Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (15 page)

Although for taxonomic purposes the Spaniards would indiscriminately lump all the peoples of America together under the name of Indians - a practice that would he continued by the English colonists - they were well aware of their cultural and ethnic diversity. Given the linguistic problems they encountered on their arrival on the mainland, this could hardly be otherwise. On his march into the interior of Mexico, Cortes was exceptionally fortunate to have the linguistic services of a compatriot, Jeronimo de Aguilar, whose eight years of captivity in Yucatan had made him fluent in Chontal Maya, and of Dona Marina - the famous Malinche - who had lived much of her life among the Maya, but whose first language was the Nahuatl of the Mexica. Cortes was thus able to make contact with the world of the Mexica through the Mayan language that, by force of circumstance, Malinche and Aguilar spoke in common. Even then there were formidable difficulties, since Nahuatl, although increasingly dominant, was only one among the languages of Mexico, and Malinche herself spoke a dialect from the southern part of Montezuma's empire.' The English in North America encountered a similar linguistic diversity, as John Smith noted in his Description of Virginia: `Amongst those people are thus many several nations of sundry languages, that environ Powhatan's territories ... All those not any one under- standeth another but by interpreters.'6 Lacking the benefit of a Jeronimo de Aguilar to help them communicate with the Indians, the Jamestown colonists exchanged the thirteen-year-old Thomas Savage for a trusted servant of Powhatan, and the boy soon learnt enough of the Algonquian spoken by the Powhatans to act as an interpreter.'

Europeans themselves - least of all the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula - were no strangers to linguistic and cultural diversity. Cortes acknowledged as much when the captive Montezuma embarrassingly asked him about the identity of the hostile army commanded by Panfilo de Narvaez which had landed on the Mexican coast on the orders of Diego Velazquez to bring Cortes and his men to heel. He explained that `as our Emperor has many kingdoms and lordships, there is a great diversity of peoples in them, some of them very brave and others even braver. We ourselves come from Old Castile, and are called Castilians, and that captain in Cempoala and the people with him are from another province, called Vizcaya. These are called Vizcayans, and they speak like the Otomis, near Mexico. . .'8

Otomis or Basques, Castilians or Mexica - they were all examples of the infinite diversity of the human race. But the Americas presented the Europeans, and in the first instance the Spaniards, with such a broad range of cultural and social differences as to stimulate intense curiosity about the reasons for this diversity and provoke considerable speculation about the stages of development of the peoples of the world.9 Nothing in his years in the Antilles had prepared Cortes for the sophistication of the civilization he found on reaching Mexico. Here were great cities and ordered polities, which bore comparison with those of Christendom: `... these people live almost like those in Spain, and in as much harmony and order as there, and considering that they are barbarous and so far from the knowledge of God and cut off from all civilized nations, it is truly remarkable to see what they have achieved in all things."0 The empire of the Incas was to evoke similarly admiring responses from sympathetic Spanish observers. `It is almost incredible', wrote Agustin de Zarate, `that a barbarous and unlettered people could have been ruled in so orderly a way."

Although the Spanish discovery of the Aztec and Inca empires brought into question conventional European notions of barbarism by showing that peoples without the benefits of Christianity, or even of writing, could in some respects at least attain to European levels of civility," it gradually became apparent that few if any other parts of the continent contained polities of comparable scale and sophistication. The first Spanish sightings of the Maya world of Yucatan suggested a high level of civilization, but the Spaniards remained baffled by the political and social complexity of a peninsula divided into eighteen or more distinctive polities which warred with each other and displayed very varying degrees of internal unity. This lack of cohesion was to make the Spanish conquest of Yucatan a slow and dispiriting process, spanning two generations and not finally completed until the subjugation of the Itza kingdom of Peten in 1697.13 A similar lack of cohesion was to be found among the settled agricultural communities of what is now northern Colombia, although the numerous chiefdoms may have been on the way to some form of unification when Jimenez de Quesada and his men advanced up the Magdalena valley in 1536 to establish what would come to be called the kingdom of New Granada. But the Muisca, unlike the Maya, were a pacific people who offered no resistance.14 In other regions, however, the Spaniards encountered peoples of a very different temper - in particular the Araucanian Indians of Chile, who would fight them to a standstill, and the hunter-gathering Chichimeca tribes of northern Mexico who, as seen by Spaniards, fully conformed to the traditional European image of a barbarous people. The Chichimecs lived, according to the sixteenth-century Spanish doctor Juan de Cardenas, `like brute savages'."

North America, like central and southern America, contained a multiplicity of tribal and linguistic groups, perhaps some five hundred in all.16 Of these, only the stratified society of the Natchez Indians of the Lower Mississippi and the Algonquian-speaking `empire' of Powhatan could stand any form of comparison with the centrally directed polities ruled by Montezuma and Atahualpa,l' while the absence from the lands first settled by the English of cities like those which so impressed the Spaniards made it less likely that these North American peoples would break free from the European stereotype of the barbarian and the savage. Captain John Smith, in a fine display of the semantic confusion generated by the European encounter with the inhabitants of the New World, compared the success of Cortes and `scarce three hundred Spaniards' in conquering Tenochtitlan, `where thousands of Salvages dwelled in strong houses', with the failure of the English colonists to subdue the tribes of tidewater Virginia. The reasons, he appeared to think, lay partly in the failure of the English to organize a welldisciplined force like that of Cortes, but also in the disparities between the peoples with whom they were confronted. The thousands of Mexican `Salvages', he noted, `were a civilized people' with houses and wealth, whereas the indigenous inhabitants of Virginia were `mere Barbarians as wild as beasts'.18

However awkwardly expressed, Smith's contrast between the indigenous peoples encountered by the Spaniards in central Mexico and those upon whose lives the English intruded in the Chesapeake, points to major differences in the character and outcome of the military confrontations that opened the way to imperial rule. The superiority of European military technology, with its weapons of steel and its gunpowder, gave the invaders a critical edge over peoples whose arms were limited to bows and arrows, slings and stones, axes, clubs and wooden swords, even when, as among the Mexica, these were made especially lethal by the addition of razor-sharp obsidian flakes.19 Firearms may have been slow and cumbersome, and gunpowder easily affected by humid conditions, but the slender steel blades of their Toledo swords gave the Spaniards a powerful advantage in close combat. Initially, too, their superiority was magnified by the psychological impact of the surprise created by guns and horses - `deer ... as tall as the roof', as the Mexica described them.20 But the surprise would wear off, and, as the dogged resistance of Tenochtitlan and Manco Inca's rebellion of 1536 would show, the indigenous opponents of the invaders soon learnt to evolve responses that reduced the impact of a European weaponry not always well adapted to American conditions.

Yet, as Smith hinted, the very fact that the Mexican `Salvages' were `a civilized people' was to play into the hands of the Spaniards. The imperial structures organized by the Mexica and the Incas, with their concentration of power at a central point, made them vulnerable to a European take-over in ways that the looser tribal groupings of Yucatan or North America were not. Seize the supreme figure of authority and the mechanisms of imperial power were thrown into disarray, as Cortes and Pizarro demonstrated. Once final victory was secured - thanks in large part to the assistance of peoples who had chafed at Mexica or Inca domination - it was relatively easy to revive the old lines of command and replace one set of masters with another. The Spaniards thus found themselves in a position of authority over vast populations, which were accustomed to paying tribute and to receiving orders from an imperial centre. The conquerors enjoyed the advantage, too, of having been victorious in battle, thus demonstrating the superiority of their own deity in a cosmic order in which the winners dictated the hierarchy of the gods. Faced, therefore, by peoples who either resigned themselves to defeat or regarded the Spanish victory as a liberation from Mexica or Inca repression, the conquerors were well placed to consolidate their domination over the heartlands of the empires they had won.

Nomadic peoples, on the other hand, presented the Europeans with military problems of a very different order. So too did the relatively loose groupings of tribes without permanently fixed points of settlement, like those that faced the Spaniards in other parts of central and southern America and the English to the north. It was not difficult to play off one tribe against another, but the very fluidity of tribal relationships meant that successes were liable to be temporary, as alliances shifted and tribes regrouped. Initial hopes of peaceful coexistence were all too easily blighted by European greed for land or gold, and by mutual misunderstandings between peoples who still had to take each other's measure. After conquering central Mexico, the Spaniards had high hopes of finding new riches far to the north - hopes that would fade with the failure of Coronado's expedition deep into the interior of North America in 1540-2. The passage of Coronado's men, like that of De Soto's expedition of 1539-43 into the North American south-east, was marked by armed clashes with the Zuni and other peoples on whose territories they encroached.2' Mutual incomprehension clouded attempts at dialogue, even in those regions where reports of the brutality of the Spaniards had not preceded their arrival.

If the North American interior was for a long time expendable for the Spaniards, north-western Mexico was not. Here, in the border areas between the sedentary peoples of central Mexico and the nomadic tribes of the north, Beltran Nuno de Guzman had savagely carved out a new kingdom, New Galicia, in the early 1530s. The behaviour of the Spaniards provoked an Indian uprising, the Mixton War of 1541-2, which shook the newly created viceroyalty of New Spain to its foundations. Once the revolt was suppressed, strategies had to be devised for incorporating these border peoples, and for defending the Spanish settlements that were beginning to spring up, as land was distributed to encomenderos and the friars began arriving. Problems of defence were compounded as the discovery of the first silver deposits at Zacatecas in 1546 precipitated a rush of miners and ranchers into lands populated by the nomadic Chichimeca peoples, who had never been subject to Mexica domination. In the following decades the protection of the mining towns and the Camino Real - the silver route which linked the mines of New Galicia to Mexico City - would become a high priority for successive viceroys.

Their attempts during the second half of the sixteenth century to deal with the Chichimeca problem vividly illustrate the difficulties that faced Spaniards and English alike on the fringes of empire.22 An obvious and immediate response was to build a string of forts - presidios as the Spaniards called them. In the same way, the colonists of Virginia would build Forts Royal, Charles and Henry in the aftermath of the `massacre' of 1644.23 But the garrisoning of forts had important implications for colonial life. Encomenderos had an obligation to provide for the defence of regions in which they held their encomiendas, and initially in New Galicia a few powerful encomenderos were responsible for the defence of the bor- derlands.24 But once presidios were built, they needed permanent garrisons, and this in turn pointed to the need for a professional soldiery. From the 1560s, when bands of Chichimec warriors began intensively raiding Spanish towns, a full-scale frontier war was under way, and this war brought into being the first bodies of paid professional soldiers in New Spain, initially most of them creoles.25 But payment imposed strains on the royal treasury in the viceroyalty that the crown was unwilling, or unable, to bear in full. This meant that war, wherever possible, had to be made to pay for itself, and the easiest method was to allow the frontier garrisons to sell their Chichimeca captives as slaves - legitimate treatment, under Europe's rules of `just war', for those who had failed, after due warning, to submit to the authority of the Spanish crown. But, as war was transformed into a lucrative business, so the inducement to bring it to a rapid end diminished. Along the north-western frontier of New Spain, as later on the southern frontiers of Chile in the war against the Araucanian Indians, self-financing warfare guaranteed its own prolongation.26

Given the perceived threat from the Indians among whom they had settled, English colonists, like Spanish colonists, promptly set about organizing themselves for defence, adapting to local needs and conditions the militia system they brought with them from England.27 The establishment of forts and frontier lines in Virginia pointed, as it did in New Spain, to the need to supplement the militia with paid professionals. But this demanded levels of taxation that the planters were reluctant to bear, and during Bacon's rebellion of 1675-6 the rebels sought to adopt the strategy pursued in New Spain and Chile of making war pay for itself by organizing plundering raids into Indian settlements.21

Although the militia system in Virginia seems to have been less effective than its counterpart in New England, where the presence of towns and villages made it possible to concentrate defence, the Chesapeake region had less need of it once the now almost centenarian Opechancanough was captured in 1646. The governor, William Berkeley, planned to send him to England, but the decrepit chief, dignified to the end, was shot in the back by a vengeful militiaman while languishing in gaol. With the acceptance by his successor of a treaty bringing the third Anglo-Powhatan War to an end, the English colony of Virginia effectively supplanted the Powhatan polity of Tsenacommacah. The Powhatans, who agreed to pay the English a tribute of twenty beaver skins a year, were excluded from their homeland between the York and James rivers, and allotted a reservation north of the York river instead. In the following decades, as new immigrants arrived, the English settlement expanded irresistibly, encroaching even on the Powhatan reservation. Although the colonists still found themselves frustratingly dependent on Powhatan and non-Powhatan middlemen in their attempts to trade for furs with the Tuscarooras and Cherokees, in general they had less need of the Indians as the colony became increasingly self-supporting. By contrast, the native Americans were growing steadily more dependent on the supply of European goods, and their dependence discouraged them from risking further confrontations.29