The blending of races and cultures inherent in the process of mestizaje was therefore at work from the earliest stages of conquest and settlement, undermining the bipartite society which royal officials had fondly hoped that they could create and maintain. 116 The crown might legislate to keep encomenderos away from the Indian communities in their encomiendas; Indians might be herded into reducciones or compelled to live in special barrios or quarters of the cities reserved exclusively for them; their natural `inferiority' might be ceaselessly proclaimed by the colonists; but in a world where they heavily outnumbered settlers who could not live without their sexual and their labour services, there was no lasting possibility of closing off the two `republics' from each other by creating the equivalent of an Anglo-Irish `pale'.
Royal policy came to reflect the same tensions between segregation and integration as those to be found in colonial practice. To some extent the encomienda acted as a barrier against integration, except in matters of religion, where it was designed to foster it. In 1550, however, even as the crown legislated to prevent unmarried Spaniards from living in or near Indian communities, it also took the first steps towards breaking down the linguistic separation between the two republics, by decreeing that the friars, in defiance of their traditional practice, should teach the Indians Castilian, `so that they should acquire our civility and good customs, and in this way more easily understand and be indoctrinated into the Christian reli- gion'.157 Already the process of linguistic change was under way in New Spain, as Indians who moved into the cities picked up a working knowledge of Castilian, while Castilian words were simultaneously being incorporated into the Nahuatl vocabulary on a massive scale.15' Large numbers of the Indian vassals of the Spanish crown, however, either resisted the imposition of Castilian or remained to all intents and purposes outside its orbit, while many friars were inclined to ignore the crown's decree. At the same time, creoles with indigenous nurses learnt in childhood the language of the conquered, and in the Yucatan peninsula, which had a high degree of linguistic unity before the conquest, the Maya language, rather than Castilian, became the lingua franca in the post-conquest era."' The crown, for its part, was driven in particular by religious considerations to recognize realities. In 1578 Philip II decreed that no religious should be appointed to Indian benefices without some knowledge of the language, and two years later he set up chairs of indigenous languages in the universities of Lima and Mexico City, on the grounds that `knowledge of the general language of the Indians is essential for the explanation and teaching of Christian doctrine.""
The English, on finding themselves confronted by the linguistic barrier between themselves and the Indians, at first reacted much like the Spaniards. Indians showed little inclination to learn the language of the intruders, and initially it was the settlers who found themselves having to learn an alien tongue, both to communicate and to convert. Indians in areas of English settlement had less inducement than those in the more urbanized world of Spanish America to learn the language of the Europeans, although by degrees they found it convenient to have some of their number who could communicate in the language of the intruders. As the balance of forces tilted in favour of the settlers, however, so the pressures on the Indians to acquire some knowledge of English increased, until the colonists were securing promises from neighbouring tribes to learn the language as a requirement for submission to their rule.16' Here there was no question, as there was in Spanish America, of a policy of actively promoting, at least among a section of the colonial community, the learning of indigenous languages - a policy which had the concomitant, if unintended, effect of encouraging not only the survival but also the expansion of the major languages, especially Nahuatl, Maya and Quechua. The powerful impulse to Christianize that worked in favour of the toleration of linguistic diversity in Spain's American possessions simply did not exist in British America.
While their acquisition of pidgin English extended their access to the developing colonial society, Indians living within the confines of the British settlements tended to have the worst of every world. They remained unassimilated, but at the same time had difficulty in maintaining the degree of collective identity to be found in so many Indian communities in Spanish America. The reasons for this were partly numerical, since their numbers were relatively so much smaller than those of the indigenous population under Spanish rule. But the difference was also a reflection of the differing policies adopted in the British and Spanish colonial worlds. The Spaniards, having imposed their dominion over vast native populations, saw it as their duty to incorporate them into a society defined on the one hand by Christianity and on the other by the rights and obligations that accompanied the status of vassals of the Spanish crown. As converts and vassals the Indians were entitled to a guaranteed position within a social order that was to be modelled as closely as possible on the divine. 162 The hopes of achieving the incorporation of the Indians into an imagined ideal society by means of a strategy of separate development were constantly frustrated by colonial conditions - demographic pressures, the demands of the settler community for Indian services, the desire of many Indians themselves to take advantage of what the Europeans had to offer. But enough of the policy was retained to make it possible for Indian communities shattered by conquest and foreign domination to regroup themselves and begin adapting collectively to life in the emerging colonial societies, while striving with a measure of success to maintain that `republic of the Indians' which the crown itself was committed to preserving.
Where the Spaniards tended to think in terms of the incorporation of the Indians into an organic and hierarchically organized society which would enable them in time to attain the supreme benefits of Christianity and civility, the English, after an uncertain start, seem to have decided that there was no middle way between anglicization and exclusion. Missionary zeal was too thinly spread, the crown too remote and uninterested, to allow the development of a policy that would achieve by gradual stages the often asserted objective of bringing the Indians within the fold. In so far as a `republic of the Indians' was to be found in British America, it was to be found in the praying towns of New England. But the whole concept of such a `republic' was alien to settlers who expected the Indians either to learn to behave like English men and women, or else to move away. Tudor and Stuart England, unlike Habsburg Castile, had little tolerance for semiautonomous juridical and administrative enclaves, and no experience of dealing with substantial ethnic minorities in its midst.
Since so many Indians appeared resistant to assimilation, it seemed to many settlers preferable to remove them out of the way. This would enable the colonists to devote their efforts to more rewarding pursuits. `Our first work', wrote Sir Francis Wyatt, the governor of Virginia, soon after the `massacre' of 1622, `is expulsion of the Salvages to gain the free range of the country for increase of cattle, swine &c, which will more than restore us, for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thorns in our sides, than to be at peace and league with them ...'163 Expulsion of the Indians had the double advantage of making space for further settlement, and removing `thorns', or something sharper, from the settlers' sides.
In part, the English response was dictated by fear. If there was a progressive hardening of attitudes towards the Indians, both in Virginia and New England, in the wake of incidents of alleged Indian `treachery' and armed confrontation, intimidation and violent revenge looked like the only options available to the frightened setters who were still greatly outnumbered by those whose lands they had taken.164 Expulsion of the Indians, if it could be managed, at least seemed to offer infant settlements a degree of security. Yet, at a time when the settlers still needed the assistance of the indigenous population in keeping them fed, their reaction suggests that the English had less confidence than the Spaniards in their ability to bring the benefits of their own civilization to these benighted people.
This may be a reflection of their failures in Ireland, although Spain,
too, effectively admitted failure when it resorted in 1609 to the expulsion of some 300,000 moriscos from the peninsula. The Spanish failure, however, could be disguised as a triumph for the purity of the faith, whereas the continuing obduracy of the Irish allowed the English no such easy sleight of hand. Inevitably there were some shocking examples of Spaniards going native in the Americas, like that of the sailor Gonzalo Guerrero who, after being cast ashore on the coast of Yucatan, was found by Cortes living contentedly among the Maya, with his nose and ears pierced and his face and hands tattooed. 161 Yet the Spanish in the early stages of colonization appear not to have had the same obsessive fear of cultural degeneration that afflicted the English on making their first contact with indigenous peoples. At least in the early years, it seems to have been confidently assumed that most Spaniards, if confronted by such a dilemma, would imitate not Guerrero but his companion, Jeronimo de Aguilar, who had held fast to his faith during the trials and temptations of captivity, and, unlike Guerrero, seized the first opportunity to rejoin his compatriots. By contrast, there was a constant trickle of deserters from the Jamestown settlement. To the distress of the colony's leaders, the poorer settlers at least tended to prefer a carefree existence among the `wild' Indians to the rigours of building a `civilized' community under the direction of their social superiors. 166
Even on the frontiers of settlement, where life remained precarious, there still seems to have been a strong confidence in the eventual triumph of Christian and Hispanic values. Friars and royal officials approached the nomadic or semisedentary tribes on the fringes of empire with a clear sense of the superiority of what they had to offer the `barbarian' peoples. Over time, the combination of urbanized frontier settlements and missions brought peace and a measure of hispanicization to many of the frontier regions. This was particularly true of northern Mexico, where a shift in viceregal policy in the later sixteenth century away from fire and slaughter to the more subtle weapons of diplomacy and religious persuasion succeeded in pacifying the ferocious Chichimecs.167
Royal officials bribed the Indians on the borderlands with offers of food and clothing. Friars sought to dazzle them with their ceremonies, and woo them with their gifts.168 The inhabitants of the advanced Spanish outposts - soldiers, cattle ranchers and miners - mixed their blood with that of the indigenous popula- tion.169 Although tensions inevitably arose as friars, royal officials and settlers pulled in different directions, they all represented in their different ways a coherent and unified culture which was not afraid to interact with the surrounding population because it took for granted that sooner or later its values would prevail.
While the English displayed a similar sense of superiority, it does not seem to have been accompanied, at least in the early stages of settlement, by the same measure of confidence in the triumph of the collective values of their own society in an alien environment. Confidence was lacking both in their capacity to instil into the Indians their own cultural and religious values, and in the willingness of fellow Englishmen and women to remain true to those values when confronted with an alternative way of life. Religious differences, social differences, and the lack of unified direction may all have worked to lessen the coherence of the twin message of Christianity and civility that the English colonizing enterprise was supposed to bring to the Indians. This in turn brought failure, and as failures multiplied, exclusion rather than inclusion of the Indians became the order of the day. Once the Indians had been defeated, however, and relegated to the margins of their society, new generations of colonists could look out on the world with a new-found confidence based on a sense of power. In their own eyes at least, they might not have Christianized and civilized the `Salvages', but they could claim a massive achievement, both for their forebears and themselves, in clearing the wilderness and transforming the land.
CHAPTER 4
Exploiting American Resources
Plunder and `improvement'
The first European images of America were images of abundance - of a terrestrial paradise with sparkling rivers, fertile plains and luxurious fruits.' Above all, there was gold, first of all in the rivers of Hispaniola,2 then in Mexico, and finally in Peru, where Atahualpa's ransom - a staggering 1,326,539 pesos of gold and 51,600 silver marks, by official, and no doubt undervalued, reckoning3 - set the seal on the image of fabulous wealth. But, as the humanist chronicler Pedro Martir de Angleria observed, `it is to the South, not the icy North, that everyone in search of fortune should turn.'4 And it was to the south that Sir Walter Raleigh duly turned in his futile quest for El Dorado.
The south - the central and southern mainland of America - offered not only the promise, and the reality, of gold and silver, but also the possibility of tapping into the labour supply and surplus production of indigenous societies which had exploited the resources of their local environments in ways that offered more points of convergence with European needs and expectations than were to be found in more northerly parts. The hunters and gatherers of the `icy North' apparently had little to offer European newcomers, other than the furs which were to become the source of a flourishing Indian-European trade. In southern New England and further down the coast, the more agricultural life-style of the native population produced a food surplus that saved the life of many a colonist in the early days of settlement. It was also a life-style that involved the stripping of forests and the clearing of fields, thus effectively doing some of the work of clearing the land that would otherwise have fallen to the settlers in this heavily forested world. But Indians who moved their village habitats in accordance with the dictates of the seasons and the fertility of the soil, and whose way of life depended on the possession of little more than a few, easily transportable household objects, seemed distinctly unpromising as a source of labour or tribute.'
It was therefore not surprising that English colonists should have felt a certain sense of bafflement on their arrival in a world in which the abundance of nature seemed to offer a standing rebuke to a sparse and - to European eyes - povertystricken, population.6 Much work was needed to `improve' the land, and there was no indication that the Indians were either willing to undertake it, or capable of doing so. On the other hand, Spaniards arriving in Mexico and Peru found teeming populations organized into polities which, for all their strangeness, functioned in relatively comprehensible ways, and which had learnt how to mobilize large labour forces for the performance of tasks that went beyond meeting basic subsistence needs. While it was not easy to come to terms with the idea that feathers, or cacao beans, might be more highly valued than gold or silver, it still remained true that these were peoples whose disciplined polities, agricultural practices, and skills in arts and crafts could be turned into valuable assets for their conquerors.
The Spaniards, slipping easily into the position of the privileged elites they had vanquished, took immediate advantage of the glittering opportunities that opened up before them. While their first response to conquest was to seize and share out the portable booty, they also moved quickly to make themselves the masters of economic and tributary systems that were still in relatively good working order in spite of the disruptions caused by the conquest. To satisfy their own overwhelming greed they were all too soon to wrench these systems out of context, especially in Peru, where they inherited forms of labour organization and redistributive systems carefully designed to provide an adequate food supply for populations living at different altitudes and in a diversity of ecological environments, rising from the sea-coasts to the high peaks of the Andes.' In effect, for the first twenty or thirty years after the conquest of Mexico and Peru, the conquerors heedlessly ran a form of plunder economy, although endowing it with a spurious respectability by the institution of the encomienda, which was supposed to carry with it certain spiritual and moral obligations, but was liable to be no more than a licence to oppress and exploit.'
If the Spanish conquerors were happy to live off the backs of the peoples they had conquered, they were also anxious to l
ead a life-style that conformed as closely as possible to that of the privileged classes in their native land. Their tastes and expectations had been formed in Castile, Extremadura or Andalusia, and now that riches had come their way, they were not about to abandon them. `The desire of the Spaniards to see the things of their native land in the Indies', wrote the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, `has been so desperate and so powerful that no effort or danger has been too great to induce them to abandon the attempt to satisfy their wishes.'9 They yearned for their glasses of wine, their oranges and other familiar fruits; they wanted dogs and horses, swords and guns; they wanted the luxuries that they had possessed, or at least coveted, at home; and they wanted their traditional staples, meat and bread.
The satisfaction of these wants would entail massive changes to the economies they had inherited - changes that in turn would transform the ecologies of the lands they had settled. The civilizations of the Americas were maize-based. It was above all maize, capable of a yield of sixty or more (some chroniclers spoke of as much as 150) to every seed planted, as against a return of six to one for wheat in Early Modern Europe, that had allowed the societies of Mesoamerica and the Andes to sustain such large populations and produce an agricultural surplus.10 The Spanish settlers, however, although gradually accustoming themselves to maize tortillas," still insisted on having their wheat loaves, to which they retained an obstinate attachment throughout the colonial period. Coarse bread therefore remained the staple of poor colonists, while the better-off ate pan blanco at twice the cost.12 English settlers to the north seem to have shown a greater degree of adaptability, perhaps by force of circumstance. Indian corn became an essential part of their diet, and was considered preferable as a crop to English cereals because it was easier to grow and produced a higher yield. The New England climate proved unpropitious for wheat production, and although wheat, barley, oats and rye were beginning to be cultivated in the Chesapeake colonies in the later seventeenth century in sufficient quantities to allow for modest exports, their `chiefest Diett' consisted of maize, and not wheat.13
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Page 16
