Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (21 page)

Since so many Indians appeared resistant to assimilation, it seemed to many settlers preferable to remove them out of the way. This would enable the colonists to devote their efforts to more rewarding pursuits. `Our first work', wrote Sir Francis Wyatt, the governor of Virginia, soon after the `massacre' of 1622, `is expulsion of the Salvages to gain the free range of the country for increase of cattle, swine &c, which will more than restore us, for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thorns in our sides, than to be at peace and league with them ...'163 Expulsion of the Indians had the double advantage of making space for further settlement, and removing `thorns', or something sharper, from the settlers' sides.

In part, the English response was dictated by fear. If there was a progressive hardening of attitudes towards the Indians, both in Virginia and New England, in the wake of incidents of alleged Indian `treachery' and armed confrontation, intimidation and violent revenge looked like the only options available to the frightened setters who were still greatly outnumbered by those whose lands they had taken.164 Expulsion of the Indians, if it could be managed, at least seemed to offer infant settlements a degree of security. Yet, at a time when the settlers still needed the assistance of the indigenous population in keeping them fed, their reaction suggests that the English had less confidence than the Spaniards in their ability to bring the benefits of their own civilization to these benighted people.

This may be a reflection of their failures in Ireland, although Spain, too, effectively admitted failure when it resorted in 1609 to the expulsion of some 300,000 moriscos from the peninsula. The Spanish failure, however, could be disguised as a triumph for the purity of the faith, whereas the continuing obduracy of the Irish allowed the English no such easy sleight of hand. Inevitably there were some shocking examples of Spaniards going native in the Americas, like that of the sailor Gonzalo Guerrero who, after being cast ashore on the coast of Yucatan, was found by Cortes living contentedly among the Maya, with his nose and ears pierced and his face and hands tattooed. 161 Yet the Spanish in the early stages of colonization appear not to have had the same obsessive fear of cultural degeneration that afflicted the English on making their first contact with indigenous peoples. At least in the early years, it seems to have been confidently assumed that most Spaniards, if confronted by such a dilemma, would imitate not Guerrero but his companion, Jeronimo de Aguilar, who had held fast to his faith during the trials and temptations of captivity, and, unlike Guerrero, seized the first opportunity to rejoin his compatriots. By contrast, there was a constant trickle of deserters from the Jamestown settlement. To the distress of the colony's leaders, the poorer settlers at least tended to prefer a carefree existence among the `wild' Indians to the rigours of building a `civilized' community under the direction of their social superiors. 166

Even on the frontiers of settlement, where life remained precarious, there still seems to have been a strong confidence in the eventual triumph of Christian and Hispanic values. Friars and royal officials approached the nomadic or semisedentary tribes on the fringes of empire with a clear sense of the superiority of what they had to offer the `barbarian' peoples. Over time, the combination of urbanized frontier settlements and missions brought peace and a measure of hispanicization to many of the frontier regions. This was particularly true of northern Mexico, where a shift in viceregal policy in the later sixteenth century away from fire and slaughter to the more subtle weapons of diplomacy and religious persuasion succeeded in pacifying the ferocious Chichimecs.167

Royal officials bribed the Indians on the borderlands with offers of food and clothing. Friars sought to dazzle them with their ceremonies, and woo them with their gifts.168 The inhabitants of the advanced Spanish outposts - soldiers, cattle ranchers and miners - mixed their blood with that of the indigenous popula- tion.169 Although tensions inevitably arose as friars, royal officials and settlers pulled in different directions, they all represented in their different ways a coherent and unified culture which was not afraid to interact with the surrounding population because it took for granted that sooner or later its values would prevail.

While the English displayed a similar sense of superiority, it does not seem to have been accompanied, at least in the early stages of settlement, by the same measure of confidence in the triumph of the collective values of their own society in an alien environment. Confidence was lacking both in their capacity to instil into the Indians their own cultural and religious values, and in the willingness of fellow Englishmen and women to remain true to those values when confronted with an alternative way of life. Religious differences, social differences, and the lack of unified direction may all have worked to lessen the coherence of the twin message of Christianity and civility that the English colonizing enterprise was supposed to bring to the Indians. This in turn brought failure, and as failures multiplied, exclusion rather than inclusion of the Indians became the order of the day. Once the Indians had been defeated, however, and relegated to the margins of their society, new generations of colonists could look out on the world with a new-found confidence based on a sense of power. In their own eyes at least, they might not have Christianized and civilized the `Salvages', but they could claim a massive achievement, both for their forebears and themselves, in clearing the wilderness and transforming the land.

The first European images of America were images of abundance - of a terrestrial paradise with sparkling rivers, fertile plains and luxurious fruits.' Above all, there was gold, first of all in the rivers of Hispaniola,2 then in Mexico, and finally in Peru, where Atahualpa's ransom - a staggering 1,326,539 pesos of gold and 51,600 silver marks, by official, and no doubt undervalued, reckoning3 - set the seal on the image of fabulous wealth. But, as the humanist chronicler Pedro Martir de Angleria observed, `it is to the South, not the icy North, that everyone in search of fortune should turn.'4 And it was to the south that Sir Walter Raleigh duly turned in his futile quest for El Dorado.

The south - the central and southern mainland of America - offered not only the promise, and the reality, of gold and silver, but also the possibility of tapping into the labour supply and surplus production of indigenous societies which had exploited the resources of their local environments in ways that offered more points of convergence with European needs and expectations than were to be found in more northerly parts. The hunters and gatherers of the `icy North' apparently had little to offer European newcomers, other than the furs which were to become the source of a flourishing Indian-European trade. In southern New England and further down the coast, the more agricultural life-style of the native population produced a food surplus that saved the life of many a colonist in the early days of settlement. It was also a life-style that involved the stripping of forests and the clearing of fields, thus effectively doing some of the work of clearing the land that would otherwise have fallen to the settlers in this heavily forested world. But Indians who moved their village habitats in accordance with the dictates of the seasons and the fertility of the soil, and whose way of life depended on the possession of little more than a few, easily transportable household objects, seemed distinctly unpromising as a source of labour or tribute.'

It was therefore not surprising that English colonists should have felt a certain sense of bafflement on their arrival in a world in which the abundance of nature seemed to offer a standing rebuke to a sparse and - to European eyes - povertystricken, population.6 Much work was needed to `improve' the land, and there was no indication that the Indians were either willing to undertake it, or capable of doing so. On the other hand, Spaniards arriving in Mexico and Peru found teeming populations organized into polities which, for all their strangeness, functioned in relatively comprehensible ways, and which had learnt how to mobilize large labour forces for the performance of tasks that went beyond meeting basic subsistence needs. While it was not easy to come to terms with the idea that feathers, or cacao beans, might be more highly valued than gold or silver, it still remained true that these were peoples whose disciplined polities, agricultural practices, and skills in arts and crafts could be turned into valuable assets for their conquerors.

The Spaniards, slipping easily into the position of the privileged elites they had vanquished, took immediate advantage of the glittering opportunities that opened up before them. While their first response to conquest was to seize and share out the portable booty, they also moved quickly to make themselves the masters of economic and tributary systems that were still in relatively good working order in spite of the disruptions caused by the conquest. To satisfy their own overwhelming greed they were all too soon to wrench these systems out of context, especially in Peru, where they inherited forms of labour organization and redistributive systems carefully designed to provide an adequate food supply for populations living at different altitudes and in a diversity of ecological environments, rising from the sea-coasts to the high peaks of the Andes.' In effect, for the first twenty or thirty years after the conquest of Mexico and Peru, the conquerors heedlessly ran a form of plunder economy, although endowing it with a spurious respectability by the institution of the encomienda, which was supposed to carry with it certain spiritual and moral obligations, but was liable to be no more than a licence to oppress and exploit.'

If the Spanish conquerors were happy to live off the backs of the peoples they had conquered, they were also anxious to lead a life-style that conformed as closely as possible to that of the privileged classes in their native land. Their tastes and expectations had been formed in Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, and now that riches had come their way, they were not about to abandon them. `The desire of the Spaniards to see the things of their native land in the Indies', wrote the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, `has been so desperate and so powerful that no effort or danger has been too great to induce them to abandon the attempt to satisfy their wishes.'9 They yearned for their glasses of wine, their oranges and other familiar fruits; they wanted dogs and horses, swords and guns; they wanted the luxuries that they had possessed, or at least coveted, at home; and they wanted their traditional staples, meat and bread.

The satisfaction of these wants would entail massive changes to the economies they had inherited - changes that in turn would transform the ecologies of the lands they had settled. The civilizations of the Americas were maize-based. It was above all maize, capable of a yield of sixty or more (some chroniclers spoke of as much as 150) to every seed planted, as against a return of six to one for wheat in Early Modern Europe, that had allowed the societies of Mesoamerica and the Andes to sustain such large populations and produce an agricultural surplus.10 The Spanish settlers, however, although gradually accustoming themselves to maize tortillas," still insisted on having their wheat loaves, to which they retained an obstinate attachment throughout the colonial period. Coarse bread therefore remained the staple of poor colonists, while the better-off ate pan blanco at twice the cost.12 English settlers to the north seem to have shown a greater degree of adaptability, perhaps by force of circumstance. Indian corn became an essential part of their diet, and was considered preferable as a crop to English cereals because it was easier to grow and produced a higher yield. The New England climate proved unpropitious for wheat production, and although wheat, barley, oats and rye were beginning to be cultivated in the Chesapeake colonies in the later seventeenth century in sufficient quantities to allow for modest exports, their `chiefest Diett' consisted of maize, and not wheat.13

In the regions settled by the Spaniards, with the exception of the Caribbean islands, where all attempts to cultivate wheat proved abortive,14 large areas of land were brought under the plough for the purpose of wheat production. Since the Indians persisted in their diet of maize, the wheat-fields which began to transform the landscapes of Mexico and Peru were exclusively devoted to production for the conquerors and settlers. With land becoming abundant as the indigenous population declined, viceroys were prepared to make land grants (mercedes de sierra) to interested parties," and the growing towns and cities provided a ready market for the produce from the new landed estates.

Simultaneously, the land was transformed even more dramatically by the introduction and proliferation of European livestock - cattle, sheep, horses and goats. The appearance of this livestock, immensely damaging to Indian agriculture as the animals trampled the maize plots and ate the vegetation, provided another set of opportunities for entrepreneurially minded settlers as they took to stock raising, again with the growing domestic market in mind. A pastoral economy was developed in the viceroyalty of New Spain, where the Spanish institution of the Mesta was taken as a model for the organization of the sheep-owners.16 Horse breeding and cattle ranching provided a further stimulus to the formation of great estates - known as haciendas or estancias - especially in northern Mexico and the Peruvian sierra.17 By means of a modest system of land grants to poorer settlers, the viceregal authorities in Peru seem to have hoped to encourage the rise in the coastal regions of a class of small farmers, comparable to that which would later develop in New England and the Middle Colonies. But all too often their farmsteads or chacras proved not to be economically viable, as a result of lack of capital and limited market outlets. By the end of the sixteenth century many of them were being swallowed up by the larger landowners."