King Philip's War undid much of the work done by Eliot and other apostles to the Indians in establishing in the English mind the worthiness of native Americans to be considered for eventual inclusion within the fellowship of the visible saints. For the Indians, the war was a disaster. Large numbers of those who had surrendered or been captured were sold into foreign slavery on the pretext, still much used by Spaniards on the fringes of empire, that they had been taken captive in a `just war'. Eliot's seems to have been the sole voice raised in moral protest, and - in striking contrast to the decision taken by Charles V to convoke the Valladolid debate - his protest was apparently ignored by the governor and council of Massachusetts, and went no further. In so far as Eliot played the part of a Las Casas, there was no one prepared to give him a hearing."9
Among the settlers there was a growing consensus that the Indians were, and always had been, degenerate barbarians, bereft of `any religion before the English came, but merely diabolical'.120 It was the same consensus as had come to prevail in Spanish America, and was accompanied by a similar blend of paternalism and contempt. But among the settlers of New England there was a further, and disturbing, element, the element of fear - fear not just of the enemy roaming on the fringes of their settlements, but also of a yet more hidden enemy, lying deep within themselves.
Coexistence and segregation
Europeans who settled in America found themselves living side by side with people who neither looked, nor behaved, like themselves. Nor did they even bear much resemblance to other peoples of whom at least some of them had earlier experience. They were not, for instance, black, as Columbus noted of the first Caribbean islanders he saw: `They were all of good stature, very handsome people, with hair which is not curly but thick and flowing like a horse's mane. They all have very wide foreheads and hands, wider than those of any race [generacion] I have seen before; their eyes are very beautiful and not small. None of them is black, rather the colour of the Canary islanders, which is to be expected since this island lies E-W with the island of Ferro in the Canaries on the same latitude. 121
Although colour was normally explained by sixteenth-century Europeans by reference to the degree of exposure to the sun, and was therefore nominally neutral as a form of categorization, blackness carried with it strong negative connotations for many Europeans, and certainly for the English.122 The peoples of the New World, however, were not black. The Spanish royal cosmographer Juan Lopez de Velasco described them in 1574 as being the colour of `cooked quince', and William Strachey in 1612 as `sodden quince' .121 One chronicler at least dismissed climatic explanations of skin colour. In his History of the Indies Lopez de Gomara wrote that the colour of the Indians was the result of `nature, and not nakedness, as many believed', and pointed out that peoples of different colour could be found in the same latitudes.124 The English, too, were to find in the light of their American experience that the traditional classical theory of climatic influence did not seem to correspond to observable facts.121 But the general tendency was to cling to the traditional paradigm. As long as this prevailed, and climate was regarded as the prime determinant of colour, tawny-skinned Indians were the beneficiaries, since the colour of their skin was free of many of the emotional overtones with which blackness was so heavily charged.
Civility, not colour, was the first test used by Europeans in their assessment of the indigenous peoples of America. Where civility was concerned, the dispersed nature of Indian settlement patterns in the areas of British colonization enhanced the disparities that European colonists normally expected to find between themselves and the indigenous population. In promoting colonization, however, Richard Eburne denied that the English faced a greater challenge than the Spaniards: `The Spaniard', he wrote, `bath reasonably civilized, and better might if he had not so much tyrannized, people far more savage and bestial than any of these. 126
But the pattern of relationships in America was determined by past experience as well as present circumstance. The Christians of medieval Spain had for centuries lived alongside an Islamic civilization with which they enjoyed a complicated and ambiguous relationship. If they fought against the Moors, they also borrowed extensively from a society which in many respects was more refined than their own. Although religion was a decisive barrier at many points, and especially where the possibility of intermarriage was concerned,127 personal contacts were numerous, and increased still further as large Moorish populations were left behind in Christian territory by the southward advance of the Reconquista. In these reconquered territories a toleration born of necessity rather than conviction prevailed for many years, although it came under increasing pressure in the fifteenth century as the Reconquista moved towards its triumphant conclusion. During the sixteenth century Spaniards came to despise and distrust the morisco population which continued to live among them, and whose conversion to Christianity was no more than nominal. But nothing could quite obliterate the experience of their long and often fruitful interaction with an ethnically different society that could not easily be regarded as culturally inferior to their own.121
The medieval English, in seeking to establish their lordship over Ireland, had no doubt of their own superiority to the strange and barbarous people among whom they were settling. Before Henry II's invasion in 1170 the native Irish, it was asserted, `did never build any houses of brick or stone (some few poor Religious Houses excepted)', nor did they `plant any gardens or orchards, enclose or improve their lands, live together in settled villages or towns, nor made any provision for posterity'.129 Given what seemed to the English to be the vast disparity between their own culture and that of a Gaelic population whose way of life was `against all sense and reason', they sought to protect themselves from the contaminating influence of their environment by adopting policies of segregation and exclusion. Marriage or cohabitation between the English and the Irish was forbidden by the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366, in the belief that mixed marriages would tempt the English partner to lapse into degenerate Irish ways.13o
The very fact that legislative measures against cohabitation were thought to be necessary suggests that English settlers in Ireland did indeed succumb to the temptation to go native.13' The choice made by these renegade settlers could only have reinforced the latent English fears of the dangers of cultural degeneration in a barbarian land. In the sixteenth century the Irish remained for the English a barbarous people, whose barbarism was now compounded by their obstinate determination to cling to papist ways. When the English crossed the Atlantic and again found themselves living among, and outnumbered by, a `savage' people, all the old fears were revived .112 In the circumstances, the equation between the Indians and the Irish was easily made. In the New World of America the English came across another indigenous population which did not live in houses of brick and stone, and failed to improve its lands. `The Natives of New England', wrote Thomas Morton, `are accustomed to build them houses, much like the wild Irish 133 As Hugh Peter, who returned to England from Massachusetts in 1641, was to observe five years later, `the wild Irish and the Indian do not much differ. 134
The instinctive tendency of the colonial leaders was therefore once again to establish a form of segregation. While the danger of Indian attacks made it prudent for the settlers of Virginia to live inside a `pale', the founders of the colony also had no wish to see their fellow colonists go the way of the Norman invaders of Ireland, most of whom, according to Edmund Spenser, had `degenerated and grown almost mere Irish, yea and more malicious to the English than the very Irish themselves'.135 While the pale, therefore, may initially have been devised by the settlers as a means of protection against the Indians, it was also a means of protection against their own baser instincts. In 1609, in the early stages of the settlement of Virginia, William Symonds preached a sermon to the adventurers and planters, in which he drew a parallel between their enterprise and the migration of Abraham `unto the land that I will shew thee' in the book of Genesis. `Then must Abram's posterity keep them
to themselves. They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcised ... The breaking of this rule, may break the neck of all good success of this voyage . . .', Symonds warned. 116 Not surprisingly, John Rolfe agonized over his prospective marriage to Pocahontas, recalling `the heavy displeasure which almighty God conceived against the sons of Levi and Israel for marrying strange wives' (fig. 8).13'
The fear of cultural degeneracy in an alien land was especially pronounced among the Puritan emigrants to New England in the 1620s and 1630s. Images of another biblical exodus, that of the Israelites out of Egypt, were deeply impressed on their minds '131 and their leaders were painfully aware of the dangers that lay in wait on every side. The Indians were the Canaanites, a degenerate race, who threatened to infect God's chosen people with their own degeneracy. For this reason it was essential that the New England Israel should remain a nation apart, resisting the blandishments of the people whom they were in process of dispos sessing of their land.139 In large measure this seems to have been achieved. In New England, no marriage is known to have occurred between an English settler and an Indian woman in the period before 1676. In Virginia, where the sex ratio among the settlers was even more unbalanced, it was much the same story, although a 1691 law passed by the colonial assembly forbidding Anglo-Indian marriages suggests that such unions did in fact occur. 140 But if so, their numbers were small, as Robert Beverley would lament in his History of the Present State of Virginia (1705):
Intermarriage had been indeed the Method proposed very often by the Indians in the Beginning, urging it frequently as a certain Rule, that the English were not their Friends, if they refused it. And I can't but think it wou'd have been happy for that Country, had they embraced this Proposal: For, the Jealousie of the Indians, which I take to be the Cause of most of the Rapines and Murders they commited, wou'd by this Means have been altogether prevented, and consequently the Abundance of Blood that was shed on both sides wou'd have been saved; ... the Colony, instead of all these Losses of Men on both sides, wou'd have been encreasing in Children to its Advantage; ... and, in all Likelihood, many, if not most, of the Indians would have been converted to Christianity by this kind Method .. .141
Beverley's vision was a belated lament for a world that might have been. Among the Spaniards the same vision inspired a series of proposals for inter-ethnic union at a time when colonial society was still in its infancy. In their instructions of 1503 to Nicolas de Ovando as the new governor of Hispaniola, Ferdinand and Isabella ordered him to `try to get some Christian men to marry Indian women, and Christian women to marry Indian men, so that they can communicate with and teach each other, and the Indians can be indoctrinated in our Holy Catholic Faith, and learn how to work their lands and manage their property, and be turned into rational men and women."42 This policy seems to have met with mixed success. In 1514, 64 of the 171 married Spaniards living in Santo Domingo had Indian wives. Most of these Spaniards, however, were drawn from the lowest social stratum, and the marriages may primarily reflect the shortage of Spanish women on the island.141 While Spanish women, even of low birth, were preferred as wives, there was, however, no compunction about taking Indian women for concubines.
By formally sanctioning inter-ethnic marriage in 1514,1 the crown appears to have been reiterating its conviction that a union of Spaniards and Indians would help realize Spain's mission of bringing Christianity and civility to the peoples of the Indies. The idea was taken up again as large areas of mainland America fell under Spanish rule. In 1526 the Franciscans in Mexico wrote to the emperor Charles V urging that, to promote the process of conversion, `the two peoples, Christian and pagan, should unite, and join together in marriage, as is already beginning to happen. 14' Las Casas, advocating the foundation in America of colonies of Spanish peasants, envisaged the intermarriage of their families with those of the Indians as a means of creating `one of the best republics, and perhaps the most Christian and peaceful in the world'.146
The two peoples had certainly been uniting outside marriage. The conquerors, beginning with Cortes himself, took and discarded Indian women at will. Marriage, however, was by no means ruled out, with rank being rated more important than ethnicity. After taking her as his mistress, Cortes married off Montezuma's daughter, Dona Isabel, to a fellow Extremaduran, Pedro Gallego de Andrade, and, following his death, she married Juan Cano, who was clearly proud of his marriage to such a high-born wife.147 In arranging Isabel's marriage Cortes appears to have been pursuing a deliberate strategy for the pacification of Mexico, which led to a number of marriages between his companions and princesses of the ruling house or the daughters of Mexican caciques.141 Such marriages, which were seen as no disparagement where the indigenous women were of noble birth, may well have helped to create a climate of acceptance among later settlers. A merchant in Mexico wrote in 1571 to his nephew in Spain telling him that he was happily married to an Indian wife, adding: `Although back in Spain it may seem that I was rash to marry an Indian woman, here this involves no loss of honour, for the nation of the Indians is held in high esteem.' 149
While it is possible that the merchant was putting the best gloss on his behaviour for the benefit of his Spanish relatives, it is also possible that the obsession with purity of blood in metropolitan Spain, springing from the insistence on freedom from any taint of Moorish or Jewish ancestry, was diluted by the Atlantic crossing. Initially at least, conditions in the New World favoured this dilution. With Spanish women still in short supply, forced or consenting unions with Indian women were accepted as a matter of course. As the first generation of mestizo children of these unions appeared, their Spanish fathers were inclined to bring them up in their own households, especially if they were sons. In 1531 Charles V ordered the Audiencia of Mexico to collect all `the sons of Spaniards born of Indian women ... and living with the Indians', and to give them a Spanish education.' ° But the existence of a growing class of mestizos created difficult problems of categorization in societies that instinctively thought in terms of hierarchy. Where did the mestizos properly belong? If they were born in wedlock there was no problem, since they were automatically regarded as creoles (Spaniards of American origin). For those born out of marriage but accepted by one or other parental group, assimilation within that group was the normal destiny, although illegitimacy was a lasting stigma, and the lack of full assimilation could leave an abiding sense of bitterness, as the career of the most famous of all mestizos, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, testifies. But there were also a rapidly growing number of mestizos rejected by both groups, and therefore unable to find a secure place in a hierarchically organized, corporate society.
No such problem apparently affected the English settler communities. While cohabitation between English men and Indian women inevitably occurred - and in 1639, to the horror of New England colonists, between an English woman and an Indian man"' - it was not on anything like the scale to be found in the Spanish colonies and it is significant that the mestizos born of these unions have largely disappeared from the historical record .112 Nor, apparently, was there any of the easy acceptance of the practice of cohabitation that was to be found in the Spanish colonies. Sir Walter Raleigh boasted of his Guiana expedition that, unlike the Spanish conquistadores, not one of his men ever laid hands on an Indian woman.153 If his boast is true, their behaviour was a world away from that of the band of some seventy Spaniards travelling up the river Paraguay in 1537, who, on being offered their daughters by the Indians, called it a day, and settled down to found what became the city of Asuncion.
Unique local circumstances made Paraguay an extreme example of the more general process that accompanied the colonization of Spanish America. The Guarani Indians needed the Spaniards as allies in their struggle to defend themselves against hostile neighbouring tribes. For their part, the Spaniards, moving inland from the newly founded port of Buenos Aires a thousand miles away, were too few in number to establish themselves without Guarani help. An alliance based on mu
tual necessity was sealed by the gift of Guarani women as wives, mistresses and servants. The continuing isolation of the settlement, and the almost total absence of Spanish women, led to the rapid creation of a unique mestizo society. Mestizo sons succeeded their fathers as encomenderos, and races and cultures mingled to a degree unparalleled elsewhere on the continent.'54
Everywhere in Spanish America, however, cohabitation took place, and the effect of it was to blur the lines of division which the Spanish authorities in church and state had originally planned to draw between the different communities. In Spanish eyes a properly ordered society was one that consisted of two parallel `republics', each with its own rights and privileges - a `republic of Spaniards' and a `republic of Indians'. But the plan to keep the two communities apart was in danger of foundering even before the emergence of a generation of mestizos which straddled the borderlines between them. The upheavals of conquest and colonization threw Spaniards and Indians into daily, and often intimate, contact. Indian women moved into Spanish households as servants and concubines, while Indians whose lives had been disrupted by the conquest gravitated naturally to the new cities founded by the Spaniards in search of new opportunities in the world of the conquerors.'55
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 15
