Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (54 page)

Campillo's interpretation of the colonial policies of France and Britain was no doubt excessively rose-tinted, but his treatise, for all the ambiguities of its recommendations and the circumspect terms in which it was couched, is an indication of the way in which Spain's empire was coming to be conceptualized by ministers in Madrid in terms of its potential as a British-style empire of commerce. Sooner or later the new priorities would lead to a systematic reforming effort in the Indies, especially if military and naval expenses generated by continental and overseas wars continued to mount.

The War of Jenkins' Ear, arising in 1739 out of Spanish efforts to cut down on contraband in the West Indies, began as an Anglo-Spanish naval conflict in the Caribbean before being swept up in the wider European conflict over the Austrian succession. On both sides, the costs of war would encourage already existing attempts to tighten the bonds of empire and rethink imperial relationships. In Britain, the war unleashed a patriotic frenzy that turned to triumphalism as the news arrived in March 1740 of Admiral Vernon's capture of Portobelo. Britain's empire of the seas was resoundingly confirmed, and fittingly commemorated in the first singing of Thomas Arne's rendering of `Rule Britannia'.55 The War of Jenkins' Ear, however, generated more than a localized patriotism. It reinforced the sense of a British transatlantic community, by giving the colonies the conviction that they were participating in a joint enterprise, both Protestant and free. In so doing, it strengthened the psychological and emotional bonds that were at least as powerful as the influence of interest groups and the bonds of patronage and commerce in tying them to the mother country.56 Yet at the same time it raised awkward questions about whether the existing structure of empire was adequate to meet the expectations, and satisfy the aspirations, of either the imperial metropolis or the colonies.

In the Spanish Atlantic community, the period of warfare which ended in 1748 with very mixed results could hardly be expected to generate such positive emotional responses. But it brought with it important changes, including the licensing, in response to the hazards of wartime shipping, of transatlantic sailings by single ships in place of the traditional fleets. Even if the monopoly-minded merchants of Seville and Cadiz succeeded in 1757 in reviving the flota to New Spain, the days of the great transatlantic convoys were over. So too were the days of the American trading fairs which traditionally followed the arrival of the fleets.17 Policy and circumstance had combined to introduce a new, if still limited, flexibility into the commercial arrangements of Spain's Atlantic empire.

Except where matters of commerce and war were involved, however, the governments of both Britain and Spain showed no great disposition during the first four decades of the eighteenth century to tamper with the prevailing political and administrative relationship between the imperial centre and its transatlantic possessions. Inertia, bordering on neglect, appeared to be the order of the day - a neglect that was salutary or pernicious according to the perspective adopted.58 But the growing appreciation in both Britain and Spain of the commercial benefits of their Atlantic empires, coupled with the growing costs of imperial defence in an age of great-power conflict on land and sea, meant that the neglect could not continue indefinitely.

Yet change imposed from the imperial metropolis was likely in both instances to aggravate the latent tensions that had existed between the colonial communities and the mother country ever since colonization began. These communities saw themselves, and were seen by the metropolitan societies from which they derived, as constituent parts of polities that spanned the Atlantic - polities more closely integrated in some areas than in others, but none the less united by a common heritage and a whole complex of loyalties and interests. Over their mutual relationship, however, hovered a puzzling question. Were these overseas communities respectively British and Spanish, or were they really something different?

In 1567 Lope Garcia de Castro, the interim governor of Peru, informed the President of the Council of the Indies: `Your Excellency should understand that the people of this land are different from what they were before, because most of the Spaniards who depend on it for their livelihood are old, and many are dead and have been succeeded in the repartimientos [of the Indians] by their sons, and have left many children. As a result, this land is full of criollos, who are those who were born here ...'S9 To the new generation which succeeded that of the conquistadores, the Indies, not Spain, was the only home they knew They were criollos -'native-born'- a word first used in the mid-sixteenth century of black slaves born in the Indies, rather than in Africa.60 In the last twenty or thirty years of the century criollo, as applied to American-born Spaniards, began to catch on in peninsular Spain, to some extent displacing indiano, a term also used to describe someone who returned home from the Indies, having made his fortune. Its growing popularity reflected the existence in America of a new breed of Spaniards, who in some respects might differ from their Spanish-born relatives.

By the early seventeenth century, some form or other of the word criollo had entered the English language, but it was still an unfamiliar term. William Strachey found it necessary to explain its meaning in his The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania of 1612, when, writing of `the Indian-Crollos', he added in parenthesis `(Spaniards born there) 1.61 In the middle years of the century Thomas Gage's racy account of his experiences in Mexico no doubt helped popularize the word among English readers, while also acquainting them with the antipathy between creoles and new arrivals from Spain, the so-called gachupines or penin- sulares.62 It seems, however, to have been only in the 1680s that English officials, or newly arrived immigrants, began to apply the term creole to their own compatriots born either in the Caribbean or the mainland colonies, or long settled there. Even then, there was some uncertainty about the usage, since creole could equally be applied to American-born blacks.63

Criollo and creole were words more likely to be employed by others to describe European settlers and their descendants, than used by native-born white Americans as a form of self-description. In a famous pamphlet of 1764 the Boston lawyer, James Otis, appended an explanatory note: `Those in England who borrow the term of the Spaniards, as well as their notions of government, apply this term to all Americans of European extract; but the northern colonists apply it only to the islanders [i.e. the West Indies settlers] and others of such extract under the torrid Zone.'64 The descendants of English settlers of America thought of themselves as quintessentially English, just as, in their own eyes, settlers of Spanish descent in the Indies were espanoles, as distinct from indios, mestizos and negros. The term creole, moreover, rapidly acquired a set of negative connotations. Even those who could boast pure Spanish descent, without any admixture of Indian blood, were widely believed among peninsular Spaniards to have gone to seed in the Indies. The seventeenth-century jurist Solorzano y Pereira, coming to their defence, blamed those who, through ignorance or a malicious desire to exclude creoles from offices and honours, liked to claim that they `degenerate so much as a result of the constellations and temper of those provinces, that they lose all the good effects that derive from the influence of Spanish blood', with the result that they were `scarcely worthy of being described as rational beings ...'6s

This notion that those who settled in the Indies ran the risk of degeneration was not confined to the Spanish world. Cotton Mather, in the annual election sermon of 1689 which he preached on the occasion of the opening of the Massachusetts General Court, spoke ominously of `the too general want of education in the rising generation, which if not prevented will gradually but speedily dispose us to that sort of Criolian degeneracy observed to deprave the children of the most noble and worthy Europeans when transplanted into America'.66 Such fears had dogged English settlers since the early days of their migration to a New World environment for which John Winthrop and others claimed an essentially English character, in spite of the climatic evidence to the contrary.67 `For the country itself,' he wrote to his son, `I can discern little difference between it and our own ...'68 But the growing realization that New England was not old England, just as New Spain was not old Spain, opened up the disturbing possibility of Mather's `Criolian degeneracy'.69

If settlers did indeed degenerate in their new transatlantic environment, one plausible explanation was their proximity to the Indians. The fear of cultural degeneration through osmosis was one that had haunted the English in their dealings with the Irish, and they carried it with them in their cultural baggage when they crossed the Atlantic.70 Spanish settlers who had consorted with Indians and grown used to Indian ways seem to have been less exercised by this fear than their English counterparts, but their unwillingness to protect themselves from contaminating Indian influences made them vulnerable to disparaging comments from officials and clerics who had recently come from Spain and did not like what they saw. Criticism was levelled in particular at the employment of Indian nurses and wet-nurses in creole households, not only because, in conditions of such intimacy, these women were likely to instil Indian habits into their creole charges, but also because - on the assumption that a child will `extract the inclinations which it imbibed with the milk' - its `inclinations' would naturally be perverse if the milk was Indian.71 With the creole elite already living a life of idleness and luxury, what hope was there that their children, and in due course their grandchildren, would escape the corrupting consequences of such perverse inclinations?

Above all, however, it was the climate and the constellations that were held responsible for the perceived failings of the creoles. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a sympathetic observer of the Indian scene, declared that he was not surprised by the blemishes in the character of the Indians of New Spain, `because the Spaniards who live in this land, and much more those born in it, acquire these evil inclinations. Those who, very like Indians, are born there, resemble Spaniards in appearance, but not in their nature and qualities, while native Spaniards, if they do not take great care, become different people within a few years of their arrival in these regions. I ascribe this to the climate or the constellations of this land.'72

This climatic determinism, a legacy of the classical world of Hippocrates and Galen, and given a fresh impetus in sixteenth-century Europe by the writings of Bodin, was to cast a long shadow over European settlers in America and their descendants.73 It implied that they were doomed to Mather's `Criolian degeneracy', a tendency to descend to the level of the Indians in their manners and morals. This assumed process of creeping Indianization was capable not only of arousing deep anxieties among settlers, but also of creating unflattering stereotypes in the minds of European visitors and observers. A Quito-born creole bishop, Gaspar de Villarroel, who spent nearly ten years in Madrid, wrote in 1661 of his indignation when a Spaniard expressed surprise that an americano should be `as white, and well-formed, as a Spaniard, and speak Castilian just as well'.74

All such stereotypes took as their starting-point the fact, or the assumption, of difference, a difference that was cultural rather than racial, although there was some suspicion that the American environment might in due course lead also to actual physical differentiation. There was anxious debate, for instance, as to whether the descendants of Spaniards who had settled in the Indies would eventually acquire hairless bodies, like those of the Indians.71 It was in response to such concerns about the impact of environment on physique as well as temperament that seventeenth-century creole writers in Spanish America began to develop racialist theories about the Indians, in an effort to differentiate the descendants of the conquerors and settlers from the indigenous population whose environment they shared. It was `nature', not environment, that made Indians what they were; and it was nature that would prevent the environment from turning American-born Spaniards into Indians.76

English settlers, for their part, were keen to deny that the American climate had any adverse impact on their physique, and claimed that English bodies positively flourished in a New World environment, unlike those of the indigenous inhabitants who were dying of disease in their thousands. As Cotton Mather's remarks on `Criolian degeneracy' indicate, however, they were less confident when it came to the cultural consequences of living in America.77 The fear of being tarnished by the slur of cultural degeneration made it important to draw sharp distinctions between themselves and the indigenous population. English colonists seem for a long time to have been reluctant to apply to themselves the epithet American, perhaps because, at least for the Founding Fathers of New England, the `Americans' were the Indians. It is not clear whether the same holds true for Spanish America. Bishop Villarroel, using the word americano in 1661, immediately adds the confusing gloss, `that is, Indian' (indio), although he is clearly referring to creoles. The word americano does not appear in the Spanish Dictionary of Authorities, published in 1726, which suggests the infrequency of its use at that date. As in British America, the association of American with Indian may well have made the word problematic. In spite of occasional use from the later seventeenth century onward, it would only be in the second half of the eighteenth century that the creole inhabitants of both British and Spanish America began to sport American as a badge of pride .71

The attempts by the creoles to disassociate themselves in the minds of their Old World cousins from the non-European inhabitants of America failed to have the desired effect. They were unable to eradicate the perception of difference - a perception that to some extent accorded with reality. It was not simply the presence of indigenous or African populations which made the difference, although this certainly counted for much. As colonial societies were consolidated, they developed their own special characteristics, which began to mark them out in significant ways from the parent society. When, as in the Chesapeake region in the early eighteenth century, immigration from the mother country tapered off and those born on the American side of the ocean came to constitute the majority of the white population, memories of how life was lived in the homeland inevitably grew fainter, and new generations slipped naturally into the patterns of life developed by their parents and grandparents as they adapted to New World conditions.79