Their two expeditions, although separated in time and space, possessed enough similarities to suggest certain common characteristics in the process of Spanish and British overseas colonization, as well as significant differences that would become increasingly marked as the years went by. The Spanish and British empires in America have been described respectively as empires of `conquest' and of `commerce'," but even these two expeditions would seem to indicate that motivations are not easily compartmentalized into neat categories, and that approaches to colonization resist straightforward classification. Was Cortes, with his almost obsessive determination to settle the land, no more than a gold-hungry conqueror? And were the promoters of the Virginia enterprise purely concerned with commercial opportunities, to the exclusion of all else?
There are sufficient references in Tudor and Stuart promotional literature to the activities of the Spaniards in America to make it clear that English attitudes to colonizing ventures were influenced in important ways by Spanish precedents. Yet at the same time, the English, like the Spaniards, had their own priorities and agenda, which themselves were shaped by historical preoccupations, cumulative experience and contemporary concerns. The aspirations and activities of both the planters of Jamestown and the conquerors of Mexico can only be fully appreciated within the context of a national experience of conquest and settlement which, in both instances, stretched back over many centuries. For historically, Castile and England were both proto-colonial powers long before they set out to colonize America.
Medieval England pursued a policy of aggressive expansion into the nonEnglish areas of the British Isles, warring with its Welsh, Scottish and Irish neighbours and establishing communities of English settlers who would advance English interests and promote English values on alien Celtic soil.72 The English, therefore, were no strangers to colonization, combining it with attempts at conquest which brought mixed results. Failure against Scotland was balanced by eventual success in Wales, which was formally incorporated in 1536 into the Crown of England, itself now held by a Welsh dynasty. Across the sea the English struggled over the centuries with only limited success to subjugate Gaelic Ireland and `plant' it with settlers from England. Many of the lands seized by the Normans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were recovered by the Irish during the fourteenth and fifteenth;73 and although in 1540 Henry VIII elevated Ireland to the status of a kingdom, English authority remained precarious or nonexistent beyond the densely populated and rich agricultural area of the Pale. With the conversion of Henry's England to Protestantism the effective assertion of this authority over a resolutely Catholic Ireland acquired a new urgency in English eyes. The reign of Elizabeth was to see an intensified planting of new colonies on Irish soil, and, in due course, a new war of conquest. The process of the settlement and subjugation of Ireland by the England of Elizabeth, pursued over several decades, absorbed national energies and resources that might otherwise have been directed more intensively, and at an earlier stage, to the founding of settlements on the other side of the Atlantic.
In medieval Spain, the land of the Reconquista, the pattern of combined conquest and colonization was equally well established. The Reconquista was a prolonged struggle over many centuries to free the soil of the Iberian peninsula from Moorish domination. At once a military and a religious enterprise, it was a war for booty, land and vassals, and a crusade to recover for the Christians the vast areas of territory that had been lost to Islam. But it also involved a massive migration of people, as the crown allocated large tracts of land to individual nobles, to the military-religious orders engaged in the process of reconquest, and to city councils, which were given jurisdiction over large hinterlands. Attracted by the new opportunities, artisans and peasants moved southwards in large numbers from northern and central Castile to fill the empty spaces. In Spain, as in the British Isles, the process of conquest and settlement helped to establish forms of behaviour, and create habits of mind, easily transportable to distant parts of the world in the dawning age of European overseas expansion.74
The conquest and settlement of Al-Andalus and Ireland were still far from complete when fourteenth-century Europeans embarked on the exploration of the hitherto unexplored waters and islands of the African and eastern Atlantic.75 Here the Portuguese were the pioneers. It was the combined desire of Portuguese merchants for new markets and of nobles for new estates and vassals that provided the impetus for the first sustained drive for overseas empire in the history of Early Modern Europe.76 Where the Portuguese pointed the way, others followed. The kings of Castile, in particular, could not afford to let their Portuguese cousins steal a march on them. The Castilian conquest and occupation of the Canary Islands between 1478 and 1493 constituted a direct response by the Crown of Castile to the challenge posed by the spectacular expansion of Portuguese power and wealth.`7
The early participation of Genoese merchants in Portugal's overseas enterprises, and the consequent transfer to an expanding Atlantic world of techniques of colonization first developed in the eastern Mediterranean'78 gave Portugal's empire from its early stages a marked commercial orientation. This would be reinforced by the nature of the societies with which the Portuguese came into contact. Neither Portuguese resources, nor local conditions, were conducive to the seizure of vast areas of territory in Africa and Asia. Manpower was limited, local societies were resilient, and climate and disease tended to take a heavy toll of newly arrived Europeans. As a result, the overseas empire established by the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted largely of a string of fortresses and factories (feitorias) - trading posts and enclaves - on the margins of the unconquered continents of Africa and Asia. The most obvious exceptions were Madeira and the Azores, and then, from the 1540s, Brazil, as the Portuguese became alarmed by reports of French designs on the territory and took the first steps towards bringing it under more effective control. By contrast, the Spaniards began constructing for themselves, from the very early stages of their movement overseas, something more akin to an empire of conquest and settlement.
The process had begun with the subjugation of the Guanche population of the Canary Islands and continued with Columbus. For all his Genoese origins and long residence in Lisbon, he seems, as he returned from his first voyage in 1492, to have had something more in mind than the establishment of an overseas trading base. Be sure', he wrote in his journal, addressing Ferdinand and Isabella, ,that this island [Hispaniola] and all the others are as much your own as is Castile, for all that is needed here is a seat of government and to command them to do what you wish'; and he went on to say of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, whom he described as `naked and with no experience of arms and very timid', that `they are suitable to take orders and be made to work, sow and do anything else that may be needed, and build towns and be taught to wear clothes and adopt our cus- toms.79 Here already can be discerned the outlines of a programme which would today be regarded as that of the archetypal colonial regime: the establishment of a seat of government and of rule over the indigenous population; the induction of that population into the working methods of a European-style economy, producing European-style commodities; and the acceptance on behalf of the colonizing power of a civilizing mission, which was to include the wearing of European clothes and the adoption of Christianity. This would in due course become the programme of the Spaniards in America.
There were reasons both metropolitan and local why the Spanish overseas enterprise should have moved in this direction. The Reconquista had firmly established the tradition of territorial conquest and settlement in Castile. Columbus, who watched Ferdinand and Isabella make their triumphal entry into the Moorish city of Granada on its surrender in January 1492, participated in, and turned to his own advantage, the euphoria generated by this climactic moment in the long history of the Reconquista. From the vantage-point of 1492 it was natural to think in terms of the continuing acquisition of territory and of the extension of the Reconquista beyond the shores of Spain.
Across the straits lay Morocco; and, as Columbus would soon demonstrate, across the Atlantic lay the Indies.
Alongside the tradition of territorial settlement and expansion, however, late medieval Castile also possessed a strong mercantile tradition, and it could have followed either route when embarking on its overseas ventures.80 But conditions in the Indies themselves encouraged a territorial approach, as conditions facing the Portuguese in Africa and Asia did not. Disappointingly for Columbus, the Caribbean offered no equivalent of the lucrative trading networks in the Indian Ocean, although the first Spanish settlers in Hispaniola and Cuba would engage in a certain amount of rescate, or barter, with the inhabitants of neighbouring islands. While some gold would be found on Hispaniola, precious metals were not a major commodity of local exchange, and if the Spaniards wanted them it soon became clear that they would have to get them for themselves. The exploitation of mineral resources therefore demanded dominion of the land.
The indigenous societies of the New World, too, were very different in character from those of Africa and Asia. In the first place they were vulnerable - vulnerable to European technological superiority and to European diseases - in ways that the societies of Africa and Asia were not. Moreover, it soon transpired that these peoples had apparently never heard the Christian gospel preached. Their conversion, therefore, became a first priority, and would constitute - with papal blessing - the principal justification for a continuing Spanish presence in the newly found Indies. Castile, already uniquely favoured by God in the triumphant reconquest of Granada, now had a recognized mission across the newly navigated `Ocean Sea' - the mission to convert these benighted peoples and introduce them to the benefits of policia (civility), or, in other words, to European norms of behaviour. In accordance with the terms of the Alexandrine bulls, Castile, by way of compensation for its efforts, was granted certain rights. The inhabitants of Hispaniola, and subsequently those of Cuba and other islands seized by the Spaniards, became vassals of the crown, and a potential labour force for crown and colonists - not, technically, as slaves, because vassalage and slavery were incompatible, but as labourers conscripted for public and private works.
The nature of the Indies and its inhabitants therefore favoured an approach based on conquest and subjugation rather than on the establishment of a string of trading enclaves, thus reinforcing the conquering and colonizing, rather than the mercantile, aspects of the medieval Castilian tradition. But, after the first heady moments, the Caribbean began to look distinctly disappointing as a theatre for conquest and colonization. Hispaniola was not, after all, to prove a source of abundant gold; and its Taino population, which the first Spanish settlers had seen as vassals and as a potential labour force, rapidly succumbed to European diseases and became extinct before their eyes.81 The same proved true of the other islands which they seized in their frenetic search for gold. For a moment it seemed as if the imperial experiment would be over almost as soon as it had begun: the meagre returns scarcely warranted such a heavy investment of resources. But once the lineaments of a great American landmass were revealed, and Cortes went on to overthrow the empire of the Aztecs, it was clear that Spain's empire of the Indies had come to stay. The discovery and conquest of Peru a decade later served to drive the lesson home. Here were vast sedentary populations, which could be brought under Spanish control with relative ease. Dominion over land brought with it dominion over people, and also - as large deposits of silver were discovered in the Andes and northern Mexico - dominion over resources on an unimagined scale.
The Cortes expedition - an expedition conceived in terms of subjugation and settlement - therefore fitted into a general pattern of behaviour developed in the course of the Iberian Reconquista and transported in the wake of Columbus to the Caribbean. Traditionally, the Reconquista had relied on a combination of state sponsorship and private initiative, the balance between them being determined at any given moment by the relative strength of crown and local forces. The monarch would `capitulate' with a commander, who in turn would assume responsibility for financing and organizing a military expedition under the conditions outlined in the agreement. The expectation was that the expedition would pay for itself out of the booty of conquest, and the followers of the captain, or caudillo, would receive their reward in the form of an allocation of land, booty and tribute-paying vassals.82 None of this would have been foreign to Cortes, whose father and uncle took part in the final stages of the Granada campaign. Not surprisingly, he pursued his conquest of Mexico as if he were conducting a campaign against the Moors. He tended to refer to Mesoamerican temples as ,mosques', 83 and in making his alliances with local Indian caciques, or when inducing Montezuma to accept Castilian overlordship, he resorted to strategies often used against the petty local rulers of Moorish Andalusia. Similarly, in his dealings with the crown, on whose approval he was more than usually dependent because of the ambiguous nature of his relationship with his immediate superior, the governor of Cuba, he was scrupulously careful to follow traditional Reconquista practice, meticulously setting aside the royal fifth before distributing any booty among his men.84
But Cortes showed himself to be something more than a caudillo in the traditional mould. Unlike Pedrarias Davila, who as governor of Darien from 1513 murdered and massacred his way through the isthmus of Panama with his marauding band, Cortes, for all the brutality and ruthlessness of his conduct, adopted from the first a more constructive approach to the enterprise of conquest. He had arrived in Hispaniola in the wake of his distant relative and fellow Extremaduran, Nicolas de Ovando, who had been appointed the royal governor of the island in 1501, with instructions to rescue it from the anarchy into which it had descended under the regime of the Columbus brothers, and to establish the colony on solid foundations.85 By the time Ovando left Hispaniola in 1509, seventeen towns had been established on the island, Indians had been allotted by distribution (repartimiento) to settlers who were charged with instructing them in Christian doctrine in return for the use of their labour, and cattle raising and sugar planting had begun to provide alternative sources of wealth to the island's rapidly diminishing supply of gold.
Cortes would have seen for himself something of the transformation of Hispaniola into a well-ordered and economically viable community, while at the same time his Caribbean experiences made him aware of the devastating consequences of uncontrolled rapine by adventurers who possessed no abiding stake in the land. He therefore struggled to prevent a recurrence in Mexico of the mindless style of conquest that had left nothing but devastation in its wake. As expressed by Gomara, his philosophy was that `without settlement there is no good conquest, and if the land is not conquered, the people will not be converted. Therefore the maxim of the conqueror must be to settle.'86 It was to encourage settlement that he arranged the repartimiento of Indians among his companions, who were to hold them in trust, or encomienda, and promoted the founding or refounding of cities in a country which already had large ceremonial complexes and urban concentrations. And it was to encourage conversion that he invited the first Franciscans - the so-called `twelve apostles' - to come to Mexico. Conquest, conversion and colonization were to be mutually supportive.
Effective colonization would not be possible without a serious attempt to develop the resources of the land, and Cortes himself, with his sugar plantations on his Cuernavaca estates and his promotion of long-distance trading ventures, practised what he preached.87 But he was only one among the many conquistadores and early settlers who displayed marked entrepreneurial characteristics. As new waves of Spanish immigrants moved across the continent in the aftermath of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, it became clear that the easiest forms of wealth - silver and Indians - were reserved for the fortunate few. Disappointed conquistadores and new immigrants therefore had to fend for themselves as best they could. This meant, as it had meant in the lands recovered by the Christians in medieval Andalusia, applying their skills as artisans in the cities, or exploiting local possibilities to de
velop new sources of wealth. The sixteenth-century settlers of Guatemala, for instance - a region without silver mines - developed an export trade in indigo, cacao and hides for American and European markets.88
Entrepreneurial as well as seigneurial aspirations were therefore to be found in this Spanish American colonial society, and already in the first half of the century that great chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, was expressing pride in Spanish entrepreneurial accomplishments: `We found no sugar mills when we arrived in these Indies, and all these we have built with our own hands and industry in so short a time.'89 Similarly, Gomara's praise for the success of the Spaniards in `improving' Hispaniola and Mexico shows that the language of improvement was being used by the Spaniards a century before English colonists turned to it in order to justify to themselves and to others their presence in the Caribbean and the North American mainland.90
Spain's empire of the Indies, then, cannot be summarily categorized as an empire of conquest, reflecting exclusively the military and seigneurial values of the metropolitan society that founded it. As Cortes's vision - and practice - make clear, there were counter-currents at work, which were perfectly capable of flourishing, given the right conditions. But those conditions would in part be set and shaped by the requirements and interests of the crown. The scale of the conquests was simply too large, the potential resources of the continent too vast, for the crown to remain indifferent to the ways in which those resources were exploited and developed. Tradition, obligation and self-interest all worked from the very beginning to ensure close royal involvement in Spanish overseas settlement.
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 5