Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (7 page)

The indigenous societies of the New World, too, were very different in character from those of Africa and Asia. In the first place they were vulnerable - vulnerable to European technological superiority and to European diseases - in ways that the societies of Africa and Asia were not. Moreover, it soon transpired that these peoples had apparently never heard the Christian gospel preached. Their conversion, therefore, became a first priority, and would constitute - with papal blessing - the principal justification for a continuing Spanish presence in the newly found Indies. Castile, already uniquely favoured by God in the triumphant reconquest of Granada, now had a recognized mission across the newly navigated `Ocean Sea' - the mission to convert these benighted peoples and introduce them to the benefits of policia (civility), or, in other words, to European norms of behaviour. In accordance with the terms of the Alexandrine bulls, Castile, by way of compensation for its efforts, was granted certain rights. The inhabitants of Hispaniola, and subsequently those of Cuba and other islands seized by the Spaniards, became vassals of the crown, and a potential labour force for crown and colonists - not, technically, as slaves, because vassalage and slavery were incompatible, but as labourers conscripted for public and private works.

The nature of the Indies and its inhabitants therefore favoured an approach based on conquest and subjugation rather than on the establishment of a string of trading enclaves, thus reinforcing the conquering and colonizing, rather than the mercantile, aspects of the medieval Castilian tradition. But, after the first heady moments, the Caribbean began to look distinctly disappointing as a theatre for conquest and colonization. Hispaniola was not, after all, to prove a source of abundant gold; and its Taino population, which the first Spanish settlers had seen as vassals and as a potential labour force, rapidly succumbed to European diseases and became extinct before their eyes.81 The same proved true of the other islands which they seized in their frenetic search for gold. For a moment it seemed as if the imperial experiment would be over almost as soon as it had begun: the meagre returns scarcely warranted such a heavy investment of resources. But once the lineaments of a great American landmass were revealed, and Cortes went on to overthrow the empire of the Aztecs, it was clear that Spain's empire of the Indies had come to stay. The discovery and conquest of Peru a decade later served to drive the lesson home. Here were vast sedentary populations, which could be brought under Spanish control with relative ease. Dominion over land brought with it dominion over people, and also - as large deposits of silver were discovered in the Andes and northern Mexico - dominion over resources on an unimagined scale.

The Cortes expedition - an expedition conceived in terms of subjugation and settlement - therefore fitted into a general pattern of behaviour developed in the course of the Iberian Reconquista and transported in the wake of Columbus to the Caribbean. Traditionally, the Reconquista had relied on a combination of state sponsorship and private initiative, the balance between them being determined at any given moment by the relative strength of crown and local forces. The monarch would `capitulate' with a commander, who in turn would assume responsibility for financing and organizing a military expedition under the conditions outlined in the agreement. The expectation was that the expedition would pay for itself out of the booty of conquest, and the followers of the captain, or caudillo, would receive their reward in the form of an allocation of land, booty and tribute-paying vassals.82 None of this would have been foreign to Cortes, whose father and uncle took part in the final stages of the Granada campaign. Not surprisingly, he pursued his conquest of Mexico as if he were conducting a campaign against the Moors. He tended to refer to Mesoamerican temples as ,mosques', 83 and in making his alliances with local Indian caciques, or when inducing Montezuma to accept Castilian overlordship, he resorted to strategies often used against the petty local rulers of Moorish Andalusia. Similarly, in his dealings with the crown, on whose approval he was more than usually dependent because of the ambiguous nature of his relationship with his immediate superior, the governor of Cuba, he was scrupulously careful to follow traditional Reconquista practice, meticulously setting aside the royal fifth before distributing any booty among his men.84

But Cortes showed himself to be something more than a caudillo in the traditional mould. Unlike Pedrarias Davila, who as governor of Darien from 1513 murdered and massacred his way through the isthmus of Panama with his marauding band, Cortes, for all the brutality and ruthlessness of his conduct, adopted from the first a more constructive approach to the enterprise of conquest. He had arrived in Hispaniola in the wake of his distant relative and fellow Extremaduran, Nicolas de Ovando, who had been appointed the royal governor of the island in 1501, with instructions to rescue it from the anarchy into which it had descended under the regime of the Columbus brothers, and to establish the colony on solid foundations.85 By the time Ovando left Hispaniola in 1509, seventeen towns had been established on the island, Indians had been allotted by distribution (repartimiento) to settlers who were charged with instructing them in Christian doctrine in return for the use of their labour, and cattle raising and sugar planting had begun to provide alternative sources of wealth to the island's rapidly diminishing supply of gold.

Cortes would have seen for himself something of the transformation of Hispaniola into a well-ordered and economically viable community, while at the same time his Caribbean experiences made him aware of the devastating consequences of uncontrolled rapine by adventurers who possessed no abiding stake in the land. He therefore struggled to prevent a recurrence in Mexico of the mindless style of conquest that had left nothing but devastation in its wake. As expressed by Gomara, his philosophy was that `without settlement there is no good conquest, and if the land is not conquered, the people will not be converted. Therefore the maxim of the conqueror must be to settle.'86 It was to encourage settlement that he arranged the repartimiento of Indians among his companions, who were to hold them in trust, or encomienda, and promoted the founding or refounding of cities in a country which already had large ceremonial complexes and urban concentrations. And it was to encourage conversion that he invited the first Franciscans - the so-called `twelve apostles' - to come to Mexico. Conquest, conversion and colonization were to be mutually supportive.

Effective colonization would not be possible without a serious attempt to develop the resources of the land, and Cortes himself, with his sugar plantations on his Cuernavaca estates and his promotion of long-distance trading ventures, practised what he preached.87 But he was only one among the many conquistadores and early settlers who displayed marked entrepreneurial characteristics. As new waves of Spanish immigrants moved across the continent in the aftermath of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, it became clear that the easiest forms of wealth - silver and Indians - were reserved for the fortunate few. Disappointed conquistadores and new immigrants therefore had to fend for themselves as best they could. This meant, as it had meant in the lands recovered by the Christians in medieval Andalusia, applying their skills as artisans in the cities, or exploiting local possibilities to develop new sources of wealth. The sixteenth-century settlers of Guatemala, for instance - a region without silver mines - developed an export trade in indigo, cacao and hides for American and European markets.88

Entrepreneurial as well as seigneurial aspirations were therefore to be found in this Spanish American colonial society, and already in the first half of the century that great chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, was expressing pride in Spanish entrepreneurial accomplishments: `We found no sugar mills when we arrived in these Indies, and all these we have built with our own hands and industry in so short a time.'89 Similarly, Gomara's praise for the success of the Spaniards in `improving' Hispaniola and Mexico shows that the language of improvement was being used by the Spaniards a century before English colonists turned to it in order to justify to themselves and to others their presence in the Caribbean and the North American mainland.90

Spain's empire of the Indies, then, cannot be summarily categorized as an empire of conquest, reflecting exclusively the military and seigneurial values of the metropolitan society that founded it. As Cortes's vision - and practice - make clear, there were counter-currents at work, which were perfectly capable of flourishing, given the right conditions. But those conditions would in part be set and shaped by the requirements and interests of the crown. The scale of the conquests was simply too large, the potential resources of the continent too vast, for the crown to remain indifferent to the ways in which those resources were exploited and developed. Tradition, obligation and self-interest all worked from the very beginning to ensure close royal involvement in Spanish overseas settlement.

The united Spain created by the dynastic union of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 bore the imprint of their unique authority. Their restoration of order in the peninsula after years of civil war and anarchy, and the triumphant completion of the Reconquista under their leadership, had brought the monarchs unparalleled prestige by the time the overseas enterprise was launched. Their investment in Columbus - a rare example of direct financial participation by the crown in overseas expeditions of discovery and conquest91- had yielded rich returns. But their `capitulations' with Columbus proved to have been over-generous. Having asserted their authority with such difficulty at home, they were not inclined to let their subjects get the better of them overseas. The crown would therefore seek to rein in Columbus's excessive powers, and would keep a close watch over subsequent developments in the Indies, making sure that royal officials accompanied, and followed hard on, expeditions of conquest, in order to uphold the crown's interests, impose its authority, and prevent the emergence of over-mighty subjects.

The case for intervention and control by the crown was further strengthened by its obligations under the terms of the Alexandrine bulls to look to the spiritual and material well-being of its newly acquired Indian vassals. It was incumbent on the royal conscience to prevent unrestricted exploitation of the indigenous population by the colonists. With the acquisition of millions of these new vassals as a result of the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the obligation was still further increased. Just as the crown, following Reconquista practice, insisted on retaining ultimate authority over the process of territorial acquisition and settlement, so also it insisted on retaining ultimate authority when it came to the protection of the Indians and the salvation of their souls.

But more than the crown's conscience was at stake. The Indians were a source of tribute and of labour, and the crown was determined to have its share of both. As it struggled under Charles V to maintain its European commitments - to fight its wars with the French and defend Christendom from the Turk - so its dependence on the assets of empire grew. The discovery in 1545 of the silver mountain of Potosi in the high Andes, followed the next year by that of important silver deposits at Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, vastly enhanced those assets, turning Castile's possessions in the Indies into a great reservoir of riches, which, in the eyes of its European rivals, would be used to promote Charles's aspirations after universal monarchy. As Cortes had told Charles in the second of his letters from Mexico, he might call himself `the emperor of this kingdom with no less glory than of Germany, which, by the Grace of God, Your Sacred Majesty already possesses'.92

Even if Charles and his successors ignored the suggestion, and declined to adopt the title of `Emperor of the Indies', Cortes's vision of the monarchs of Castile as masters of a New World empire was very soon to be an established fact. Charles and his successors saw this empire as a vast resource for meeting their financial necessities. Their consequent concern for the exploitation of its silver deposits and the safe annual shipment of the bullion to Seville was therefore translated into continuing attention to the affairs of the Indies, and into a set of policies and practices in which fiscal considerations inevitably tended to have the upper hand. In the Europe of the sixteenth century, silver meant power; and Cortes and Pizarro, by unlocking the treasures of the Indies, had shown how the conquest and settlement of overseas empire could add immeasurably to the power of European states.

In the circumstances, it was not surprising that the England of Elizabeth should have expressed its own imperial aspirations, nicely symbolized by the `Armada portrait' of Queen Elizabeth, with her hand on the globe and an imperial crown at her side.93 Empire calls forth empire, and although Elizabeth's `empire' was essentially an empire of `Great Britain' embracing all the British Isles, the notion of imperium was flexible enough to be capable of extension to English plantations not only in Ireland but on the farther shores of the Atlantic.94 It was important, too, for Hakluyt and other promoters of overseas colonization to refute any Spanish claims to possession of the New World based on papal donation by the Alexandrine bulls. In his Historie of Travell into Virginia of 1612, William Strachey roundly asserted that the King of Spain `hath no more title, nor colour of title, to this place (which our industry and expenses have only made ours ... than hath any Christian prince'.95

While Spain served as stimulus, exemplar, and sometimes as warning, English empire-builders could equally well look to precedents in their own backyard. Ireland, like the reconquered kingdom of Granada, was both kingdom and colony, and, like Andalusia, constituted a useful testing-ground of empire. 16 For example, the English had for centuries been seeking to enmesh Irish kings and chieftains in a network of allegiance, and the model of Montezuma's submission was hardly a necessary prerequisite for the Virginia Company to come up with the farce of Powhatan's `coronation'.