Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (13 page)

Yet for tiny settlements of immigrants, neither total isolation nor a permanent state of hostility was a viable option. The settlers needed at least a degree of co-operation from the Indians for the practicalities of everyday life, and, as the settlements grew, they needed Indian land. In the early stages of colonization, considerations of morality and expediency alike led the colonists to negotiate land purchases from the Indians, although, as the balance of numbers tilted in favour of the colonists, the tendency simply to encroach on Indian land became increasingly hard to resist. But it became clear in Virginia as well as in New England that some modus vivendi was needed if there were not to be an unending succession of raids and counter-raids arising over territorial disputes. In Virginia a peace treaty in 1646 and a comprehensive statute passed by the assembly in 1662 attempted to provide some safeguard for Indian rights to land;"' in the New England colonies, statutory limits were placed on the rights of the settlers to purchase Indian land. For their part the Indians, their numbers much diminished by the epidemics of 1616-17 and 1633-4, were generally willing to sell as long as they could retain their right to hunt, fish and gather on the land they had surrendered. 114

Although the Pequot War left the initiative in New England firmly in the hands of the settlers, and relations were reasonably amicable with the Indian tribes in the three decades preceding the outbreak of King Philip's War in 1675, there were psychological as well as legal and moral barriers to unrestricted movement inland. On the edges of the clusters of villages lay the `wilderness' - a fraught and emotive word in the New England vocabulary of the seventeenth century. `What could they see', wrote William Bradford of the safe arrival of the Pilgrims at Cape Cod, `but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?"" A few years later John Winthrop, after a longer acquaintance with the land, was still writing in similar terms of the colonists coming together `into a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men ... '16 The image of the wilderness, with its biblical connotations, possessed a strong hold over the minds of the settlers, and not only those of New England. Virginia's colonists, too, saw themselves as living in a `Wildernesse' and surrounded by 'Heathen'."' But the image of the wilderness was ambiguous. On the one hand it implied danger and darkness - a land where Satan ruled. But on the other it implied a place of retreat and refuge, in which trials and tribulations would strengthen and refine the faithful as they struggled to tame and improve the wild land."'

There were tensions in the thought of the settlers between these competing interpretations of the wilderness - tensions that do not seem to have troubled the Spaniards, for whom biblical imagery was less all-pervasive. The Spanish equivalent of the concept of `wilderness' would seem to have been either despoblado"9 - an isolated and `uninhabited' area far from the heartlands of empire - or `desert' (desierto). If the desert conjured up images of the early church fathers, to whom the early friars in the New World could reasonably be compared'120 it was not a place for the ordinary run of mortals, who required a social existence to realize their full potential. The Puritans too were aware of the desocializing effects of the wilderness, and sought to legislate against it, as when Massachusetts passed a law in 1635 ordering that all houses should be built within half a mile of the meeting-house.121 They sought, too, to ward off its dangers by constructing hedges, walls and fences, all of them frontiers of exclusion. The Spanish settlers, on the other hand, clustered in towns and thinly spread across a continent many of whose peoples they had subdued, sought rather to incorporate those peoples within a world the Spaniards had already claimed as their own. Frontiers would inevitably spring up - in northern Mexico or in Chile - where further Spanish incursion was blocked by powerful tribes, but even these frontiers were to prove highly permeable as the Spaniards sought to continue their advance by other means.122

Yet even as the English colonists built their palisades, they sought to push them back. The pressures to do so were in part psychological - the wilderness, for all its dangers, was there to be tamed. But they were also created by demographic facts. As the numbers of settlers grew, so too did their need for space. Against this, even the mechanisms of social control imposed by the Puritan leadership could not prevail indefinitely. The wilderness constituted no permanent barrier against the force of numbers.

To establish a permanent presence in the New World, the Spaniards and the English were dependent, at least in the first stages of settlement, on a steady stream of immigrants. Mortality rates among the first arrivals were very high. A different climate and environment, different food - or sheer scarcity of food - hardship and deprivation, took a heavier toll than Indian arrows. `All of us', wrote a Franciscan who arrived in Santo Domingo in 1500, `became ill, some more, others less. 1121 During the first decade in Hispaniola two-thirds of the Spaniards may have died, while nearly half the Pilgrims perished of disease and exposure during their first New England winter.124 Until the gender imbalance inherent in the first transatlantic migratory movements was corrected, there was no chance of the white population holding its ground, let alone increasing, without a continuous supply of immigrants from the mother country.

Over the centuries Castilians had been drawn to southern Spain, and the English to Ireland, in their search for land and opportunity. The existence of this migratory tradition suggests that neither people was likely to see the Atlantic as an insuperable barrier to further migration once transatlantic sailings became reasonably well established. But there would need to be good reason to embark on the hazardous ocean crossing, and this was likely to come from severe pressures at home, or the lure of richer rewards and a better life overseas, or some combination of the two.'25

When Castile launched out on its conquest of the Indies, there was no overwhelming compulsion in terms of population pressure to expand overseas; but the system of land-ownership in some regions - notably Extremadura, which contained no more than 7 per cent of Spain's population but provided 17 per cent of its overseas migrants in the period up to 1580 - was sufficiently inequitable to encourage the more adventurous among the deprived and the disappointed to seek new opportunities elsewhere.126 Reports of fabulous riches to be found in the Indies provided a strong incentive to these mostly young men to up stakes and go, although probably with the expectation of returning home once they had made their fortunes overseas. By placing themselves in the service of an influential local figure, and drawing on the extensive family networks which soon criss-crossed the Spanish Atlantic, these first migrants - and often involuntary colonists - succeeded in making the crossing, if not necessarily the fortunes which they believed to be awaiting them in the Indies.

Once the crown was committed to establishing a permanent Spanish presence in the Indies, it was naturally concerned to curb the migration of these footloose adventurers, and encourage the transatlantic movement of potentially more reliable elements in the population, who possessed the determination and the skills to help develop the natural resources of the land. It established an appropriate instrument for control in the Casa de la Contratacion - the House of Trade set up in Seville in 1503, which was made responsible for the regulation of all emigration to the Indies - and nominated Seville as the sole point of departure for the Indies. Would-be emigrants had to present the necessary documents relating to their background and place of birth to officials of the Casa in order to receive a royal licence for the transatlantic crossing. From the earliest years, therefore, this was a controlled emigration, and restrictions were added - or sometimes relaxed - in accordance with changing priorities and needs. The passage of foreigners, for instance, was legally prohibited, except for a short period between 1526 and 1538, but the definition of `foreigner' was far from clear. Technically it even included the inhabitants of the Crown of Aragon, but in practice there seems to have been no impediment to their travelling to the Indies, although their numbers seem to have been small. This was overwhelmingly a migration from the Crown of Castile, with Andalusia providing a third of the emigrants.

Map 2. The Early Modern Atlantic World.

Based on D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 1, Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (1986), fig. 8; The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998), vol. 1, map 1.1; and Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740 (1986), figs 2 and 3.

While non-Spaniards were officially excluded from Spain's American possessions, individuals with a legitimate reason for going could apply for naturalization or secure a special licence.121 Jews, Moors, gypsies and heretics were all forbidden entry to the Indies. In the earlier years of colonization it was possible to find ways around these prohibitions, but evasion became more difficult after 1552, when it was decreed that potential emigrants must furnish proof from their home towns and villages of their limpieza de sangre, demonstrating the absence of any taint of Jewish or Moorish blood.121

In comparison with the elaborate efforts made by the Spanish crown to control and regulate the process of overseas emigration, the efforts of the early Stuarts in the same direction were puny. In 1607 James I renewed the standing restrictions on travel to foreign ports without first securing a licence, and in 1630 Charles I invoked his father's proclamation to ensure that emigrants to New England would be registered at their port of departure. During the course of the 1630s - the decade of the Great Migration - the king and Archbishop Laud became increasingly preoccupied by `such an universal running to New England' and elsewhere, at a time when settlers were needed for Ireland; but although the clerks at the port of London conscientiously recorded the names and details of emigrants, the Privy Council was unable in practice to control the movement of emigration.121

Even the Spanish crown, however, with far stricter regulatory procedures and with emigration to the Indies allowed only from a single port, achieved only a limited success. Documents could be falsified, ships' captains bribed, and there was a high rate of attrition among crew members and soldiers on the transatlantic fleets, who would jump ship on arriving at Vera Cruz, Portobelo or Cartagena de las Indias, and disappear into American space.l3o If the Spanish crown achieved only limited success in preventing clandestine emigration, its efforts in the early stages of colonization to promote the kind of emigration of which it approved were an almost total failure. In 1512, for instance, a royal councillor proposed that poor families should be shipped across the Atlantic at the state's expense. Yet assisted emigration for peasant and artisan families seems to have been of limited effect, and the crown was unwilling to approve the system of free transport in return for a period of enforced labour service on arrival in the Indies which was to have such a future in the Anglo-American world. This would have led to a form of white servitude quite unacceptable in a world so heavily populated by `free' Indians.13' As far as official efforts to redress the balance of the sexes were concerned, the constant repetition of royal orders that wives should join their husbands in the Indies suggests that they were widely flouted, and in 1575 Philip II had to suspend preferential measures to facilitate the emigration of unmarried females because of complaints from Peru that the arrival of so many dissolute women from Spain was endangering family stability and public morality. 112

For all the efforts of the Spanish crown to control and direct the movement of people to the Indies, it remained - as subsequent British migratory movements would remain - firmly subject to the laws of supply and demand. As the population of Castile grew over the course of the sixteenth century - possibly from under 4 million to 6.5 million133 - the pressures to move became more intense, but much of the movement was internal, into the towns and cities. The restriction of the port of departure to Seville must itself have acted as a deterrent for those who lived far away, especially if they were travelling with their families; and to move on from Seville to the Indies entailed extra commitment and heavy additional expense. The transatlantic crossing, including the cost of provisions for the journey, was not cheap. The 20 or more ducats required by the 1580s for the passage of a single adult, with a further 10-20 for provisions, would suggest that emigrants dependent on their wages would either have to sell up before setting sail, or would need to rely on remittances from relatives who had preceded them to the Indies. In order to meet their costs, many would sign up as the servants of more affluent passengers, or would seek to travel as part of the entourage of a new viceroy or an important royal or clerical official. 114

The total number of emigrants from Spain to the Indies over the length of the sixteenth century is generally put at 200,000-250,000, or an average of 2,000-2,500 a year. 115 The majority of these gravitated to the two viceroyalties - 36 per cent to Peru and 33 per cent to New Spain - while New Granada received 9 per cent, central America 8 per cent, Cuba 5 per cent and Chile 4 per cent.136 There was, inevitably, a heavy preponderance of men in the initial stages of emigration, but by the middle years of the century, as conditions in the Indies began to be stabilized, the proportion of women emigrants started to rise, and there was an increase in the emigration of families, often going to join a husband or father who had successfully established himself in America. During the seventeenth century, indeed, just over 60 per cent of Andalusian emigrants went in family units '117 and family and clientage networks played a crucial part in Spain's settlement of the Indies. But even in the 1560s and 1570s, when the sixteenth-century emigration flow was at its highest, women never reached as many as a third of the total of all registered emigrants.13'