An alternative method, to which the British crown several times resorted, was to issue charters to groups of interested individuals who constituted themselves into companies, like the Massachusetts Bay Company of 1629. The nearest to company colonization in Spanish America was the authorization given in 1528 to two Sevillian agents of the German commercial house of the Welser for the discovery, conquest and settlement of Venezuela, but the name of the Welser seems to have been carefully kept out of the agreement, allowing them to disclaim responsibility for the actions of their company agents and representatives.44 More frequently the British crown, less concerned than the Spanish crown with the retention of close control over its American possessions, would make proprietary grants to chosen patentees, like George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose son Cecilius received the seals and charter for the colonization of Maryland in 1632.41 Proprietors in turn would proceed to allocate land on the terms most likely to prove attractive to settlers, while conserving as many rights to themselves as they could. But the process of land acquisition and settlement remained considerably more haphazard in British than in Spanish America. Some English colonies - Plymouth, Connecticut and Rhode Island - received no royal charters, and this only enhanced the ambiguities surrounding their rights to settle in Indian territory. At least in the initial stages of settlement, these New England colonists sought to resolve their legal and moral dilemmas by negotiating land purchases from the Indians.46
There could, however, be no lasting settlement of American land without the establishment and acceptance of some form of civil authority. On landing on the coast of Mexico in June 1519, Cortes's first action was to found the town of Vera Cruz. His purpose in doing this was to establish a civil authority, which would both legitimate his past and future actions, and lay the foundations for permanent Spanish settlement in Montezuma's realms. `The new alcaldes [mayors] and officers', writes Gomara, `accepted their wands of authority and took possession of their offices, and at once met in council, as is customary in the villages and towns of Castile.'47 A similar process was at work when the Mayflower dropped anchor off Provincetown in November 1620. In this instance the Pilgrims before going ashore agreed to `covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation'.48 They went on to elect John Carver as their Governor, just as the town council of Vera Cruz went on to elect Cortes as Captain and Justicia Mayor.
Spaniards and Englishmen therefore regarded the reconstitution of European civil society in an alien environment as the essential preliminary to their permanent occupation of the land. As participants in the same western tradition, both these colonizing peoples took it for granted that the patriarchal family, ownership of property, and a social ordering that as nearly as possible patterned the divine were the essential elements of any properly constituted civil society. But both were to find that American conditions were not always conducive to their re-creation on the farther shores of the Atlantic in the forms to which they were accustomed. The dissolving effects of space, at work from the outset, gave rise to responses which would eventually produce societies that, although still recognizably European, appeared sufficiently different to justify their being described as `American'.
These responses were determined by a combination of metropolitan tradition and local circumstance, and would vary by region as well as by nationality. The New England response, for example, was to differ in important ways from that of Virginia. But in so far as the differences between New England and Virginia were conditioned by local topography, these paled into insignificance when set against the enormous geographical and climatic differences between the areas of Spanish and British colonization on the American mainland. The Spaniards were faced with jungles, mountain ranges and deserts which made William Bradford's `hideous and desolate wilderness' of New England49 look like a garden of Eden by comparison.
The Spaniards, too, lacked great rivers like the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio and the St Lawrence to take settlers deep into the interior. Yet in spite of the apparently overwhelming geographical disadvantages they encountered, the Spaniards had fanned out through the continent within a generation of the capture of Tenochtitlan. The English, on the other hand, although faced with a more benevolent geography, had a preference for clustering close to the Atlantic seaboard until the eighteenth century; only in the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys, and in parts of the Chesapeake region, did settlement of the interior begin from the outset.50 It is a striking commentary on English predilections that, for the first twenty years of its existence, the inhabitants of Dedham in Massachusetts, with immense spaces around them, continued to parcel out tiny house lots, and disposed in all of less than 3,000 acres of lands' It seems ironical that New England colonists who saw themselves as charged with an `errand into the wilderness' should so resolutely have turned their backs upon it.
The determination of the Spaniards to range far and wide through American space, in spite of the vast distances and terrible hardships involved, can be attributed partly to their ambitions and expectations, and partly to long-established Iberian traditions. Unlike the English, they soon became aware that just over the horizon were to be found large polities and densely settled lands. There was early evidence, too, of the existence of deposits of gold and silver, for which the settlers of Jamestown were to hunt in vain. Hunger for riches and lordship and a restless ambition for fame lured conquistadores like Hernando de Soto, in his epic journey through the American South between 1539 and 1542, deep into the interior in ways that few Englishmen after Sir Walter Raleigh were willing to emulate. `Why', asked Captain John Smith, `should English men despair and not do so much as any? ... Seeing honour is our lives ambition, and our ambition after death, to have an honourable memory of our life . .. '52 But appeals to honour seem to have fallen on deaf ears among English settlers who saw all around them apparently vacant land awaiting occupation. In particular, New Englanders, according to William Wood writing in 1634, were `well contented and look not so much at abundance as at competency'.53 `Competency' as an ideal left little room for glory.
'Competency'- the willingness to settle for a life-style that brought sufficiency rather than riches - was an aspiration that was not confined to English, or some English, colonists. Letters exchanged between sixteenth-century Spanish settlers in the Indies and their relatives back home suggest that the relatively modest ambition of pasar mejor - becoming better off - was seen by Spaniards as a good enough reason for risking the hazards of a transatlantic crossing, just as it was by their English equivalents. `This is a good land for those who want to he virtuous, hard-working and well-respected', wrote a settler in Mexico in 1586 about the prospects that awaited a young man thinking of emigrating from Spain.54 But the presence in Spanish-occupied lands of precious metals and a docile labour force served to perpetuate in the Hispanic world conceptions of wealth in terms of booty and lordship that were instinctive to those nurtured in the traditions created by the prolonged medieval movement of the Reconquista against Islamic Spain.-51 For new arrivals in the Spanish Indies, the ever-present possibility of a sudden bonanza served as a continuing inducement to move on.
The corollary of this was that Spanish settlers, or at least first-generation Spanish settlers, would set much less value on land as a desirable commodity in itself than the settlers of seventeenth-century English America. It was vassals, rather than land, that they wanted, and it would have been neither desirable nor practicable to clear of their indigenous inhabitants such densely settled lands as those of central Mexico.56 Those Spaniards who commanded the services of tribute-paying Indians could look forward to enjoying a seigneurial income and life-style without the trouble of developing large estates, for which in any event there were few market outlets until the immigrant population became large enough to generate new wants. Consequently, the subjugation of those regions most densely settled by the indigenous population was the immediate priority for the conquistadores and first settlers
from Spain, since these were the regions that offered the best hope of lordship over vassals, and hence the easy route to riches.
The Spanish settlement of America was therefore based on the domination of peoples, and this involved taking possession of vast areas of territory. In the nature of things, such areas could only be thinly settled by the colonists, and it was natural that, if only for purposes of self-protection, they should band together in towns. But the early predisposition of Spanish colonial society in the Indies to assume an urban form can also be traced back to established practice and collective attitudes. When Ferdinand and Isabella despatched Nicolas de Ovando to Hispaniola in 1501 to restore order to a colony that had descended into anarchy, they instructed him to establish cities at appropriate locations on the islands? This would help to provide rootless colonists with a fixed point and focus. A policy of urbanization in the Indies was consonant, too, with the practices developed during the Reconquista in medieval Spain, where the southward movement of the Castilians was based on cities and towns which were granted jurisdiction by the crown over large areas of hinterland.
Spaniards in any event shared the Mediterranean predisposition towards urban life, and it was not by accident that Cortes's compact for civil government when landing in Mexico, unlike the civil compact of the Mayflower Pilgrims, assumed from the outset an urban form. The ideal of the city as a perfect community was deeply rooted in the Hispanic tradition, and for human beings to live far away from society was regarded as contrary to nature. Following the Roman tradition, too, cities were seen as visible evidence of imperium, and memories of the Roman Empire were never far away from the minds of Spanish captains and bureaucrats.
In the Antilles, to their amazement, the Spaniards encountered for the first time peoples who did not live in cities," but as soon as they reached mainland America they found themselves on more familiar ground. Here once more was an urban world with some resemblances to their own. The great pre-Columbian cities - Tlaxcala, Tenochtitlan, Cuzco - reminded them initially of Spanish and European cities, like Venice or Granada, and provided further evidence that they were now in a world that boasted a higher level of civilization than that of the Antilles. Cortes wrote of Tenochtitlan: `The city is as big as Seville or Cordoba ... There is also one square twice as big as that of Salamanca.'S9 No English settler on the thinly settled North American seaboard would have been able to draw such parallels between Indian centres of population and Norwich or Bristol. No doubt on closer inspection the resemblances between the European city and these Indian cities or ceremonial complexes of Mesoamerica and the Andes proved to be not quite as great as the conquistadores assumed in the first flush of enthusiasm. But the very existence of large Indian population centres on the American mainland confirmed Spanish preconceptions about the relationship between cities and civilized living, and offered an additional inducement to the construction in Spain's new American possessions of an essentially urban civilization.60
The town, indeed, was to become the basis for Spanish dominion in America. Occasionally it might be a pre-Columbian town, remodelled to conform to Spanish styles of living, as happened with Cuzco or with the Mexico City that arose from the ruins of Tenochtitlan. Usually it was a new foundation. But either way it offered the Indians clear evidence of the determination of the conquerors to put down roots and stay, just as it also offered clear evidence to the conquerors themselves that the crown wanted them to abandon their restless ways and establish a stable society, in accordance with metropolitan norms. It is enough to look at the ordinances for the `good government' of New Spain, issued by Hernan Cortes in 1524, to see how the earlier experience of anarchy in the Antilles had etched itself into the consciousness of those responsible for the establishment and preservation of Spanish dominion in the Indies. The ordinances insist that the conversion of the Indians made it essential that the Spaniards should stay put, and not `every day be thinking of leaving, or returning to Spain, which would destroy these lands and their inhabitants, as experience in the islands settled up to now has shown'. To achieve this, all those who possessed Indians were to promise to stay put for the next eight years; the married men among them were to bring their wives over from Castile within a year and a half, while the remainder were to marry their mistresses within the same period; and Indian-holding inhabitants of all the cities and towns of New Spain were to establish households in the towns to which they belonged.61
The town was therefore to provide the setting for the stable family life without which effective long-term colonization was regarded as impossible. It was also to act as the essential agency for the distribution, settlement and control of the land. Cortes himself, on first arriving in Hispaniola from his native Extremadura, was told by Governor Ovando's secretary that he should `register as a citizen, by which he would acquire a caballeria, that is, a building lot and certain lands for cultivation'.62 This was standard practice - the allocation of a building lot, along with an additional grant of land, with free possession,63 on the outskirts of the town. Following the system established by Ovando in Hispaniola in 1503, which itself drew on practices developed in metropolitan Spain during the Reconquista, the leading citizens of the towns of mainland America were also assigned Indians in repartimiento or encomienda.
Over large parts of Spanish America the encomienda became the chosen instrument for satisfying the demand of the conquerors for a share of the spoils, in the form of Indian tribute and services, and at the same time for discouraging them from laying waste the land and moving on in search of more plunder. In arranging for the deposito or repartimiento of Indians among his restless followers, Cortes took the first steps in mainland America towards the establishment of what was to become the fully fledged encomienda system.64 He assigned encomiendas to 300 of his men - about 40 per cent of the survivors of the army that captured Tenochtitlan, and about 6 per cent of the total European population of the Indies at that time.65 Pizarro followed suit in 1532 when he made the first depositos of Peruvian Indians among his companions in San Miguel de Piura, before leaving for his encounter with Atahualpa in Cajamarca. The accompanying documents, which made it clear that these grants of Indians constituted rewards for services, specified what were to be the essential characteristics of the encomienda in its initial stages - the obligation of the Indians to perform labour services for those who held them in deposit, and the obligation of the depositories to instruct their Indians in the Christian faith, and to treat them well.66
The crown subsequently ratified the grants made by Pizarro, as it had previously ratified those made by Cortes, and by the 1540s there were some 600 encomenderos in the viceroyalty of New Spain, and 500 in Peru.67 This suggests that a New World feudal aristocracy was already in the making, but the encomienda would evolve in ways which were to disappoint the high hopes of the conquistadores. Deeply concerned by the maltreatment and brutal exploitation of their Indians by many of the encomenderos, and then by the horrifying decline in the size of the Indian population, the crown sought, with varying degrees of success, to transform the heavy labour services of encomienda Indians into the payment of tribute. In its determination to prevent the rise of a European-style aristocracy, the crown also struggled to prevent the automatic perpetuation of encomiendas through family inheritance. Although rebellion by the settlers in Peru and widespread opposition in New Spain forced it to revoke the notorious clause in the New Laws of 1542 by which all encomiendas were to revert to the crown on the death of the current holder, the transmission of the encomienda from one generation to another was never to become automatic. The crown remained the master.68
Above all, the encomienda remained what it had always been - a grant of Indians, not of land. When land was abandoned by the Indians, it reverted to the crown, and not to the encomendero to whom the Indians had been assigned.69 But although in principle the encomienda had nothing to do with land-ownership, encomenderos and their families were well positioned to take advantage of expanding opportunities as colonial
societies developed and the urban population increased. Obliged by law to live in towns and cities, and not in the areas where they held their encomiendas, the encomenderos were precluded from becoming a European territorial aristocracy living on their estates.
In spite of these constraints, their privileged status, their social influence, and the income provided by their encomiendas would enable the shrewder among them to purchase large tracts of land which their heirs would one day develop for stock raising or cereal production to minister to the needs of rapidly expanding towns. In accordance with metropolitan usage, however, there remained strict limitations on land-ownership in Spain's American possessions. The possession of land was conditional on its occupation or use, although, in accordance with Castilian law, the subsoil remained the inalienable possession of the crown;70 property-owners could set up boundary markers, but were not allowed to fence off their estates - in contrast to British America, where fences were visible symbols that land had been 'improved';71 shepherds and others were allowed free passage across private estates; and woods and water remained in common ownership.72
The outcome of the process by which encomenderos and other privileged and wealthy settlers could acquire landed property would be the emergence of what was to be the classic Spanish American model of a colonial society built on the twin foundations of the city and the rural estate, the estancia or hacienda, which varied considerably in size and function according to local circumstances. In some areas, like the Oaxaca region of Mexico, there were medium or small-sized rural holdings, although the development of the mayorazgo or entail system, transmitting property as an inalienable inheritance to a single heir, gave an impulse to the long-term concentration of smaller holdings into large estates.73 But the city remained central to the enterprise, with 246, or nearly half, of the encomenderos of New Spain registered as householders, or vecinos, of the new Mexico City. The remainder became householders in newly created towns which sprang up in the wake of the conquest.74 In response to the legal requirement that encomenderos and others should also be vecinos, there was a rush to found and build such new towns in the first post-conquest decades in New Spain and Peru. By 1580 there were some 225 towns and cities in the Spanish Indies, with a total Hispanic population of perhaps 150,000, at a low estimate of six to a household.75 By 1630 the number had increased to 331,76 and many more were to be founded in the eighteenth century.
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