However awkwardly expressed, Smith's contrast between the indigenous peoples encountered by the Spaniards in central Mexico and those upon whose lives the English intruded in the Chesapeake, points to major differences in the character and outcome of the military confrontations that opened the way to imperial rule. The superiority of European military technology, with its weapons of steel and its gunpowder, gave the invaders a critical edge over peoples whose arms were limited to bows and arrows, slings and stones, axes, clubs and wooden swords, even when, as among the Mexica, these were made especially lethal by the addition of razor-sharp obsidian flakes.19 Firearms may have been slow and cumbersome, and gunpowder easily affected by humid conditions, but the slender steel blades of their Toledo swords gave the Spaniards a powerful advantage in close combat. Initially, too, their superiority was magnified by the psychological impact of the surprise created by guns and horses - `deer ... as tall as the roof', as the Mexica described them.20 But the surprise would wear off, and, as the dogged resistance of Tenochtitlan and Manco Inca's rebellion of 1536 would show, the indigenous opponents of the invaders soon learnt to evolve responses that reduced the impact of a European weaponry not always well adapted to American conditions.
Yet, as Smith hinted, the very fact that the Mexican `Salvages' were `a civilized people' was to play into the hands of the Spaniards. The imperial structures organized by the Mexica and the Incas, with their concentration of power at a central point, made them vulnerable to a European take-over in ways that the looser tribal groupings of Yucatan or North America were not. Seize the supreme figure of authority and the mechanisms of imperial power were thrown into disarray, as Cortes and Pizarro demonstrated. Once final victory was secured - thanks in large part to the assistance of peoples who had chafed at Mexica or Inca domination - it was relatively easy to revive the old lines of command and replace one set of masters with another. The Spaniards thus found themselves in a position of authority over vast populations, which were accustomed to paying tribute and to receiving orders from an imperial centre. The conquerors enjoyed the advantage, too, of having been victorious in battle, thus demonstrating the superiority of their own deity in a cosmic order in which the winners dictated the hierarchy of the gods. Faced, therefore, by peoples who either resigned themselves to defeat or regarded the Spanish victory as a liberation from Mexica or Inca repression, the conquerors were well placed to consolidate their domination over the heartlands of the empires they had won.
Nomadic peoples, on the other hand, presented the Europeans with military problems of a very different order. So too did the relatively loose groupings of tribes without permanently fixed points of settlement, like those that faced the Spaniards in other parts of central and southern America and the English to the north. It was not difficult to play off one tribe against another, but the very fluidity of tribal relationships meant that successes were liable to be temporary, as alliances shifted and tribes regrouped. Initial hopes of peaceful coexistence were all too easily blighted by European greed for land or gold, and by mutual misunderstandings between peoples who still had to take each other's measure. After conquering central Mexico, the Spaniards had high hopes of finding new riches far to the north - hopes that would fade with the failure of Coronado's expedition deep into the interior of North America in 1540-2. The passage of Coronado's men, like that of De Soto's expedition of 1539-43 into the North American south-east, was marked by armed clashes with the Zuni and other peoples on whose territories they encroached.2' Mutual incomprehension clouded attempts at dialogue, even in those regions where reports of the brutality of the Spaniards had not preceded their arrival.
If the North American interior was for a long time expendable for the Spaniards, north-western Mexico was not. Here, in the border areas between the sedentary peoples of central Mexico and the nomadic tribes of the north, Beltran Nuno de Guzman had savagely carved out a new kingdom, New Galicia, in the early 1530s. The behaviour of the Spaniards provoked an Indian uprising, the Mixton War of 1541-2, which shook the newly created viceroyalty of New Spain to its foundations. Once the revolt was suppressed, strategies had to be devised for incorporating these border peoples, and for defending the Spanish settlements that were beginning to spring up, as land was distributed to encomenderos and the friars began arriving. Problems of defence were compounded as the discovery of the first silver deposits at Zacatecas in 1546 precipitated a rush of miners and ranchers into lands populated by the nomadic Chichimeca peoples, who had never been subject to Mexica domination. In the following decades the protection of the mining towns and the Camino Real - the silver route which linked the mines of New Galicia to Mexico City - would become a high priority for successive viceroys.
Their attempts during the second half of the sixteenth century to deal with the Chichimeca problem vividly illustrate the difficulties that faced Spaniards and English alike on the fringes of empire.22 An obvious and immediate response was to build a string of forts - presidios as the Spaniards called them. In the same way, the colonists of Virginia would build Forts Royal, Charles and Henry in the aftermath of the `massacre' of 1644.23 But the garrisoning of forts had important implications for colonial life. Encomenderos had an obligation to provide for the defence of regions in which they held their encomiendas, and initially in New Galicia a few powerful encomenderos were responsible for the defence of the bor- derlands.24 But once presidios were built, they needed permanent garrisons, and this in turn pointed to the need for a professional soldiery. From the 1560s, when bands of Chichimec warriors began intensively raiding Spanish towns, a full-scale frontier war was under way, and this war brought into being the first bodies of paid professional soldiers in New Spain, initially most of them creoles.25 But payment imposed strains on the royal treasury in the viceroyalty that the crown was unwilling, or unable, to bear in full. This meant that war, wherever possible, had to be made to pay for itself, and the easiest method was to allow the frontier garrisons to sell their Chichimeca captives as slaves - legitimate treatment, under Europe's rules of `just war', for those who had failed, after due warning, to submit to the authority of the Spanish crown. But, as war was transformed into a lucrative business, so the inducement to bring it to a rapid end diminished. Along the north-western frontier of New Spain, as later on the southern frontiers of Chile in the war against the Araucanian Indians, self-financing warfare guaranteed its own prolongation.26
Given the perceived threat from the Indians among whom they had settled, English colonists, like Spanish colonists, promptly set about organizing themselves for defence, adapting to local needs and conditions the militia system they brought with them from England.27 The establishment of forts and frontier lines in Virginia pointed, as it did in New Spain, to the need to supplement the militia with paid professionals. But this demanded levels of taxation that the planters were reluctant to bear, and during Bacon's rebellion of 1675-6 the rebels sought to adopt the strategy pursued in New Spain and Chile of making war pay for itself by organizing plundering raids into Indian settlements.21
Although the militia system in Virginia seems to have been less effective than its counterpart in New England, where the presence of towns and villages made it possible to concentrate defence, the Chesapeake region had less need of it once the now almost centenarian Opechancanough was captured in 1646. The governor, William Berkeley, planned to send him to England, but the decrepit chief, dignified to the end, was shot in the back by a vengeful militiaman while languishing in gaol. With the acceptance by his successor of a treaty bringing the third Anglo-Powhatan War to an end, the English colony of Virginia effectively supplanted the Powhatan polity of Tsenacommacah. The Powhatans, who agreed to pay the English a tribute of twenty beaver skins a year, were excluded from their homeland between the York and James rivers, and allotted a reservation north of the York river instead. In the following decades, as new immigrants arrived, the English settlement expanded irresistibly, encroaching even on the Powhatan reservation. Although the c
olonists still found themselves frustratingly dependent on Powhatan and non-Powhatan middlemen in their attempts to trade for furs with the Tuscarooras and Cherokees, in general they had less need of the Indians as the colony became increasingly self-supporting. By contrast, the native Americans were growing steadily more dependent on the supply of European goods, and their dependence discouraged them from risking further confrontations.29
In New England the crushing defeat of the Pequots in the war of 1636-7 seems at first sight comparable in its impact to the defeat of the Powhatan in Virginia, but here, in contrast to the Chesapeake region, the increasing dominance of the settlers and their continuing encroachments on Indian territory led to major tribal realignments which built up formidable possibilities for future resistance. The consequences were felt throughout New England when the Wampanoag chief Metacom ('King Philip') and his allies launched a fierce assault in 1675, and the region was plunged into more than a year of bitter and bloody conflict, with many English settlements put to the torch.30
The variety of Indian responses to the European intrusion - the rapid collapse of the organized empires of the Incas and the Aztecs, the passivity of the Muisca Indians of the kingdom of New Granada, the prolonged resistance of the Chichimeca and the Araucanians, the exasperated bellicosity of the Powhatan and the Wampanoag - makes it clear that tribal traditions and culture were as important in determining the outcome of any confrontation as were the varieties of approach adopted by the Europeans themselves. In the numerous encounters of civilizations on the fringes of European settlement, a pervasive but varied and uneven process of mutual acculturation was under way. All too often in the first instance this involved acculturation to war. The indigenous peoples, at first terrified by European firearms, were soon craving for them, and there was always some settler or trader ready to oblige, like Thomas Morton of Merrymount in the Plymouth Plantation: `... first he taught them how to use them ... And having thus instructed them, he employed some of them to hunt and fowl for him, so as they became far more active in that employment than any of the English, by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body ... And here I may take occasion to bewail the mischief that this wicked man began in these parts ... So as the Indians are full of pieces all over, both fowling pieces, muskets, pistols etc.'3'
Transferring to America the legislation used in Granada against the Moors, the Spaniards from the earliest years of settlement prohibited the sale of weapons to the Indians and their holding of firearms - a policy which seems to have been successfully maintained, at least in the heartlands of empire. Nor were Indians allowed to carry swords or ride on horseback.32 The English also legislated against Indian ownership of firearms, but exceptions were made, and it proved impossible to prevent settlers like Morton trading in guns, especially in the border regions.33 Horses, too, were assimilated into the military culture of the indigenous peoples, notably the Araucanians and the Apaches, both of whom chose warfare as a way of life.34 Besides adjusting to European military technology, peoples who had often fought wars primarily to achieve some form of symbolic ascendancy now learnt to fight for land and possessions, just as they also learnt to fight for the purpose of killing. For their part, Europeans had to learn to adapt their fighting methods to meet native tactics of guerrilla warfare - the sudden ambushes, for instance, and the frightening attacks from out of the forests.35 Following the methods used with such success in the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, they also turned to Indians to help them in their wars against Indians, pitting one tribe against another, and building up networks of Indian allies. The Spaniards recruited Indian allies along the Chichimec frontier, winning over recently pacified tribes with gifts and privileges, such as exemptions from tribute and the granting of licences for the possession of horses and guns; the Virginians created a buffer zone of friendly Indians; the New Englanders depended on the Mohegans and other friendly tribes as auxiliaries in King Philip's War.36
The most effective of all allies, however, in the imposition of European supremacy was not human but biological - those Old World diseases which the invaders and settlers unwittingly brought with them to the New. Estimates of the total population of the Americas on the eve of the arrival of the first Europeans have varied wildly, from under 20 million to 80 million or more. Of these 20 to 80 million, the North American population constituted between 1 and 2 million in the assessment of minimalist demographic historians, and as many as 18 million in that of the maximalists.37 While the totals will always be a matter of debate, there is no dispute that the arrival of the Europeans brought demographic catastrophe in its train, with losses of around 90 per cent in the century or so following the first contact.38
The degree to which that catastrophe was the result of atrocities committed in the course of conquest and of the subsequent maltreatment and exploitation of the indigenous peoples by the new masters of the land was already a source of fierce discussion among Spanish observers in the age of conquest, and has remained so to this day. Bartolome de Las Casas's Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Seville in 1552, etched itself into the European consciousness as an unsparing record of the barbarous behaviour of his compatriots, and there were others, equally well informed, to second his words. `The Spaniards', wrote Alonso de Zorita, a judge of the Mexican Audiencia, in his `Brief Relation of the Lords of New Spain', `compelled them to give whatever they asked, and inflicted unheard-of cruelties and tortures upon them.'39 For others, however, the cruelty lay elsewhere. `It is my opinion and that of many who have had dealings with them', wrote Bernardo Vargas Machuca in a refutation of Las Casas, `that to paint cruelty in its full colours, there is no need to do more than portray an Indian.'40
In practice, there was no advantage to the Spaniards in killing off their tribute payers and labour supply, although this did not prevent many of them from flouting the laws introduced by the crown for the protection of the Indians, seizing them on unauthorized (and sometimes authorized) slaving raids which wrenched them out of their own environment, and exploiting them to the limits and beyond. But, as Zorita himself recognized, the Indians were dying out not only because of the `unheard-of cruelties and tortures' that he catalogued, but also because of the `plagues that have affected them', although he ascribed the susceptibility to disease of the Mexican Indians to the demoralization caused by hard labour and the disruption of traditional ways of life.41
There can be no doubting the psychological impact on the indigenous peoples of America of the trauma induced by the sudden destruction of their world. It was reflected, for instance, in the growth of drunkenness among them, a phenomenon noted in the areas of Spanish and English settlement alike.42 Their susceptibility to disease, however, was not simply the result, as Zorita believed, of the demoralization caused by conquest and exploitation. It was above all their previous isolation from Eurasian epidemics that made them so vulnerable to the diseases brought from Europe. These diseases afflicted not only peoples who suffered the trauma of conquest and colonization but also those whose contacts with Europeans were no more than sporadic, or else were mediated through several removes.
Forms of sickness that in Europe were not necessarily lethal brought devastating mortality rates to populations that had not built up the immunity that would enable them to resist. In Mesoamerica the smallpox which ravaged the Mexica defenders of Tenochtitlan in 1520-1 and killed Montezuma's successor, Cuitlahuac, after a few weeks of rule, was followed during the succeeding decades by waves of epidemics, many of them still difficult to identify with certainty: 1531-4, measles; 1545, typhus and pulmonary plague, an epidemic that struck on a horrendous scale; 1550, mumps; 1559-63, measles, influenza, mumps and diphtheria; 1576-80, typhus, smallpox, measles, mumps; 1595, measles. Comparable waves struck the peoples of the Andes, who were stricken by smallpox in the 1520s, well before Pizarro embarked on his conquest of Peru.43 Over the course of a century the decline in the size of the indigenous populations of Mexico and Peru appe
ars to have been of the order of 90 per cent, although there were significant regional and local variations. The highland regions of Peru, for instance, seem to have suffered less than lower-lying areas, and the impact of the epidemics was affected both by the degree of intensity of settlement by Europeans, and by the settlement patterns of indigenous populations, with dispersed settlements 44 being more likely to escape.
Just as the coming of European diseases preceded European settlement in the Andes, so death stalked the Atlantic coast of North America well before the arrival of the English in any large numbers. Already in the sixteenth century sporadic contacts with Europeans had unleashed major epidemics, as when the Spanish ship that was to carry away the young Indian `Don Luis de Velasco' entered the Chesapeake Bay in 1561.45 As the contacts multiplied, so did the sicknesses. There is evidence that the indigenous population of Virginia was in decline before the founding of Jamestown in 1607, and major epidemics are reported for 1612-13 and 1616-17 in the region soon to be called New England, where the Patuxets were simply wiped oUt.46 As a result, the English found themselves settling in a land that was already partially depopulated. Although this was disappointing in so far as it reduced the chances of their finding an adequate supply of native labour, it also had its advantages, as some of the settlers appreciated. Captain John Smith remarked that `it is much better to help to plant a country than implant it and then replant it', as, in his view, the Spaniards had done, killing off their Indians and then finding it necessary to import African slaves to replace them. `But their Indians', he continued, `were in such multitudes, the Spaniards had no other remedy; and ours such a few, and so dispersed, it were nothing in a short time to bring them to labour and obedience.'47
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 12
