Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (14 page)

Although many letters survive from sixteenth-century settlers in Spanish America begging relatives back home to join them,139 the greatest deterrent to a more massive migratory movement from the Iberian peninsula to the Indies was probably to be found neither in the cost of the journey, nor in the Sevillian monopoly of sailings and the complexity of bureaucratic procedures, but in the relatively limited opportunities once the first stage of colonization had passed. Because of the presence, especially in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, of a large Indian labour force, reinforced where necessary by the importation of slaves from Africa, there was no extensive labour market in the Spanish Indies to provide immigrants with work. Artisans who arrived from Spain would find themselves in competition with Indian craftsmen who had been quick to master European skills, and the unsuccessful would join the ranks of that floating population of vagrants, of which the viceroys were always complaining. 140 There was a significant return movement from America to Spain - perhaps of the order of 10-20 per cent141- and while many of those returning were ecclesiastics and officials who had completed their overseas assignment, or settlers paying short-term visits to their homeland for business or family reasons, some at least must have been emigrants whose high hopes of a new life in the Indies had been dashed.

In North America, by contrast, with its more sparsely settled indigenous population, labour prospects for immigrants were far better. England, too, was believed by contemporaries to be suffering from overpopulation. Its total area of 50,333 square miles supported a population of some 4 million in 1600,142 whereas the population of the Crown of Castile (147,656 square miles) fell from some 6.5 million in the middle decades of the sixteenth century to 6 million at its end as a result of devastating harvest failure and plague in the 1590s.143 The pressures in England for overseas migration were correspondingly stronger. But the West Indies or the North American mainland were not the only possible destinations for English emigrants. The principal deterrent to New World emigration in the early seventeenth century was not the absence of opportunity but the much easier option of migration to Ireland, which received some two hundred thousand immigrants from England, Wales and Scotland during the first seventy years of the century.144 If the new transatlantic settlements were to be peopled, therefore, it would be necessary to offer substantial inducements to potential emigrants to make the more expensive and hazardous crossing to America, and to resort to recruitment devices which were hardly needed in Spanish America, with its rich supply of indigenous labour. Projectors and proprietors went to great lengths to promote settlement in their colonies by emphasizing their attractiveness in promotional literature - a genre which did not exist in Spain, where a work like Sir William Alexander's An Encouragement to Colonies (1624) would have had little point or purpose.

Promotional tracts like New England's Plantation (1630) made much of the opportunities of a land that was represented to the English public as largely empty, and ripe for improvement: `Here wants as yet the good company of honest Christians to bring with them horses, kine and sheep to make use of this fruitful land: great pity it is to see so much good ground for corn and for grass as any is under the heavens, to lie altogether unoccupied, when so many honest men and their families in old England through the populousness thereof, do make very hard shift to live one by the other ... The Indians are not able to make use of the one fourth part of the land, neither have they any settled places, as towns to dwell in, nor any ground as they challenge for their own possession, but change their habitation from place to place.' Here, then, was space in abundance, together with no more than a thin population of Indians `who generally profess to like well of our coming and planting here ...'145 - a benign picture comparable to that found in the early promotional literature for Virginia, where the image of the Indian was suitably adjusted to refute popular notions of his bestiality.141

Mere promotion, however, was unlikely to do much more than bring the possibilities of emigration to America to the attention of people who might not otherwise have considered them; and in any event letters from settlers, comparable to those sent home from Spanish America, and encouraging friends and relatives to join them on the other side of the ocean, are likely to have proved more influential than impersonal publicity. `Here', wrote the minister Thomas Welde in 1632 to his former parishioners in Tarling, `I find three great blessings, peace, plenty, and health in a comfortable measure ...'147 The message was attractive, and when it could be presented as promoting God's work and God's design, it could be counted upon to receive a particularly attentive and sympathetic hearing from the more godly members of the community.

Religion, which in the Spanish movement to the New World was channelled into the evangelizing activities of members of the religious orders anxious to win new converts for the faith, exercised a broader influence over English transatlantic emigration. It played its part in the settlement of Virginia - which received a significant influx of Puritans148 - and of Maryland, originally founded to provide a place of refuge for Catholics. But although the prospect of building John Winthrop's `city upon a hill' was one impelling element in the Great Migration to America in the 1630s, it hardly represents the exclusive and overwhelming force that subsequent generations claimed it to be as they rewrote the history of New England to shape it to their own preconceptions and agenda.141 Only 21,000 of the 69,000 Britons who crossed the Atlantic in the Great Migration went to New England. 150 Of these some 20-25 per cent were servants, who may or may not have had Puritan inclinations, and there were enough profane and ungodly settlers to prove a source of constant anxiety to the New England ministers.

Among British, as among Spanish, emigrants the motives for emigration were naturally mixed, and the cost of the journey - described in 1630 as `wondrous dear'151 - was a deterrent in the British Isles, just as it was in Spain. The basic cost of the eight- to twelve-week transatlantic passage was about the same in the two countries in the early seventeenth century - £5 or 20 ducats (at an exchange rate of 4 ducats to the pound) - and to this had to be added the cost of provisions and of commodities which would be needed on arrival in America. In order to make the crossing, therefore, the majority of emigrants from the British Isles, as from Spain, would either have to sell up their property, or secure some form of assisted passage. But since the need for settlers was greater in British than in Spanish America, more intensive and systematic efforts had to be made to find ways of financing the passage of those emigrants from the British Isles who could not pay for themselves.

Accordingly, from 1618 Virginia developed its headright system, under which a hundred acres of land was offered to each settler, and a further hundred for every person he brought with him. 112 But throughout the Anglo-American world indentured service became the most effective and pervasive instrument for the encouragement of transatlantic emigration.153 Terms of service varied, but most servants emigrating to the Caribbean and the Chesapeake signed up for four to five years '154 and legal and institutional constraints were much more binding than the kind of arrangements generally negotiated by Spanish emigrants who secured a free passage by entering the service of some travelling dignitary, and who could usually expect to gain their independence through voluntary agreement within a relatively short time after arrival in the Indies.155 In British America conditions of service varied widely, according to time and place, and some servants were able, as in Maryland, to make use of their legal rights as contracted labourers to secure redress in the county courts from tyrannical masters.156 But for many others indentured service was the equivalent of slavery.

Until plantation-owners in the West Indies and the Chesapeake found an alternative, and - as they hoped - more submissive, source of labour in the importation of African slaves, unfree white labour was vital for the peopling and exploitation of British America. Indentured servants constituted 75-85 per cent of the settlers who emigrated to the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century, and perhaps 60 per cent of the emigrants to all British colonies in America during the course of the century came with some form of labour contract.117 Of the indentured servants, 23.3 per cent were women. 1's

These figures make it clear that in the British world, as in the Spanish, there was a massive superiority of men to women in the first century of colonization, the exception being the emigrants to New England, 40 per cent of whom between 1620 and 1649 were women.159 The much more favourable sex ratio of women to men in New England than in the other colonies created a white population that by 1650 was nearly able to sustain itself by reproduction alone, whereas the white population of the Chesapeake could only be sustained by a constant supply of new immigrants. With male immigrants to the region outnumbering female by six to one in the 1630s and still by as many as three to one in the 1650s, large numbers of men remained unmarried.160

Mortality rates, too, in the tidewater region were appallingly high, with possibly as many as 40 per cent of the new arrivals dying within two years, many of them of the malaria that was endemic in the swampy, low-lying land.161 The effect of this was to be seen in brief marriages, small families, and children often deprived of one or both of their parents at an early age. At an annual death rate of around 10 per cent, perhaps 40 per cent of all indentured servants arriving in the middle decades of the seventeenth century died before they could complete their term of service. Those who survived to become freedmen married late, or did not marry at all, and tended to become bachelor inmates in the households of others. The combined effect of such high mortality rates in Virginia and Maryland and of the prevailing sexual imbalance was to create volatile societies in which patterns of behaviour were subjected to the disproportionate influence of newly arrived immigrants. It was only in the last years of the century that the population born in the Chesapeake colonies finally outnumbered the new arrivals. 162

As New England, with the benefit of its healthy climate and an early age for marriage, succeeded in the second half of the seventeenth century in meeting its labour needs largely from natural growth, its supply of immigrants tapered off, with new arrivals choosing the West Indies or the Middle Colonies in preference. Yet the overall level of emigration to the New World remained high. During the first century of the British colonization of America, some 530,000 men and women crossed the Atlantic - between twice and four times the number of Spanish emigrants during the equivalent period a century earlier. But there was more need of their labour in the territories claimed by the British crown, and more readily available land to be `improved'.

The different rates of migration are at least crudely reflected in the comparative figures for the size of the settler populations of the Caribbean and mainland America. By 1570, three-quarters of a century after the first voyages of discovery, the white population of Spanish America is thought to have been of the order of 150,000. By 1700, some eighty years after the settlement of Jamestown, British America had a white population of some 250,000. 161 It was a population that, if it lived on the mainland, still hugged the Atlantic seaboard, but was increasingly beginning to look westward in the search for more space. This meant, necessarily, more Indian land. By contrast, strung out across the central and southern hemisphere, an urbanized Spanish population of immigrants and their Americanborn children and grandchildren suffered few of the same spatial constraints. They looked out from the window grills of their town houses over landscapes that had been rapidly emptying themselves of their Indian inhabitants. For their confrontation with American space was also a massive confrontation with its indigenous population - a confrontation that brought demographic catastrophe on an almost unimaginable scale.

If the America encountered by the Spaniards and the English consisted of a multiplicity of micro-worlds, each with its own geographical and climatic characteristics, the same was no less true of the peoples that inhabited it. Something of this diversity became apparent to Columbus as he reconnoitred the Caribbean islands, although in his effort to make this strange new world comprehensible to himself and his fellow Europeans, he ignored or failed to detect many of the social, political and linguistic differences among the peoples he encountered, and simply divided them into two contrasting groups, the Tainos or Arawaks, and the ferocious, man-eating Caribs who preyed upon them.' Living in villages and grouped into five major polities under chieftains who left a permanent legacy to western cultures in the word cacique,2 the Tainos of Hispaniola presented a series of puzzles to the Spaniards, that were still far from being resolved when the polities disintegrated and the people died out. Had they ever heard of the Christian gospel, and if not, why not? Why were they naked, and yet apparently unashamed? Were they, as first appearances suggested, innocent beings, prelapsarian men and women who had somehow escaped the fall? What god, if any, did they worship, and were they ripe for conversion to Christianity, as Columbus assumed? Did they live in stable communities conforming to European notions of policia or civility, or were their lives - as many Spaniards increasingly came to believe - more like those of beasts than of men?

These were the kind of questions that the Spaniards asked as they made their first acquaintance with the peoples of America; and in one form or another they repeated themselves as the invaders moved on from the Antilles to mainland America, where they found themselves faced with a multiplicity of new peoples, new cultures and new languages. On the strength of many years of residence in Hispaniola, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo decided that what he regarded as the inordinately thick skulls of the Indian inhabitants of his island were indicative of a `bestial and ill-intentioned mind', and he saw no hope of their being able to absorb Christian doctrine.' On the other hand, Cortes had no doubt, on arriving in Mexico, that he had come across peoples of a very different calibre from those of the Antilles, and that this in turn would have important implications for their future prospects as subjects of the Spanish crown: `... we believe that had we interpreters and other people to explain to them the error of their ways and the nature of the True Faith, many of them, and perhaps even all, would soon renounce their false beliefs and come to the true knowledge of God; for they live in a more civilized and reasonable manner than any other people we have seen in these parts up to the present.'4