Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The difficulties faced by the empire in expanding significantly into North America were illustrated by the case of New Mexico. In 1595 Juan de Oñate, son of one of the wealthiest citizens of New Spain, presented to the viceroy a proposal to settle the northern limits of the Spanish frontier, in the area of the Rio Grande known since the 1580s as New Mexico, over one thousand miles beyond the recognized area of Spanish settlement. Apart from an undertaking to go with two hundred men, he promised to take a thousand head of cattle and a similar number of sheep, as well as a large quantity of other animals and supplies.26 The Crown would supply priests and artillery, and granted him the title of governor and adelantado. Typical delays and disputes stopped any action on the proposal until January 1598, when the expedition finally left. Though there were fewer Spaniards than expected, it was still a considerable enterprise, with eighty-three wagons and seven thousand head of animals. In late April, at a site to the south of the Rio Grande and of the subsequent fort of El Paso, the adelantado took part in a formal ceremony in which he laid claim to New Mexico. His small group – barely a hundred and thirty men, including eight Franciscans – had naive ambitions of acquiring ‘new worlds, greater than New Spain’, and of reaching both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. In the summer and fall Oñate led his group round the country of the Pueblo Indians, accepting the ‘obedience’ of the chiefs and their villages. The nature of this ‘obedience’ sheds, as we shall see, interesting light on the misunderstandings that always underlay Spanish pretensions to imperial authority.

  There were problems at the village of Acoma, a small settlement situated on the roof of a sandstone mesa nearly four hundred feet above the surrounding desert. Virtually inaccessible from the bottom of the cliffs surrounding it, Acoma was a natural stronghold. A small group of thirty-two men from Oñate's expedition reached the area in December 1598, whereupon the Acomas guided them to the top of the mesa and supplied them with water and food. When the soldiers became too insistent, some of the villagers refused further supplies and attacked the Spaniards, killing a dozen of them. On receiving the news Oñate consulted his advisers, who agreed that ‘if these Indians were not punished, they could destroy us easily’.27 A task force of seventy soldiers was sent against Acoma in January. In a brilliant operation, the Spaniards scaled the cliffs at an uninhabited point of the mesa, and lifted two small cannon with them. The next day the soldiers attacked, with devastating results. They killed some five hundred men and three hundred women and children, and enslaved about five hundred survivors, condemning adult males among them to have a foot severed.28 No Spaniards died in the action. Surviving children were taken from their parents and put in the care of missionaries for the ‘salvation of their souls’. Little was gained by the brutality, nor could any territory be occupied.

  Oñate was persistent, and despite failures he repeatedly invested in further expeditions from his isolated base in San Gabriel. In October 1604 he led a group of three dozen Spaniards westward through Hopi country; they managed in 1605 to descend the River Colorado and locate its entry into the Gulf of California. These were the years when Vizcaíno had been mapping the California coastline from the sea. On Oñate's return to Mexico City the viceroy refused to sanction further expeditions by him into what he termed a ‘worthless land’. There was nothing there, the viceroy said, but ‘naked people, false bits of coral and four pebbles’.29 Though there was strong pressure to abandon New Mexico, in 1608 the crown decided to back its existence because of the conversions that the Franciscans reported making in the province. In 1609 the capital of the province was re-located from San Gabriel to Santa Fe. In reality the whole idea of New Mexico had been a mistake, an over-optimistic extension of the frontier. It continued to exist almost exclusively because of the missions. Oñate returned to Spain in 1621, all his schemes in ruins. The Spanish presence on the northern frontier remained extremely small. In 1630 Santa Fe had no more than 250 Spaniards in it; the rest of the population consisted of Indians and people of mixed race. In 1660 the tiny settlement at El Paso, further south on the Rio Grande, also began to expand. In this almost empty frontier region, the few settlers survived by relying on the labour of Pueblo Indians.

  The Pueblo were a notably peaceful group, with a tradition of hospitality towards outsiders. The establishment and expansion of Spanish settlements was made possible by the normally friendly reception accorded to the newcomers. The Spanish response to this welcome took a curious form that had not changed since the days when Cortés had confronted Montezuma. The Spaniards interpreted the act of hospitality as an act of homage. The reports made by Oñate on his journey through the Rio Grande area in 1599 leave no doubt about this. In one village of five hundred houses ‘the Indians received him very well with maize, water and turkeys, and rendered obedience to His Majesty’. The Zuñi villages ‘received us very well with maize, tortillas, beans and quantities of rabbits and hares. They are a very amiable people and all rendered obedience to His Majesty.’ Further on, the tribes ‘came out to receive us with tortillas, scattering fine flour upon us and upon our horses as a token of peace and friendship, and all those provinces, which are four pueblos, rendered obedience to His Majesty and treated us very well’.30 The frontier limits of the Spanish empire in North America were in this way defined in the minds of the Spaniards, by the limits of hospitality. The possibility of ‘conquest’ did not arise, for there were never adequate Spanish men or weapons and in any case it would have been impossible to hold on to areas that had been occupied exclusively by force. The frontier became defined, as events would prove, not by the capacity of the Spaniards but by the goodwill of the Indians.

  Oñate capitalized on the friendly reception he received everywhere, and used it as the basis for exacting submission. The terms on which the Indians gave their ‘allegiance’ were transmitted through the medium of two Mexican interpreters accompanying Oñate. One interpreter translated what the Pueblo leaders said into Nahuatl, the other translated from Nahuatl into Spanish.31 On the basis of this highly unreliable method of communication, the Pueblo villages unknown to themselves and quite involuntarily accepted the authority of the mighty Spanish empire.

  By the first decade of the seventeenth century, it appeared that Spanish efforts to extend their presence into the North American continent had met with little success. Immigrants from the mother country preferred to go to the well-established centres in continental South America. Though there was no territorial expansion the fragile settlements that still existed in New Mexico and Florida managed somehow to survive. For the next hundred and thirty years after Menéndez de Avilés, and until the founding in 1698 of Pensacola on the Gulf coast, St Augustine remained as the only significant Spanish settlement in all Florida. Its isolation was further testimony to the failure of Spain's enterprise on the northern frontier. In 1600 the fort had just over 500 residents, though the figure increased to around 1,400 in 1700, the peak of its population in Spain's colonial epoch. There was farming country around the fort, but little else was available to attract settlers, and Spaniards were reluctant to make their home there. The white males intermarried with local Timucuan women, and food supplies came from the neighbouring Indian community. Free contact between the communities thus converted the fort into North America's first ‘melting pot’ of races.32

  The Florida experience may have been one of the influences on perhaps the most important measure ever taken by Philip II in respect of the overseas empire: his Ordinance on Discovery and Population. The Ordinance, issued on 13 July 1573, reflected in some measure the aspirations of Las Casas, who had died seven years before but whose writings were used in framing its text.33 Fruit of lengthy deliberations that had begun at least five years earlier, it definitively banned further conquests in America, and emphasized the preaching of religion and the protection of the Indian as primary objectives. The aim was to stop further and fruitless expeditions and consolidate control over areas already settled. From now on, Spain recognized the ‘fron
tier’ as an objective in its American domains. The only people authorized to move the frontier forward were the missionaries, aided if necessary by small military escorts for their protection. At the same time, the native peoples in the area under Spanish control, those who were known as ‘peace Indians’ in contrast to hostile ‘war Indians’, were guaranteed certain legal rights and protection. The king was applying in the New World what he had already put into practice in the Old. After the Lepanto campaign of 1571 and subsequent truce agreements with the Turks, Philip opted for a defensive rather than an aggressive policy in the western Mediterranean.34 The Mediterranean frontier was to consist on one hand of a network of small defensive garrisons, on the other of peace agreements with local Muslim rulers in North Africa. A similar policy was meant to be applied in the New World.

  It is hardly necessary to say that the Ordinance had little effect on the practical situation of the American native. But its importance for other aspects of the emergent empire was fundamental. The papacy refused to give formal approval to a law that ignored its claim to be able to grant away territories. Philip II in retaliation took directly under his control the supreme authority over the Church in America, using as his excuse the Patronato. He had already used this authority when granting formal permission in 1568 for the Jesuits to begin work in the New World. The ‘frontier’ in America now became a reality. The law also took over all mining enterprises for the crown. The king began at the same time to send out questionnaires, both in Castile and in America, calling for information on the geography, culture and economy of the regions he ruled. In Castile a pilot questionnaire was first sent out in 1574, and a list of questions went to all the towns in 1575. In 1576 (see Chapter 4 above) a detailed list of forty-nine questions was sent to all officials in America. Without adequate laws and information, government of the empire would not have been possible, and Philip wished to be kept informed.

  Like most laws that preceded and followed it, the 1573 Ordinance erred on the side of optimism and did not always bear in mind what happened in the real world. The ‘frontier’ was an ill-defined area, both geographically and politically, in which an alien Spanish culture attempted to come to terms with an indigenous culture that showed remarkable resilience in dealing with the invaders.35 In practice, the Spaniards made a significant impact in a few frontier areas of North and South America but failed to establish themselves securely everywhere. The cases of St Augustine and Santa Fe exemplify the distance, loneliness and fragility of the outer fringes of the empire. Spanish settlements usually had only marginal contact with their dispersed Indian neighbours and only sporadic links with their own people. The entire area surrounding the Spanish settlement at Santa Fe remained unpenetrated by Spaniards for nearly one hundred years.

  Part of the problem lay in the limited resources available to the representatives of royal government. The difficult frontier of Chile, for example, could not be defended by only the settlers, who resented the heavy costs incurred by the Araucanian wars. Royal government in the shape of the viceroy therefore had to assume the burden. Philip II's Ordinance had stated expressly that defence was a direct obligation of the settlers only, but he had to make an exception for Chile, where it was calculated that up to 1594 the crown had spent over four million pesos on the war.36 By the early seventeenth century, Chile became an exceptional case where the crown was in effect maintaining at its own expense a standing army (around two thousand men) to defend the frontier against the natives.37 In New Spain, tax revenue had to be spent on coastal defences and the Caribbean, leaving little available for expeditions and exploration. As viceroys of the early seventeenth century repeatedly observed, apart from the defences in existence at the ports of San Juan de Ulúa and Acapulco, there were no arms or soldiers to defend New Spain against a possible attack from the sea by foreigners. In this fragile situation, as the acting viceroy bishop Juan de Palafox reported to the crown in 1642, it was advisable to make no moves to expand northwards: ‘with the Indians who live next to the peace Indians, for the moment it is better to leave them alone, not provoke them, and keep up discreet contacts’.38

  In effect, only the native Indian could maintain the frontier. The ‘peace Indians’ became the principal line of defence against the so-called ‘war Indians’. There was not enough Spanish manpower available for colonization or for military advance, but that did not threaten Spanish control. The viceroy of New Spain, Velasco, explained to the crown in October 1590 that in the absence of Spanish soldiers he could turn to the ‘peace Indians’ and use their services against hostile tribes.39 The ‘peace Indians’ in their turn needed the occasional help of Spanish colonists for supplies of food, particularly maize and beef. This fruitful relationship seemed to benefit both sides and, above all, guaranteed the continuation of the Spanish presence.

  No sooner had Spaniards begun to settle in the Caribbean than other European ships also appeared in the area. There are records of French traders on the coasts of Brazil as early as 1503. In official eyes the vessels were illegal pirates and could be dealt with out of hand. The Europeans did not recognize the sweeping Spanish claims to New World territory, and felt that they were equally entitled to take part in trade. Most important of all, they were frequently supported by their governments, which considered their acts to be not piracy but legitimate commercial competition, an expression of the rivalry between European states for control of overseas trade and territory. The European traders inevitably differed among themselves about each other's rights to trade, so that they too came to consider rivals as pirates. The combination of trade and belligerency at sea had already existed in other parts of the world, including the Mediterranean and the Pacific. In the Caribbean, it presented a particularly grave threat to the security of the nascent Spanish empire.

  The authorities applied the term ‘pirate’ to all illegal shipping, but there were in reality many categories of pirate. Some were privateers (in possession of a licence from their governments), some were interlopers (contraband traders), and by the seventeenth century some were habitually based in American waters and were known as freebooters and buccaneers (the words were, respectively, of Dutch and French origin). There was often a world of difference between criminal pirates dedicated only to robbery, and illicit traders concerned only to make a profit, but the Spanish authorities saw little to separate the two. Foreign activity in the earlier decades tended to coincide with a war situation in Europe: the French were particularly active in the half century from 1500 to 1559, the English during the last decades of the sixteenth century, and the Dutch from the 1570s to 1648.

  The problem intensified with the epoch of religious wars in Europe after 1560. Non-Spaniards, whose primary motive was clearly trade or settlement, began to cite ideological reasons for their actions. John Hawkins, the notorious English trader, always took care to cite religious motives for his activities. The Spanish government adopted the same tactic and pinned the label heretic on all the foreign traders in the areas that it claimed to control. Though piracy was not therefore a new phenomenon, it took place after 1560 in a context that was particularly conflictive, because the interests of states as well as of religions inflated its significance. Spain's inability to patrol its imperial seas adequately was fully recognized by other European powers, which did not scruple to extend war situations into colonial waters. The most agitated months for naval activity in the Atlantic, and by extension in the Caribbean, were from March to July and from August to November, periods that lay outside the stormy season and allowed reasonable security to trading vessels but also enabled predators to act. For safety reasons but above all to control illicit commerce, the Spanish government officially limited trade to specific ports on either side of the Atlantic, normally Seville in Spain and a range of ports in the Caribbean.

  A French vessel carried out the first recorded pirate attack in the Caribbean in 1536, on the north coast of Panama.40 In 1544 the French actually captured the town of Cartagena. By the 1550s the most
notorious of the French captains in the Caribbean was François Le Clerc, known as ‘Peg-leg’, who in 1554 occupied for a month and left in ruins the town of Santiago de Cuba. Another, the Huguenot Sores, captured Havana the following year, destroyed it and massacred his prisoners. A resident of Hispaniola reported in 1552 that ‘on top of our many problems there is an even bigger one, having as neighbours the French, who every day rob from us all we have. Six months ago they took over this region and burnt the village after looting it, and we were a month wandering through the wilds suffering hunger and illnesses.’41 ‘Along the whole coast of this island there is not a single village that has not been looted by the French’, an official of Santo Domingo reported in 1555.42 From this date there was a growing swarm of unauthorized vessels in the Atlantic and Caribbean, their activities based less on ‘piracy’ than on profits from trade. The most obvious example is John Hawkins, whose first voyages from England in 1562 and 1564 were an extension of his father's activity in the slave trade.

  Defence of the seas and of trading ships was not an obligation of the Spanish government. The bulk of trade on the Atlantic was private, and merchants often preferred to adopt their own methods of security. On the other hand, the government received income from taxing the trade and from its own import of precious metals; it therefore collaborated with defence measures, enforcing, for example, the rule that ships must sail together. From an early period it also dedicated a part of its income from America to defence costs, which rose regularly during the sixteenth century.43 So did the spate of attacks on ships and coastal towns. It was impossible to organize a naval squadron to patrol the seas, so defence measures over the next generation concentrated on building fortifications in coastal towns. Additionally, from 1562 the authorities in Seville enforced the rule that merchants' ships must sail together, in ‘convoy’. At the same time the crown helped to finance the construction at Bilbao of a dozen ships to form a new ‘armada’ to patrol the coasts both of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and to escort the convoys. Launched in 1568, the armada over the next dozen years played a valuable role44 but was obviously unable to guarantee security on both land and sea.