A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Ovando set to work briskly and effectively. On his arrival, he found three hundred quarrelsome, ill-nourished Spaniards on the brink of rebellion and despair. Within four years the population had risen to twelve thousand. Neither in the mines nor rivers was gold found in the quantities that the emigrants had hoped, but agriculture began to flourish. Ovando introduced the irrigation system that the Moors had initiated in Andalusia. The climate was unfavourable to the vine and olive tree, but oranges, figs and lemons flourished; so did rice, bananas and the sugar cane; pigs proliferated, though the culture of them had to be discouraged, because they devoured the sugar crop; on the other hand, the wild herds of cattle provided hides and tallow, which were returned very profitably to Spain.

  On the surface, the colony was prospering, with the city of Santo Domingo set out on the Spanish pattern, with a piazza, a cathedral and public buildings, but the problem of a labour force was insistent. On the death of Isabella, the system of repartimentos was established, by which land was made over to Spaniards, who were allowed to enrol Indians to work it on the system prevalent in the Canaries. But the Indians would not work. The Spaniards laid down a programme and a time schedule. Every native of fourteen years and over was to furnish every three months a bell full of gold dust; the natives who lived in regions where no gold could be extracted from the rivers were to provide twenty-five pounds of spun cotton instead. Those who delivered their quota wore a stamped token round their necks. But the Indians refused to be coerced; they fled into the mountains, they starved themselves, they committed suicide rather than work for the Spaniards. They did not understand the religion in which the Spanish priests diligently and patiently endeavoured to instruct them. Their new tormentors were not, they gradually gathered, cannibals, but that was the only difference they could detect between the Spaniards and the Caribs.

  So insistent were the Spaniards in their demand for gold that one of the Cuban chiefs believed that the Europeans’ god was gold, and that gold was responsible for their sins. This belief led him to the conviction that there would be no peace while the Spanish god existed. He told his followers to throw the gold into the sea. The Spaniards tied him to the stake; their priests besought him to accept conversion before the faggots were lighted, so that he could go to heaven. He asked if there were any Spaniards in heaven. Yes, he was told; there were a great many. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I would prefer not to go there.’

  The Spaniards were exasperated beyond the limits of control. They had crossed the Atlantic in danger and great discomfort, in the hope of making a speedy fortune. That fortune, they were convinced, was within their grasp, but they were prevented from reaching it by the apathy of these futile heathen. They were driven to desperate measures. To inspire industry in the survivors they would roast a few dozen over a slow fire, having gagged them first so that their screams should not disturb their master’s siesta. The Indians, in retaliation, whenever they encountered a solitary Spaniard, slew him. The Spaniards retorted by burning and disembowelling a hundred Indians for every Spaniard killed. But still the Indians would not work.

  Ovando tried to recruit labour in other islands, but the Indians from the Bahamas were no more tractable than his own. It is impossible to tell how many Indians there were in Hispaniola when Columbus landed. Las Casas’ estimate is two million. This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but there were undoubtedly very many. Within twenty years hardly one remained. There was, in fact, no alternative to the importation of slaves from Africa. Many of them died on the journey over, but those who survived had strong constitutions that could resist the climate, and they were used to work. But they were no more patient of subjection than the Indians. There was always the danger of rebellion, and quite a number fled into the hills to join with the Indians and become known as ‘Maroons’. In the meantime, the number of common-law marriages contracted between Spaniards and Indian women was rapidly creating what came to be known as the ‘Creole class’-Creole in its original use meaning ‘native, or indigenous to the soil’. The stage was being set, indeed, for that long conflict between black and white, between brown and black that harries Caribbean civilization to this day.

  Yet under Ovando progress was being made. Pearls were being shipped from the Gulf of Paria, a certain amount of gold was being found in Cuba, the supply of hides and tallow was proceeding calmly. The first European colony was putting down solid roots and would have come to fill a modest but useful place in the pattern of Spanish political economy had not the discoveries of Balboa, Cortés and Pizarro poured into the treasuries of Seville the wealth of Peru and Mexico during the first years of Ferdinand’s successor’s reign.

  It has been said that the greatest misfortune that befell Spain was the death of Ferdinand and Isabella’s son. Had Don Juan and his line survived, the destiny of Spain would have been Spanish, its ambitions directed toward the Mediterranean, toward Africa and Italy. But the son of Ferdinand and Isabella’s demented daughter was not only their grandson but also that of the Emperor Maximilian. Charles V’s grandeur as a monarch is to be matched only by that of Louis XIV. No European king has owned so much territory in his own right as opposed to possession by conquest. In addition to Spain itself, he had inherited Naples from Ferdinand, and Burgundy and the Netherlands from his father; when he secured the election as Holy Roman Emperor, the centre of Europe and the Germanic principalities passed under his control. He is spoken of as Spain’s greatest king, but he was scarcely a Spaniard at all. He was not, indeed, until the very end of his reign, King of Castile and Leon, but regent for his demented mother, in whose name he signed every proclamation. He spent only a quarter of his life in Spain. On his accession he spoke little Spanish. He was an Austrian, a Habsburg, and his thoughts and ambitions were focused north of the Pyréneés. He set less store by his Spanish than by his Austrian possessions. The Netherlands lay nearest to his heart. To consolidate his empire, he gave his eastern approaches in Hungary and Bohemia to his brother Ferdinand, and concentrated upon his rivalry with France.

  Charles as a personality lacks the sombre majesty of gloom that envelops his son Philip. He had little personal charm, but he had great qualities as a ruler; he was patient; in victory his demands were moderate; he took a long time to make up his mind, but when he came to a decision he carried out his purposes with pertinacity; his greatest strength lay in his capacity to assess the capabilities of his generals and ministers. His appointments were invariably wise. As an administrator he knew how to take a short view; he could recognize what was of immediate importance, and make the most effective moves to implement his decisions. He found it easier to take a short view because, as a Catholic, he intuitively took a long one. He was not as belligerently devout as his grandparents had been and his son was to become. His ultimate purpose was to strengthen the authority of the Church and to spread its teaching. But he had not, to the extent that his grandparents had had and his son was to have, the threat of heresy within his kingdom. Martin Luther was to start his campaign in the early years of his reign, but Charles did not hasten into action. He was prepared to temporize with the Reformation in its early years. If he had realized into how serious a danger it was to grow, he might not have bequeathed the Netherlands to Philip, thereby launching Spain upon a disastrous alien war, but it might well have been that he would have put the interests of his beloved Netherlands before those of Spain. He was always an Austrian at heart. And it was as an Austrian that he welcomed the doubloons that poured from the silver mines of Pitossi, as an aid to the fulfilment of his dynastic interests; he did not, as Isabella would have done, wonder what benefits through this sudden accretion of wealth would accrue to the Spanish people.

  Charles accepted these successive miracles as acts of God, and in his methodical, painstaking way set about their administration. These new dominions were not colonies but parts of Spain. In Santiago, Cartagena, Lima, he built cities on the Spanish pattern, with a cathedral, a piazza and the appropriate public buildings. Their
governors were directly responsible to the King. They were as powerful in their own setting as the King in his, except that complaints of bad management might lead to the sending out of a royal commission. Justice was administered through audiencias, by judges sent out from Spain. There was no popular control of the central government, but the municipalities had rights even as they had in Spain, and they could petition the crown. Charles drew up instructions on how trade was to be conducted and to what extent the resulting revenues were to be allotted to the crown. It was strictly ordained that no ships other than Spanish were to deal with the dependencies, that all goods were to be brought home to Seville, and that no Spaniard could trade without a licence. The Pope had decreed that all lands lying west of a certain line belonged to Spain. The Papal Bull was not subject to alteration. It was a law transcending all other laws. Charles could not imagine that any Christian would question its validity. He did not foresee a time when the Papal authority would be flouted, not merely by pirates but by monarchs professing Christianity. He did not foresee that for nearly two hundred years the West Indies would become the focus of European politics and the cockpit of Europe’s navies. European history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has to be studied in relation to the West Indies. The fortunes of the islands were dependent on what was happening in the courts and on the battlefields of Europe, but at the same time Europe’s destinies were shaped by the importance of the Sugar Islands.

  2 The Spanish Main

  When Charles V abdicated his throne, he gave to his son, Philip, two main instructions – to oppose heresy and keep peace with England. That was in 1556, when the man who was most responsible for making impossible the fulfilment of those instructions was a twenty-four-year-old seaman, busily and blithely plying his trade at Plymouth Hoe.

  John Hawkins would have been astonished had he been told that such a fate awaited him. He had nothing but the friendliest feelings for Spain and for its monarch. Throughout his lifetime and for several years before, Spain had been his country’s ally. There was no heritage of rancour. France was the traditional enemy of England; France with her twelve million inhabitants against England’s four; France who could invariably rely on Scotland’s support from across the border. When Philip married Mary Tudor, Hawkins was happy enough to think of him as his Royal Master; there are indeed reasons for believing that when Philip came to Southampton in 1553 for his marriage, Hawkins was able to render him certain services after a rough crossing.

  Hawkins was a man of charm, with an easy-going nature, except when the discipline of the sea demanded ruthlessness. He was of medium height, erect and handsome; he was elegant in dress; he impressed strangers; he was persuasive in debate; but beneath his charm there was a hard rock of loyalty. He was his sovereign’s servant. His own interests were subservient to that service. At sea he ordered the daily observances of the Church, but there is no reason to believe that he was exceptionally devout; he was certainly not a partisan Protestant as Drake was. He was presumably glad enough to see the authority of the Pope curtailed and church property dispersed, but he did not want any change of ritual. He was a professional seaman and his own life was not affected below the surface by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. He accepted with equanimity the dissolution of the monasteries, the reforms of Edward VI, the restoration of Mary Tudor and the established .order of Elizabeth. That was other people’s concern, not his. His business was the sea, and the trade of the sea, as it had been his father’s. He was a Plymouth man, and the prosperity of Plymouth depended on the ships that anchored beyond the sound, in Sutton Pool.

  His father, William Hawkins, was one of the most important city merchants, both a mayor of the city and a member of Parliament. He was also a fine navigator, who crossed the Atlantic more than once, and was one of the first to organize the triangle of trade – a home port, the Guinea coast, America – that was to form a pattern of commerce for two and a half centuries.

  At first, he exported cloth and tin to western Europe, bringing back salt from La Rochelle, wines from Bordeaux, and, from Spain and Portugal, wine, sugar, olive oil and pepper. He traded with the Canaries, which, though Spanish possessions, were open to foreign traders; he also collected pepper from the Guinea coast. Later he decided to cross the Atlantic and bring back wood from Brazil, and the dyes that were so valuable in the cloth trade. Brazil belonged, as did the Guinea coast, to Portugal, but Portugal was unable to police two such long coastlines. Both coasts were, in fact, divided into two; Guinea by Cape Palmas, Brazil by Cape San Roque.

  As early as 1530, two years before the birth of John, William Hawkins had equipped an expedition to sail from Plymouth to the Guinea coast, thence to Brazil. John Hawkins grew up in terms of the triangle of trade, a point to be remembered when one considers the conflicts in which he was to become involved in the Caribbean.

  By the time that John Hawkins was ready to go to sea, the Caribbean situation had assumed a pattern. The Spaniards had been disappointed in hopes of bullion in Cuba and Hispaniola, and they had no labour with which to exploit the agricultural possibilities of the islands. Even when there had been Indians available to work the mines, the supply of gold had been minute. Their experiences in the Lesser Antilles had been so unfortunate that they had decided to leave them to the fierce and hostile Caribs. Most of the original settlers on Hispaniola had moved to the Pacific coast, and the few remaining Spanish settlements were at the mercy of French privateers. But though the islands were valueless in themselves, they were of great importance as bastions protecting the gold and silver caravans from South America. In 1524, a French corsair captured a Spanish galleon and was astounded by the richness of its cargo; for the greater part of this period France and Spain were at war, and the harrying of Spanish galleons became one of the chief activities of the French navy. English historians, when recounting the deeds of Hawkins and Drake, forget to remind their readers that France had several years’ start in the arena. To combat the French corsairs, Charles V started and Philip II regularized a system of convoys that for over a century safeguarded the transportation of silver from the New World to Seville.

  The current of the trade winds was the determining factor in West Indian history, until steam supplanted sail in the middle of the nineteenth century. Barbados, for example, never flew a French flag, because the French in Martinique and Guadeloupe could not attack against the northeast trades. For a westbound European ship the first natural port of call was Dominica, and the Gulf Stream would carry it back to Europe either by the Florida Channel, north of Cuba, or by the Windward Passage, past Jamaica, north of Hispaniola. A ship bound for Brazil could only return by coasting the Spanish Main.

  The Spanish system was concentrated on two annual fleets, the flota and the galleones. The flota, the smaller fleet, took a northern route to Santo Domingo, Cuba, and New Mexico. The galleones served the Spanish Main, calling at Margarita to take on pearls. Both fleets assembled in Nombre de Dios Bay to collect the treasure that had been brought up the Pacific coast and carried by mules across the isthmus. Both fleets returned to Europe via Havana. Under this system Santo Domingo was valuable as an administrative centre; Havana was important as a fort; while on the Spanish Main Margarita was important as a base for the pearl trade, and Cartagena as a port.

  The convoy system was effective, but expensive. The costs of the convoy and the protection involved had to be borne by the local merchant, most of whose rewards were absorbed by the bureaucratic overheads of Seville; there was consequently an infinite scope for bribe and graft. Free trade would have been highly advantageous to the colonists. It was not surprising that the privateer was welcomed. Such was the situation when John Hawkins, in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, began to interest himself in the Caribbean.

  His interest was practical and commercial. For a number of years he had been trading with the Canaries and the Guinea coast. His relations with the Spaniards were cordial, as were those of a great many Englishmen who had cl
ose links with Andalusia and had factories in Seville. English ships had helped the Spaniards in some of their expeditions, and Englishmen had been given grants of land as Spanish subjects. From his contacts with the Spaniards of the Canaries, Hawkins had come to appreciate the problems of the colonists on the Spanish Main and in the Antilles. There was a great shortage of manufactured goods and of labour. A few slaves had been imported, but the trade was so set about by restrictions, so many middlemen had to have their cut, that the cost to the colonists was excessive. Hawkins was convinced that he could supply slaves and goods at half the price. He was assured by his friends in the Canaries that he would be warmly welcomed.

  Hawkins, like his father, was most anxious to ensure the legality of any expedition that he undertook. He was resolved not to be classed as a privateer. He recognized that the lands ‘beyond the lines’ were Spanish possessions; and he knew that the Spanish monarchy considered itself to hold, under the Pope’s approval, a monopoly of trade with them. But the Spaniards had always allowed foreign trade with the Canaries, and the man on the spot could usually be trusted to interpret liberally instructions that had been issued by a bureaucrat three thousand miles away. Moreover, the relations between England and Spain were cordial. Though Elizabeth had broken with the Pope, the bonds of self-interest remained. France was as great a menace to England as she was to Spain. Mary, Queen of Scots, had as strong a claim to the English throne as Elizabeth herself. Mary could rely on France to defend that claim. Spain was at war in the Netherlands; her troops had to be transported thither by sea. They were liable to be harried by the French; if England was to join with France, their transport would be grievously imperilled. The spectacle of a heretic England might be distressing to Philip II, and a time might come when England’s apostasy might make a claim upon his crusading instinct, but first things first. The Netherlands stood at the head of the list.