Empires Apart (6 page)

Seven centuries later another native American people was leaving enormous signatures on the landscape. In the Chaco canyon of New Mexico buildings were going up of a size that would not be matched again in North America until the 1920s. Five-storey buildings, some with more than a thousand rooms, were built of sandstone and clay. Huge
wooden beams brought over 40 miles from the nearest forest supported the upper storeys and roofs.

In the middle of the eleventh century, as Kievan Rus was reaching its peak, Cahokia itself flourished on the eastern side of the Mississippi. Experts believe the city was a little smaller than the London that William the Conqueror was about to take, or twice its size, or somewhere in between. Its suburbs stretched across the river into what is St Louis today. Cahokia was the capital of a people known as the Mississippian culture. Their buildings were constructed of wood and earth, so, unlike the stone Mayan cities of the same period, little now remains of their complicated architecture and great plazas other than hundreds of mounds dotting the flood plains of the Mississippi. One pyramid-shaped ruin, now known as Monks Mound, covers 15 acres and stretches 100 feet high in stepped terraces: the largest pre-Columbian construction north of Mexico. Nearby is a grand 40-acre plaza and artificial lakes, the largest covering 17 acres. This was not the work of a few primitive nomads living in wigwams.

It is ironic that Americans in their hundreds of thousands visit the pre-Columbian remains of Mexico, but in their own country such remains are obliterated by freeways and shopping malls.

The more intriguing issue, however, is what happened to the inhabitants of Chaco and Cahokia? There were certainly no mighty empires awaiting the first whites to explore North America. Cahokia seems to have lasted little more than a century. At almost exactly the same time as the Mongols were razing the cities of Russia, many of Cahokia's houses were torn down and huge wooden defences were erected, city walls with bastions every 65 feet. The defences did not work. Thousands of arrowheads testify to a vicious battle, thought to have been a peasant insurrection against the wealthy city-dwellers, after which the city was abandoned.

When in 1539 Hernando de Soto, fresh from helping to destroy the Inca empire in Peru, undertook a barbarous three-year trek through the American south-east, the enormous territory the Spaniards called Florida,
he found mound-building tribes whose chiefs lived in relative luxury in homes perched above the surrounding countryside. Undoubtedly these were the remnants of the Mississippians. Ethnographers have also found traces of Mississippian culture in tribes as far away as the Osage and Winnebago on the edge of the Great Plains.

Historians were intent not only on showing that the continent's original inhabitants were primitive savages but also that there were not many of them, and that Europeans had ‘settled' rather than ‘conquered', rather as Jewish ‘settlers' occupy the land from which Palestinians have been evicted in more recent times. Nobody knows how many people were living north of the Rio Grande when the first whites arrived. Until fairly recently the number quoted was usually around a million. As archaeological finds continued to increase it became apparent that there had been far more natives than first thought. Henry Dobyns, a respected anthropologist, suggested 18 million. As the debate continued the numbers came down again, but estimates still range from 2 million up to 10 million.

One factor in particular underlies the earlier view that there were hardly any Native Americans in occupation when the whites arrived: when the settlers started moving west they found a largely ‘empty' land. The reason for that, however, is not that there had been no natives but that the native population had already collapsed. European colonisers may have been slow to move beyond their initial settlements; European diseases were not. Almost entirely by accident the first European settlers had perpetrated the world's most successful example of biological warfare.

Community after community faced extinction with the coming of the white man. A typical case, chronicled in detail by early French missionaries and explorers, was the Huron in southern Canada. Within twenty years of Samuel de Champlain first setting eyes on the Huron, diseases from the trading posts further east were destroying them. Measles struck in 1634, causing blindness and in some cases death. In 1636 it was the turn of
influenza, followed the next year by scarlet fever. Then in 1638 came the worst plague of all, smallpox. In five years between a half and two thirds of the entire Huron population died.

The primary reason that Europeans were able to impose themselves so much more successfully on America than on Africa was the balance of biological power. The natives of America had been completely isolated from the rest of the world for millennia. They had no immunity to western diseases and no diseases of their own to give to their invaders, other than syphilis. Africans had not only been exposed to European and Asian traders but they also had a fearful armoury of tropical diseases with which to retaliate. The result was that Africans retained an overwhelming numerical superiority, which American natives lost within a few years of the arrival of the white man.

Columbus had shown that a promised land existed. All anyone had to do was point their ship west; the New World could not be missed. The Spanish and Portuguese grabbed South and Central America and the larger Caribbean islands. They also sent a few expeditions north in search of gold. Coronado reached as far as Kansas in 1540, murdering any natives who got in his way: on one occasion he had a hundred captured warriors burnt at the stake to strike terror into anyone stupid enough to oppose the onward march of European civilisation. The French went further north, seeking furs and fish in Canada.

The English first came to the Americas not to settle but to steal, not to trade but to terrorise. The early history of England and the New World is a history of organised crime, although rather than using terms like ‘mobster' or ‘gangster' British historians have preferred the more romantic ‘pirate' or ‘buccaneer' or even ‘privateer', as if to imply that armed robbery is acceptable if cloaked in the mantle of private enterprise. (Another term used in some accounts transforms ruthless killers into cuddly pets, as men like the murderous Hawkins are described charmingly as ‘sea dogs'). With the exception of west country fishermen the primary objective of the first English mariners venturing westward was to find someone who had already made money there and to take it
away. English pirates raided not just the Spanish galleons heading home with their looted gold but anyone with something worth taking. Pirates like Sir John Perrot, Peter Easton (known as the pirate admiral) and Henry Mainwaring attacked the Portuguese, Basque and French fishing fleets that had descended on the immense shoals of cod off Newfoundland. Pirate expeditions were expensive to organise and needed the support, implicit or explicit, of the crown. Pirate captains were not petty criminals escaping to easier pickings in the sun. Henry Mainwaring, for example, was an Oxford graduate and member of the bar. After succeeding as a Newfoundland pirate he returned to England and became Chancellor of Ireland, before dying as an exile in France having chosen the wrong side in the English Civil War.

When the time came to attempt their own settlements many of these pirates played prominent roles. Hawkins was an early advocate of settlement in Virginia. The pirate David Kirke, who had captured a fleet of eighteen French ships in the Gulf of St Lawrence and even raided Quebec, was a prime mover in the creation of the Scottish colony of Nova Scotia. Piracy was to remain a feature of colonial life for many years to come. English settlements in Newfoundland (of which David Kirke was eventually made governor) and Labrador were subject to pirate raids well into the eighteenth century, with French, Dutch and later American pirates finding easy pickings in even the hardiest outposts.

The most successful mobster of all was the Welshman Henry Morgan, whose gang, protected by the Governor of Jamaica, devastated Spanish ports in the Caribbean and Central America. Morgan became one of the wealthiest men in Jamaica, diversifying into legitimate businesses such as sugar plantations. Much of Morgan's life is shrouded in the myths of time, but one story is certainly true. In 1670, with thirty-six ships and a gang of nearly 2,000 men, he attacked the city of Panama, burning it to the ground. On the way back he deserted his men and absconded with most of the loot. This did not make him universally popular, especially as at the time of the raid England and Spain had just signed a peace agreement. Charles II responded to Spanish protests by recalling the governor and ordering
the destruction of the buccaneers. Morgan was arrested and transported to London, but spread so much money around that he returned to Jamaica with a knighthood and was made deputy governor.

Although to the Spanish, and to pirates of all nations, the Americas were seen primarily as an opportunity to get rich quick, to many Europeans the new land offered more than plunder. It offered the opportunity for colonisation, somewhere to dispatch surplus populations who would simultaneously become markets for the products of Europe and supply products the home countries could not economically produce themselves. It also offered the possibility of religious freedom. There is a myth that America was created by doughty puritans whose Protestant work ethic formed the philosophical bedrock upon which the wealth and power of the United States was to be built. Like most myths there is an element of truth here. The first European settlers in North America since the Vikings were religious refugees who were confident that their Protestant commitment to prayer and hard work would enable them to create a promised land in the New World.

In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers fled the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church to found a new society on the coast of New England. But fifty-five years before them five hundred Protestant men women and children had crossed the Atlantic and landed much further south in Florida. These people were also seeking freedom from religious persecution, not from the Church of England but from the Church of Rome. French Calvinists, known as Huguenots, were under tremendous pressure from the Catholic monarchy, pressure that was to culminate in the attempt in 1572 to exterminate them in the Massacre of St Bartholomew.

The Huguenots who fled to the New World seven years earlier were determined to avoid such a fate. They failed. At dawn on 20 September 1565 their settlement, named Fort Caroline, was attacked and most of the inhabitants were killed. Those that managed to escape gave themselves up over the next few days. Perhaps they thought they would be spared, for their attackers were not savage natives but Christian soldiers in the service of one of Europe's most renowned monarchs, Philip II of Spain.
The Spanish commander appealed to his God for guidance, and decided that there was only one way to serve his Lord in these circumstances. Every one of the Huguenots was murdered. When he heard the news Philip II sent his congratulations.

The story of the Huguenot settlement well illustrates the political realities of sixteenth-century Europe. It also illustrates the political realities of today. On one Florida tourist website the only reference to the putative French colony is a one line comment that it was destroyed by the ‘brilliant military skills' of the Spanish commander Pedro de Menendez. It does not mention that Menendez had been released from jail in Spain on Philip II's orders specifically to command this mission of extermination. Another website refers to the colonists only as ‘French pirates'.

The reality as always is far more complicated than either the ‘Protestant martyrs' or the ‘French pirates' school of history pretend. The Huguenots were not dour Puritans who wanted the state to leave them alone. Their leader, Admiral Coligny, was a military advisor to the French king, and was well aware of the strategic implications of creating a colony in what the Spaniards regarded as their territory. Their first settlement was founded by Jean Ribault in what is now South Carolina. He left thirty-eight soldiers there and returned to Europe for reinforcements, but the men he left behind mutinied, built themselves a longboat and headed north. Amazingly they happened upon some English fishermen, who ferried them back across the Atlantic. They were lucky. Ribault had returned to France to find the Huguenots suffering violent repression and had appealed to Protestant England for support. Unfortunately for him Elizabeth I was still in her pro-Spain phase, so she threw him into prison in London and told the Spanish ambassador about the garrison in South Carolina. When the Spanish got there they found the settlement deserted, but in the meantime Admiral Coligny was sending reinforcements.

This was the force that founded Fort Caroline in Florida. Although primarily a Huguenot expedition it included among its 300 members pardoned criminals, men described as ‘Moors' and even a few Catholics. The colony did not fare well, and some of the settlers may indeed have
turned to piracy against the Spanish. Certainly Fort Caroline was visited by the English privateer John Hawkins, who left food for the settlers and returned to Europe to warn Coligny of the dangers facing his enterprise. By this time Ribault was out of jail in England, and Coligny sent him with 600 settlers, including for the first time children, to restock the colony.

Both the French leader Ribault and the Spanish commander Menendez showed flashes of tactical brilliance but Menendez also had the most essential of military attributes: luck. Ribault set off to attack the Spanish in their new settlement of St Augustine, but a storm wrecked most of his fleet on Daytona beach. While Ribault was struggling back, Menendez attacked and destroyed the largely defenceless French settlement. He then marched south and met Ribault and the survivors from Daytona beach struggling north at a site later known as Massacre Inlet. Menendez sent a boat across the inlet to bring Ribault to him. After the Huguenots' formal surrender had been accepted, Ribault and his men were marched ten by ten into the sand dunes and butchered. Only sixteen were spared: ten French Catholics and six cabin boys.