Max Deardorff

“At Sea and Ashore” offers a social and cultural history of the galleys, a military penal institution in Spain’s American and Asian colonies. The typical galley, staffed by roughly 200 manacled oarsmen and 50 soldiers and mariners, spent roughly half the year at sea and the other half in one of the empire’s major ports: Santo Domingo, Havana, and Cartagena de Indias (Atlantic), and Lima and Manila (Pacific). At sea, they guarded colonial shorelines against piracy and contraband trading. And in port, the galleys’ manacled oarsmen—African, Islamic, and Southeast Asian slaves, run-of-the-mill convicts, and individuals condemned by the Inquisition for heresy—contributed to the earliest age of globalization, shaping local port cultures and economies.