Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

by John H. Elliott

  This notion that those who settled in the Indies ran the risk of degeneration was not confined to the Spanish world. Cotton Mather, in the annual election sermon of 1689 which he preached on the occasion of the opening of the Massachusetts General Court, spoke ominously of `the too general want of education in the rising generation, which if not prevented will gradually but speedily dispose us to that sort of Criolian degeneracy observed to deprave the children of the most noble and worthy Europeans when transplanted into America'.66 Such fears had dogged English settlers since the early days of their migration to a New World environment for which John Winthrop and others claimed an essentially English character, in spite of the climatic evidence to the contrary.67 `For the country itself,' he wrote to his son, `I can discern little difference between it and our own ...'68 But the growing realization that New England was not old England, just as New Spain was not old Spain, opened up the disturbing possibility of Mather's `Criolian degeneracy'.69

  If settlers did indeed degenerate in their new transatlantic environment, one plausible explanation was their proximity to the Indians. The fear of cultural degeneration through osmosis was one that had haunted the English in their dealings with the Irish, and they carried it with them in their cultural baggage when they crossed the Atlantic.70 Spanish settlers who had consorted with Indians and grown used to Indian ways seem to have been less exercised by this fear than their English counterparts, but their unwillingness to protect themselves from contaminating Indian influences made them vulnerable to disparaging comments from officials and clerics who had recently come from Spain and did not like what they saw. Criticism was levelled in particular at the employment of Indian nurses and wet-nurses in creole households, not only because, in conditions of such intimacy, these women were likely to instil Indian habits into their creole charges, but also because - on the assumption that a child will `extract the inclinations which it imbibed with the milk' - its `inclinations' would naturally be perverse if the milk was Indian.71 With the creole elite already living a life of idleness and luxury, what hope was there that their children, and in due course their grandchildren, would escape the corrupting consequences of such perverse inclinations?

  Above all, however, it was the climate and the constellations that were held responsible for the perceived failings of the creoles. Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a sympathetic observer of the Indian scene, declared that he was not surprised by the blemishes in the character of the Indians of New Spain, `because the Spaniards who live in this land, and much more those born in it, acquire these evil inclinations. Those who, very like Indians, are born there, resemble Spaniards in appearance, but not in their nature and qualities, while native Spaniards, if they do not take great care, become different people within a few years of their arrival in these regions. I ascribe this to the climate or the constellations of this land.'72

  This climatic determinism, a legacy of the classical world of Hippocrates and Galen, and given a fresh impetus in sixteenth-century Europe by the writings of Bodin, was to cast a long shadow over European settlers in America and their descendants.73 It implied that they were doomed to Mather's `Criolian degeneracy', a tendency to descend to the level of the Indians in their manners and morals. This assumed process of creeping Indianization was capable not only of arousing deep anxieties among settlers, but also of creating unflattering stereotypes in the minds of European visitors and observers. A Quito-born creole bishop, Gaspar de Villarroel, who spent nearly ten years in Madrid, wrote in 1661 of his indignation when a Spaniard expressed surprise that an americano should be `as white, and well-formed, as a Spaniard, and speak Castilian just as well'.74

  All such stereotypes took as their starting-point the fact, or the assumption, of difference, a difference that was cultural rather than racial, although there was some suspicion that the American environment might in due course lead also to actual physical differentiation. There was anxious debate, for instance, as to whether the descendants of Spaniards who had settled in the Indies would eventually acquire hairless bodies, like those of the Indians.71 It was in response to such concerns about the impact of environment on physique as well as temperament that seventeenth-century creole writers in Spanish America began to develop racialist theories about the Indians, in an effort to differentiate the descendants of the conquerors and settlers from the indigenous population whose environment they shared. It was `nature', not environment, that made Indians what they were; and it was nature that would prevent the environment from turning American-born Spaniards into Indians.76

  English settlers, for their part, were keen to deny that the American climate had any adverse impact on their physique, and claimed that English bodies positively flourished in a New World environment, unlike those of the indigenous inhabitants who were dying of disease in their thousands. As Cotton Mather's remarks on `Criolian degeneracy' indicate, however, they were less confident when it came to the cultural consequences of living in America.77 The fear of being tarnished by the slur of cultural degeneration made it important to draw sharp distinctions between themselves and the indigenous population. English colonists seem for a long time to have been reluctant to apply to themselves the epithet American, perhaps because, at least for the Founding Fathers of New England, the `Americans' were the Indians. It is not clear whether the same holds true for Spanish America. Bishop Villarroel, using the word americano in 1661, immediately adds the confusing gloss, `that is, Indian' (indio), although he is clearly referring to creoles. The word americano does not appear in the Spanish Dictionary of Authorities, published in 1726, which suggests the infrequency of its use at that date. As in British America, the association of American with Indian may well have made the word problematic. In spite of occasional use from the later seventeenth century onward, it would only be in the second half of the eighteenth century that the creole inhabitants of both British and Spanish America began to sport American as a badge of pride .71

  The attempts by the creoles to disassociate themselves in the minds of their Old World cousins from the non-European inhabitants of America failed to have the desired effect. They were unable to eradicate the perception of difference - a perception that to some extent accorded with reality. It was not simply the presence of indigenous or African populations which made the difference, although this certainly counted for much. As colonial societies were consolidated, they developed their own special characteristics, which began to mark them out in significant ways from the parent society. When, as in the Chesapeake region in the early eighteenth century, immigration from the mother country tapered off and those born on the American side of the ocean came to constitute the majority of the white population, memories of how life was lived in the homeland inevitably grew fainter, and new generations slipped naturally into the patterns of life developed by their parents and grandparents as they adapted to New World conditions.79

  Self-interest, however, might well exaggerate allegations of difference in ways prejudicial to settler societies. In seventeenth-century Spanish America there was fierce competition for administrative and ecclesiastical posts between native sons and new arrivals from Spain, and it was to the obvious advantage of the newcomers to harp on the inadequacies of the creoles with whom they were competing. Even if recurrent intermarriage between Spaniards and creoles took the edge off some of the rivalry by uniting peninsulares and old-established settler families in a nexus of interests,80 there is widespread evidence of bitter hostility. Commenting on the tendency of creole women to prefer as husbands poor Spaniards to rich creoles, a Neapolitan traveller who visited Mexico City in 1697 claimed - no doubt with more than a touch of Mediterranean hyperbole - that antipathy had reached a point where the creoles `hate their own parents because they are Europeans'.81

  With many fewer administrative posts in the gift of the British than the Spanish crown, one major cause of friction in the relationship between newcomers and colonists was correspondingly reduced in the British Atlantic world, although it was by no m
eans eliminated. Settlers in the Caribbean islands and on the American mainland had constantly to struggle against charges of difference similar to those levelled by the Spaniards against their creole cousins. Disparagement began with slurs on their origins. `Virginia and Barbados', wrote Sir Josiah Child, `were first peopled by a Sort of loose vagrant People, vicious and destitute of Means to live at Home ... and these I say were such as, had there been no English foreign Plantation in the World, could probably never have lived at home to do service for this Country, but must have come to be hanged, or starved, or died untimely of some of those miserable Diseases, that proceed from Want and Vice ... '82

  Early negative images were compounded by scandalous reports of the life-style of the settlers. By the early eighteenth century the planters in the Caribbean islands had become a byword for extravagance and debauchery:

  Nor did the more sober New Englanders escape disparagement. `Eating, Drinking, Smoking and Sleeping', wrote Ned Ward in 1699, `take up four parts in five of their Time; and you may divide the remainder into Religious Exercise, Day Labour, and Evacuation. Four meals a Day, and a good Knap after Dinner, being the Custom of the Country ... One Husband-man in England, will do more Labour in a Day, than a New-England Planter will be at the pains to do in a Week: For to every Hour he spends in his Grounds, he will be two at an Ordinary [i.e. tavern].'84

  Such slurs left the more sensitive settlers with deeply ambivalent feelings. While rejecting the criticisms as coming from malevolent or ill-informed outsiders, they simultaneously worried that they might perhaps be true. This led either to excessively strident rebuttals, or to the kind of defensiveness displayed by the historian of Virginia, Robert Beverley, when he sought to forestall criticisms of his prose style by explaining to the reader in his preface: `I am an Indian, and don't pretend to be exact in my Language ...'85 The very charge of `Indianization' - the charge that British settlers of the mainland feared most of all - was thus self-deprecatingly turned into a weapon of defence.

  The first line of defence among the creoles, whether English or Spanish, was to emphasize their inherent Englishness or Spanishness, qualities which neither distance, climate nor proximity to inferior peoples were capable of erasing. Ignoring the juridical inconvenience that the Indies were conquests of the Crown of Castile, the creole inhabitants of the kingdoms of New Spain or Peru claimed comparable rights to those enjoyed by the king's subjects in his kingdoms of Castile or Aragon. Faced with new levies and imposts, they would have had no difficulty in identifying with the Barbadian planter in 1689 who complained that Barbadians were being `commanded as subjects and ... crusht as Aliens'.86 Any imputation that they were in some sense alien was deeply offensive to those who regarded themselves as entitled by birth to the status and rights of metropolitan-born subjects of the crown.

  Insinuations of inferiority were particularly offensive to those creoles who claimed legitimate descent from the original conquerors of Spanish America. As the conquest itself receded into the distance, and the descendants of the conquistadores found that newcomers were preferred before them in appointments to offices, they grew increasingly embittered. `We are Spaniards - somos espanoles', wrote Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza in the early seventeenth century, as he lovingly recorded the names of the conquistadores and their descendants, and claimed that, since he and his like belonged to the `harvest and government' of Spain, they should be governed by its laws and customs.87 Because of the heroic achievements of their fathers and grandfathers, such men should be honoured and rewarded, not rejected and excluded. Yet their petitions and complaints were ignored.

  Although officers of Cromwell's expeditionary force who remained on the island as planters liked to refer to themselves as `the conquerors of Jamaica',88 British America, unlike Spanish America, could claim no conquering elite. But this did not prevent the emerging class of Virginia planters from seeking to establish their claims to gentility on the model of the English gentry, just as the descendants of the conquistadores sought to model their own life-styles on the real or imagined life-styles of Castilian senores. When Virginian planters travelled to London they acquired coats of arms and had their portraits painted; and when they returned home to Virginia they built themselves handsome new brick houses, and displayed all the enthusiasm for horse-racing of their English counterparts.S9 Unlike Spanish settlers in the Indies, some of them, like William Byrd I, sent their sons back to the mother country for their education, although never on the scale of the West Indian planters, large numbers of whom chose an English education for their sons.90 The experience, at least as far as William Byrd II was concerned, seems to have led to a deep ambivalence. Never quite accepted by his fellow schoolboys at Felsted, he did his best to become the perfect English gentleman. Yet somehow his colonial origins thwarted all his efforts. Too colonial to be entirely at ease in England, and for a long time too English to be entirely at ease in his native Virginia, he was caught between two worlds without truly belonging to either.9'

  The sense of exclusion, experienced to a greater or lesser degree by Byrd and his fellow colonials who visited the mother country or came into contact with unsympathetic representatives of the crown, was especially painful because it implied second-class status in a transatlantic polity of which they believed themselves to be fully paid-up members. Just as Dorantes de Carranza complained in 1604 that the descendants of the conquistadores were not enjoying the equal treatment with native-born Castilians to which they were entitled by the laws of Castile, so, exactly 100 years later, Robert Beverley complained on behalf of Virginia's House of Burgesses that `it's laid as a crime to them that they think themselves entitled to the liberties of Englishmen.'92 The rights of Castilians and the liberties of Englishmen were being denied them by their own kith and kin.

  Yet even as they demanded full recognition of those rights, not least as evidence of a shared identity with their metropolitan cousins, they could not shake off the uneasy suspicion that the community of identity was perhaps less complete than they would have wished. The revealing comment of a sixteenth-century Spanish immigrant to the Indies suggests that some of them at least were conscious of a difference in themselves. In a letter to a cousin in Spain he wrote that, on returning home, he would not be what he had previously been, `because I shall return so different (tan otro) from what I was, that those who knew me will say that I am not I ...'93 His comment was an unsolicited testimonial to the transforming power of the American environment, for good or for ill.

  Since metropolitan observers seemed in little doubt that the transformation was for ill, it was natural that the creoles, even as they proclaimed their identity with their Old World kith and kin, should seek to counter charges of inevitable degeneracy by loudly singing the praises of their New World environment. In the American viceroyalties a succession of writers sought to depict their American homeland as an earthly paradise, producing the fruits of the earth in abundance, and climatically benign. New Spain and the kingdoms of Peru, wrote Fray Buenaventura de Salinas, `enjoy the mildest climate in the world'. It was a climate that ennobled the spirit and elevated the mind, and so it was not surprising that those who lived in Lima should do so `with satisfaction and pleasure, and look upon it as their patria'.94 The pride of place - a place uniquely blessed by God - was to be the cornerstone of the increasingly elaborate edifice of creole patriotism.95

  During the seventeenth century the creoles of New Spain began to develop a strong sense of the location of their own distinctive space in both the geographical and the providential ordering of the universe. To the east lay the Old World of Europe and Africa. To the west lay the Philippines, that distant outpost of Hispanic and Christian civilization which formed an extension to the viceroyalty of New Spain, and served as a natural gateway to the fabled lands of the East. Their homeland, therefore, was situated at the centre of the world.96 Historically, too, as well as geographically, they bridged the different worlds. Had not the apostle Saint Thomas, coming from Jerusalem, preached
the gospel in the Indies as well as in India, and might not Saint Thomas be identified with Quetzalcoatl, the bearded god-hero of the ancient inhabitants of central Mexico, as the great Mexican savant Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora affirmed?97 Even if the identification was disputed, there was no doubt in creole minds that their patria enjoyed a providential status. Following the publication in 1648 of a treatise by Miguel Sanchez recounting the miraculous origins of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her cult acquired a wide following among the creole population of New Spain. The Virgin, it seemed, had graciously cast her protective mantle over their beloved patria (fig. 21).98

  The increasingly regionalized American patrias of the creoles came to be located not only in space, but also in time. The conquest and conversion of the Indies were decisive and heroic achievements, worthy of eternal remembrance. But while they marked a decisive new beginning, it was not a beginning ex nihilo. The presence of such large numbers of Indians, and the survival in Mexico and the Andes of so many relics of the Indian past, drew attention to a more distant, if largely barbarous, antiquity. It clearly suited the self-image of the conquistadores as a warrior caste to dwell on the heroic qualities of the peoples they had vanquished.99 With the Indians safely defeated, the way was open, at least in New Spain, to idealize certain aspects of the pre-Columbian civilization that Cortes had overthrown.