Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (16 page)

In New England the crushing defeat of the Pequots in the war of 1636-7 seems at first sight comparable in its impact to the defeat of the Powhatan in Virginia, but here, in contrast to the Chesapeake region, the increasing dominance of the settlers and their continuing encroachments on Indian territory led to major tribal realignments which built up formidable possibilities for future resistance. The consequences were felt throughout New England when the Wampanoag chief Metacom ('King Philip') and his allies launched a fierce assault in 1675, and the region was plunged into more than a year of bitter and bloody conflict, with many English settlements put to the torch.30

The variety of Indian responses to the European intrusion - the rapid collapse of the organized empires of the Incas and the Aztecs, the passivity of the Muisca Indians of the kingdom of New Granada, the prolonged resistance of the Chichimeca and the Araucanians, the exasperated bellicosity of the Powhatan and the Wampanoag - makes it clear that tribal traditions and culture were as important in determining the outcome of any confrontation as were the varieties of approach adopted by the Europeans themselves. In the numerous encounters of civilizations on the fringes of European settlement, a pervasive but varied and uneven process of mutual acculturation was under way. All too often in the first instance this involved acculturation to war. The indigenous peoples, at first terrified by European firearms, were soon craving for them, and there was always some settler or trader ready to oblige, like Thomas Morton of Merrymount in the Plymouth Plantation: `... first he taught them how to use them ... And having thus instructed them, he employed some of them to hunt and fowl for him, so as they became far more active in that employment than any of the English, by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body ... And here I may take occasion to bewail the mischief that this wicked man began in these parts ... So as the Indians are full of pieces all over, both fowling pieces, muskets, pistols etc.'3'

Transferring to America the legislation used in Granada against the Moors, the Spaniards from the earliest years of settlement prohibited the sale of weapons to the Indians and their holding of firearms - a policy which seems to have been successfully maintained, at least in the heartlands of empire. Nor were Indians allowed to carry swords or ride on horseback.32 The English also legislated against Indian ownership of firearms, but exceptions were made, and it proved impossible to prevent settlers like Morton trading in guns, especially in the border regions.33 Horses, too, were assimilated into the military culture of the indigenous peoples, notably the Araucanians and the Apaches, both of whom chose warfare as a way of life.34 Besides adjusting to European military technology, peoples who had often fought wars primarily to achieve some form of symbolic ascendancy now learnt to fight for land and possessions, just as they also learnt to fight for the purpose of killing. For their part, Europeans had to learn to adapt their fighting methods to meet native tactics of guerrilla warfare - the sudden ambushes, for instance, and the frightening attacks from out of the forests.35 Following the methods used with such success in the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, they also turned to Indians to help them in their wars against Indians, pitting one tribe against another, and building up networks of Indian allies. The Spaniards recruited Indian allies along the Chichimec frontier, winning over recently pacified tribes with gifts and privileges, such as exemptions from tribute and the granting of licences for the possession of horses and guns; the Virginians created a buffer zone of friendly Indians; the New Englanders depended on the Mohegans and other friendly tribes as auxiliaries in King Philip's War.36

The most effective of all allies, however, in the imposition of European supremacy was not human but biological - those Old World diseases which the invaders and settlers unwittingly brought with them to the New. Estimates of the total population of the Americas on the eve of the arrival of the first Europeans have varied wildly, from under 20 million to 80 million or more. Of these 20 to 80 million, the North American population constituted between 1 and 2 million in the assessment of minimalist demographic historians, and as many as 18 million in that of the maximalists.37 While the totals will always be a matter of debate, there is no dispute that the arrival of the Europeans brought demographic catastrophe in its train, with losses of around 90 per cent in the century or so following the first contact.38

The degree to which that catastrophe was the result of atrocities committed in the course of conquest and of the subsequent maltreatment and exploitation of the indigenous peoples by the new masters of the land was already a source of fierce discussion among Spanish observers in the age of conquest, and has remained so to this day. Bartolome de Las Casas's Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Seville in 1552, etched itself into the European consciousness as an unsparing record of the barbarous behaviour of his compatriots, and there were others, equally well informed, to second his words. `The Spaniards', wrote Alonso de Zorita, a judge of the Mexican Audiencia, in his `Brief Relation of the Lords of New Spain', `compelled them to give whatever they asked, and inflicted unheard-of cruelties and tortures upon them.'39 For others, however, the cruelty lay elsewhere. `It is my opinion and that of many who have had dealings with them', wrote Bernardo Vargas Machuca in a refutation of Las Casas, `that to paint cruelty in its full colours, there is no need to do more than portray an Indian.'40

In practice, there was no advantage to the Spaniards in killing off their tribute payers and labour supply, although this did not prevent many of them from flouting the laws introduced by the crown for the protection of the Indians, seizing them on unauthorized (and sometimes authorized) slaving raids which wrenched them out of their own environment, and exploiting them to the limits and beyond. But, as Zorita himself recognized, the Indians were dying out not only because of the `unheard-of cruelties and tortures' that he catalogued, but also because of the `plagues that have affected them', although he ascribed the susceptibility to disease of the Mexican Indians to the demoralization caused by hard labour and the disruption of traditional ways of life.41

There can be no doubting the psychological impact on the indigenous peoples of America of the trauma induced by the sudden destruction of their world. It was reflected, for instance, in the growth of drunkenness among them, a phenomenon noted in the areas of Spanish and English settlement alike.42 Their susceptibility to disease, however, was not simply the result, as Zorita believed, of the demoralization caused by conquest and exploitation. It was above all their previous isolation from Eurasian epidemics that made them so vulnerable to the diseases brought from Europe. These diseases afflicted not only peoples who suffered the trauma of conquest and colonization but also those whose contacts with Europeans were no more than sporadic, or else were mediated through several removes.

Forms of sickness that in Europe were not necessarily lethal brought devastating mortality rates to populations that had not built up the immunity that would enable them to resist. In Mesoamerica the smallpox which ravaged the Mexica defenders of Tenochtitlan in 1520-1 and killed Montezuma's successor, Cuitlahuac, after a few weeks of rule, was followed during the succeeding decades by waves of epidemics, many of them still difficult to identify with certainty: 1531-4, measles; 1545, typhus and pulmonary plague, an epidemic that struck on a horrendous scale; 1550, mumps; 1559-63, measles, influenza, mumps and diphtheria; 1576-80, typhus, smallpox, measles, mumps; 1595, measles. Comparable waves struck the peoples of the Andes, who were stricken by smallpox in the 1520s, well before Pizarro embarked on his conquest of Peru.43 Over the course of a century the decline in the size of the indigenous populations of Mexico and Peru appears to have been of the order of 90 per cent, although there were significant regional and local variations. The highland regions of Peru, for instance, seem to have suffered less than lower-lying areas, and the impact of the epidemics was affected both by the degree of intensity of settlement by Europeans, and by the settlement patterns of indigenous populations, with dispersed settlements 44 being more likely to escape.

Just as the coming of European diseases preceded European settlement in the Andes, so death stalked the Atlantic coast of North America well before the arrival of the English in any large numbers. Already in the sixteenth century sporadic contacts with Europeans had unleashed major epidemics, as when the Spanish ship that was to carry away the young Indian `Don Luis de Velasco' entered the Chesapeake Bay in 1561.45 As the contacts multiplied, so did the sicknesses. There is evidence that the indigenous population of Virginia was in decline before the founding of Jamestown in 1607, and major epidemics are reported for 1612-13 and 1616-17 in the region soon to be called New England, where the Patuxets were simply wiped oUt.46 As a result, the English found themselves settling in a land that was already partially depopulated. Although this was disappointing in so far as it reduced the chances of their finding an adequate supply of native labour, it also had its advantages, as some of the settlers appreciated. Captain John Smith remarked that `it is much better to help to plant a country than implant it and then replant it', as, in his view, the Spaniards had done, killing off their Indians and then finding it necessary to import African slaves to replace them. `But their Indians', he continued, `were in such multitudes, the Spaniards had no other remedy; and ours such a few, and so dispersed, it were nothing in a short time to bring them to labour and obedience.'47

This was a somewhat optimistic assessment, especially coming from one of the founders of a colony that failed signally to bring its Indians `to labour and obedience', and would soon be importing large numbers of Africans to make good the deficiency. But the relative sparsity of the Indian presence along the North Atlantic coast did much to smooth the path for the first English settlers, and enabled them to `plant a country' on new foundations in ways that were impossible for the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. John Winthrop put it succinctly in a letter of 1634 to Sir Nathaniel Rich: `... For the natives, they are all near dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess. 141 In reality the intervention of providence did not solve the `Indian question' to quite the degree that the earlier English settlers liked to think. But it made it a different kind of question, in character and scale, from that which faced Spanish settlers who found themselves the masters of multitudes - if shrinking multitudes - of vanquished Indians.

While the Spaniards, unlike the English, had effective dominion over large numbers of Indians, the English saw their mission in America in the same terms as the Spaniards - as one of `reducing the savage people to Christianity and civility', in Christopher Carleill's words of 1583.49 In this context to `reduce' (in Spanish, reducir) meant in the vocabulary of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not to level down,50 but to bring back or restore, and in particular to restore by persuasion or argument. `To be reduced is to be convinced', according to the definition of the word in Sebastian de Covarrubias's Castilian dictionary of 1611.51 These were peoples who had to be converted to a knowledge and understanding of the true faith, ideally by persuasion, but, as some argued, by compulsion if necessary, for had not Christ commanded: `compel them to come in 'j52

If the commitment to conversion was paramount, the reduction to `civility' was to prove a great deal more problematical. What constituted a `civilized' being, and in what respects did the peoples of America fail to meet the necessary criteria? Smith's description of the `savages' of Tenochtitlan as `a civilized people"' suggests something of the confusion in European minds as they came into contact with peoples whose customs were so different from their own. If it soon became apparent that levels of civilization, as defined by Europeans, varied enormously from one Amerindian people to another, it still remained to be decided how far those at the top of the scale, in Mesoamerica and the Andes, conformed to the necessary standards of civility, and how far their new masters should intervene to correct their failings.

Since this was a problem that first confronted the Spaniards, it is not surprising that both Spanish America and Spain itself should have been wracked by a series of highly charged debates about the character and aptitudes of the Indians. The Spaniards, by reason of their priority, were forced to be pioneers, evolving by trial and error a set of policies and practices that would determine the extent to which the peoples under their domination were to be `reduced' to European norms of behaviour.54 The novelty of the challenge, and the sheer scale of the obligation imposed on them by the Alexandrine bulls to bring these unknown peoples to the faith, forced the Spanish authorities in church and state to develop what was in effect a programme for conversion - a programme that would slide by sometimes imperceptible stages into widespread hispanicization. In terms both of a programmatic approach and of a systematic effort to implement it, the English colonization of North America would show nothing comparable.

The intensity of the Spanish effort to convert the peoples of the New World to Christianity is only comprehensible in the context of the spiritual preoccupations of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Christendom, and particularly those of the Iberian peninsula. The hunger for spiritual regeneration and renewal among sections of both the church and the laity unleashed a great movement for reform, which already by the end of the fifteenth century had made a profound impact on European civilization. The reform movement often possessed millenarian and apocalyptic overtones, especially in Spain, where the completion of the Reconquista created its own climate of spiritual euphoria. The defeat of Islam, the conquest of Jerusalem, the conversion of the world, which was regarded as a prelude to its ending - all these hopes and expectations were conjoined in the obsessive mentality of Columbus and inspired many of those with whom he came into contact, including Ferdinand and Isabella themselves." In 1492 Columbus in effect launched Spain and its monarchs on a world-wide messianic mission, although the nature of the mission makes it strange that, while the expedition included an interpreter, there was no priest on board. This deficiency was remedied on his 1493 voyage, when he took with him a Benedictine, three Franciscans, and a Catalan Hieronymite, Ramon Pane, whose experiences on Hispaniola led him to write the first in the great series of ethnographical treatises on the indigenous peoples of America produced by members of the religious orders. 56