Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (4 page)

By the time of Christopher Newport's departure from London in December 1606, the story of Cortes and his conquest of Mexico was well known in England. Although Cortes's Letters of Relation to Charles V had enjoyed wide circulation on the continent, there is no evidence of any particular interest in him in the British Isles during the reign of Henry VIII. In 1496 Henry's father, tempted by the lure of gold and spices, and anxious not to be excluded by the Spaniards and Portuguese, had authorized John Cabot to `conquer and possess' in the name of the King of England any territory he should come across on his North Atlantic voyage not yet in Christian hands.' But after the death of Henry VII in 1509, Tudor England, enriched by the discovery of the Newfoundland fisheries but disappointed in the prospects of easy wealth, turned away from transatlantic enterprises, and for half a century left the running to the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the French. In the 1550s, when Mary Tudor's marriage made Charles's son and heir, Philip, for a brief time King of England, Richard Eden used his translation into English of the first three books of Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World to urge his compatriots to take lessons from the Spaniards. It was not until around 1580, however, that they began to pay serious attention to his words.10

By then, English overseas voyages had significantly increased in both number and daring, and religious hostility, sharpening the collective sense of national consciousness, was making an armed confrontation between England and Spain increasingly probable. In anticipation of the conflict, books and pamphlets became the instruments of war. In 1578 Thomas Nicholas, a merchant who had been imprisoned in Spain, translated into English a much shortened version of Lopez de Gomara's History of the Indies under the title of The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India. Here English readers could read, although in mutilated form, a vivid account of the conquest of Mexico, based on information derived from Cortes himself."i Not only did Nicholas drastically cut Gomara's text, but he also managed to give it a distinctively English colouring. Where Gomara introduced Montezuma's formal surrender of sovereignty to Charles V by saying that he summoned a council and Cortes `which was attended by all the lords of Mexico and the country round', English readers would no doubt have been gratified to learn that he `proclaimed a Parliament', after which `Mutezuma and the burgesses of Parliament in order yielded themselves for vassals of the King of Castile, promising loyalty'."

A few years later, Richard Hakluyt the younger, who had emerged as the principal promoter and propagandist of English overseas empire, reminded the readers of his Principall Navigations how `Hernando Cortes, being also but a private gentleman of Spain ... took prisoner that mighty Emperor Mutezuma in his most chief and famous city of Mexico, which at that instant had in it above the number of 500,000 Indians at the least, and in short time after obtained not only the quiet possession of the said city, but also of his whole Empire."3 The taking of possession had hardly been `short' or `quiet', but Hakluyt's message was clear enough.

A few Elizabethans were coming to realize, as Cortes himself had realized after observing the devastation by his compatriots of the islands they had ravaged in the Caribbean, that the acquisition of empire demanded a firm commitment to settle and colonize. The preface to John Florio's 1580 English translation of Jacques Cartier's account of his discovery of Canada (New France) informed English readers that `the Spaniards never prospered or prevailed but where they planted';14 and in his Discourse of Western Planting of 1584 Richard Hakluyt cited with approbation Gomara's remarks on the folly of Cortes's predecessor, Juan de Grijalva, who, on reaching the coast of Yucatan, failed to found a settlement.'5 In that same year an English expedition identified Roanoke Island, off the coast of what was later to become North Carolina, as a base for privateering attacks on the Spanish West Indies. But Walter Raleigh, for one, saw its potential as a base not only for privateering but also for colonization, and in the following year Roanoke was to become the setting for England's first serious, although ultimately abortive, attempt at transatlantic settlement (fig. 4).16

Although Raleigh's Roanoke colony ended in failure, it would provide valuable lessons for the more sustained Jacobean programme of colonization that was to begin with Christopher Newport's expedition of 1606-7. But the loss of the colony meant that, lacking any base in the Americas, Newport's expedition, unlike that of Cortes, had to be organized and financed from the home country. The Cortes expedition had been funded in part by Diego Velazquez out of his resources as governor of Cuba, and in part by private deals between Cortes and two wealthy islanders who advanced him supplies on credit. 17 The Newport expedition was financed and organized by a London-based joint-stock company, the Virginia Company, which received its charter from James VI and I in April 1606, granting it exclusive rights to settle the Chesapeake Bay area of the American mainland. Under the same charter a Plymouth-based company was given colonizing rights further to the north. Although funding was provided by the investors, many of whom were City merchants, the appointment of a thirteenman royal council with regulatory powers gave the Company the assurance of state backing for its enterprise.18

Where Cortes, therefore, was nominally serving under the orders of the royal governor of Cuba, from whom he broke free at the earliest opportunity, Newport was a company employee. The company chose more wisely than the governor of Cuba. Cortes was too clever, and too ambitious, to be content with playing second string. His father, an Extremaduran hidalgo, or minor nobleman, had fought in the campaign against the Moors to reconquer southern Spain. The son, who learnt Latin and seems to have mastered the rudiments of the law while a student in Salamanca, made the Atlantic crossing in 1506, at the age of twenty-two.19 When Cortes left for the Indies it was hardly his intention to serve out his life as a public notary. Like every impoverished hidalgo he aspired to fame and fortune, and is said to have dreamed one night, while working as a notary in the little town of Azua on the island of Hispaniola, that one day he would be dressed in fine clothes and be waited on by many exotic retainers who would sing his praises and address him with high-sounding titles. After the dream, he told his friends that one day he would dine to the sound of trumpets, or else die on the gallows.20 But for all his ambitions, he knew how to bide his time, and the years spent in Hispaniola, and then in Cuba, gave him a good understanding of the opportunities, and the dangers, that awaited those who wanted to make their fortunes in the New World. If he lacked military experience when he set out on the conquest of Mexico, he had developed the qualities of a leader, and had become a shrewd judge of men.

Newport, too, was an adventurer, but of a very different kind.2' Born in 1561, the son of a Harwich shipmaster, he had the sea in his blood. In 1580, on his first recorded transatlantic voyage, he jumped ship in the Brazilian port of Bahia, but was back in England by 1584, when he made the first of his three marriages. By now he was a shipmaster who had served his apprenticeship, and was gaining the experience that would make him one of the outstanding English seamen of his age. The years that followed saw him engaged in trading and raiding, as England went to war with Spain. He took service with London merchants, and he sailed to Cadiz with Drake in 1587, remaining behind to engage in privateering activities off the Spanish coast. In 1590 he made his first independent voyage to the Caribbean as captain of the Little John, and lost his right arm in a sea-fight off the coast of Cuba when attempting to capture two treasure ships coming from Mexico. His third marriage, in 1595, to the daughter of a wealthy London goldsmith, made him a partner in major new commercial and privateering ventures, and provided him with a well-equipped man-of-war. Thereafter he made almost annual voyages to the West Indies, and by the time of the Anglo-Spanish peace settlement of 1604 he knew the Caribbean better than any other Englishman of his times. His long experience of Spanish American waters and his impressive seafaring skills therefore made him a natural choice in 1606 as the man to plant a colony for the Virginia Company on the North American mainland (fig. 3).

Of the 105 `first planters', as the men who composed Newport's expedition were called, thirty-six were classed as gentlemen.22 There were also a number of craftsmen, including four carpenters, two bricklayers, a mason, a blacksmith, a tailor and a barber, and twelve labourers. The proportion of gentlemen was high, and would become still higher by the time the new colony had twice been reinforced from England, giving it six times as many gentlemen as in the population of the home country.23 It was also high in relation to the number in Cortes's band, which was five times as large. Of the so-called `first conquerors', who were present with Cortes at the founding of Vera Cruz, only sixteen were clearly regarded as hidalgos.24 But many more had pretensions to gentility, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo goes so far as to claim in his History of the Conquest of New Spain that ,all the rest of us were hidalgos, although some were not of such clear lineage as others, because it is well known that in this world not all men are born equal, either in nobility or virtue.'25 The Cortes expedition included some professional soldiers, and many other men who, during their years in the Indies, had participated in raiding parties to various of the Caribbean islands, or joined previous expeditions for reconnaissance, barter and settlement. It also included two clerics (Newport's expedition had on board `Master Robert Hunt Preacher'), and a number of notaries, as well as craftsmen and members of specialist trades. Effectively, Cortes's company was composed of a cross-section of the residents of Cuba, which was deprived of nearly a third of its Spanish population when the expedition set sail.26 It was therefore well acclimatized to New World conditions, unlike Newport's party, which, within six months of arrival, had lost almost half its number to disease.27

The fact that the company on board Newport's ships were styled `planters' was a clear indication of the purpose of the voyage. For the English in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts, `plantation' - meaning a planting of people - was synonymous with 'colony'.28 This was standard usage in Tudor Ireland, where `colonies' or `plantations' were the words employed to designate settlements of English in areas not previously subject to English governmental control.29 Both words evoked the original coloniae of the Romans - simultaneously farms or landed estates, and bodies of emigrants, particularly veterans, who had left home to `plant', or settle and cultivate (colere), lands elsewhere.30 These people were known as `planters' rather than `colonists', a term that does not seem to have come into use before the eighteenth century. In 1630, when the British had established a number of New World settlements, an anonymous author would write: `by a colony we mean a society of men drawn out of one state or people, and transplanted into another country.'3'

The Spanish equivalent of `planter' was poblador. In 1498, when Luis Roldan rebelled against the government of the Columbus brothers on Hispaniola, he rejected the name of colonos for himself and his fellow settlers of the island, and demanded that they should be known as vecinos or householders, with all the rights accruing to vecinos under Castilian law. 32 A colon was, in the first instance, a labourer who worked land for which he paid rent, and Roldan would have none of this. Subsequent usage upheld his stand. During the period of Habsburg rule Spain's American territories, unlike those of the English, were not called `colonies'. They were kingdoms in the possession of the Crown of Castile, and they were inhabited, not by colonos, but by conquerors (conquistadores) and their descendants, and by pobladores, or settlers, the name given to all later arrivals.

The English, by contrast, were always `planters', not `conquerors'. The discrepancy between English and Spanish usage would at first sight suggest fundamentally different approaches to overseas settlement. Sir Thomas Gates and his fellow promoters of the Virginia Company had asked the crown to grant a licence ,to make habitation plantation and to deduce a Colonic of sundry of our people' in `that part of America commonly called Virginia ...'33 There was no mention here of conquest, whereas the agreement between the Castilian crown and Diego Velazquez in 1518 authorized him to `go to discover and conquer Yucatan and Cozumel'.34 But the idea of conquest was never far away from the promoters of English colonization in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Spaniards had given the lead, and the Spanish example was very much in the elder Richard Hakluyt's mind when he wrote in his Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise of 1585 that in the face of opposition from the Indians `we may, if we will proceed with extremity, conquer, fortify, and plant in soils most sweet, most pleasant, most strong, and most fertile, and in the end bring them all in subjection and to civility."' The degree to which `conquest' entered into the equation would depend on the behaviour and reactions of the indigenous population when Newport and his men set foot on land.

First impressions were hardly encouraging. Approaching Chesapeake Bay, Captain Newport put a party ashore on a cape he christened `Cape Henry', after the Prince of Wales, only to have them `assaulted by 5 Salvages, who hurt 2 of the English very dangerously'.36 Although the English were unaware of the fact, this was not the first encounter of the local inhabitants with European intruders. The Spanish had been seeking to establish fortified posts along the coast, first at Santa Elena, in the future South Carolina, in 1557, and then in Florida, where Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St Augustine in 1565 after exterminating a settlement of French Huguenots.37 Five years later, with Menendez's blessing, a party of eight Jesuits set out from Santa Elena under the leadership of Father Juan Bautista de Segura, the vice-provincial of the Jesuit Order in Florida. They had as their guide and translator a young Algonquian chief who had been picked up on an earlier expedition, given the baptismal name of Don Luis de Velasco in honour of the viceroy of New Spain, and taken to Spain, where he was presented to Philip II. Presumably in a bid to return to his native land he encouraged the Jesuits to establish their mission at `Ajacan', whose exact location on the Chesapeake is unknown, but which may have been some five miles from the future Jamestown. In 1571 Velasco, who had made his excuses and returned to live among his own people, led an Indian attack which wiped out the mission. Following a Spanish punitive expedition in 1572 the Ajacan experiment was abandoned. If, as has been suggested, Velasco was none other than Opechancanough, the brother of the local `emperor' Powhatan, Newport and his men had fixed their sights on a land where the ways of Europeans were already known and not admired.38