by Henry Kamen
Rules and regulations issued by Spain were, however, in practice ignored on the other side of the Atlantic. Slavery, and the slave trade in Indians, continued to have a fundamental impact on the indigenous population long after it had theoretically ceased to exist legally. The entire history of the first century of contact between Europeans and native Americans is tied up with it. There were areas, often forgotten if we look only at the main centres of colonial activity, where the impact was deadly. When the Spaniards settled in Panama, and later after 1530 extended their interest to Peru, they desperately needed assistance from native labour. As a consequence, the Pacific coast of Nicaragua became one of the biggest centres of slaving. It has been suggested that in the decade 1532–1542, when demand for slaves was highest, as many as two hundred thousand natives were seized from this coastline and shipped off into slavery.59 Already in 1535 an official was reporting that a third of the population in the Nicaragua area had been disposed of for purposes of slavery.
The scant details demonstrate beyond any possibility of controversy, that the indigenous peoples of the New World were those who, with their labour and with their lives, contributed principally to making possible the establishment of a European presence. The undoubted heroism of the conquistadors pales into insignificance before the involuntary heroism of the native Americans, who in their hundreds of thousands participated in and attempted to survive the new order of things.
Almost unconsciously, Spain became the channel through which the agrarian and social life-cycle of the Atlantic world was transformed. The first Castilians in the New World were faced by an environment that did not supply the foods they normally consumed, the liquids they drank, the clothes they wore, the tools they used, or the animals that helped them to perform their labour or to move about. New World food provoked some of the gravest illnesses they suffered, and was possibly the chief cause of mortality among early European immigrants. Spaniards therefore brought with them everything they needed. In so doing they set in motion (see Chapter 6) profound changes in the biological processes of the continent.
Few historical issues have provoked so much contention as the impact of the European presence on the demography of the New World. Bartolomé de las Casas began the debate by offering in his polemical writings the spectacle of a native population that was virtually exterminated. He estimated that twenty million Indians were wiped out by Spanish cruelty. There can never be any doubt over the disaster that took place. In the thirty years after the arrival of Columbus, the indigenous population in parts of the Caribbean and sections of the mainland were completely extinguished. Like Las Casas, many subsequent commentators blamed the cruelty of the Europeans for what happened. A jurist, Tomás López Medel, sent out to Guatemala in 1542 to assess the need for the New Laws that had just been decreed, came to a conclusion that may have been exaggerated in its calculations but was inspired by the facts as presented to him:
Our Old World has been responsible in the New World of the Indies for the deaths of five or six million men and women who have been wiped out in the wars and conquests waged over there, as well as through mistreatment and mortal cruelty and other causes of the same character, intolerable conditions of work in the mines, forced labour, personal service and very many other ways in which the insatiable greed of our men from over here has inflicted itself on those wretched people in America.
The cruelty of the Spaniards was incontrovertible. It was pitiless, barbaric, and never brought under control by the colonial regime. The Spaniards of course had no interest whatever in destroying the natives; to do so would evidently have hurt their primary institution, the encomienda. Yet to establish themselves in the land with security they had no hesitation in employing extreme violence. Mistreatment by colonial settlers, widespread and always pernicious, was sufficiently terrible for the Franciscan friar Toribio de Motolinía, in his History of the Indians of New Spain (1541), to list it among the Ten Plagues that had destroyed the Nahua people. The examples of cruelty were endless. During the war against Manco Capac in 1536 the Spaniards in the Jauja district, according to one who took part in the action, ‘captured a hundred Indians alive; they cut off the arms of some and the noses of others, and the breasts of the women, and then they sent them back to the enemy’.60 When the Spaniards were settling into the Mérida area in Yucatan, the Maya in 1546 attacked them and killed fifteen to twenty colonists. In retaliation the encomenderos killed hundreds of Maya, enslaved an estimated two thousand, burned six of their native priests, and hanged the women.61
Such incidents were repeated throughout the New World. All the contemporary reports speak, like a Maya chronicler in the sixteenth century, of ‘how much suffering we went through with the Spaniards’.62 The reports give relatively little importance to the loss of lives in hand-to-hand fighting, but narrate what their authors witnessed and experienced directly from day to day: the consequences of enslavement, of overwork, of ill-treatment, of under-nourishment and famine. Contemporary chroniclers, both native and Spanish, offer impressive figures for the deaths caused among the Indians. The image of Spanish cruelty was rapidly transmitted to Europe and became engraved on the minds of Europeans. When Michel de Montaigne was writing in France, the cruelty of Spaniards was already proverbial. Some European commentators eventually settled on the figure of twenty million Indians for a total of those killed by Spain.63
Yet the cruelty inflicted on the inhabitants of the New World was responsible for only a small part of the subsequent disaster. There were never enough Spaniards in America to kill the vast number of natives who perished. Without any doubt, the main reason for the catastrophic drop in the population of the Americas was infectious disease brought by the Europeans. Natives of the Atlantic world were free neither from illness nor epidemic.64 But the European invasion brought new and cruel forms of death. Bacterial organisms carried by Spaniards hit the Caribbean area soon after the landfall of Columbus, and reached the mainland even before Cortés. The first major pandemic (of smallpox) broke out in Hispaniola at the end of 1518, reached Mexico in 1520, and seems to have travelled well into North America and possibly also into the Inca empire. The Europeans brought with them from their continent and from Africa a hideous range of killer infections, including smallpox, typhus, measles, diphtheria, influenza, typhoid, the plague, scarlet fever, yellow fever, mumps, colds, pneumonia and gonorrhoea.65 Syphilis also became known in America, though it may have been simply a mutation of an existing disease; logically its appearance in Europe at this time made many attribute it to the contact with America. The direct impact of disease was devastating and was recorded by the Indians in their chronicles. There were other causes of mass mortality, but they were all indirect or long-term.
The fall in the indigenous population of the New World is amply documented. Statistics have normally been arrived at on the basis of reports drawn up at the time, and of subsequent censuses made by administrators and clergy. Controversy has arisen, however, on the fundamental and unresolved question of the size of the pre-contact population:66 how many people were there in the Caribbean and the mainland before the epidemics hit? Demographers have made learned guesses, with a tendency always67 to settle on the highest figures for the pre-disease population. The high figures offered by historians of distinction have logically led to stark conclusions when compared with the very low figures of population censuses effected by authorities in America from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. All that is certain is that extensive depopulation took place. The island of Hispaniola within half a century of the arrival of Columbus had been totally denuded of its original inhabitants. Within a generation the outer fringes of the Spanish-occupied territories were affected. In northwestern New Spain the Totorame and Tahue peoples of Nayarit and Sinaloa had by 1590 been reduced by around ninety per cent, though other tribes suffered less.68
The epidemics, moreover, often preceded contact with the invaders, whose pathogens were carried in advance of their arrival, by the air, by insects,
by animals and by natives. ‘While the Spaniards were in Tlaxcala [after the Noche Triste]’, a Nahua text reports, ‘a great plague broke out here in Tenochtitlan.’ The last undisputed Inca, Huayna Capac, died of a pestilence just before 1528, a few years before the Spaniards arrived in Tawantinsuyu.69 In this way smallpox prepared the way for the fall of the American empires. Bacterial infection appears almost as an immense, impersonal and continent-wide punishment inflicted on the New World by its contact with the Old. The coming of the European, no matter what barbarities he may subsequently have committed, appears to have had a small role in the epic of cosmic disaster. However, pre-contact ravages had limits both in space and time: they did not maraud freely70 and were controlled by local conditions.71 In the post-contract period, by contrast, disease spread more rapidly. The epidemic of 1545–8 was probably the most disastrous ever to affect central Mexico.72 In another in 1576 a settler wrote: ‘the epidemic here in Mexico is terrible; the Indians represented all our wealth, and since so many of them have died everything is at a standstill’.73 But already with the colonial period came the contribution made by contact, and it was deadly. The total number of people affected can never be reliably calculated, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that over ninety per cent of the deaths among the indigenous peoples of the New World were caused by infection74 rather than by cruelty.
The birth of an Atlantic world in the sixteenth century, it has been pointed out, involved a gigantic international migration of people.75 The Spaniards occupied a primary place in it.
Not a single Castilian accompanied Columbus on his first voyage; most of the sailors were Andalusians or from the Cantabrian coast, men who had more knowledge of the sea. Within the next decade, however, Castilians – the majority population of the peninsula – formed the greater part of the adventurers who went out to the Caribbean and then to the mainland. Men from Castile, Andalusia and Extremadura made up four-fifths of the 380 who left Cuba with Cortés on their way to Mexico; the same 3 regions answered for the majority of identified conquistadors. The places of origin of emigrants varied in subsequent years, depending on the economic circumstances that impelled them. Many, obviously, were fleeing from poverty, from a country of ‘so much misery and suffering that there is no future for anybody there’,76 towards new horizons. ‘I am determined’, a settler in Mexico confessed, ‘to raise my sons in a country where they are not oppressed by so much misery’ as in Spain; in New Granada another wished to ‘raise my sons in a good country where they are able to eat’.77
The new lands attracted dispossessed Spaniards of all conditions, many of them soldiers and sailors unemployed after the wars in Granada and Italy had come to an end, others young and hardy men of limited means, including many hidalgos (like Cortés) and illiterate labourers (like Pizarro) who looked to America to better their fortunes. Emigration was the way to improvement: ‘you must understand’, a new arrival in Panama wrote back to his son in Spain, ‘that those who want to better themselves cannot continue living where they were born'.78 The procedure, as explained by a settler in Puebla to his brother-in-law in Extremadura, was: ‘if you need to come to these parts the first thing you must do is go to Madrid to get a licence to emigrate, then when you have the licence sell whatever you have to raise as much money as possible, then go to Seville and arrange for your passage at the lowest price possible’.79
The total figures for emigration from the peninsula did not by any means amount to a flood. Emigrants had to register at the House of Trade in Seville, and about fifty-six thousand persons did so in the course of the sixteenth century. An historian has suggested that this may represent only about a fifth of the real total, since very many managed to emigrate without passing through the system of control. If this reasoning is accepted, many more went to the New World than the surviving records say. A recent estimate is that in the peak period 1500–1650 perhaps 437,000 Spaniards went to the New World, and over the two centuries 1500–1700 perhaps 100,000 Portuguese.80 In reality, all such figures are arithmetical projections based on the (improbable) supposition that a continuous torrent of people went across the Atlantic. There is no firm evidence that this was the case. Unregistered emigration obviously took place, but it is likely, as has recently been argued,81 that the numbers were significantly lower. The Spanish population of the chief cities of America was always small, and was fed by fairly modest levels of immigration from the peninsula. As we can see from the correspondence of those who were successful in the New World and wished to attract their families over, it was not easy to convince Spaniards of the benefits of emigration.
Success in the New World depended, in the view of Spaniards themselves, on their own personal effort. ‘Someone who comes here from Spain as poor as I was’, stated an immigrant in Guatemala, ‘has to go through a great deal to find a living.’82 Others were frankly pessimistic about their chances: ‘America is not the place for people who come here poor; a man is hard put to earn enough to feed and dress himself.’83 However, there was no lack of optimism, either: ‘those who apply themselves to work hard in this land can make more in one year than over there in a lifetime’ ‘The man who has a will to work will not go short,’ another wrote from central Mexico, ‘the opportunities here are better than in Spain.’84 There were of course very many immigrants who made their way merely through the labour of their hands, such as the farmer in Puebla who around 1550 ‘was a farm labourer for one year together with another labourer, and later I obtained lands and bought four teams of oxen, and sold my wheat for making flour in Mexico city.’85 The attraction was obviously enormous of a ‘land where there is no hunger and those who want to apply themselves become rich in a short time’, the reference being to Peru in 1559.86
Reports from successful immigrants tended of course to leave out of consideration the crucial contribution of the native population and of imported blacks, without whose help (as Las Casas pointed out) the Spaniards would have achieved little. A settler in Mexico explained succinctly that ‘in this country hunger is unknown and we have all the produce of Castile as well as much more from this land, with the result that Spain is not missed; so that even if you are poor you are better off here than in Spain, because here you are always in charge and do not have to work personally, and you are always on horseback’.87 A settler in Lima explained that ‘the property I have is a farm with vineyards, a lot of land, and cattle that are worth many ducats; and its value is such that I have a dozen blacks working, without counting the Indians who bring much profit to the property’.88 He was rich but also old, and pleaded with his son in Madrid to come out and take over the inheritance: ‘if you had come out here, son, each year you would have been earning more than four thousand pesos’. The continuing promise of America, based less on ‘work’ and more on opportunity, encouraged further emigration from Spain.
It is easy to forget that the terrors of a sea voyage deterred very many Spaniards from emigrating. The crossing to America was frequently a long and painful purgatory. During all voyages the mortality rate could be enormously high, but an even greater peril were the storms at sea that lasted for days and tore the small vessels apart. The sufferings of the passengers on the vessel (part of a convoy of twenty-seven ships) in which Bartolomé de las Casas set out from Seville in July 1544, are described vividly by one of his fellow passengers, Padre de la Torre.
The ship is a narrow, tight, prison from which nobody can escape even though there are no bars or chains, and so merciless that it makes no distinction between its prisoners. The feeling of being crushed, and of suffocation and heat, is intense; bed is usually the floor, some bring pillows, ours were poor, small and hard, stuffed with dog's hair, and we had miserable goat's hair blankets. There is a lot of vomit in the ship, and a great deal of bad temper, which makes many people lose control completely, some for a longer time than others, and some unceasingly. The thirst you suffer is unbelievable, made worse by the food, which is biscuit and salted things. The drink is a litre of water a
day, you have wine only if you bring it. There is an endless number of fleas that eat you alive, and clothes cannot be washed. The smell is awful, especially in the hold, though it is insufferable everywhere in the ship… These and other travails are quite normal in the ship, but we feel them particularly badly because it is not what we are used to.89
Once they had arrived in the New World, new colonists were all too aware of the immense space between them and their home country. A colonist in Mexico in the 1590s lamented to his nephew in Spain that he would probably never see him again, the distances being such that ‘it's not like me going to your house and you coming to mine, as we used to do’.90
Those who emigrated were always highly selective about where they wanted to go. The government tried to encourage them to settle everywhere, but people had firm preferences. The failure of early endeavours in the Río de la Plata meant that nobody wished to go there. In 1558, when the authorities were trying to enlist colonists for a sailing to the Plata, they explicitly lifted the normal ban on foreigners, Jews and Muslims. It was still not enough, complained an organizer of the expedition. Even allowing in all the prohibited categories, as well as Moriscos, ‘despite everything, in the whole of Spain people could not be found to come’.91 The expedition finally sailed, but mainly with soldiers, which had not been the intention of the council of the Indies.