Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (55 page)

Self-interest, however, might well exaggerate allegations of difference in ways prejudicial to settler societies. In seventeenth-century Spanish America there was fierce competition for administrative and ecclesiastical posts between native sons and new arrivals from Spain, and it was to the obvious advantage of the newcomers to harp on the inadequacies of the creoles with whom they were competing. Even if recurrent intermarriage between Spaniards and creoles took the edge off some of the rivalry by uniting peninsulares and old-established settler families in a nexus of interests,80 there is widespread evidence of bitter hostility. Commenting on the tendency of creole women to prefer as husbands poor Spaniards to rich creoles, a Neapolitan traveller who visited Mexico City in 1697 claimed - no doubt with more than a touch of Mediterranean hyperbole - that antipathy had reached a point where the creoles `hate their own parents because they are Europeans'.81

With many fewer administrative posts in the gift of the British than the Spanish crown, one major cause of friction in the relationship between newcomers and colonists was correspondingly reduced in the British Atlantic world, although it was by no means eliminated. Settlers in the Caribbean islands and on the American mainland had constantly to struggle against charges of difference similar to those levelled by the Spaniards against their creole cousins. Disparagement began with slurs on their origins. `Virginia and Barbados', wrote Sir Josiah Child, `were first peopled by a Sort of loose vagrant People, vicious and destitute of Means to live at Home ... and these I say were such as, had there been no English foreign Plantation in the World, could probably never have lived at home to do service for this Country, but must have come to be hanged, or starved, or died untimely of some of those miserable Diseases, that proceed from Want and Vice ... '82

Early negative images were compounded by scandalous reports of the life-style of the settlers. By the early eighteenth century the planters in the Caribbean islands had become a byword for extravagance and debauchery:

Nor did the more sober New Englanders escape disparagement. `Eating, Drinking, Smoking and Sleeping', wrote Ned Ward in 1699, `take up four parts in five of their Time; and you may divide the remainder into Religious Exercise, Day Labour, and Evacuation. Four meals a Day, and a good Knap after Dinner, being the Custom of the Country ... One Husband-man in England, will do more Labour in a Day, than a New-England Planter will be at the pains to do in a Week: For to every Hour he spends in his Grounds, he will be two at an Ordinary [i.e. tavern].'84

Such slurs left the more sensitive settlers with deeply ambivalent feelings. While rejecting the criticisms as coming from malevolent or ill-informed outsiders, they simultaneously worried that they might perhaps be true. This led either to excessively strident rebuttals, or to the kind of defensiveness displayed by the historian of Virginia, Robert Beverley, when he sought to forestall criticisms of his prose style by explaining to the reader in his preface: `I am an Indian, and don't pretend to be exact in my Language ...'85 The very charge of `Indianization' - the charge that British settlers of the mainland feared most of all - was thus self-deprecatingly turned into a weapon of defence.

The first line of defence among the creoles, whether English or Spanish, was to emphasize their inherent Englishness or Spanishness, qualities which neither distance, climate nor proximity to inferior peoples were capable of erasing. Ignoring the juridical inconvenience that the Indies were conquests of the Crown of Castile, the creole inhabitants of the kingdoms of New Spain or Peru claimed comparable rights to those enjoyed by the king's subjects in his kingdoms of Castile or Aragon. Faced with new levies and imposts, they would have had no difficulty in identifying with the Barbadian planter in 1689 who complained that Barbadians were being `commanded as subjects and ... crusht as Aliens'.86 Any imputation that they were in some sense alien was deeply offensive to those who regarded themselves as entitled by birth to the status and rights of metropolitan-born subjects of the crown.

Insinuations of inferiority were particularly offensive to those creoles who claimed legitimate descent from the original conquerors of Spanish America. As the conquest itself receded into the distance, and the descendants of the conquistadores found that newcomers were preferred before them in appointments to offices, they grew increasingly embittered. `We are Spaniards - somos espanoles', wrote Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza in the early seventeenth century, as he lovingly recorded the names of the conquistadores and their descendants, and claimed that, since he and his like belonged to the `harvest and government' of Spain, they should be governed by its laws and customs.87 Because of the heroic achievements of their fathers and grandfathers, such men should be honoured and rewarded, not rejected and excluded. Yet their petitions and complaints were ignored.

Although officers of Cromwell's expeditionary force who remained on the island as planters liked to refer to themselves as `the conquerors of Jamaica',88 British America, unlike Spanish America, could claim no conquering elite. But this did not prevent the emerging class of Virginia planters from seeking to establish their claims to gentility on the model of the English gentry, just as the descendants of the conquistadores sought to model their own life-styles on the real or imagined life-styles of Castilian senores. When Virginian planters travelled to London they acquired coats of arms and had their portraits painted; and when they returned home to Virginia they built themselves handsome new brick houses, and displayed all the enthusiasm for horse-racing of their English counterparts.S9 Unlike Spanish settlers in the Indies, some of them, like William Byrd I, sent their sons back to the mother country for their education, although never on the scale of the West Indian planters, large numbers of whom chose an English education for their sons.90 The experience, at least as far as William Byrd II was concerned, seems to have led to a deep ambivalence. Never quite accepted by his fellow schoolboys at Felsted, he did his best to become the perfect English gentleman. Yet somehow his colonial origins thwarted all his efforts. Too colonial to be entirely at ease in England, and for a long time too English to be entirely at ease in his native Virginia, he was caught between two worlds without truly belonging to either.9'

The sense of exclusion, experienced to a greater or lesser degree by Byrd and his fellow colonials who visited the mother country or came into contact with unsympathetic representatives of the crown, was especially painful because it implied second-class status in a transatlantic polity of which they believed themselves to be fully paid-up members. Just as Dorantes de Carranza complained in 1604 that the descendants of the conquistadores were not enjoying the equal treatment with native-born Castilians to which they were entitled by the laws of Castile, so, exactly 100 years later, Robert Beverley complained on behalf of Virginia's House of Burgesses that `it's laid as a crime to them that they think themselves entitled to the liberties of Englishmen.'92 The rights of Castilians and the liberties of Englishmen were being denied them by their own kith and kin.

Yet even as they demanded full recognition of those rights, not least as evidence of a shared identity with their metropolitan cousins, they could not shake off the uneasy suspicion that the community of identity was perhaps less complete than they would have wished. The revealing comment of a sixteenth-century Spanish immigrant to the Indies suggests that some of them at least were conscious of a difference in themselves. In a letter to a cousin in Spain he wrote that, on returning home, he would not be what he had previously been, `because I shall return so different (tan otro) from what I was, that those who knew me will say that I am not I ...'93 His comment was an unsolicited testimonial to the transforming power of the American environment, for good or for ill.

Since metropolitan observers seemed in little doubt that the transformation was for ill, it was natural that the creoles, even as they proclaimed their identity with their Old World kith and kin, should seek to counter charges of inevitable degeneracy by loudly singing the praises of their New World environment. In the American viceroyalties a succession of writers sought to depict their American homeland as an earthly paradise, producing the fruits of the earth in abundance, and climatically benign. New Spain and the kingdoms of Peru, wrote Fray Buenaventura de Salinas, `enjoy the mildest climate in the world'. It was a climate that ennobled the spirit and elevated the mind, and so it was not surprising that those who lived in Lima should do so `with satisfaction and pleasure, and look upon it as their patria'.94 The pride of place - a place uniquely blessed by God - was to be the cornerstone of the increasingly elaborate edifice of creole patriotism.95

During the seventeenth century the creoles of New Spain began to develop a strong sense of the location of their own distinctive space in both the geographical and the providential ordering of the universe. To the east lay the Old World of Europe and Africa. To the west lay the Philippines, that distant outpost of Hispanic and Christian civilization which formed an extension to the viceroyalty of New Spain, and served as a natural gateway to the fabled lands of the East. Their homeland, therefore, was situated at the centre of the world.96 Historically, too, as well as geographically, they bridged the different worlds. Had not the apostle Saint Thomas, coming from Jerusalem, preached the gospel in the Indies as well as in India, and might not Saint Thomas be identified with Quetzalcoatl, the bearded god-hero of the ancient inhabitants of central Mexico, as the great Mexican savant Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora affirmed?97 Even if the identification was disputed, there was no doubt in creole minds that their patria enjoyed a providential status. Following the publication in 1648 of a treatise by Miguel Sanchez recounting the miraculous origins of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her cult acquired a wide following among the creole population of New Spain. The Virgin, it seemed, had graciously cast her protective mantle over their beloved patria (fig. 21).98

The increasingly regionalized American patrias of the creoles came to be located not only in space, but also in time. The conquest and conversion of the Indies were decisive and heroic achievements, worthy of eternal remembrance. But while they marked a decisive new beginning, it was not a beginning ex nihilo. The presence of such large numbers of Indians, and the survival in Mexico and the Andes of so many relics of the Indian past, drew attention to a more distant, if largely barbarous, antiquity. It clearly suited the self-image of the conquistadores as a warrior caste to dwell on the heroic qualities of the peoples they had vanquished.99 With the Indians safely defeated, the way was open, at least in New Spain, to idealize certain aspects of the pre-Columbian civilization that Cortes had overthrown.

If writers like Bernardo de Balbuena, in his poem of 1604, Grandeza mexicana, celebrated the beauties of the Mexico City built by the Spaniards, they were also very conscious of the vanished splendors of its Aztec predecessor, the great city of Tenochtitlan, once described by Hernan Cortes in such glowing terms. There was an increasing tendency to emphasize the continuities between the old and the new, as in the depiction on the city's banner, as well as on prominent buildings, of the Mexica's device of the eagle perched on a cactus with a serpent in its beak.10° This process of appropriating selected features of the Aztec past and incorporating them into the history of the creole patria reached a climax in the famous triumphal arch designed by Siguenza y Gongora for the entry into Mexico City of the new viceroy, the Marquis of La Laguna, in 1680. The arch carried statues of the twelve Mexica emperors since the foundation of Tenochtitlan in 1327, with each emperor representing a different heroic virtue, as if they were so many heroes of classical antiquity. Even the defeated Montezuma, and Cuauhtemoc, the defiant defender of Tenochtitlan, were accorded their place in the pantheon.1 '

A Mexican-style appropriation of the pre-Columbian past in order to endow the creole patria with a mythical antiquity was more problematic in Peru, where indigenous resistance was more persistent and more menacing than in New Spain. The mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, nostalgically writing the history of his homeland in far-away Andalusia, constructed for it a developmental narrative in his Royal Commentaries of the Incas. Primitive Peru with its multiplicity of gods had given way to the sun-worshipping Incaic Peru of his ancestors, only to be replaced in turn by the Peru of his own times, to which the Spaniards had brought the inestimable knowledge of the one true God.102 Garcilaso offered a vision of the Andean past - and with it of a utopian future - that was to prove highly attractive to an indigenous nobility which survived better under Spanish rule than its Mexican counterparts. But equally this vision held fewer attractions for a creole society uneasily aware of the influence exercised by the local Indian leaders (the curacas) over the sullen indigenous population of the Andes, and afraid that one day it might rise in revolt to restore the empire of the Incas. Slowly, however, attitudes began to change. It became fashionable among Peruvian creoles in the later seventeenth century to possess complete portrait series of the Inca rulers, but it was not until the eighteenth century that a patriotic ideology embracing the period of Inca rule began to attract sections of the creole population.'°3