Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (6 page)

Powhatan was clearly no Montezuma. Nor, it turned out, did his `empire' offer anything comparable to those fabulous riches extracted by the Spaniards from that of Montezuma. The letters patent of 1606 authorized the colony's council to `dig, mine and search for all manner of mines of gold, silver and copper', with one-fifth (the Spanish quinto real) of the gold and silver, and one-fifteenth of the copper, to be automatically set aside for the crown.64 Initially, hopes ran very high. A letter home from one of the colonists, dating from May or June 1607, reported that

such a bay, a river and a land did never the eye of man behold; and at the head of the river, which is 160 miles long, are rocks and mountains, that promiseth infinite treasure: but our forces be yet too weak, to make further discovery: now is the king's majesty offered the most stately, rich kingdom in the world, never possessed by any Christian prince; be you one means among many to further our seconding, to conquer this land, as well as you were a means to further the discovery of it: And you yet may live to see England more rich, and renowned, than any kingdom, in all Ewroopa [sic].65

`To conquer this land.' The mentality, at least, was that of Cortes and his men, and the motivation was the same: riches, conceived in terms of gold, silver and tribute. But the high hopes were soon dashed. `Silver and gold have they none ...', reported Dudley Carleton in August 1607.66 Even trading prospects were severely limited. `The commodities of this country, what they are in Esse, is not much to be regarded, the inhabitants having no commerce with any nation, no respect of profit ... '67 Limited local resources; a colony oversupplied with gentlemen unwilling to turn their hands to work; a parent organization at home, the Virginia Company, ill-informed about the local situation and impatient for quick profits; and a dangerous dependence on the Powhatans for supplies of corn - all these brought the colony to the brink of disaster. There was an absence of continuity in the direction of the colony as Newport made his frequent voyages to and from England to keep Jamestown's lifeline open, although Captain Smith did his best to instil some discipline among the settlers. At the same time, rejecting Newport's conciliatory approach to the Indians, he adopted bullying and intimidating tactics that seem to have been inspired by those of Cortes, and brought him some success in securing food supplies.68

Looking back many years later on his experiences of a colony that he left in 1609, never to return, Smith remarked on the importance of having the right men in positions of leadership: `Columbus, Cortez, Pitzara, Soto, Magellanes, and the rest served more than apprenticeship to learn how to begin their most memorable attempts in the West Indies ...'69 This indeed was true, but neither the circumstances, nor perhaps his own temperament, allowed Smith to achieve a repeat performance of the conquest of Mexico on North American soil. For many years the survival of the settlement was to hang in the balance, with alternating peace and hostilities between the Powhatans and the English, until the so-called `Great Massacre' of some 400 of the 1,240 colonists in 1622 precipitated a conflict in which the English gradually gained the upper hand.70 But the Virginia colony that emerged from these harsh birth-throes differed sharply in many ways from the viceroyalty of New Spain. Unlike New Spain, it was not established on the tribute and services of the indigenous population, whose numbers were rapidly depleted by hunger, war and disease. And salvation, when it came, came not from gold but from tobacco.

Cortes, outmanoeuvred by royal officials, returned to Spain in 1528 to put his case to the Emperor, who confirmed him as captain-general, but not governor of New Spain. He returned there in 1530, but after costly and exhausting expeditions to the Pacific coast searching for a route to China and the Moluccas, he moved back to Spain in 1540, never again to return to the land he had conquered for Castile. Christopher Newport, for his part, left the service of the Virginia Company in 1611, apparently as a result of his dissatisfaction with its efforts to keep the Jamestown settlement supplied, and died in Java in 1617 on the third of a series of voyages on behalf of the East India Company. Both men had cause to feel disappointment with their treatment, but each, in his own way, had laid the foundations for an empire. Cortes, an inspired leader, beached his boats and led his expedition resolutely into the interior of an unknown land to conquer it for his royal master. Newport, ever the professional sailor, was the great enabler, who explored the waterways of the Chesapeake, and, after establishing a tiny settlement on the edges of a continent, opened the lifeline with the mother country that would allow it to survive.

Their two expeditions, although separated in time and space, possessed enough similarities to suggest certain common characteristics in the process of Spanish and British overseas colonization, as well as significant differences that would become increasingly marked as the years went by. The Spanish and British empires in America have been described respectively as empires of `conquest' and of `commerce'," but even these two expeditions would seem to indicate that motivations are not easily compartmentalized into neat categories, and that approaches to colonization resist straightforward classification. Was Cortes, with his almost obsessive determination to settle the land, no more than a gold-hungry conqueror? And were the promoters of the Virginia enterprise purely concerned with commercial opportunities, to the exclusion of all else?

There are sufficient references in Tudor and Stuart promotional literature to the activities of the Spaniards in America to make it clear that English attitudes to colonizing ventures were influenced in important ways by Spanish precedents. Yet at the same time, the English, like the Spaniards, had their own priorities and agenda, which themselves were shaped by historical preoccupations, cumulative experience and contemporary concerns. The aspirations and activities of both the planters of Jamestown and the conquerors of Mexico can only be fully appreciated within the context of a national experience of conquest and settlement which, in both instances, stretched back over many centuries. For historically, Castile and England were both proto-colonial powers long before they set out to colonize America.

Medieval England pursued a policy of aggressive expansion into the nonEnglish areas of the British Isles, warring with its Welsh, Scottish and Irish neighbours and establishing communities of English settlers who would advance English interests and promote English values on alien Celtic soil.72 The English, therefore, were no strangers to colonization, combining it with attempts at conquest which brought mixed results. Failure against Scotland was balanced by eventual success in Wales, which was formally incorporated in 1536 into the Crown of England, itself now held by a Welsh dynasty. Across the sea the English struggled over the centuries with only limited success to subjugate Gaelic Ireland and `plant' it with settlers from England. Many of the lands seized by the Normans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were recovered by the Irish during the fourteenth and fifteenth;73 and although in 1540 Henry VIII elevated Ireland to the status of a kingdom, English authority remained precarious or nonexistent beyond the densely populated and rich agricultural area of the Pale. With the conversion of Henry's England to Protestantism the effective assertion of this authority over a resolutely Catholic Ireland acquired a new urgency in English eyes. The reign of Elizabeth was to see an intensified planting of new colonies on Irish soil, and, in due course, a new war of conquest. The process of the settlement and subjugation of Ireland by the England of Elizabeth, pursued over several decades, absorbed national energies and resources that might otherwise have been directed more intensively, and at an earlier stage, to the founding of settlements on the other side of the Atlantic.

In medieval Spain, the land of the Reconquista, the pattern of combined conquest and colonization was equally well established. The Reconquista was a prolonged struggle over many centuries to free the soil of the Iberian peninsula from Moorish domination. At once a military and a religious enterprise, it was a war for booty, land and vassals, and a crusade to recover for the Christians the vast areas of territory that had been lost to Islam. But it also involved a massive migration of people, as the crown allocated large tracts of land to individual nobles, to the military-religious orders engaged in the process of reconquest, and to city councils, which were given jurisdiction over large hinterlands. Attracted by the new opportunities, artisans and peasants moved southwards in large numbers from northern and central Castile to fill the empty spaces. In Spain, as in the British Isles, the process of conquest and settlement helped to establish forms of behaviour, and create habits of mind, easily transportable to distant parts of the world in the dawning age of European overseas expansion.74

The conquest and settlement of Al-Andalus and Ireland were still far from complete when fourteenth-century Europeans embarked on the exploration of the hitherto unexplored waters and islands of the African and eastern Atlantic.75 Here the Portuguese were the pioneers. It was the combined desire of Portuguese merchants for new markets and of nobles for new estates and vassals that provided the impetus for the first sustained drive for overseas empire in the history of Early Modern Europe.76 Where the Portuguese pointed the way, others followed. The kings of Castile, in particular, could not afford to let their Portuguese cousins steal a march on them. The Castilian conquest and occupation of the Canary Islands between 1478 and 1493 constituted a direct response by the Crown of Castile to the challenge posed by the spectacular expansion of Portuguese power and wealth.`7

The early participation of Genoese merchants in Portugal's overseas enterprises, and the consequent transfer to an expanding Atlantic world of techniques of colonization first developed in the eastern Mediterranean'78 gave Portugal's empire from its early stages a marked commercial orientation. This would be reinforced by the nature of the societies with which the Portuguese came into contact. Neither Portuguese resources, nor local conditions, were conducive to the seizure of vast areas of territory in Africa and Asia. Manpower was limited, local societies were resilient, and climate and disease tended to take a heavy toll of newly arrived Europeans. As a result, the overseas empire established by the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted largely of a string of fortresses and factories (feitorias) - trading posts and enclaves - on the margins of the unconquered continents of Africa and Asia. The most obvious exceptions were Madeira and the Azores, and then, from the 1540s, Brazil, as the Portuguese became alarmed by reports of French designs on the territory and took the first steps towards bringing it under more effective control. By contrast, the Spaniards began constructing for themselves, from the very early stages of their movement overseas, something more akin to an empire of conquest and settlement.

The process had begun with the subjugation of the Guanche population of the Canary Islands and continued with Columbus. For all his Genoese origins and long residence in Lisbon, he seems, as he returned from his first voyage in 1492, to have had something more in mind than the establishment of an overseas trading base. Be sure', he wrote in his journal, addressing Ferdinand and Isabella, ,that this island [Hispaniola] and all the others are as much your own as is Castile, for all that is needed here is a seat of government and to command them to do what you wish'; and he went on to say of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, whom he described as `naked and with no experience of arms and very timid', that `they are suitable to take orders and be made to work, sow and do anything else that may be needed, and build towns and be taught to wear clothes and adopt our cus- toms.79 Here already can be discerned the outlines of a programme which would today be regarded as that of the archetypal colonial regime: the establishment of a seat of government and of rule over the indigenous population; the induction of that population into the working methods of a European-style economy, producing European-style commodities; and the acceptance on behalf of the colonizing power of a civilizing mission, which was to include the wearing of European clothes and the adoption of Christianity. This would in due course become the programme of the Spaniards in America.

There were reasons both metropolitan and local why the Spanish overseas enterprise should have moved in this direction. The Reconquista had firmly established the tradition of territorial conquest and settlement in Castile. Columbus, who watched Ferdinand and Isabella make their triumphal entry into the Moorish city of Granada on its surrender in January 1492, participated in, and turned to his own advantage, the euphoria generated by this climactic moment in the long history of the Reconquista. From the vantage-point of 1492 it was natural to think in terms of the continuing acquisition of territory and of the extension of the Reconquista beyond the shores of Spain. Across the straits lay Morocco; and, as Columbus would soon demonstrate, across the Atlantic lay the Indies.

Alongside the tradition of territorial settlement and expansion, however, late medieval Castile also possessed a strong mercantile tradition, and it could have followed either route when embarking on its overseas ventures.80 But conditions in the Indies themselves encouraged a territorial approach, as conditions facing the Portuguese in Africa and Asia did not. Disappointingly for Columbus, the Caribbean offered no equivalent of the lucrative trading networks in the Indian Ocean, although the first Spanish settlers in Hispaniola and Cuba would engage in a certain amount of rescate, or barter, with the inhabitants of neighbouring islands. While some gold would be found on Hispaniola, precious metals were not a major commodity of local exchange, and if the Spaniards wanted them it soon became clear that they would have to get them for themselves. The exploitation of mineral resources therefore demanded dominion of the land.