Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (8 page)

It is therefore no accident that the Elizabethans most active in devising the first American projects - Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Lane, Thomas White - were deeply involved in the schemes for Irish plantation. It was not until he went to Ireland in 1566 as a soldier and planter that Gilbert began to appreciate how colonization could bring to its promoters territorial wealth and power.97 In the early years of Elizabeth, growing hostility to Spain, and the burning desire of the English to get their hands on the riches of the Spanish Indies, made it natural that strategic and privateering interests should predominate over any enterprise of a less ephemeral character. But in his abortive voyage of 1578 Gilbert seems to have been moving beyond piracy towards some sort of colonizing scheme.98 The failure of the voyage pushed him still further in the same direction, and in 1582 he devised a project for the settlement of 8.5 million acres of North American mainland in the region known as Norumbega.99

Sir Humphrey Gilbert belonged to that West Country connection - Raleighs, Carews, Gilberts, Grenvilles - with its trading, privateering and colonizing interests, initially in Ireland, which can be seen as an English counterpart to the Extremadura connection that produced Nicolas de Ovando, Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, and many other Spanish conquerors and settlers of America." His plans were designed to provide landed estates for that same class of rural gentry and younger sons which had looked to land and vassals in Ireland as a means of realizing its aspirations. The Irish experience was of a kind to encourage gentlemen adventurers - men imbued with similar values and ideals to those to be found among the Spanish conquistadores, for there was nothing exclusively Spanish about the conquistador ideal. It inspired Sir Walter Raleigh with his wild schemes for wealth and glory through the conquest of the `large, rich, and bewti- ful empyre of Guiana', and it filled the heads of the gentlemen adventurers of Jamestown with dreams of gold and Indians.101

But if there were some suggestive similarities in English and Castilian plans for overseas expansion - plans which, although carried out under state sponsorship and subject to state control, were heavily dependent on private and collective initiatives for their realization - there were also some important differences. England under Elizabeth was moving, however reluctantly, in the direction of religious pluralism, and this was to be reflected in the new colonizing ventures. It was symptomatic, for instance, that one of the main proponents of Gilbert's colonization scheme was Sir George Peckham, a Roman Catholic, and the colony was at least partially envisaged as offering alternative space to the English Catholic commu- nity.102 In 1620, inspired by comparable urgings for an alternative space, a group of separatists under the leadership of William Bradford would land at Cape Cod and move across Massachusetts Bay to establish themselves in New Plymouth. The willingness of the English crown to sanction projects designed to provide refuge in America for a harassed minority contrasted strikingly with the determination of the Spanish crown to prevent the migration of Jews, Moors and heretics to the Indies.

It was also a reflection of the changing times that England's transatlantic enterprise was sustained by a more coherent economic philosophy than that which attended Spain's first ventures overseas. Commercial considerations had admittedly been present from the beginning of the Spanish enterprise, and had been central to Columbus's presentation of his case at court. The colonization of Venezuela in the early 1530s was actually undertaken by a commercial organization, the Seville branch of the German merchant-banking firm of the Welsers, with results as disappointing as those that would later attend the efforts of the Virginia Company.103 But the discovery of silver in such vast quantities, and the overwhelming importance of precious metals in the cargoes for Seville, inevitably relegated other American commodities, however valuable, to a subordinate status in Spain's transatlantic trade. Although by the middle years of the sixteenth century some Spaniards were already expressing concern about the economic as well as the moral consequences of the constant influx of American silver into the Iberian peninsula'104 those who benefited from it - starting with the crown - had little inducement to listen to the theorists.

In the England of Elizabeth, however, the promoters of overseas colonization were still having to look for arguments that would advance their cause. Although the younger Hakluyt's writings were suffused with anti-Spanish and patriotic sentiments, patriotism by itself was not enough. Colonization schemes required merchant capital, and it was essential to present them in terms that would appeal to the mercantile community, with which the Hakluyts themselves had close con- nections.105 At a time when the country was anxiously casting around for new export markets, this meant emphasizing the value of colonies as an outlet for domestic manufactures. Again, the example of Spain was uppermost in the younger Hakluyt's mind. Warning his compatriots of the likely consequences of Philip II's acquisition of Portugal and its overseas territories in 1580, he reminded them that `... whenever the rule and government of the East and West Indies ... shall be in one prince, they neither will receive English cloth nor yet any vent of their commodities to us, having then so many places of their own to make vent and interchange of their commodities. For all the West Indies is a sufficient vent of all their wines, and of all their wool indraped ...'106

The case was further strengthened by the growing anxiety in Elizabethan England about the alarming social consequences of overpopulation. Spain and Portugal, wrote Hakluyt somewhat optimistically in his Discourse of Western Planting, `by their discoveries have found such occasion of employment, that these many years we have not heard scarcely of any pirate of those two nations: whereas we and the French are most infamous for our outrageous, common and daily piracies.' In contrast with Spain, `many thousands of idle persons are within this realm, which having no way to be set on work be either mutinous and seek alteration in the state, or at least very burdensome to the common wealth'.107 Colonization, therefore, became a remedy for the home country's social and economic problems, as Hakluyt conjured up for the benefit of contemporaries and posterity the vision of a great English commercial empire, which would redound both to the honour of the nation and the profit of its industrious inhabitants.

It was ironical that, at the very time when Hakluyt and his friends were vigorously arguing the case for overseas empire, a number of informed and sophisticated Spaniards were beginning to question its value to Spain. In his great General History of Spain, written in the early 1580s, Juan de Mariana summed up the increasingly ambivalent feelings of his generation towards the acquisition of its American possessions: `From the conquest of the Indies have come advantages and disadvantages. Among the latter, our strength has been weakened by the multitude of people who have emigrated and are scattered abroad; the sustenance we used to get from our soil, which was by no means bad, we now expect in large measure from the winds and waves that bring home our fleets; the prince is in greater necessity than he was before, because he has to go to the defence of so many regions; and the people are made soft by the luxury of their food and dress.'108

Mariana's words were a foretaste of things to come. The years around 1600, when the ominous word `decline' first began to be uttered in Spain, saw the beginnings of an intensive Castilian debate about the problems afflicting Castilian society and the Castilian economy.109 From the earliest stages of this debate, the alleged benefits to Spain of the silver of the Indies were the subject of particularly critical scrutiny. `Our Spain', wrote one of the most eloquent and intelligent of the participants, Martin Gonzalez de Cellorigo, `has its eyes so fixed on trade with the Indies, from which it gets its gold and silver, that it has given up trading with its neighbours; and if all the gold and silver that the natives of the New World have found, and go on finding, were to come to it, they would not make it as rich or powerful as it would be without them."10 In this reading, precious metals were not after all the true yardstick of wealth, and real prosperity was to be measured by national productivity, and not by a fortuitous inflow of bullion.

This was a lesson that still had to be learnt, outside as much as inside Spain itself. The insistence of Hakluyt and his friends on an empire based on the exchange of commodities rather than on the acquisition of precious metals played its part in helping to give merchants and their values a new prominence in the English national consciousness at a moment when in Castile a minority was struggling against heavy odds to promote a similar awareness of the crucial importance of those same values for national salvation." English merchants, too, benefited from a social and political system which offered them more room for manoeuvre than their Castilian counterparts, who found it difficult to protect their interests against the arbitrary financial requirements of the Spanish crown.

The fact that the English were embarking on overseas colonization at a time when their society was acquiring a more commercial orientation in response to internal pressures and to a changing climate of national and international opinion about the relationship of profit and power,'12 inevitably gave a slant to the English colonial enterprise that was not to be found in the opening stages of Castile's overseas expansion. The founding of the Virginia Company in 1606 under royal charter reflected the new determination of merchants and gentry to combine personal profit and national advantage by means of a corporate organization which owed more to their own energy and enthusiasm than to that of the state.113 The very fact that the agent of colonization was to be a trading company pointed towards a future English `empire of commerce'.

Yet the tensions that bedevilled the Company from the outset suggest that an empire of commerce was by no means foreordained. The seigneurial aspirations that nearly wrecked the Jamestown settlement were to recur frequently in English colonizing projects of the seventeenth century. Indigenous labour might be in short supply, but the introduction of a slave labour force would in due course allow for the growth in the British Caribbean of societies characterized by the same kind of attitude to conspicuous consumption as was to be found in the Hispanic-American world.

If large quantities of silver had indeed been found in Virginia, there is little reason to doubt that the development of an extractive economy would have created a high-spending elite which would have more than lived up to the dreams of the gentlemen settlers of Jamestown. But the lack of silver and indigenous labour in these early British settlements forced on the settlers a developmental as against an essentially exploitative rationale; and this in turn gave additional weight to those qualities of self-reliance, hard work and entrepreneurship that were assuming an increasingly prominent place in the national self-imagining and rhetoric of seventeenth-century England.

The presence or absence of silver, and of large native populations that could be domesticated to European purposes, had other implications, too, for the two imperial enterprises. With much less immediate profit to be expected from overseas colonization, the British crown maintained a relatively low profile in the crucial opening stages of colonial development. This contrasted strikingly with the interventionist behaviour of the Spanish crown, which had an obvious and continuing interest in securing for itself a regular share of the mineral wealth that was being extracted in the Indies. Similarly, with fewer Indians to be exploited and converted, the British crown and the Anglican church had much less reason than their Spanish counterparts to display a close interest in the well-being of the indigenous population in the newly settled lands.

As a result of this relatively low level of royal and ecclesiastical interest, there was correspondingly more chance for a transatlantic transfer of minority and libertarian elements from the metropolitan culture to British than to Spanish America. While Massachusetts was a reflection of the growing pluralism of English society, it was also a reflection of the relative lack of concern felt by the British crown in these critical early stages of colonization over the character of the communities that its subjects were establishing on the farther shores of the Atlantic. There was, said Lord Cottington, no point in troubling oneself about the behaviour of settlers who `plant tobacco and Puritanism only, like fools'.114 The Spanish crown, acutely aware of its own dependence on American silver and of the vulnerability of its silver resources to foreign attack, could not afford the luxury of so casual an approach to settlement in its overseas possessions.

If, then - as the Cortes and Jamestown expeditions suggest - many of the same aspirations attended the birth of Spain's and Britain's empires in America, accidents both of environment and of timing would do much to ensure that they developed in distinctive ways. But in the early stages of settlement, the creators of these Spanish and British transatlantic communities found themselves confronted by similar problems and challenges. They had to take `possession' of the land in the fullest sense of the word; they had to work out some kind of relationship with the peoples who already inhabited it; they had to sustain and develop their communities within an institutional framework which was only partly of their own devising; and they had to establish an equilibrium between their own developing needs and aspirations, and those of the metropolitan societies from which they had sprung. At once liberated and constrained by their American environment, their responses would be conditioned both by the Old World from which they came, and by the New World which they now set out to master and make their own.

Europeans engaged in the conquest and settlement of America were confronted by a challenge of almost inconceivable immensity - the mastering of American space. As described by William Burke in his Account of the European Settlements in America, first published in 1757, `America extends from the North pole to the fifty-seventh degree of South latitude; it is upwards of eight thousand miles in length; it sees both hemispheres; it has two summers and a double winter; it enjoys all the variety of climates which the earth affords; it is washed by the two great oceans."