Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (63 page)

In 1673, nine years before the publication of The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, a Chilean soldier, Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascufian, put the final touches to a manuscript recounting his six months' captivity among the Araucanian Indians over forty years earlier. Entitled `Happy Captivity' - Cautiverio feliz - it would not find its way into print for another two centuries. It was not only in its publishing history that it differed from Mary Rowlandson's account. The two writers responded in very different ways to the ordeal of their captivity.126

The differences cannot simply be put down to the differences between the Nipmuck Indians and the Araucanians. Both writers, indeed, depicted the Indians as cruel, and Nunez de Pineda had to watch while his captors `sacrificed' one of his companions and devoured his heart. But where Mary Rowlandson misses no opportunity to express her revulsion for her captors' way of life, Nunez de Pineda gives every impression of bonding with the people into whose hands he had fallen. He would sup with them `with great pleasure', and was treated as if he were the cacique's adopted son, a status that could have been his for the asking. The temptation to remain among his captors was clearly strong, and it was with regret that he eventually parted from them and returned to `Christian country' and his elderly father. 127 For all the cruelty of the Indians, they were - unlike the Spaniards - men of their word, true descendants of the noble and heroic people portrayed a century earlier in Alonso de Ercilla's epic poem, La Araucana. Happy the captive of such a race!

Mary Rowlandson, too, was well treated by her captors, not one of whom `ever offered me the least abuse or unchastity to me, in word or action' .121 The Algonquians, like the Araucanians, were keen to adopt captives to replenish their numbers, and Rowlandson, like Nunez, could easily have done what many others of her compatriots did in a similar situation, and remained. But if ever the temptation to do so came upon her, she went to enormous pains to conceal the fact, and was keen to express her revulsion for the way of life of the `diabolical' Indians, and her nostalgia for the English world she had lost. Hers was an unhappy captivity, although at the same time a truly redeeming experience, in that her afflictions made her wonderfully aware of the overwhelming power of God.

It was on the point of religion that the Calvinist Rowlandson and the Catholic Nunez, so different in their responses to life among the Indians, were most closely united, at least when it came to addressing themselves to their readers. To emphasize his spiritual steadfastness when among the heathen, Nunez makes much play of how he resisted the temptation to sleep with the women offered him by his hosts, and how he seized such opportunities as he could to teach his captors Christian prayers. At the end, both the redeemed captives joined in offering up thanks to God for their safe return. But if one of them on returning left the frontier wide open, the other did her best to ensure that it remained tight shut.

`Happy Captivity' - for so long unpublished - represents the captivity literature that Spanish America otherwise lacks, with the exception of the famous sixteenth-century narrative, Los naufragios, by Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.129 One reason for this may be that until the eighteenth century there were few places on the fringes of Spain's empire of the Indies, other than Chile, where it is possible to speak of military borderlines and a more or less permanent state of `war'. As the eighteenth century proceeded, the situation would change, and the number of captives would increase as the frontiers of the empire were pushed forward into hostile country. The accounts of their sufferings, however, were to be found in petitions to the monarch rather than, as in British America, in narratives that made their way into print.l3o

The unwillingness of Spaniards who had been taken prisoner to go public with an account of their experiences may well reflect a feeling of shame at the sheer fact of captivity among `barbarous' Indians. A stigma was now attached to them, although Nunez de Pineda went some way to expunging it by presenting his captors in a favourable light, especially when their behaviour was set against that of corrupt and self-serving royal officials sent out from Madrid. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that his manuscript had to wait two centuries before seeing the light of day. The authorities were unlikely to license publication of any work that would draw attention to failings and deficiencies in a great imperial enterprise whose rationale was to bring Christianity to pagan peoples and incorporate them into a civilized Hispanic polity. Readers, both in Spain and the Indies, may well have shared these inhibitions. It was unpleasant to be reminded of the barbarians still at the gates. For readers in Britain and colonial America, on the other hand, captivity narratives like that of Mary Rowlandson served a useful didactic purpose, reminding them of the need for fortitude in the face of adversity, and the wonderful workings of Providence.

The different responses to the ordeal of captivity among the Indians, however, are also likely to reflect different attitudes to `the frontier' in the two colonial societies. The northern borderlands of New Spain were remote and thinly populated regions, far removed from the densely settled heartland of Mexico, and neither before nor after the coming of independence did they carry the kind of emotional charge associated with `the frontier' in the minds of British colonists, for whom it conjured up visions of hard labour and heroic enterprise in hostile Indian territory. The psychological frontiers separating the colonial societies from `Indian country' were also less sharply drawn in Spanish than in British America, and the deep concerns about the temptations of `Indianization' that so troubled English settlers were apparently not shared by Spanish settlers, many of whom already had Indian blood in their veins. The elite of New Mexico might be concerned to preserve the already suspect purity of their blood-lines, and uphold their status by ostentatiously sporting Spanish dress,13' but mestizaje nevertheless proceeded more or less unchecked. Secure in their value-systems and beliefs, the settlers on the borderlands, while boasting of their Spanish descent, could allow themselves some latitude in the way they lived their daily lives.

The colonists of British North America, and especially those of Puritan New England, where the Indian wars were most intense and prolonged, seem to have been less well equipped to deal with the psychological consequences of life on the borders of `Indian country'. The Indian had been demonized for too long, and ambiguities are hard to accept in a world where mental polarization is the order of the day. In the face of the insecurities generated by defections to the way of life of the enemy, the narratives of redeemed captives offered some assurance of the ultimate triumph of religion and civility.

Yet the creation and expansion of new frontiers in the Middle and Southern Colonies, and the acquaintance of growing numbers of settlers with the life on the borderlands, gradually began to prompt a change of attitude.132 There was to be an increasing sense of affinity with the American landscape, no longer as much of a `wilderness' as it had originally seemed. With this came the beginnings of a reassessment of the Indian, as his way of life, apparently so well attuned to American nature, came to be better known and understood. The eighteenth century was rediscovering `natural man' in the forests of America, Indians who possessed the primitive virtues of an uncorrupted people. The Iroquois, as described by Cadwallader Colden in his History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), were like the early Romans in their devotion to the ideals of republican liberty. `Indeed', he wrote, `I think our Indians have outdone the Romans' - a comparison already made in the sixteenth century, and also to the advantage of the Indians, in Ercilla's La Araucana.133

In this mid-eighteenth-century world of changing sensibilities, the frontier was becoming broad enough to accommodate two ideal types - Indians still uncorrupted by the vices that civilization brought in its train, and settlers who were not ,the Scum of the Earth', but upright and hard-working farmers, living close to God and nature as they cleared spaces in the forests and met the challenge of the wild. The two races inhabited a bountiful land of rugged beauty, a land whose savagery would in due course be tamed by the honest toil of a people no longer European but `American', at one with an American environment they had made their own. The myth of the frontier was in process of creation.

Colonial Spanish America, it seems, could do without this particular myth. There was less urgency than in British America to bring under cultivation the often arid land on the borders of empire, and hence less need for the heroic pioneer. A mythology, too, already existed - a mythology woven from the memories of conquest, and in which the conquered as well as the conquerors came to participate, as they re-enacted on festival days the battles of Moors and Christians, or of Christianized Indians against the `barbarian' Chichimecas of the northern frontier of New Spain. 114 The English settlers, by contrast, had no conquest to celebrate. Nor could they very convincingly celebrate that massive winning of Indian souls for the faith, which to the creoles of Spanish America conferred upon their patrias a special place in God's providential plan.13'

While it was true that Puritan New England, too, could lay claim to a special place in God's providential plan, the vision had lost some of its cogency by the eighteenth century, and in any event was not immediately and obviously applicable to colonies which had been founded at different times from New England, and under very different auspices. The captivity narrative might serve to reanimate the vision, but in a society subjected to strong new secularizing influences and being peopled by immigrants from many different lands, the mythology of the frontier could help to extend the range of imaginative possibilities by creating the collective image of a pioneering society on the move.

Yet if the `backcountry', as the North American borderlands were coming to be called, symbolized the future for thousands of colonists, its existence also posed a multitude of problems for the more settled territories of the Atlantic seaboard. There was the increasingly urgent problem of how best to defend these outlying regions at a time when border relations between settlers and Indians were being subsumed in the great struggle between the rival European powers for the control of a continent. There was also the fundamental question of the nature of the relationship between the populations of the maritime regions, proud of their increasing refinement and civility, and the hordes of backcountry farmers and squatters, regarded by many inhabitants of the eastern seaboard as beyond the pale. Independent-minded people, with a taste for liberty, these backcountry dwellers would not take easily to discipline or any form of institutional control. 116 This was a problem that would face all the mainland colonies to a greater or lesser degree, and its solution was made no easier by the fact that, under the pressure of immigration and population expansion, so many of them were themselves in a state of flux.

If the increase in population affected all the British American mainland, its impact was most strongly felt in the Middle and Southern Colonies, where immigration, whether voluntary or involuntary, was strongest. It was not only a matter of numbers, but also of growing ethnic, religious and racial diversity, as more and more immigrants streamed - or were shipped - into the country, changing the face of society wherever they appeared. By the middle of the eighteenth century a heterogeneous British America was in the making, although its heterogeneity was different from that of Spanish America, where the survival and slow recovery of substantial Indian populations had created an astonishing racial mosaic of white, red and black, and every shade in between.

In the British-controlled areas of North America the drastic diminution of the indigenous inhabitants meant that the red had in many parts dwindled to the point of invisibility. The black, on the other hand, was daily becoming more prominent. Among the whites, colonists of English origin were now liable to find themselves in a minority, swamped by Scots-Irish and continental Europeans. By 1760 settlers of English origin would constitute no more than 45 per cent of all the residents of New York, and only some 30 per cent of those of Pennsylvania. 137 `Unless', wrote an alarmed Benjamin Franklin in 1753 of the German immigrants flooding into Pennsylvania, `the stream of importation could be turned from this to other colonies ... they will soon outnumber us, that all the advantages we have, will in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.""

Although the arrival of so many non-English whites, many of them without a knowledge of the language, created obvious problems of assimilation for the receiving societies, these could not compare in magnitude with the lastingly divisive issues raised by the growth of the black population, most of it enslaved. By 1740 Africans and Afro-Americans constituted 28.3 per cent of the population of the Upper South, and 46.5 per cent of that of the Lower South. In the Middle Colonies and New England the percentages were 7.5 per cent and 2.9 per cent respectively.139 From as early as the second decade of the eighteenth century Virginia's slave population was beginning to grow from natural increase - the first time this had happened in any New World slave population - and during the 1740s American-born blacks in the Chesapeake colonies came to outnumber those imported from Africa, allowing slave-owners to replenish their labour force from their own stock.140 With the growth of an African population that had no memory of Africa, black, as well as white, society was undergoing a decisive transformation.

Both in the Chesapeake region, and in North and South Carolina, societies based on chattel bondage were in the making. The only exception in the Lower South was the new colony of Georgia, whose trustees held out against the introduction of slavery until 1751, the year in which they surrendered the colony to the crown.141 The model for these slave societies, which Georgia would join after 1751, was provided by the British West Indies islands, with their forced plantation labour. These in turn had found their model in the sugar-producing slave plantations of Portuguese Brazil.142 If the plantation societies resembled each other, however, in depending on forced labour by a work-force whose members were no more than chattels to be exploited and disposed of at the whim of their masters, the effect of differing ecologies, demographic patterns, and social and cultural attitudes was to create significant differences between them. In the West Indies, where, in the 1740s, 88 per cent of the population was black '141 there was likely to be a different dynamic, both between white and black societies and within them, from that to be found in a mainland region in which some 70 per cent of the population was still of European descent.144