Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  No less impressive than the achievements of the conquerors, whether Spanish or Indian, were those of the handful of adventurers who penetrated the unknown interior of the new continent. Settlement was only one dimension of empire. Equally powerful was the urge to extend its fringes, a task that kept Spaniards constantly on the move. ‘In this land’, reported one, ‘a man is never fixed but always moving from one place to another.’48 The histories of Cortés and Pizarro are ample confirmation that the primary aim of the adventurers was gold, whose existence was confirmed by their own experience but above all by the persistent myths, current among the indigenous population, of peoples and lands where gold was a commonplace item of everyday use. In his Chronicle, Guaman Poma commented bitingly on the motives that had driven Columbus and his men:

  They did not wish to linger a single day in the ports. Every day they did nothing else but think about gold and silver and the riches of the Indies of Peru. They were like a man in desperation, crazy, mad, out of their minds with greed for gold and silver.

  Through questioning natives and following up stories they heard, the Spaniards soon built up a corpus of stories – what we may call myths – about possible locations of gold. The finding of gold in part of Tierra Firme caused the area to be renamed ‘Castilla del Oro’ (Golden Castile) in 1514, and from the 1530s Spaniards reported finding gold in burial grounds in the Sinu area inland from Cartagena. The myth of ‘El Dorado’ (The Golden Man) began to appear from this date, in the lands associated with the Chibcha peoples. When Quesada was governor of Santa Marta, he heard for the first time of the story of El Dorado and of the ceremonies at the sacred lake of Guatavita. Shortly after, Benalcázar, who was coming up from Peru, encountered near Quito an Indian who told him of ‘a certain king who went naked aboard a raft to make offerings, smeared all over with powdered gold from head to foot, gleaming like a ray of the sun’.49 Thereafter the search for the fabled site, where gold was so commonplace that it could be used to decorate the body, became a part of the mythology of exploration and conquest. Fifty years later, a brother of St Teresa of Avila reported from Quito that he was hoping to form an expedition to look for ‘the Golden Man, in whose search a thousand captains and men have so often been lost’.50

  After the fall of Tenochtitlan the Spaniards went their separate ways, pursuing the continuous reports that reached them of peoples as wealthy as the Mexica. One of the first to venture north, in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, was Nuño de Guzman, who in 1529 led an expedition into the region of Culiacan. The most famous of the ventures into North America (see Chapter 6) belonged to this period: that of Hernando de Soto in 1539–42, which set out from Cuba, and that of Coronado in 1540–2, with its base in Mexico. The spin-offs from the Pizarro expeditions to the Andes also had important consequences. Perhaps the most notable hero was Pedro de Alvarado, who had played a leading role in the campaign of Mexico and after it departed southwards with a large force of auxiliaries to the region of Guatemala. When he heard of the events in Peru, Alvarado in 1534 took ship down the Pacific coast and made for Quito, where he arrived shortly after Almagro and Benalcázar, and narrowly avoided a battle with them. Benalcázar in his turn took men with him to the lands further north, where he founded the town of Popayán (1536) and even further north, in 1538, came into contact with another Spaniard, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a native of Andalusia.

  The most important of the non-Spanish expeditions also entered at the same time into the same area. The contract granted to the Welser family in Venezuela allowed them to penetrate the interior of the continent. Expeditions were made by Ambrosius Alfinger in 1531 and Georg Hohermuth in 1535–8, but the best known is that of Nicolaus Federmann, who in 1537 set off into the mountains and made his way towards El Dorado. ‘I lost’, he reported later, ‘many people and horses; of the three hundred persons with whom I left no more than ninety survived.’51 The cost in lives was everywhere enormous. When Quesada reached his objective only 166 remained of the nearly 900 with whom he had set out. An early Italian historian of America, Benzoni, reported that ‘of those who went to Peru, eighty died out of every hundred’. The intrepidity of the early pioneers became legendary, and the chroniclers never ceased to insist on it. ‘As for the hardships and hunger they have faced,’ wrote the chronicler Cieza de León, ‘no other nation in the world could have endured it.’ In the chroniclers' hands, the legend quickly became racially exclusive, and the intrepidity was converted into something possessed only by Castilians and by nobody else. The endurance of the thousands of Indians who made the expeditions possible was effaced from historical memory. ‘What other race’, asked Cieza de León, ‘can be found which can penetrate through such rugged lands, such dense forests, such great mountains and deserts, and over such broad rivers, as the Spaniards have done, without help from others, solely by the valour of their persons?’

  After the execution of Almagro, Francisco Pizarro felt able to consolidate his authority in the lands to the south. He entered into an agreement with Pedro de Valdivia, a veteran of the Italian wars who had come to Peru in 1536. Early in 1540 Valdivia left Cuzco with an expedition of 150 Spaniards and over 1,000 Indians, which made its way southwards and in February 1541 founded the town of Santiago de Chile. In the following years Valdivia set himself up as governor of the region, and for the first time made contact with the hostile Araucan people. In 1547 he returned to Peru in order to help the new royal viceroy Gasca eliminate the rebellion of the Pizarros. He was rewarded with the governorship of Chile, but returned in 1549 to Santiago to deal with the problem of the Araucanians. The Araucanian wars were a continuous conflict that ended, for Valdivia, with his capture in a battle in January 1554 and his execution by ritual torture. The wars went on, with a pause in the year 1558, when the Araucanians were for a period defeated. A young soldier who served in the Spanish forces, Alonso de Ercilla, narrated their heroic story of resistance; his poem La Araucana remains one of the greatest of all epics.

  The Atlantic coast was not forgotten. Among the first visitors was the Venetian Sebastian Cabot, who conceived the idea that there was a shorter route to Asia through the American land mass than that taken by Magellan (on the latter, see Chapter 5). He received official support, and set out from Sanlucar in April 1526 with 4 vessels and 210 men, the majority of whom were Germans and Italians.52 The vessels reconnoitred the South American coast and early in 1528 entered the estuary of a river which Cabot named the ‘river of silver’, the Río de la Plata, in the hope of coming across more of the precious metal that they had already encountered. The silver had come across the continent from the still undiscovered Inca empire, but Cabot and his men were unable to continue their expedition and had to return to Spain. Discovery of the Incas five years later unleashed excitement over the possibility of reaching Peru from the Atlantic.

  On 14 January 1534 Hernando Pizarro arrived in Seville with part of the Inca treasure. The reaction was swift: a flood of volunteers demanded to go on expedition. In May 1534 a royal contract with the Andalusian soldier Pedro de Mendoza authorized him to explore the Río de la Plata, gave him the rank of adelantado, and conceded a vast territory for him to govern and pacify. The expedition set out in August 1535 in fourteen large ships, with at least fifteen hundred Spaniards and around a hundred Belgians, Germans and Portuguese. According to the historian Gómara, it was the largest fleet to have sailed to the Indies till that date. The chronicler of the enterprise, the German Huldrich Schmidt, describes how the main body of the men under Mendoza suffered extreme hardships and Indian attacks in the Plata estuary (where they began the settlement of Buenos Aires) and were soon reduced to a fifth of their number. He himself went with a group up the Paraná under their leader Juan de Ayolas; in August 1539 they founded the town of Asunción, Mendoza returned to Spain but died en route. In 1540 Charles V passed on Mendoza's privileges to Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, veteran of extraordinary explorations (see Chapter 6) in the North American continent. Cabeza de Vac
a's experiences were put to good use, and his small but efficient expedition pushed up towards the River Iguaçu in December 1541, spending a relaxed Christmas among friendly Indians. In January they discovered the spectacular Iguaçu Falls, and shortly afterwards changed direction, moving back downstream by the Paraná towards Asunción.

  Of the many, varied and always significant expeditions pioneered by Castilians, two stand out as exceptional because they were different in concept and consequence. The first was the highly individual quest of Francisco de Orellana, who was serving as an official in Guayaquil under the command of Gonzalo Pizarro, at the time governor of Quito. In 1540 Orellana accompanied Pizarro on a long and fruitless expedition into the interior of the continent. Pizarro returned empty-handed two years later; meanwhile he had sent Orellana and a small group ahead to look for food. The group was carried swiftly downstream by the current, with little hope of turning back. Surviving by wit and effort, the Spaniards made rafts and lodged when possible with friendly Indians. At the end of August 1542 they emerged out into the Atlantic, having spent eight months descending the river, which they named the Amazon from the accounts they picked up about women warriors in that region. They then made their way by sea up the coast till they reached a port near Trinidad.

  Another attempt was made on the Amazon in 1558, from the direction of Peru. The expedition, led by the Navarrese Pedro de Ursúa, planned to make its way to the great river from its tributary the Marañón. Unfortunately, Ursúa had recruited a number of undesirable elements, including the soldier Lope de Aguirre. He also made the mistake of bringing along as his companion a beautiful widow, Inés. Shortly after they began descending the Marañón, Aguirre led a coup, murdered Ursúa (December 1560), seized Inés and later murdered her also. He went on to murder other possible rivals, and proclaimed himself king and in rebellion against the king of Spain. His bloody journey and career was short; at its end he was seized and executed.

  Neither of these expeditions advanced the process of empire. But they helped to stamp the Spanish presence, however cursorily, on extensive and almost inaccessible expanses of the continent. The mere act of exploration became in some measure an act of conquest. In the strange European way of thinking, simply to be there confirmed possession of those territories. The Amazon as a consequence now became subject to the king of Spain, in the same way that centuries later other rivers, waterfalls and lakes in Africa and Asia would be claimed for European nations because an explorer happened to come upon them. The Falls of Iguaçu, whose thunder echoed through the ears of Cabeza de Vaca during the five miles that he and his group had to trek through the forest in order to avoid them, became in this way part of the cultural heritage of the Spanish empire.

  By around 1570, three-quarters of a century after Columbus, Spaniards were to be found in every corner of the Atlantic world. Their presence, however, was so thin as to make them virtually invisible. After struggling against great odds for two generations, they managed to make their presence more acceptable to native Americans. But their small numbers and the immensity of the New World landscape made it impossible for them to carry out a European-style occupation. There was never in any real sense a ‘conquest’ of America, for the Spaniards never had the men or resources to conquer it. All their settlements were tiny and vulnerable. The whole of Cuba had only 322 households in 1550; 20 years later the town of Havana had only 60. In 1570 the city of Cartagena had only three hundred. Around 1570, according to the king's official geographer López de Velasco, the total number of Spaniards in all the settlements of the New World came to 25,000 households.53 The entire Spanish population of America, in other words, could have fitted easily into a moderately large European town, such as Seville. There were few colonists outside the major towns. Their main concern always was to occupy a useful coastal strip, then make the zone round it secure, as they did around 1545 with their settlements in the Yucatan at Mérida and Campeche.

  For Spanish power in America to become viable, it was essential to work out a system based on collaboration rather than ‘conquest’. Wherever they claimed authority, one of the first acts of the Spaniards was to distribute encomiendas, which gave them ‘rights’ over the labour of the natives. To do this they had to reach some agreement with local chiefs. Where possible, they opted to retain existing patterns of authority among the native Americans, placing themselves at the top in the place previously occupied by the Aztecs and Incas. The old system of tribute was continued, this time with local Indian leaders helping to extract payment from the population. The process can be seen in the Peruvian area of Huamanga, where the Spaniards founded a town in 1539. Many of the local communities allied willingly with the Spaniards, hoping in that way to gain freedom from Inca rule and a position of advantage for themselves.54 It proved to be valuable help in establishing Spanish power. For many decades after the beginning of Spanish rule, and especially in remoter areas such as the valleys of Peru, native Indian societies continued their traditional way of life, unhindered by the changes that were certainly taking place elsewhere in the New World. In the central zones of Spanish settlement, two parallel societies developed: a Spanish world, where everything was organized in response to the demands of colonists, and an Indian world, with its own culture and ruling élite. The two often remained autonomous for generations, though in time they began to converge. In Huamanga by the 1550s the Indians, guided by their curacas, were helping to make the local economy function to serve the needs of Spaniards. Even this system was breaking down a decade or so later, as the number of Indians declined.

  As soon as the Spaniards had consolidated their impact, their first concern was always to set up a township, the basic unit of life in the Iberia from which they came. By the mid-sixteenth century there were small towns, often with names taken directly from Spain (Trujillo, León, Santiago), dotted over the landscape. Having made sure that they had access to the sea and to local sources of wealth, they set about organizing their labour force. This involved making agreements with the local native chieftains (the caciques in Mexico, the curacas in Peru), for men to be supplied for work in the encomienda, the fundamental economic institution of the early colonial period. Indian labour, and also by now some black labour, made possible the survival of Spaniards as the new governing class in America. ‘Through my services in war’, a proud young conqueror wrote home from Chile in 1552 to his father in Medina del Campo, ‘I have obtained a repartimiento of Indians, and am owner of a valley on the sea coast which has over a thousand Indians. I built a fortified house where I live, with horsemen serving me, and I have subjected the whole province, burning houses and hanging Indians.’55 Labour services had been traditional in the imperial scheme of both Mexicas and Incas, as defenders of the encomienda did not fail to point out. For a high proportion of the early settlers, it was their mainstay. ‘I am aiming to obtain some Indians’, explained one newly arrived Spaniard in 1578, ‘because here in these parts the man who has no Indians has no way of making a living.’56

  Confronted by the enormous extent of the New World and their own exiguous numbers and limited capacity for conquest, the Spaniards never achieved adequate control over the native population. In areas where it was possible to implement the encomienda and make use of native labour, the Spaniards used Indians to build houses, plant crops, tend the fields and irrigate them, spin and weave textiles for domestic use, and transport goods. This type of basic economy functioned adequately for the first generation of the colony. But when more Spaniards came to live in the New World, the resources of native labour became inadequate. Spaniards required items with which they were familiar and with which the natives could not supply them, such as wheat, olives, sugar, wine, weapons, and quality cloth. The emphasis moved, for them, from local production to import of essential items. Inevitably, many Indians on the fringe of this scheme of things returned to their own way of life. The Spanish market system remained important for many natives, but for the majority it became secondary, for they had th
eir own parallel society and parallel markets. Where, above all, there was no mining industry, the Indian managed to survive in his own society.

  The principal question round which the Spanish presence in the Atlantic revolved, was that of the survival of the native population, or, to present the other face of the same problem, the use of Indian labour. Spaniards, like many of the early French and English in the New World, came in search of quick wealth, not with the intention of settling and working. Ever on the move, the early European population relied entirely on the settled indigenous population for food and survival. In every essential respect, the natives of the New World constructed the economy and society of the empire controlled there by Spain. Production in America rose and fell according to the productive labour supplied by the natives. ‘All our Spaniards’, runs an unequivocal report from Chile in 1600, ‘are sustained by the labour of the Indians and the work of their hands and are maintained thanks to their sweat.’57 It was well known, chroniclers reported time and again, that Spaniards from the peninsula did not go to America to work, but to live off the exploitation of native labour.

  The Spanish presence, in consequence, involved the enslavement of large numbers of the indigenous population of America.58 In medieval Europe slavery had normally been practised as a consequence of war, but no war had taken place when in February 1495 Columbus seized and sent to Spain as slaves five hundred young people from the Caribbean, followed by three hundred more in June the same year. Queen Isabella forbade any further slavery in October 1503 and in December decreed that natives of the New World should be considered ‘free and not to be enslaved’. After her death, however, slavery continued to be widely practised on the indigenous population, especially in the Caribbean, and was expressly permitted if the subjects were defined as cannibals or rebels. King Ferdinand admitted to Columbus in 1511 that the practice was ‘something that weighs on my conscience’, but did nothing to restrict it. The first serious attempt by the crown to stop slaving was an order by Charles V in 1530. He had life-long scruples about the issue. Though obliged for practical reasons to withdraw his ban shortly after, he grappled firmly with the problem in 1542 by a decree that was incorporated in November into the famous New Laws. It was a historic step. Thereafter the Spanish crown formally permitted slavery on only one occasion, when in 1608 it allowed Araucanian ‘rebels’ in Chile to be enslaved (the law was revoked only in 1674).