Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (61 page)

The treaty, however, which involved the exchange of considerable areas of land between the two crowns, proved ephemeral. It was welcomed neither on the Portuguese side, nor by the Jesuits and their Guarani charges, who rebelled against the transfer. It was also premature, in the sense that the new line ignored a vast central and northern belt of territory inhabited solely by Amazon tribes. With Portuguese and Spanish settlements still far away, this was a territory that Brazil would start to colonize and incorporate only in the nineteenth century.79 In those areas along the new frontier where Spanish and Portuguese settlements were in striking distance of each other, the frontier line itself remained little more than a vague point of reference, and the borderlands continued to be what they had always been, a law unto themselves, regulated, in so far as they were regulated at all, by the prospects of commercial advantage, a mutuality of interests, and the power of the gun.

Where frontier areas were tamed along this great Brazilian border, this tended to be a consequence of the activities of the religious orders, which effectively created new frontiers, as they penetrated into regions as yet unsettled by Europeans, and then imposed upon them their own brand of Christian peace. It was a method of colonization also employed by the French, but alien to the ways of a British colonial world that had no religious orders and all too few ministers willing to dedicate their lives to the conversion of the Indians. Its extensive use by the Spaniards, not only on the borders of Brazil, but also in pushing forward the boundaries of Hispanic culture into the far north of Mexico and Florida, gave the borderlands of Spain's empire in America a dynamic distinct from that of the British American borderlands.

The mission frontier system developed by the Spaniards - initially by the Franciscans, but increasingly during the seventeenth century by the Jesuits, who began moving into areas, like Arizona and the western coastal regions of North America, that the Franciscans had not reached - was a form of cultural activism intended to transform the indigenous peoples on the fringes of Spain's empire, and bring them into the orbit of Spanish civilization. While there were disagreements both between and within the religious orders as to the desirability or necessity of turning Indians into Spanish speakers,80 their aim was to acculturate them to accept Spanish Christianity and Spanish norms of civility. Where possible, the initial approach was that of more or less subtle persuasion,S1 but the end result, which involved the relocation of Indian converts into new settlements or reducciones, was to turn their world upside down. Drastic changes to that world had already been occurring as a result of contacts, either at first or second hand, with European intruders into indigenous territory. The coming of the missions, however, effectively meant a system of forced acculturation designed to bring them within the frontiers of an alien Spanish world.

The friars and the Jesuits were the advance agents of a Spanish frontier policy that sought to be a policy of inclusion, absorbing and assimilating the indigenous population, in contrast to the frontier policy of exclusion that had become the norm among the British colonies to the north.82 But the policy of inclusion had its limitations and its failures, of which the Chilean frontier with the Araucanian Indians along the river Biobio was for long the most glaring example.83 After failing lamentably to subdue the Araucanians in their wars of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Spaniards found themselves compelled in the middle of the seventeenth century to reinforce their defensive system of frontier garrisons. The costs of maintaining a standing army of some 1,500 men were high, and the soldiers' pay, as in all Spanish presidios, was pitifully inadequate. They therefore supplemented it by a brisk trade in Indian captives. These could legally be enslaved since the Araucanian war was deemed to meet the criteria of a `just war', and this lucrative traffic provided every inducement to perpetuate the conflict. It was only in 1683 that the crown ceased to authorize the enslavement of the Araucanians, but it would take more than a decree from Madrid to stamp out such a well-established practice in one of the remotest outposts of Spain's global empire.

Yet increasingly the Araucanian war became a phantom war, as trading and personal contacts across the frontier multiplied. Simultaneously, conflict was being reduced by alternative methods of pacification. The missions played their part, although the process of Christianization proved frustratingly slow, not least because it was hard for the religious to disassociate themselves from the activities of the military. More effective in reducing tension was the development from the mid-seventeenth century of regular `parliaments' between the Spanish authorities and the Araucanians, comparable to the discussions that William Penn held with the Pennsylvania Indians in his pursuit of an enlightened Indian policy. These could lead to the signing of formal treaties between the two parties.84 But more than the missions, or regular discussions between Spanish officials and Indian caciques, it was the evolution of forms of coexistence based on mutual need which gradually tamed the Chilean border zone. Not war but trade and mestizaje would finally subdue the people whose heroic defence of their homeland had so moved European readers of Alonso de Ercilla's sixteenth-century epic La Araucana.

In spite of periodic raids by Dutch and other foreign vessels on the Pacific coast of South America, there was little to suggest that Spain's attempt to bring the Araucanians within the confines of their empire would be seriously compromised by the activities of Spain's European enemies. In this respect the Chilean frontier differed both from the Spanish-Portuguese frontier in Brazil and from the borderlands of northern New Spain, although there was always a lurking fear of enemy intervention in support of the Indians even in the remote Pacific coastal regions, and in the middle years of the seventeenth century some 20 per cent of the revenues of the Lima treasury were having to be allocated for coastal defence.85

The defence of northern New Spain was to become by the end of the seventeenth century a growing preoccupation for Mexican viceroys and the ministers in Madrid. The northwards advance of New Spain had been a hesitant and often faltering process ever since the creation of the vast new province of Nueva Vizcaya in 1563.86 In 1598 Juan de Ofiate, leading an expedition from the new province, took possession of the Pueblo Indian territory of New Mexico in the name of the King of Spain, and went on to find the mouth of the Colorado River at the head of the Gulf of California. The settlements that sprang up in New Mexico were hundreds of miles from those of Nueva Vizcaya, and unlike Nueva Vizcaya, where silver mines were discovered, the far northern borderlands seemed to have little to offer potential Spanish settlers. The Pueblo Indians, living in their scattered villages, were not easily brought under control, while the rugged and desert landscape of the American Southwest was uncongenial territory, difficult to reach either from Nueva Vizcaya or New Mexico. For much of the seventeenth century, therefore, New Spain's northern borders remained only lightly populated by settlers, a frontier territory of missions and military outposts. Slowly, however, the Hispanic population of New Mexico, with its capital at Santa Fe, began to grow, and agricultural and ranching settlements started to spread.87

Each new advance of the northern frontier, however faltering, brought the Spaniards into closer proximity to hostile Indian peoples, like the Apaches, whose mastery of the horse would convert them into formidable adversaries.88 The extension of the frontier regions also increased the possibilities of eventual confrontation with the settlements of European rivals, like those of the French at the mouth of the Mississippi and the English in the Carolinas.

Like New Mexico, Florida was another isolated outpost of empire, consisting of little more than the presidio or garrison town of St Augustine and the Guale missions. In the later years of the seventeenth century both these frontier provinces came close to being obliterated. Carolina settlers, supported by nonmission Indians who had been alienated by Spanish labour demands, were on the offensive in Florida from 1680 onwards, and forced the Franciscans to abandon their Guale missions. They failed, however, to capture St Augustine, which was strongly enough fortified to beat off the attacks by land and sea launched by Governor James Moore of Carolina in 1702.89 In New Mexico in 1680, four years after the ending of King Philip's War in Massachusetts, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico launched a concerted attack on the Spaniards. Already suffering from the loss of herds and crops through the effects of drought and the raids of Navajos and Apaches, they turned on a settler population only some 3,000 strong, which had continually oppressed them with labour demands. Their rebellion, too, was the cry of protest of a people whose way of life was being eroded by Spanish attempts to impose new cultural practices and religious beliefs.90 Here as elsewhere along the margins of Spain's empire in America, the missions were just as likely to be part of the problem as of its solution.

The Pueblo rebellion, when it came, took the Spaniards by surprise. Santa Fe was surrounded and destroyed, and the surviving Hispanic population of New Mexico was driven back to El Paso. The whole northern frontier caught fire as the rebellion spread beyond Pueblo country to engulf other Indian peoples under Spanish rule. Spain and New Spain alike lacked the people and the resources to establish well-defended frontiers along the borderlands of empire.

Yet strategically the northern frontier was too important to be abandoned for long. Indian raids deep into the viceroyalty were a standing danger to the mining camps of Nueva Vizcaya, while the presence of the English and the French in the region posed a growing threat. Silver fleets making their homeward journey from the Caribbean through the Bahama Channel had to sail uncomfortably close to English settlements in the Carolinas.91 As for the French in the Gulf of Mexico, there was the prospect that one day they would be strong enough to seize the silver mines of northern New Spain, although the danger receded when a Bourbon monarch ascended the Spanish throne. The French and the English, too, had access to a wider range of European goods than the Spaniards for trading with the Indians, and could turn this to advantage when seeking Indian allies.

The requirements of defence, therefore, at least as much as the need to acquire more land for agriculture and ranching and the urge to win more converts for the faith, pushed Spain to strengthen and extend its North American borders at the turn of the new century. In the 1690s a campaign began to reoccupy New Mexico. Little by little a shrinking Pueblo population was worn down, until eventually an accommodation was reached, and relative calm at last descended on the Pueblo-Spanish borderland .12

In the 1690s, too, Spain embarked on sporadic efforts to forestall the French in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1691 the viceroy of New Spain appointed the first governor of the province of Texas, where a Franciscan mission had just been founded to evangelize the Indians.93 Seven years later the Spaniards built a small fort at Pensacola in West Florida, but Pensacola Bay proved no substitute for the mouth of the Mississippi as a base from which to control the river system that led to the interior. While the emerging French colony of Louisiana drove a wedge between New Spain and Florida, the expanding French presence in the region also threatened Texas, with its fragile Spanish missions. In 1716 the viceroy was sufficiently alarmed by the threat to despatch a small military expedition to reoccupy East Texas. With this expedition the permanent Spanish occupation of Texas began. A new outlying province was added to Spain's extended empire of the Indies - a thinly settled province of garrisons, missions, and struggling settlements vulnerable to attack by the Apaches. But the beginnings of cattle ranching around San Antonio at least hinted at the possibility of less bleak times to come.94

Florida, Texas and the other outposts that straggled along the northern borders of the viceroyalty of New Spain were, and remained, the orphans of Spain's empire in America. Madrid accepted them only reluctantly, and ignored them as far as it could. The tripartite struggle between England, France and Spain for the domination of the vast area of territory that lay to the south and south-east of the North American continent made their acquisition and defence an unpleasant necessity. They represented a constant and unwelcome drain on resources, and they were also unattractive to emigrants, who preferred to make for the more settled regions of New Spain and Peru.

The occasional importation of Canary Islanders to populate the frontier regions had little impact when compared with that made by the influx into British America of the Scots-Irish, who were encouraged by the colonial authorities to settle the frontier areas on the assumption that their experiences in Ulster had uniquely equipped them to deal with barbarous frontier tribes. Writing in 1720 about the grant two years earlier to Scots-Irish settlers of a tract of land in Chester County, where they founded the border township of Donegal, the provincial secretary of Pennsylvania explained that, in view of apprehensions about the Indians, he `thought it might be provident to plant a settlement of such men as those who formerly had so bravely defended Londonderry and Enniskillen as a frontier against any disturbance'.95 His use of the word `frontier' was itself suggestive. In this region of encounter between European and non-European a defensive barrier made up of doughty fighters was regarded as a prerequisite for successful settlement. The Indians, however, were not Irish, in spite of traditional assumptions to the contrary,96 and `defence' was all too liable to be a euphemism for the most naked forms of offence.

The British American borderlands, unlike the Spanish, were constantly being replenished by fresh streams of immigrants, many of them brutal in their disregard for the Indians and their rights, but most of them ready and willing to employ their energy and skills in clearing the ground and `improving' the land. Such people were in short supply on the northern frontiers of Spain's empire in America. As a result, the Hispanic frontier territories found it hard to generate the kind of economic activity that would create self-sustaining wealth, unless - as in the missions or the mining camps - they had a docile Indian labour force at their command.