Be it known that we have given and granted … to our well beloved John Cabot, citizen of Venice [and his sons] full and free authority, leave and power to sail to all parts, countries, and seas of the East, of the West, and of the North under our banners and ensigns … to seek out, discover and find whatsoever isles, countries, regions or provinces of the heathen and infidels whatsoever they be, and in what part of the world soever they be which before this time have been unknown to all Christians. We have granted to them … license to set up our banner and ensigns in every village, town, castle, isle or mainland newly found by them which they can subdue, occupy, and possess as our vassals and lieutenants, getting unto us the rule, title and jurisdiction of the same villages, towns, castles and firm land so found.
Despite high expectations, the new territories were initially a disappointment, since they seemed to present a new barrier to the east while offering little in return. Traces of gold were found in the possession of the native inhabitants, but there was little else of interest. The first settlement of any promise was on Hispaniola, where some gold was found, while after 1500 tobacco, ranching, and sugar – which the Spanish already had experience of growing on the Mediterranean coast and Canary Islands – proved moderately profitable.
The pace of the Spanish invasion increased with the subjugation of the islands of Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba from 1509 to 1511. Trading posts were established soon after in Venezuela and Colombia at Santa Marta and Cartagena. Then in 1519 the economic potential of what Europeans were now calling the New World began to be realized at last with the expedition of Hernando Cortés to Mexico to conquer the Aztec empire of Montezuma. Cortés discovered significant Indian cultures with advanced agriculture, sophisticated building techniques, and enormous deposits of gold and other precious metals. Twelve years later Francisco de Pizarro overthrew the Inca empire in Peru and discovered wealth beyond his wildest expectations.
Before Spain could reap the benefits of its newfound riches it had to find sufficient labor to exploit the new territories. Initially the Spanish adventurers who had conquered the new territories enslaved indigenous peoples and forced them to work on plantations and in gold mines. In Hispaniola and Cuba this was a disastrous policy. The people sickened and died from diseases brought by the Europeans, their numbers being reduced in some areas by almost 90 percent. After 1510 an alternative supply of labor began to be found when the Spanish king authorized the first shipment of African slaves to Hispaniola, brought there from Lisbon by Portuguese traders.3 In Mexico and Peru, the exploitation of indigenous labor was more successful, since the local populations were so vast. Although many died from European diseases, the surviving populations were often large enough to meet Spanish demands for labor in mines and on ranches. Where there were not enough indigenous workers, Spaniards imported enslaved Africans. During the early years most of these had previously been slaves in Spain or the Canary Islands, spoke Spanish, and were Christian converts.
Thanks to their heavy reliance on Indians and Africans for labor, the Spanish American colonies developed racially diverse and racially integrated societies. The colonizers themselves were mostly Spanish men, while domestic labor and conjugal companionship were usually provided by Indian women. The Spanish Crown and church alike encouraged Spanish men and Indian women to formalize their unions in Christian marriages, and allowed their mixed race (mestizo) children to become educated and assimilated into Spanish colonial societies. Spanish policy also encouraged the Christianization of the Indians, even catechizing them in their indigenous languages, thereby encouraging indigenous languages to survive and flourish. Meanwhile, because Indian workers often worked alongside enslaved Africans in Spanish American mines, plantations, ranches, and artisan workshops, intermarriage between Indians and Africans was common as well. All of these marriages were recognized by Spanish legal codes, which had for many years recognized slavery and tried to mitigate its worst abuses. By the end of the sixteenth century, therefore, the Spanish American colonies had developed significant populations of mestizos and other mixed race peoples, many of whom had achieved a middling social status and assumed responsible positions in Spanish American societies.
Having founded colonies in the regions of Central and South America, which offered the greatest opportunities for profit, the Spaniards continued to explore much of the region north of the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico before 1542, looking either for comparable sources of wealth or a route to the Pacific. In 1513 Juan Ponce de León of Spain explored the coast of Florida, and in 1521 he tried to establish a settlement there but failed after antagonizing the Calusa Indians in the region. In 1526 Lucas de Ayllón made another attempt farther north in what is now Georgia, but this effort foundered too after most of the settlers died from starvation and disease. Another party led by Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528 alienated the Apalachee Indians while blundering through northern Florida, then became lost after sailing to modern-day Texas, where the survivors were enslaved by Karankawas Indians. Eventually three of the Spaniards and one African slave made it back to Mexico, after an eight-year ordeal.
The survivors' reports fuelled more rumors about the possible existence of rich kingdoms in North America, inspiring further expeditions. Spain's Hernando De Soto arrived with nine ships in Florida in 1539 and proceeded to storm through the Southeast between 1539 and 1543. Along the way the Spaniards encountered a densely populated region of peoples descended from the Mississippians, living in large towns with elaborate ceremonial centers and burial mounds, surrounded by rich farmland. Although the Indians were open to forming an alliance, the Spanish were interested only in conquest and pillage. They forced local inhabitants to cooperate with them by using terrorist tactics including hostage taking, torture, and bloody executions. Before long the word spread that the Spaniards were not to be trusted, and the Indians began to launch surprise attacks against De Soto and his men. Eventually, having failed to find wealth comparable to that of the Aztec empire in Mexico, the Spaniards left. Unfortunately they left behind a legacy of destruction as well as exposure to Old World diseases.
Other Spaniards explored the West, both overland and along the Pacific coast. Between 1540 and 1542, Coronado's expedition in the Southwest encountered Pueblo peoples descended from the Anasazi. Accompanied by 300 Spaniards and 1,000 Indians from Mexico, Coronado ranged through the countryside seizing pueblos and taking their food supplies. Finally during the winter of 1540–1, a group of Pueblo Indians who were suffering from food shortages attempted to rebel against their Spanish occupiers. The Spaniards destroyed 13 Indian villages in the course of putting down the rebellion, in one place burning all of the inhabitants alive in order to set an example for other would-be rebels. However in 1542 Coronado finally abandoned his conquests and returned to Mexico, having failed to find any gold. Here, just as in the Southeast, the Indians would remember Europeans as violent, untrustworthy people who brought death and destruction. Another Spanish expedition led by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed up the California coast with three ships in 1542 and 1543, reaching what is now the southern boundary of Oregon. Along the way the local Indians repeatedly shot at Cabrillo and his men. Having heard stories about Coronado's exploits further inland, they were taking no chances.4
From the Spanish point of view, these voyages of exploration yielded nothing, despite many rumors and hopeful promises. Even at the end of these expeditions, Spanish mapmakers had acquired only a sketchy understanding of North American geography north of the Rio Grande. Speculation about the possible existence of a water route through North America to the Pacific continued for centuries to come. As one historian has recently pointed out, it is surprising that Spain failed adequately to map North American terrain during the sixteenth century, since Spanish explorers had mastered equally difficult terrain in Central and South America. Why did Spaniards not persist in their explorations of North America? The most likely explanation is that North America had too little to offer. The Spanish had found riche
s beyond their wildest dreams further south, and it was not worth their time to finance continued exploration of a region that seemed to have so little wealth. The hostility of the Indians (who could see no reason to tolerate the Spaniards' heavy-handed tactics) was an additional disincentive.5
4 Sixteenth-Century European Competitors
Even before 1546, with the opening of the Potosí silver mines in colonial Peru, the silver that Spanish ships had begun to transport annually back to Seville was transforming Spain and, with it, the balance of political power in western Europe. Spain's American wealth made it a center for trade and finance, and the Spanish monarchy was able to create the most powerful navy in Europe. A dynastic union with the Habsburg empire along with an expansionist military policy gave Spain's rulers effective control over territory across much of continental Europe.
Spain's chief political rival at this time was King Francis I of France. With a long history of military conflict with Spain, France became the first European state to seek out ways to compete with Spain by exploiting American wealth and resources. Francis authorized several exploratory expeditions for France, including the 1524 voyage of Giovanni de Verrazzano, who found the Hudson River and sailed as far north as present-day Nova Scotia, and the 1535 expedition of Jacques Cartier, who sailed up the St. Lawrence to the future site of Montréal. In addition to sponsoring voyages of exploration, he encouraged French sea captains to siphon off a share of Spanish silver and gold through piracy. From 1521 to 1559, a period of ongoing warfare with Spain, French kings authorized privateers to raid Spanish galleons and Spanish colonial cities in the Caribbean, which they did with great frequency.
Meanwhile the French government also had the idea to create a permanent American base for privateering raids, which could help it to compete militarily with Spain. A Crown-sponsored settlement in Canada in 1541 was tried, but collapsed. Jean Ribaut and a group of French Protestants founded a settlement at Charlesfort in what is now South Carolina in 1562, hoping to create a refuge for use in case of persecution by French Catholics and a base from which to attack Spanish ships sailing up the coast to catch return currents across the Atlantic. This settlement also failed. Two years later Ribaut led a second expedition, this time to build a fort and settlement at Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River in Florida. Unfortunately for the French, this second, more substantial expedition merely induced the Spanish to make a new effort to establish themselves in that area. In the summer of 1565, a force of 1,500 men under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés first founded the town of St. Augustine and then tracked down and destroyed Ribaut's settlement. The Spanish then placed various missions along the coast to convert the local inhabitants and to prevent any further intrusion by the subjects of a rival power.
Though French colonizing efforts had little initial success, a number of French adventurers did begin to succeed as fishermen and traders in the second half of the sixteenth century. French fishermen had long journeyed west in the summers, traveling as far as Greenland in search of cod, haddock, and other fish from the north Atlantic. After Cartier's voyage to Canada in 1535, French fishermen began to travel further west to Newfoundland and Acadia (Nova Scotia). By the 1560s and 1570s, fishermen in temporary French fishing camps had begun to make sustained contacts with local Iroquoian and Algonquian-speaking Indians along the coasts of Québec, the Maritime Islands, and even northern New England. The Indians' tradition of trade with other peoples predisposed them to offer gifts of food and beaver skins to the newcomers; their hope was to build trade ties and alliances with the Europeans in order to strengthen the own political standing of their own clans and tribes within the region. The Frenchmen, seeing an opportunity for profit, offered glass beads and metal tools in exchange for the beaver skins, which they brought back to Europe to sell along with the fish. Since many fur-bearing mammals had become extinct in overpopulated Europe, beaver and other furs were highly prized in France and could fetch good prices.
Portugal, the other main legal claimant to American territory under the Treaty of Tordesillas, initially held back from colonizing the Americas, even though Portuguese sailors had discovered Brazil in 1500. A territorial empire seemed unnecessary for a nation that was already reaping untold profits from its African and Asian trades. Portuguese merchants did use Brazilian harbors in its trading activities, purchasing brazil wood, a source of red dye, from the local Indians in exchange for cloth, metal tools, and ornamental beads, occasionally transporting a shipment of African slaves to Spanish buyers in the Caribbean or on the mainland. However, when French merchants became interested in Brazil in the 1540s, and especially in 1557, after a group of French adventurers and settlers established a short-lived colony in the Rio de Janeiro bay, the Portuguese government changed its priorities. Portugal sent a military expedition to destroy the French fort and then founded its own colony at Rio de Janeiro. Portugal would also now begin to promote the development of a sugar industry in Brazil.
The rise of Brazilian sugar would be an important milestone in the history of the Americas, for it marked the beginning of the large-scale importation of African slaves into the colonies. The local Indian population, with its susceptibility to European diseases, had dwindled to small numbers and could not be used for labor. Instead, Brazilian planters began to import slaves directly from West Africa, supplied by Portuguese merchants. Spain's takeover of Portugal at the end of the 1570s soon made it possible for Spanish colonizers, too, to purchase African slaves from Portuguese suppliers. Before 1550 Portuguese and Spanish merchants had brought only about 10,000 African slaves into the Americas, but over the next 50 years as many as 200,000 Africans arrived in Brazil and Spanish America. These numbers would continue to grow exponentially. By the time the African slave trade to the Americas ended in 1880, a total of 11 million Africans had been transported to the Americas by Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Spanish merchants.6
The arrival of millions of African slaves would have a profound impact not only on the American societies to which they were being transported, but also on the African societies they had left behind. The enormous forced diaspora devastated West African villages and disrupted local economies. Warfare became endemic, destabilizing entire societies. Meanwhile West African slave traders profited handsomely as their business expanded. Historians once believed that African traders were unable to resist European demands to expand the slave trade because they had become dependent on Europeans for supplies of guns, iron tools, and textiles. Recent research shows, however, that African traders largely controlled the terms of the slave trade that they conducted with Europeans. Local traders actively worked to expand the slave trade because they stood to benefit both economically and politically. In order to increase the number of slaves they could supply, they provoked raids on villages across an ever widening expanse of territory, in the process setting off a cycle of retaliation and warfare that would devastate the populations of western and central Africa for the next three centuries. Meanwhile the slaves they sold across the Atlantic would increasingly face a new kind of slavery. Instead of working as household servants, they would work on commercial plantations producing crops like sugar, first in Brazil and later in the Caribbean, under increasingly exploitative and brutal conditions, for planters whose demand for more slaves grew by the year. The institution of slavery now beginning to be created in the Americas would have a profound influence on the types of societies that would develop there.7
In 1580, with the rapid growth of silver exports from Spanish mines and slave imports from Portuguese traders, it may have appeared that Iberian hegemony in the Americas would last forever. Spain had found an unparalleled source of wealth in Mexico and Peru. Sugar exports from Brazil were growing, and thousands of African slaves were being transported to the Americas to produce it. France had been unable to establish a permanent base, although by the 1570s French fishermen were traveling every summer to Canada's Atlantic shores, where Spanish ships never ventured. A few English privateers had succeede
d in marauding Spanish and Portuguese vessels, but England was too weak politically to contemplate a permanent settlement. Other European nations, meanwhile, seemed unable to make any impression. Holland, although well situated to become a commercial power, remained a province of Spain until 1579; Germany was divided into small states; and Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries were remote and impoverished. In addition the trauma of the Reformation was still sweeping through most of northern Europe, channeling the region's energies away from exploring the New World.
5 England: The Elizabethan Prelude
The Reformation in Europe began in 1517 when Martin Luther protested against what he considered to be the corrupt practices of the Roman Catholic Church under the pope. Luther and others believed that faith alone, not good works, could secure salvation. They also felt that the church contained too much ceremony, pomp, and superstition to be compatible with the Christian message contained in the Bible. Ultimately most of northern Europe, including England, denounced the pope and separated from Catholicism. However, the process of reforming the English church proved tortuous. Many years of conflict between Catholics and Protestants in England produced lasting bitterness, and it was not until 1559 that Elizabeth I effected even a partial settlement.
England had begun to emerge from its poverty and isolation in the early 1500s, spurred by the growth of cloth manufacturing for export to Europe. However, England's economic rise was halting. After 1550, the flood of Spanish silver into Europe's economy caused an inflationary spiral that indirectly provoked a collapse in the market for English cloth in western Europe. English merchants began turning their attention towards new ventures, trading with Russian and Turkish merchants, exchanging English textiles for gold and sugar in Morocco, even attempting to buy and sell African slaves in Guinea. The English public became vaguely aware of successful raids by the mariner John Hawkins on Portuguese slave ships in the Caribbean in the 1560s, and by Francis Drake on Panama in 1573. Interest in the New World picked up in 1576, when Martin Frobisher set off on a series of journeys to seek a northwest passage, and in 1577, when Francis Drake set out on a privateering voyage bound for the Pacific side of South America. To investors, the idea of a colony to serve as a base for privateers became increasingly appealing. In 1578 the English adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert obtained a patent from Queen Elizabeth for the discovery and colonization of the northern continent (though he unfortunately drowned off the Newfoundland coast in September 1583 before he could accomplish anything).
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