Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  By this time matters of religion and diplomatic changes in Europe were seriously affecting security in the Atlantic. Western European governments began to invest heavily in ideological enterprise. A member of France's royal council, the Calvinist leader Gaspard de Coligny, backed the expedition of Jean Ribault in Florida. Queen Elizabeth of England and members of her council were shareholders in the second slaving voyage of John Hawkins in 1564. The Spaniards considered Hawkins a pirate, though his activities amounted to illegal trade rather than piracy. On his fourth and last slaving voyage, which was also backed by the queen, he was attacked in 1568 in the harbour of San Juan de Ulúa by the fleet of the newly arrived viceroy, and barely managed to escape home to England after losing three-quarters of his men and three of his six vessels. The incident unleashed an unremitting campaign of revenge against the Spanish. In the period 1570–1577 there were some thirteen illegal, and deliberately piratical, English expeditions to the Caribbean.45 Some of the English were quite simply foolhardy. John Oxenham in 1576 led a group of fifty men that crossed the isthmus of Panama by land and captured a Spanish ship on the South Sea, the first foreigners ever to do so; but they were subsequently captured by the Spanish and executed.

  The most important and daring enemy was Francis Drake, whose campaigns against Spain began in 1570 (see Chapter 5). His attacks in 1585 on Santo Domingo and in the Caribbean were no longer simply acts of piracy but full-blooded war campaigns, backed in his case by the resources of a fleet financed by the queen of England. After a short two-week visit to Galicia in September 1585, Drake set out across the Atlantic with his squadron. It was the most powerful naval force ever seen in American waters: twenty-two ships with two thousand three hundred men and twelve companies of soldiers. Santo Domingo was sacked and made to pay a ransom, Cartagena was occupied and held for six weeks. There was dissension among the English commanders over what to do next, since no news emerged of a silver fleet. Eventually Drake decided not to attempt Panama, sailed off into the Florida Channel without bothering to attack Havana, and instead attacked and destroyed the fort at St Augustine. There were few or no material benefits to the English from this remarkable expedition, which on the other hand exposed the complete vulnerability of the Spanish colonies in the New World. To uphold pride in their own reputación, the Spanish authorities persisted in treating Drake publicly as though he were a pirate, but in the privacy of government meetings the ministers virtually accorded him treatment as a head of state when they discussed what steps might be taken to have him assassinated.

  The depredations of Drake in the Atlantic ports of Spain forced the helpless and indebted government, fearful now of losing all control over America, to take some long overdue steps.46 In 1586 Philip II sent out to the Caribbean the Roman military engineer Gian Battista Antonelli, whom he had invited to Spain in 1559 and who stayed on to become one of the most active engineers of the crown. Spain had few military engineers of its own, depending almost entirely on experts from Italy (a situation that continued well into the eighteenth century).47 Antonelli spent several years in the Indies and elaborated an ambitious scheme of defensive forts for Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Florida, San Juan de Ulúa and Havana. In practice, decades passed before much was done. Increased defence by land, moreover, might afford excellent protection against attack from the sea, yet could not affect the increase of foreign privateers out at sea. The English alone launched around two hundred privateering voyages to the Caribbean during the war years from 1585 to 1603.48 The vessels sometimes acted like swarms of bees, hovering over their prize until they were sure how to act. The governor of Cuba reported how in 1592 just offshore from Havana ‘in addition to fourteen ships on watch at the entrance to this port, off Cape San Antonio there are three ships and two pinnaces. These remain there day and night. The total number of large ships that have been seen so far is nineteen, with four pinnaces. I suspect that it is a foregathering of thieves.’49

  Privateers ranged through the entire Caribbean, robbing and sacking virtually at will, but taking care not to inflict damage that would hurt their own commercial interests. Conflict in Europe also encouraged the growth of intervention by French and Dutch shipping. The latter came principally to exploit the great natural saltpans at the western end of the Araya peninsula, in Venezuela, between La Margarita Island and Cumaná. The local authorities had neither ships nor men to stop them. The governor of Cumaná reported that from 1600 to 1605 about one hundred Dutch ships a year came openly to the saltpans and loaded up for free.50 A punitive expedition was undertaken against them in November 1605, when twenty Dutch salt ships were destroyed. Though they cut back on salt smuggling for over a decade, the Dutch went on to settle parts of the mainland, and by 1616 were firmly based on the River Essequibo, where they formed the nucleus of the foreign colony of Guiana.

  Illicit activity by foreign ships was not restricted to the Caribbean, but common to the entire coastlines, which were endless and therefore wholly vulnerable, of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Between 1575 and 1742 at least twenty-five different foreign raiders made their impact felt on the Pacific coast.51 Although the Pacific was relatively distant in terms of access, it was no less promising to raiders, for the silver of Potosí was normally taken overland to the coast at Arica and then transported by sea to Callao, from where it was taken by an armed naval escort to the isthmus of Panama. Drake's raid on Peru in 1579 was the first of its kind; he was followed to the South Sea by Thomas Cavendish in 1587, as we have seen, and by Richard Hawkins in 1593. Hawkins was not as fortunate as Cavendish had been. He entered the South Sea with only one ship early in 1594, but managed through making successful raids to capture other vessels in the ports of Valparaiso and Valdivia. In an action against the South Sea defence squadron in June, he was captured and his vessel, the Dainty, was taken and incorporated into the Spanish fleet. It was the only success registered by the Spaniards in the entire sixteenth century. The English were not a mere external threat. Their actions on the Pacific coast encouraged a few natives to believe that the English were a hope for liberation from the Spaniards, and some even suggested that the English were the legitimate successors of the Incas, on the assumption that the word ‘inglés’ derived from the word ‘inga’.52 A century later there was a native rising in the province of Potosí, with the intention of handing the land over to the English, if they came.

  From the end of the century English raiders were succeeded by Dutch, typically with the expeditions of Olivier van Noort (1600) and of Joris van Spilbergen (1614–15). Van Noort's intrusion into the Pacific, with four vessels, was financed by three Rotterdam merchants.53 The Dutch hoped in general to establish a basis for trade (rather than merely rob gold) and secure a place for settlement with the help of Indians hostile to the Spanish. Van Noort achieved nothing on either count, suffering instead great travails from the weather and the loss of many men, but he won fame as the first Dutch circumnavigator of the globe. Spilbergen left Holland with six well-armed ships in 1614, and encountered the first serious attempt at defence. In July 1615 the viceroy of Peru managed to put together two galleons and five merchant vessels to repel the invaders, but they were quickly routed by the Dutch off Cañete and five hundred men killed or drowned.54 Like van Noort, Spilbergen achieved little of substance, but his military success and the continuing hope of further trade and wealth kept Dutch interest alive. After the expiry of the Twelve Years Truce with Spain, in 1623 the Dutch sent a powerful fleet of eleven warships commanded by Admiral Jacques l'Hermite, with 1,640 men and 294 guns, through the passage round Cape Horn, with the intention of intercepting either the Peru silver convoy or the Manila galleon.55 It was the biggest naval force ever to have entered the South Sea, but though it wreaked considerable damage at several ports the expedition failed to achieve anything of value, and returned home via the Pacific and the Cape of Good Hope, only a remnant reaching Holland in 1626.

  Previous attempts to defend the Caribbean were resumed in 1636 with the formatio
n of the Windward Squadron (‘armada de Barlovento’), in theory to be financed by a levy on the trade of New Spain, and based on Veracruz. The armada had an unstable life, being used more frequently for escorting the annual fleet across the Atlantic than for its initial role of defending the seas in America. In the mid-seventeenth century it ceased to exist as a united squadron, but was re-formed again in 1665 as a result of successful aggression in the Caribbean coasts by British and French. In Peru the ability to defend the enormous coastline was even less likely to succeed. Foreign intrusions never developed into a serious threat to territory, but they were also impossible to detect and control. The viceroy in 1600 reported that ‘it is not possible to guard Callao and at the same time scour the coast without forsaking the one to attend to the other, and even if this were done what resistance can four ships offer?’ The following year an official complained that Lima was ‘protected only by its reputation’.56 In practice the Spaniards were unable to put up any effective resistance to attacks from the sea, but could normally rally the civil population, for the most part unarmed blacks and mulattoes,57 to offer a good defence against any landing of foreign invaders.

  The menace of foreign privateers had in spite of everything two significant benefits for Spain. First, it exposed the haphazard organization of trade and drove the Spanish authorities to take defensive measures and develop a system of regulated fleets. Second, by their persistent illicit activities – excluding from our consideration the openly military actions - the foreign traders helped to bring some order into the commerce of the region. We know, for example, of Captain Fleury of Dieppe, who between 1618 and 1620 traded (against the opposition of Dutch and English competitors) in the Atlantic and Caribbean areas, bringing supplies to coastal communities that would otherwise have died of starvation.58

  The situation was not peculiar only to Spanish settlements. The English in seventeenth-century Bermuda were in the same way dependent on supply ships from other nations. No European colony outside Europe could afford to limit its trade only to vessels of its own nation. Common sense suggested that in order to obtain regular supplies so far from home, and also incidentally to avoid the taxes demanded by the home country, informal smuggling should wherever possible be encouraged side by side with the official trade.59 Spanish officials in the Caribbean complained of the commercial activities of foreigners and claimed that they were ruining the colonies. It was only part of the truth. Foreign traders and smugglers helped to create in the Caribbean a normal system of trade, whereas the restrictions of the official system were in fact condemning the colonies to economic frustration.60 As in other corners of its vast empire, Spain did not have the means to regulate adequately the trade of the territories it claimed. Had there been no illicit traders, the supply and maintenance of the very many outposts manned by Spaniards would have collapsed. In their own way, the foreign traders were actually making it possible for the empire to survive.

  The 1573 Ordinance was based on the fundamental premise that the empire's chief mission was religious. In the months that the document was being prepared, the king had been made well aware that Spain had a special duty to defend and promote the true faith. He supported the programme of reform and renewal in the Catholic Church that the Council of Trent had recently proposed. He was also conscious of the threat to Spain's security posed by Islam in the Mediterranean and by the successes of the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe. Nor did the issue of the missionary effort in the overseas empire escape him. The Spanish crown under Philip came to play a leading role in the evangelization of the New World, as it had an obligation to do through the so-called Patronato Real. This privilege, almost unique61 in the history of the Church since it gave the crown the right to appoint all prelates as well as enjoy all Church revenues in the New World, inspired direct royal participation in religious affairs. Between 1493 and 1800 the crown financed the sending to America of at least fifteen thousand clergy, of whom a quarter went to New Spain.62

  Not all these clergy were Spanish. The Flemish priests who featured among the Twelve that arrived in New Spain in 1524 were the forerunners of a long line of foreign clergy that went to the colonies out of pioneering zeal, curiosity and self-sacrifice. They had no specific loyalty to Castile or its culture. Toribio de Motolinia, in a famous letter of 1555 that he wrote to Charles V, worked with them and asked the emperor to send more, especially ‘the many friars in Flanders and Italy who are servants of God’. Mendieta in his account of the work of the early Franciscans paid tribute to the French, Flemish and Italian priests who spent their careers in Mexico.63 Both in America and in Asia, the religious orders were a vehicle for utilizing the talents of Catholics from all parts of the kingdom and from foreign countries. Many of them left memoirs that remain an invaluable source for assessing the views and motives of the missionary clergy. An outstanding example is the Franciscan friar Alonso de Benavides, a Portuguese born in 1578 in the Azores, who was in New Spain by 1598. He took part in the pioneering advance of the friars into New Mexico, and returned to Madrid in 1630, where he published an account of the triumphant advance of the faith in the New World. In the same decades, an Englishman, Thomas Gage, lived for fifteen years as a Dominican and parish priest in Guatemala, and after he left his post to return to England (1637) wrote the first full and intimate account by a foreigner of religious and social conditions in the American colonies.

  From the later seventeenth century, when the flow of Castilian clergy from the peninsula began to dry up, foreign missionaries increased appreciably in number. A substantial proportion of those who served the Jesuits in this period came from Italy and central Europe,64 as we know from the examples of Kino and Neumann cited below. A random check on the twenty-six Jesuits who sailed from Cadiz in 1730 and arrived in Havana in February 173 shows that they included two Swiss, one Austrian, one German and one Moravian priest.65 On subsequent sailings these nationalities continued to feature, together with one Sardinian and one Hungarian.

  The effort and money did not always pay off. Forty years after the arrival of the mendicant missionaries, the evidence for their success was highly ambiguous. The friars claimed to have baptized hundreds of thousands of eager Indians; there is no lack of impressive statistics in the reports they compiled. The real status of the new converts was not so clear. Native peoples showed an amazing capacity for accepting many of the outward forms of Christianity without in any way abandoning their own cultural habits. The relative failure of conversion efforts led very quickly to a change of focus in the clergy's methods. As early as 1533 in Mexico the Dominican Domingo de Betanzos maintained that Indians were not rational creatures and were therefore incapable of accepting Christianity. The clergy began to adopt an openly aggressive and domineering policy, which differed little in its practical effects from racial discrimination. In Mexico their distrust of those of mixed race was unmitigated; both mestizos and mulattoes tended to be excluded from all possibility of equality with other Christians. The Franciscans, who also came to view the American natives as deficient in natural reason, allotted them a subordinate role in the Church. They were treated as innocent ‘children’, in need of guidance. ‘They are made to be pupils, not teachers; parishioners, not priests’, Mendieta maintained.66

  The decades after the fall of Tenochtitlan coincided with a catastrophic fall in native population levels. The clergy felt that the only practical way to cater to scattered communities of Indians was to bring them together into organized Christian townships. From about 1538, as a result, the so-called ‘doctrinas’ or Indian villages were created. Indians were often uprooted from their own homes and forced to move to the townships, where they lived under the protection of the friars. The experiment lasted for a long time, over thirty years, but provoked opposition on almost every side. The Indians normally disliked the new townships; the Spanish settlers objected to Indians being removed from the labour pool; and the other clergy criticized the friars for their allegedly tyrannical control of the Ind
ians.

  Changes in the religious programme were central to Philip II's 1573 Ordinance, which effectively altered the nature of the missionary effort. From the 1580s the ‘doctrinas’ so carefully nurtured by the orders were removed from their control and converted into ‘parishes’, in the charge of resident clergy responsible to a bishop. In practice, as in everything else the changes were not implemented adequately for nearly half a century.67 The Franciscans denounced the new policy, which they saw as the end of a fruitful period in the planting of the gospel. From this time, in accord with the principles of the 1573 guidelines, they dedicated their efforts to missionary work on the northern frontiers of New Spain. It turned out to be perhaps the most heroic period in the history of their order.

  The Franciscans effectively converted the frontier mission into an instrument of empire. Until the end of Spain's presence in North America, they ‘monopolized the missions along the Spanish rim from California to Florida’.68 They claimed to have founded, by 1629, fifty churches among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. In the reports that they later published for dissemination in Europe, the friars claimed to have converted tens of thousands of natives. The first Franciscans, also in 1573, reached the Atlantic coast of Florida, where they were heirs to a previous effort by Jesuits. Within a century they succeeded in establishing a number of mission centres northwards from St Augustine into present South Carolina. They also succeeded in founding a string of missions westward from the Suwanee river into the territory of the Apalachee Indians. The same ‘successes’ were registered in every corner of the worldwide empire, and books published by the orders in Madrid gave an unequivocal picture of the irresistible spread of the faith.