft
by George G. Borcello; and “ ‘El Hilo Maravilloso’: A Key to Early Sixteenth-Century Spanish Sea Power” by M.D.R. Meltwater in
Atlantic Maritime History
108, no. 5 (1974): 435–88.
    Marín sailed with Cortés and is mentioned in the standard biographies in his capacity as sailmaker-to-the-fleet; but references are few to his agrarian predilections and to his more or less sudden shift of occupation, which occurred when he was granted 17.6 hectares of arable land and the services of 30 indigenous workers in Cuba. I have been in correspondence with Roberta Nesserman-Phillips of the Department of History at Florida International University, who is preparing a book-length manuscript of Marín’s early years in Cuba, including his role in the suppression of the Mortemos Revolt. Early drafts of her manuscript make it plain that the renowned sailmaker and the lesser-known agrarian pioneer are one and the same, a point contested some years ago by Makelos Kostermela in a seminal article, “Technical Achievement in Sixteenth-Century French, English, and Spanish Sailcraft,” in
Journal of Sewn and Fastened Materials
16, no. 7 (1947): 136–59. See also “Early Agrarian Reform Movements in the Caribbean” by Victor Brent in
Panamanian Perspectives
44, no. 2 (1985): 227–89; and
L’Insurrection des indigènes de l’île de Cuba et la répression espagnole
by Jean-Bédel Bosschère, pp. 508–15.
    4. The property, a grant from Carlos V made upon the recommendationof Cortés, was one of sixteen Cortés authorized in 1524, each of equal size, the so-called “peach,” or “durazno,” of 17.6 hectares (43.5 acres). The grant was located in the southern piedmont of the Organos Mountains in the Pinar del Río, at the heart of what was to become the Vuelta Abajo. At this time the land was not so highly valued that Marín could not purchase tracts cheaply and trade to his advantage, perhaps with a sense of intuition. At the time of his death in 1551, he held title to 251 hectares (620.2 acres).
    The land-grant system of patronage in early Cuban history was, of course, politically motivated, and the process was subject to a certain amount of corruption. One must be careful, however, not to assume unblessed intentions prevailed or that invidious plots existed where none has been proven. Among the most lucid and penetrating analyses of this volatile aspect of Spanish colonial history is “Terrenos en barbecho, trabajadores disponibles: Una visión de agricultura duradera,” a 1988 doctoral dissertation by Manuel Peña, which draws heavily on two obscure works:
La punizione di Cuba
by Luigi Pernotti and
Servitus in Novo Mundo
by Henri Latrousse, S.J.
    5. Cortés, of course, has been studied handily by Demott, Esperanza, Bouchald, Clackas, Merriman, and Dorger. All of these biographies are rich and each one is distinctly valuable. Among more recent work, both the Tesraffe and Urbanowitz biographies suffer in my mind from vindictiveness and offer no improvement on earlier scholarship. Quite the contrary is true of
Cortés and the Institution of an Imperial Order
by Esther Manas vanKamp. She not only brings to bear her extensive knowledge of the Tomás de Bivar collection, which has only recently been opened to scholars, but pioneers a psychoanalytic approach long missing in studies of Cortés. In addition to her singular modern work, see her “Iconography in the Mexican Journals of Cortés” in
Journal of Historical Psychoanalysis
52, no. 3 (1989): 279–301.
    6. In tracing the lineage of fifty-one New World families of Spanish origin whose founders arrived in the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, I’ve found that with thirty-six the consolidation of great wealth