Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (42 page)

One of the ironies inherent in Mather's comment is that the friars in Spain's American dominions had agonized over the absence of miracles to support and validate their efforts. Not all were convinced by Mendieta's argument that `Miracles according to St. Paul are for the infidels and unbelievers, and since the Indians of this land received the Faith with such readiness and desire, miracles were not necessary in order to convert them.'16 Mather and his colleagues were untroubled by any such doubts. Theirs was a world not of miracles but of 'especial providences of God', in which an event like the healing of an Indian's withered arm constituted but one small fragment of the providential order of a God-centred universe.17

According to the Protestant apocalyptic tradition as it developed in Tudor and early Stuart England, all the territories in America settled and to be settled by the English had their predestined place in God's grand design, since the English themselves were an elect nation chosen by the Lord. For John Rolfe, as for others who pioneered the settlement of Virginia, their migration across the Atlantic was the going forth of `a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God, to possess it, for undoubtedly he is with us'.18 As one of the sermons preached before the Virginia Company at the time of the founding of Jamestown declared, England possessed a divine warrant to establish a `new Britain in another world'.19 America thereby assumed its position as a new battleground in the unrelenting struggle between the forces of light, represented by the Protestant Reformation, and the satanic forces of darkness, which had their seat in Rome.

Yet if, in accordance with this cosmic vision, all British America acquired the character of sacred space, one part of it, at least in the eyes of its committed inhabitants, was sacred above all others: `that English settlement', as Cotton Mather put it, `which may, upon a thousand accounts, pretend unto more of true English than all the rest, and which alone therefore has been called New-England ...' Here, looking back over the course of the seventeenth century, he could proudly record `some feeble attempts made in the American hemisphere to anticipate the state of the New Jerusalem, as far as the unavoidable vanity of human affairs and influence of Satan upon them would allow of it ... '20

Not everyone was willing to accept Mather's version of the story, even in New England itself. The maverick Roger Williams, for one, rejected the notion that New England, or for that matter old England or any other nation, qualified as elect because of a covenant with God.21 Others, more secularly minded, would have no truck with the idea that they had come to America to build an approximation of the New Jerusalem. When a minister attempted to persuade a group of listeners in northern New England to mend their ways because `otherwise they would contradict the main end of planting this wilderness', one of them cried out: `Sir, you are mistaken: you think you are preaching to the people at the Bay; our main end was to catch fish.'22 But if the image of New England as new Canaan held little appeal for those who had gone there merely to catch fish, many saw the unfolding of God's plan in the story of its settlement.

The story, as told by Mather, began with the providential landfall in 1620 of the Pilgrim Fathers at Cape Cod, which `was not the port upon which they intended', and not the `land for which they had provided. There was indeed a most wonderful providence of God, over a pious and a praying people, in this disappointment! The most crooked way that ever was gone, even that of Israel's peregrination through the wilderness, may be called a right way, such was the way of this little Israel, now going into the wilderness ...'23 The children of Israel had set forth on the tortuous journey that would lead them to the promised land.

John Winthrop's crossing in the Arbella in 1630 added to the already potent image of an exodus into the wilderness24 another, and eventually even more potent image, that of a `city upon a hill'.25 `The eyes of the world are upon us', as he told his companions in his address on board ship. The covenant among the participants in the Great Migration to build their city on a hill in New England rather than old England was an explicit recognition of the failure of the Puritans to conform the Anglican church to their wishes and to create in their home country the godly society for which they had yearned and striven for so long. God's wrath was about to descend on England for its sins. `I am verily persuaded,' wrote John Winthrop, `God will bring some heavy Affliction upon this land and that speedily.' America thus became a place of refuge for those whom God `means to save out of this generall callamitie'.26

The providentialist vision therefore transcended the Protestant- Catholic divide, giving America, in the eyes of Franciscans and Puritans alike, its assigned place in the great drama of judgment and salvation. But where the Franciscans made the conversion of the Indians the centrepiece of this drama, the Puritan version of it was exclusive, not inclusive, and was framed in terms of the salvation of the elect. The church to be established in Massachusetts Bay was to be a gathered church of visible saints, those who had experienced the transforming touch of God's grace. Whether Indians would be numbered among the saints was in the disposition of God, not of man. For this reason, the mission to the Indians came a poor second to ministering to the elect.

Yet it was possible that the Indians had special claims to the attention of the New England ministers, for reasons that were both historical and providentialist - or so the `Apostle' John Eliot came to believe. Ever since the conquest of Mexico there had been suggestions that its inhabitants might be descended from the lost tribes of Israel. How else explain what seemed to a number of friars, like the Dominican Fray Diego Duran, the remarkable parallels between some of the rites and experiences of the Israelites as related in the Bible, and those of the Aztecs, a people whose history was also that of an exodus to a promised land?27 In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, possible affinities between the Jews and the indigenous peoples of America again became the subject of excited debate, this time among the Protestants, duly impressed in the prevailing climate of millennial expectation by Manasseh ben Israel's identification of the Indians with the ten lost tribes in his Spes Israelis.21

Just as the identification had lent credibility in the sixteenth century to the notion that the Indians were capable of conversion, and had thus given a providentialist context to the activities of the friars, so, a century later, similar doctrines gave a new impetus to Eliot's missionary endeavours. In two series of public lectures on biblical prophecy the Boston preacher John Cotton had expounded in the 1640s a millenarian doctrine which can be traced back, like that of the Franciscans of New Spain, to the teachings of Joachim of Fiore. The New England saints were to stand ready for a period of great convulsions, in which the destruction of the Church of Rome would be followed by the conversion of the Jews, the dawn of the millennium and the redemption of the gentiles, among whom he numbered the American Indians. Eliot was one of those deeply influenced by Cotton's millenarian beliefs, although they offered no hope for anything more than a few scattered conversions of the New England Indians until there had first been a mass conversion of the Jews. But if, as Eliot began to believe at the end of the decade, the peoples of America were not after all of gentile but of Jewish origin, then - if the millennium was indeed imminent - the mass conversion of the Indians must be much nearer than was thought. While the execution of Charles I indicated that England was to provide the setting for the inauguration of the new millennial order in the west, New England now became, in Eliot's eyes, the setting for its inauguration in the `east'.29

In 1651, at Natick, on the Charles River, he established his first Indian community. Like Vasco de Quiroga's `pueblo-hospitals' on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro, the settlement was a civil and religious polity, and Eliot planned its governance by means of rulers of one hundred, as prescribed by his understanding of the millennial order.30 Yet although the missionary work itself made great strides in the following years, and thirteen more praying towns were eventually to be founded, the founder himself gradually retreated from some of his more extreme positions. The Restoration of the monarchy in England cast doubt on the anticipated time-scale for the coming of the millennium, and further study made the Hebrew origin of the Indians less certain than it had seemed at the peak of Eliot's millenarian zeal in the early 1650s. Others never shared his millenarian views, and had always harboured doubts about the spiritual aptitude of the Indians. Especially afer the trauma of King Philip's War of 1675-6, New England ministers were inclined to agree with the conclusion to William Hubbard's General History of New England (1680): `here are no footsteps of any religion before the English came, but merely diabolical."' The same conclusion had long ago been reached by friars and clerics in Spanish America, who castigated Indian `idolatry' as active devil worship, and had become convinced that any resemblances between indigenous ceremonial practices and those of Judaism were deceptions by the devil rather than the acting out of vague ancestral memories of distant Hebrew rites.

For the devil stalked Spanish and British America alike. `That old usurping landlord of America', Cotton Mather called him, the prince of darkness who hoped that `the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire'.32 In a European mental world `structured by opposition and inversion',33 it was taken for granted that the devil operated by means of a cunning mimesis of the supernatural order, turning the world upside down. The friars were therefore not surprised to find that the rites and ceremonies of the indigenous societies mimicked, sometimes frighteningly, the rites and ceremonies of the Christian church.34 Faced with a world of invisible forces, of sorcery and enchantment, they wrote manuals to alert converts and their confessors to the stratagems of Satan, and the history of the church in Spanish America was to be characterized by a series of campaigns, like that of Archbishop Villagomez in seventeenth-century Peru, for the `extirpation of idolatry'.31

Such campaigns were in effect a contest for the sacralization of American space, and nowhere more literally than in the Andes, where the Spaniards sought to destroy the huacas - the sacred objects, the sites and the shrines of the Indians - and erect on the site of every huaca a cross, a shrine or a church. A similar contest for mastery was enacted in New England, where

upon the arrival of the English in these parts, the Indians employed their sorcerers, whom they call powaws, like Salaam, to curse them, and let loose their demons upon them, to shipwreck them, to distract them, to poison them, or in any way to ruin them, . . . but the devils at length acknowledged unto them, that they could not hinder those people from their becoming the owners and masters of the country, whereupon the Indians resolved upon a good correspondence with our new-comers; and God convinced them that there was no enchantment or divination against such a people.36

The gradual spread of settlement, and the establishment of new congregations of the saints, displaced the devil, along with the Indians, to the New England forests.37 But he was, and remained, terrifyingly close, and was forever walking abroad in pursuit of his nefarious designs. Not only did he hold the Indians in his thrall, but he was also working to seduce the godly, who must be on constant guard to defend themselves against his wiles. `Wilderness' was closely equated with temptation in the minds of the godly, for had not Christ struggled with the tempter in the wilderness?38 In a world that was perceived to be dominated by supernatural forces - where the ways of providence were expressed not only in extraordinary expressions of God's favour, but also in sudden calamities, in storms and crop failures and prodigies of nature - the dividing line between the angelic and the diabolical was a narrow one. For this reason it was all too easy for even the elect to be deceived.

The resort to magic was one way both to secure access to, and to seek to control, the occult forces at work in the universe. Although the ministers set themselves firmly against recourse to magical practices, these were widespread in Puritan New England, as in the other British settlements.39 At the best of times it was not easy to distinguish between orthodox and magical remedies for the cure of ailments. In the New World the difficulty was compounded by the profusion of hitherto unknown plants with potential medicinal qualities, and by the proximity of an indigenous population with its own traditional healing arts, that in European eyes were all too likely to smack of superstition and sorcery.

In principle the challenge might seem to have been even greater in Spanish America than in the English settlements, as a result of the cohabitation and racial intermingling of Europeans, Indians and Africans, all furnished with their own ample stock of folk beliefs and practices. The settlers, through their nursemaids and servants, learnt new healing arts from the Indian curanderos, whose resort to `superstition' and to hallucinogenic plants was a source of indignation to doctors trained in European practices, like Juan de Cardenas in later sixteenth-century New Spain.40 Sorcery and magic among the creole, mestizo and mulatto population fell within the ambit of the tribunals of the Inquisition, which were set up in Lima in 1570 and in Mexico City in 1571. But the Mexican tribunal displayed a relatively limited interest in them, to judge from the number of prosecutions that it undertook.41 The Lima Inquisition, at least from the 1620s, seems to have shown considerably more interest than its Mexican counterpart, possibly because of the growing preoccupation of the authorities with the apparent failure of Christianization to uproot superstitious and idolatrous practices in Andean society, and the seductive power of Inca revivalism, among non-Indians as well as Indians, as the age of the Incas receded into the mists of the past.42 The extensive use of coca, not only for curing but also for divining, inevitably added to the uneasinesss of the authorities. With the possible exception, however, of the Lima region and the Andean highlands in the age of the `extirpation of idolatry' campaigns, the general impression is of a broad tolerance in the racially mixed society of Spanish America for practices that lent themselves to a benevolent interpretation as offering cures for ills.