The timber cuts of Cuba: two centuries of arguing about who owned the trees
Havana built warships because Cuba had cedar and mahogany, and the state kept trying to reserve them. A cedula of 1622, another forbidding cuts near the capital after a private yard stripped the nearest woods, a jurisdictional quarrel in 1774 settled by giving cedar to the navy and mahogany to the sugar crates, a joint board of naval officers and planters in 1800, and in 1805 a royal order handing landowners absolute freedom over their own trees.
Why this wins its question: Colonial forest policy is usually discussed either as an early conservation achievement or as extraction with a legal veneer, and almost never with the documents in order. This puts the sequence on the record with its dates: 1622, the first cedula, prompted by two proposed galleys; a prohibition on cutting near Havana issued because a private yard had stripped the nearest woods and left the townspeople short of building timber; 1774, a jurisdictional fight between the Captain General and the naval commander that ended in the practical compromise of cedar to the navy and mahogany to the sugar crates; 14 February 1800, a joint board of naval officers and planters; 30 August 1805, absolute freedom for landowners over their own trees, granted after the yard had stopped building. It also prints the source's own admissions - that the Havana accounts were destroyed in the English occupation, that the 74,593,662-peso total is an approximation, and that the article is arguing for the arsenal's revival - so a reader can weigh the narrative against the interest of the man telling it.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Cuba was a shipbuilding island because of what grew on it, and the state noticed the trees before it built the yard. No naval construction was undertaken on the island for more than a century after the conquest, and the first royal cedula relating to timber cuts did not appear until 1622, when the Captain General Francisco de Venegas proposed building two small galleys.
The 1622 provisions were incomplete enough that the first serious private attempt broke them in practice. About twenty years later a captain of sea and war settled in Havana, Juan Perez de Oporto, undertook shipbuilding there with some speculators; his small yard, in the source's words, stripped the woods nearest the capital of their best trunks and so deprived the neighbours of much of the timber they needed for building and repairing their houses.
The response was a reservation in favour of housing rather than of nature. The disorder observed in his cuts gave rise to a royal cedula forbidding them to fell trees in the woods near the capital, whose timber was reserved exclusively for the building and repair of houses; the king issued several further cedulas to check the abuse early, but the source records that they hardly came to be observed at all, and that the yard barely outlived Oporto's death.
The permanent yard came from a private petition and a technical opinion. Agustin de Arriola, brother of the general of galleons and one of the more comfortable residents of Havana, went to Madrid in 1713 to promote a shipyard there on wider and more durable terms than an earlier promoter had offered; Bernardo Tinajero, secretary of the Council of the Indies, laid the case before the king; and when Antonio Gaztanaga, the first authority of that period in matters of naval construction, reported favourably, it was resolved to form the yard at Havana.
The ambition was cut down at once by the treasury, and the source contradicts itself on the date in a way better carried than resolved. The plan was to inaugurate the yard with ten warships of sixty guns, which required outlays the treasury could not bear after so long and destructive a war, and the project began instead with three war frigates while the stores, the maestranza and the timber cuts were organised. The same article says on one page that the project only began to be realised in 1725 on government account, with Jose del Campillo ordering everything necessary in Havana as Comisario de Marina from two years earlier, and on the next page that the first yard, later converted into an arsenal, began to be installed in the capital in 1722. Both readings are printed here rather than a choice made between them.
The real conflict began when the trees became valuable to two industries at once. The first serious disagreements arose in 1774, between the Captain General, the Marques de la Torre, and the Comandante general del Apostadero, Bonet, as the sugar plantations expanded and their product was always shipped in cedar and mahogany cases - precisely the woods the navy preferred - and as both the navy and private people wanted the nearest trees.
The quarrel was jurisdictional and the civil authority won part of it. There being no special forest ordinance for the island, Bonet claimed that cuts should be made with all the advantages the navy enjoyed in Spain under the ordinance in force there. The Marques resisted, on the ground that a peninsular rule could not apply in the island without great public injury, and obtained that at least the great spars for masts be taken from distant points on the coast. The two then agreed an arrangement whose basis was to assign the cedars to the navy and the mahoganies to the packing cases.
When that arrangement was breached, the crown answered with a board rather than a decree. After infractions under their successors, and following reports raised to the king by the Captains General the Conde de Ezpeleta and Luis de las Casas, a royal order of 14 February 1800 created a special board of naval officers and planters on the island, to agree in all necessary cases the best rules for reconciling the supply of the Arsenal with that of private persons, of agriculture and of commerce.
The settlement, when it came, was the opposite of a conservation regime. By a royal order of 30 August 1805, when the manufacturing activity of the establishment had already ended, landowners were declared to have absolute freedom to dispose of every tree their land contained, and the source records that from then on they enjoyed that right without the least alteration. Two centuries of reserving Cuban timber for the state ended by handing it to private property at the moment the state had stopped needing it.
What the reservation had cost the forest is stated by the source as an inference, not a measurement. From the number and tonnage of the ships launched into the bay in that period, it says, an infinite extraction of cedars, mahoganies and hardwoods may be inferred, necessary to enrich the Armada with the best ships of that time; and it adds that the population was then so small, and transport so difficult, that questions of this kind could arise at all only in an island with timber enough by itself to keep the arsenals of every power in motion.
The article is candid about the state of its own evidence, and that candour is why it can be used. It states that establishing the naval supplements received on the island would be an arduous task, that it could not be got even from the archives of the peninsular departments or the Indies archive at Seville, and least of all from the accounts of the Havana station, where an infinity of documents disappeared during the English occupation. From the references and accounts it had seen it deduces only approximately that naval expenditure on the island since 1763 amounted to 74,593,662 pesos fuertes.
The source is advocacy and should be read as such. The article is written to argue that Spain will not recover the place it is called to occupy among the great European powers without also recovering its old naval power, that the Havana Arsenal must be one of the surest means of increasing the fleet, and that its resurrection, sooner or later, is infallible. Pezuela was a Spanish colonial official writing in 1866 inside the slaveholding order about an establishment he wanted rebuilt. The sequence of measures and dates he gives is used here; his estimate of what they were for is not.