Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (9 page)

As Burke indicates, American space varied enormously in its physical and climatic characteristics. There was not one America but many, and these different Americas lent themselves to different styles of settlement and exploitation.' Far to the north, Basque or English fishermen attracted from the fifteenth century by the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland, would be faced by a bleak and inhospitable coastal landscape. Further south, the view of land from the sea was more encouraging. The Reverend Francis Higginson, writing home to his friends in England in 1629, observed the `fine woods and green trees by land and these yellow flowers painting the sea', which `made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England, whence we saw such fore-running signals of fertility afar off'.' Inland, however, lay dark forests, and the frightening unknown. To the south again was the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia, described by Captain Smith as `a country in America that lieth between the degrees of 34 and 44 of the north latitude', where `the summer is hot as in Spain; the winter cold as in France and England. '4

The Spaniards who reached the Caribbean and moved onwards into central and southern America were faced with landscapes and climates of extreme contrasts - tropical islands in the Antilles, barren scrubland in the Yucatan peninsula, the volcanic high plateau or altiplano of northern and central Mexico, and the dense tropical vegetation of the central American isthmus. While there was a climatic unity to the tropical world of the Caribbean islands and central America, southern America was a continent of violent extremes, and nowhere more than in Peru, as the great Jesuit writer, Jose de Acosta, noted in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies at the end of the sixteenth century: `Peru is divided into three long and narrow strips, the plains, the sierras and the Andes. The plains run along the sea-coast; the sierra is all slopes, with some valleys; the Andes are dense mountains ... It is astonishing to see how, in a distance of as little as fifty leagues, equally far from the equator and the pole, there should be such diversity that in one part it is almost always raining, in one it almost never rains, and in the other it rains during one season and not another.'s

Distances in this South American world were vast, and were made still vaster by the impossible character of so much of the terrain. In the kingdom of New Granada, for instance, the combination of a hot, damp climate and dramatic changes of level between the Magdalena valley and the Cordillera Oriental of modern Colombia meant that after a sixty-day transatlantic crossing from Seville to the Caribbean port city of Cartagena, it took a minimum of another thirty days to cover the thousand kilometres from Cartagena to Santa Fe de Bogota.6

How were the Spaniards, and those other Europeans who followed them, to take possession of so much space? The mastering of America, as effected by Europeans, involved three related processes: the symbolic taking of possession; physical occupation of the land, which entailed either the subjection or the expulsion of its indigenous inhabitants; and the peopling of the land by settlers and their descendants in sufficient numbers to ensure that its resources could be developed in conformity with European expectations and practices.

The symbolic taking of possession tended to consist in the first instance of a ceremonial act, the nature and extent of which were likely to be as much conditioned by circumstance as by national tradition.' The Spanish and the English alike accepted the Roman Law principle of res nullius, whereby unoccupied land remained the common property of mankind, until being put to use. The first user then became the owner.' According to the thirteenth-century Castilian legal code of the Siete Partidas, `it rarely happens that new islands arise out of the sea. But if this should happen and some new island appears, we say that it should belong to him who first settles it.'9 A similar principle would govern land titles in Spanish colonial America: possession was conditional on occupation and use.1° In claiming sovereignty, however, the Spaniards, unlike the English, had little or no need of the doctrine of res nullius, since their title was based on the original papal concession to the Spanish crown. Arriving, moreover, in lands for the most part already well settled by indigenous populations, their principal preoccupation would be to justify their lordship over peoples rather than land.i" In this, the most serious objections faced by the crown would come from within Spain itself, rather than from foreign rivals who lacked the power to enforce their own counter-claims.

Even if claims to sovereignty were entirely valid in the eyes of those who made them, the formal taking of possession by some form of ceremony constituted a useful statement of intent, directed at least as much to other European princes as to the local population. Both in Castile and England, taking possession of a property was traditionally accompanied by symbolic acts, such as beating the bounds, cutting branches, or scooping up earth. When the Castilians seized Tenerife in the Canary Islands in 1464, Diego de Herrera secured the formal submission of the local chiefs. He then had the royal standard raised, and made a circuit of two leagues, `stamping the ground with his feet as a sign of possession and cutting the branches of trees .. .'12 Columbus makes no mention of such a ceremony following his landfall at San Salvador, but he raised the standard of Ferdinand and Isabella, and had the solemn declaration of their rights to the island duly notarized. Subsequently, as he noted in his journal, he did the same in the other islands: `I did not wish to pass by any island without taking possession of it, although it might be said that once one had been taken, they all were."3

The delimitation of the areas allocated respectively to the crowns of Castile and Portugal by the bull Inter Caetera of 4 May 1493 did not preclude ceremonial assertions of possession when captains and commanders set foot on new soil. In his instructions to Pedro Margarit, dated 9 April 1494, Columbus ordered that, wherever he went, `along all the roads and footpaths' he should have `high crosses and boundary stones erected, and also crosses on the trees and crosses in any other appropriate place, where they cannot fall down ... because, praise be to God, the land belongs to Christians, and this will serve as a permanent memorial, and you should also place on some tall and large trees the names of their Royal Highnesses. 114 Comparable rituals occurred as the Spaniards made their way across mainland America, with Balboa walking into the Pacific in 1513 with raised banner and drawn sword to take possession of the ocean and the surrounding land and islands on behalf of the Crown of Castile. Similarly, Cortes was scrupulous in following the instructions given him by the governor of Cuba to `assume possession ... with all possible solemnity', and in Honduras in 1526 tufts of grass would be pulled up and earth scooped up by hand."

The clearest English analogy to these practices occurred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Newfoundland voyage in 1583. On landing, he had his commission under the Great Seal `solemnly read' to an assembled company of his own men, together with a motley band of English and foreign merchants and fishermen. He then `took possession of the said land in the right of the Crown of England by digging of a turf and receiving the same with an hazel wand, delivered unto him after the manner of the Law and custom of England'. The land in question, known as `Norumbega' since Verrazano's account of it in 1524, had the advantage of being of unknown dimensions and infinitely expandable boundaries. After the assembled company had affirmed its consent and its obedience to the queen, `the arms of England engraven in lead' were set up on a wooden pillar.16

Without the benefit of a papal donation, the English crown was compelled, as here, to assert its own rights over `remote, barbarous and heathen lands, countries, and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people'," and trust that they would be respected by other European powers. Since Spain in fact regarded the entire Atlantic coastline from the Florida peninsula to Newfoundland as part of its own territory of La Florida," such trust was likely to be misplaced. It is in this context that the principle of res nullius became of much greater service to the English than to the Spaniards. It could be used both against other European powers which had made claims to American territory but had done nothing to implement them, and also against an indigenous population which had failed to use the land in accordance with European criteria.19 The ceremony at St John's harbour was a clear declaration of Gilbert's intention of transforming a land in which at the time of his arrival `nothing appeared more than Nature itself without art'.20 Once art was applied to nature, the land was no longer res nullius and passed into legitimate and permanent ownership.

It was naturally easier to make use of the principle of res nullius where the land was at best thinly populated by indigenous peoples than where they were very obviously present, as they were in the mainland territories seized by the Spaniards, or even in Virginia. When the Jamestown settlement was established in what was clearly Powhatan territory, the Virginia Company obviously felt that the setting up of a cross and the proclamation of James I as king were somehow insufficient to establish English sovereignty, and so resorted to the dubious staging of Powhatan's `coronation'. In Virginia and elsewhere, as on Captain George Waymouth's New England voyage of 1605, the English followed Spanish practice in setting up crosses," but in general the more elaborate rituals used by Gilbert seem not to have been followed by subsequent generations of English settlers.22 This may have reflected the lack of any felt need, given the sparseness of the indigenous population and the fact that English suzerainty over vast, if indeterminate, regions had already been asserted.

There were, however, other and additional ways of asserting territorial possession, of which the most widely practised was the renaming of the land. Columbus was lavish in his bestowal of new names on the islands, capes and geographical features that he encountered on his voyages: sacred names, beginning with San Salvador, names of the royal family (Fernandina or Juana), descriptive names appropriate to some striking physical feature, or names that simply conformed with those already inscribed on his own imaginative landscape of the lands he had reached, starting with `the Indies' themselves.23 The obsession with names and naming was shared by his monarchs, who told him in a letter of 1494 that they wanted to know `how many islands have been found up to now Of those islands you have named, what name has been given to each, because in your letters you give the names of some but not all of these.' They also wanted to know `the names that the Indians call them'.24

While this process of renaming, which extended to all the European powers in the Americas, can reasonably be described as a `manifestation of power', and an act of `Christian imperialism', 25 it was by no means a uniquely European habit. When the Mexica incorporated the various states of central Mexico into their empire, they either transliterated their place-names into Nahuatl, or gave them new, Nahuatl names unrelated to those by which their inhabitants knew them .21 When Cortes, therefore, decided to rename Montezuma's empire Nueva Espana because of `the similarity between this land and that of Spain, its fertility and great size and the cold and many other things', he was unwittingly following the practice of his indigenous predecessors.27

The English followed suit. Norumbega is a name of unknown, but allegedly Indian origin.21 Later, it was sometimes called North Virginia, but in his `Description' of the territory in 1616, John Smith astutely renamed it New England, just as Cortes had renamed the land of the Mexica New Spain.29 Initially, however, `malicious minds amongst sailors and others, drowned that name with the echo of Nusconcus, Canaday, and Penaquid.'30 In his dedicatory preface Smith therefore appealed to the Prince of Wales `to change their Barbarous names, for such English, as posterity may say, Prince Charles was their godfather'. The prince duly obliged, although not in time to prevent the incorporation of many Indian names into Smith's A Description of New England. The text therefore had to be preceded by a table of correspondences, like Southampton for Aggawom, and Ipswich for Sowocatuck.31

The Spaniards and the English in fact seem to have adopted much the same approach to the renaming of American places, preferring new names to old when they settled, but not necessarily ruling out indigenous names, in so far as they could catch or pronounce them. Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, but Qosqo was easily transformed into Cuzco, and the indigenous Cuba prevailed over the Spanish Juana. Indigenous names, however, were frequently too long and difficult for Europeans, and, not surprisingly, a stream `called in the Indian tongue Conamabsqunoocant' was `commonly called the Duck River' by the New England colonists.32 But there was also prejudice against Indian names. In 1619, for example, the inhabitants of Kiccowtan petitioned Virginia's House of Burgesses to `change the savage name' to Elizabeth City.33 The natural tendency, in any event, was for settlers to choose the names of their home towns - Trujillo, Merida, Dorchester, Boston - and in so doing to bring the unknown within the orbit of the known.

Among Spanish captains and colonists a popular option was to choose the names of saints for whom they felt a particular devotion, or whose day in the liturgical calendar had been the day of discovery or of a town's foundation. The result, as the Spanish chronicler Fernandez de Oviedo remarked, was that `anyone looking at one of our navigational charts for one of these coasts seems to be reading a not very well ordered calendar or catalogue of the saints."' It was a practice that would later be ridiculed by the Bostonian, Cotton Mather.-3' Where English settlers were concerned, the sacred was more likely to be confined to biblical names, like Salem, or to expressions of gratitude for divine guidance and mercy, as with Roger Williams, who `in a sense of God's merciful providence unto me in my distress called the place Providence ... '36