El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Virginia struggled on, and its early years were precarious. The settlers died in droves from disease and hunger—some ten thousand people arrived between 1607 and 1622, but only around two thousand were alive by 1622.11 The crown, however, realized that this colony could be a useful place to send the potentially troublesome as well as the poor, for instance shipping some two hundred impoverished children there in 1618–19.12 Attacks from Native Americans on the colony required constant vigilance. Yet like the French, the English also depended on Indian support for survival, though like the Spanish, they were quick to dispossess Native Americans of their territory. They were aided in this as illnesses threatened peoples of the Algonquin-speaking Powhatan confederacy, whose numbers in Virginia plummeted; there were around twenty-four thousand at the time of the first encounter with the English, but this figure was reduced to two thousand by 1669.13 The English colonies also had lower levels of mestizaje—in their case Anglo-Indian—than Spain’s. While the Spanish crown had permitted, and in the earliest years even encouraged, marriage between Amerindians and Spaniards, the English did not follow suit. Despite this, one of the most important foundational stories of English settlement remains how Pocahontas, a Powhatan chief’s daughter, was said to have saved the life of Captain John Smith, a member of the initial voyage, though she was later held captive by the English. By 1614, however, she married John Rolfe and through her actions temporarily mitigated the growing animosity between the two groups. Pocahontas was an exception and remained so. As more Englishwomen traveled to join the colony, concubinage or cohabitation with Native Americans was increasingly frowned upon.14*

  Any hope of finding mineral wealth faded in Virginia’s early years. Captain Smith, in writing his account of Virginia, had much to say about the natural wonders of the colony, though less about such riches. His 1612 The Description of Virginia praised its forests of oak, walnut, and elm trees; the wide range of fruits that grew there; and the birds and fish that abounded: “no place is more convenient for pleasure, profit, and mans sustenance.”15 On the matter of extractable riches, he was more circumspect, claiming that “concerning the entrailes of the earth little can be saide for certainty … only this is certaine, that many regions lying in the same latitude, afford mines very rich of diverse natures.”16

  The rise of tobacco reinforced the English belief that the land itself was capable of providing wealth through the production of an exportable commodity, and, to this end, unused land meant a loss of potential profit. The English puzzled over Algonquin land management and often claimed that land was not being “used,” as a justification for trying to buy, barter, or take it away from the Indians. To work the land was to own it, and this pattern was repeated throughout the Tidewater region.17 The English philosopher John Locke, who would go on to become a secretary to one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina and a shareholder in the slave-trading Royal African Company, believed that laboring to “improve” land was at the heart of the colonizing project. He wrote much later in his 1690 Two Treatises of Government that “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property,” arguing that “the extent of the ground is of so little value without labour.”18

  After some deliberation, the Council of the Indies in Spain finally recommended an attack on Virginia in 1611, though the expedition never materialized. In its place were diplomatic complaints and a slight expansion of the St. Augustine garrison, because it was the closest point to the English.19 The crown did not want to risk another long, costly conflict with England. Spain’s unwillingness to act may have avoided problems for the time being, but the longer-term ramifications were profound: it allowed the English to cement their place in North America and the wider Atlantic world. Not long after the establishment of Jamestown, other colonies were placed on islands with little or no Spanish presence, including St. Kitts in 1623 and Barbados in 1627. The English also later took Jamaica as a consolation prize from the Spanish in 1655 after a failed attempt to capture Santo Domingo.

  Where the English went, other Europeans soon followed. French privateers were already roaming the West Indies. The Dutch also engaged in piracy, but they, too, began using joint-stock companies to fund American colonies, putting one in what they called New Amsterdam (New York), by 1625, as well as a few in the islands of the Caribbean, including, in 1634, Curaçao, which would become a hub of the African slave trade.

  Trade and wealth were not the only goals of the English colonists; they also had their minds on God. Christianity was a crucial factor in colonization, but for reasons distinct from those of the Spanish. Protestants did not have the equivalent of the Jesuits or Franciscans to minister to Native Americans, nor did English edicts demand conversions. While settlers like Captain Smith believed, as he wrote, that colonists could “bring such poore infidels to the true knowledge of God and his holy Gospell,” Protestant Christianity would have its own trajectory in the Americas.20 At first, religion provided many settlers with their reason for being in North America. John Rolfe described the English presence there as a sign of being “marked and chosen by the finger of God.”21 New England became a beacon for Protestants escaping the often fatal uncertainties of the English Reformation; and while the initial Plymouth Colony may have been a failure, English Protestants continued to eye the shores of North America.

  Although Henry VIII had broken with Rome in 1533, the particulars of English Protestantism were in no way settled. The Puritans, who followed the teaching of John Calvin, pushed for further changes in the Anglican Church; indeed the term “Puritan” was initially meant as an insult by Anglicans who viewed them as extremists. There was much disagreement within Puritan circles on how changes should be accomplished, but in general their aims included the creation of a more direct relationship with God and a less formal worship service. Such dissent, however, was interpreted in different ways by subsequent monarchs, and so at times Puritan beliefs could be perilous.22 They were tolerated under James I, though some uneasy Puritans began to seek religious refuge across the Atlantic. The most famous group of dissenters, the Pilgrims, were the first to make that crossing. They were also Calvinists but were more extreme than other Puritans in their demands. Their ship, the Mayflower, arrived in 1620; they landed on the easternmost hook of modern Massachusetts before crossing the bay and establishing their Plymouth Colony.

  When Charles I took the throne in 1625 more serious issues emerged, not least that he was married to a Catholic and had sympathies with English Catholics. Indeed, Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, received a charter in 1632 that would become the colony of Maryland, which was intended to be a place of tolerance and refuge for Catholics who faced discrimination in England, though the initial settlers in 1634 also included Protestants.23 By this time, the Puritans were leaving England in droves, having established the Massachusetts Bay Colony near the Pilgrim settlements in 1630. Some thirty thousand Puritans, many of whom had been middle-class merchants in England and would be so again, migrated over the course of the 1630s.24

  Unlike Virginia, where tobacco plantations were forming, New England became a land of small farmers, craftsmen, and merchant houses. From here, the Puritans could build their “city upon a hill” and engage in a form of worship they could not practice in England.25 These settlements also faced hardships early on and many were very rudimentary in comparison with parts of the Spanish empire. Mexico City, for instance, had a population of at least 150,000 by 1620, a university, and a cathedral.26 The town of Boston, some thirty years later, in 1650, hovered around only 2,000 souls.27

  Although other parts of Spanish America were urban and populated, St. Augustine lagged. The dream of thriving missions throughout Florida had not materialized, though by 1655, seventy friars were ministering to some twenty-six thousand people in the region, working across four mission provinces: Guale, Timucua, Apalachee, and Apalachicola.28 This modest success, however, could do little to stem the decline of the indi
genous population by the middle of the 1600s. There were a number of factors involved, with significant outbreaks of smallpox and measles, but also changes in diet and land use brought on by the missions, as well as serious rebellions, including an eight-month uprising in 1656 of the Timucua, and raids from other Native Americans.29 The Spanish settler and mestizo population remained small, while the Timucua would see virtual eradication, dropping from around ten thousand in 1600 to fourteen by 1727, and the Apalachee population was halved to around ten thousand over roughly the same period.30 Some Florida Indians moved north and west, often joining with other indigenous communities.31 Others looked south, seeking Spanish help and protection; for instance, the Guale people headed to St. Augustine around 1680.32 As these groups moved, the number of laborers dropped and the missions struggled to sustain themselves.

  Another factor in these shifts in Florida was the English, who were inching closer. As Virginia had prospered, there was growing pressure within the colony to push south, both to expand and, it was claimed, to defend Jamestown from any Spanish incursions.33 In 1663, Charles II issued a grant to a group of investors—who were also supporters of his restoration to the throne after the English Civil War—for a settlement to be called Carolina. Soon English ships were exploring the waterways around Santa Elena, though the main port, Charles Town (modern Charleston, South Carolina), was placed a bit farther north, around the Ashley River, in 1670. That same year, England and Spain hammered out the terms of the Treaty of Madrid, drawn up to ease tensions between the two brought about by a number of attacks between English and Spanish ships in the Caribbean. It was a turning point in Anglo-Spanish relations, finally granting official recognition to British claims on Jamaica and Virginia and placing the boundary of Spanish Florida at N 32°30´, with Charles Town sitting just north of this border.

  Around the same time, in 1672, the Royal African Company was granted a monopoly on all English trade between the west coast of Africa, the Caribbean, and the North American colonies, and English ships joined those of the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch in violently forcing the migration of Africans. Within thirty years, some sixty-six hundred people lived in Carolina, of whom thirty-eight hundred were settlers and twenty-eight hundred slaves.34

  Africans were the other significant group of arrivals in the seventeenth century. These were not the first Africans in North America—the Spanish had enslaved and freed people with them from their sixteenth-century expeditions onward—but the English drove up this number. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between 1670 and 1700, some 8,600 Africans, many from the western region of the continent, disembarked in North America. Most of them went to either the Virginia territory (4,504) or Maryland (2,917).35 Their numbers continued to rise as the colonists wanted more workers for the expanding plantations and Africans replaced white or Indian laborers. The use of enslaved people had also spread throughout the British colonies in the West Indies, where Africans were put to work in the sugar fields of islands such as Barbados.

  However, not all slaves were African. Native American enslavement remained a significant component of labor throughout the English colonies at this time, and into the eighteenth century. The English considered conflict with the Indians a “just war,” and so any captivity or enslavement was deemed fair. Native Americans made up the majority of nonwhite labor in New England before 1700, with some thirteen hundred people enslaved at this time.36 The definition of slavery was also nebulous in this period, with servitude and unfair indenture contracts leading to a form of enslavement, even after 1700 when Indian enslavement was made illegal.37 The Virginia colonists also enslaved Indians throughout the seventeenth century, for instance after a number of conflicts with the Powhatan. Some were kept to work in Virginia, while others were exported—often at a handsome profit—to other English colonies.38

  Carolina, with its proximity to the Native American communities of Spanish Florida, was heavily involved in this slave trade. The colony’s officials made alliances with the Westo—also called the Rickahockan—who had migrated in the mid-1600s to an area around the Savannah River, and who had pushed the Guale off their land. The Westo were critical to Indian enslavement in Carolina, and they were offered English goods, such as guns, tools, or cloth, in exchange for captives. This made raiding potentially far more lucrative than hunting or farming, but it also introduced a particular dilemma for the English, in that in this trading configuration there was a distinct lack of a “just war.”39

  The raids into neighboring chiefdoms and Spanish territory spelled the end of the Spanish mission system in Florida, as the priests could no longer offer protection when the Westo assailed sites in Timucua and Apalachee. The situation was such that by the 1690s the Spanish found it necessary to keep troops in a small fort at the San Luis de Apalachee mission and in the surrounding area.40 By the first years of the 1700s, the chain of missions linking the Guale territory to St. Augustine had disintegrated, bringing more than a century’s worth of evangelical effort to a close.41

  While these attacks destroyed a crucial part of Spanish Florida, they were foundational in the development of the Carolina plantation economy. That colony’s leaders tried to keep the trade for themselves, using the profits from Indians sold to other English colonies to buy the tools and African slaves needed to develop the land, as well as the manufactured goods to exchange for more slaves.42 The entire situation was fragile, however, and there were wars between the English and the Westo in the 1670s and 1680s.43 The Carolina planters were forced to find allies beyond the Westo, for instance, with the Yamasee, a confederation of smaller chiefdoms from Georgia and South Carolina that raided Apalachee in 1684–85.44 Some raiders even brought back slaves from as far west as modern Texas, and this practice continued well into the next century.45

  In addition to these raids, sea-based hostilities continued between the English and Spanish. English privateers attacked Florida in 1668 and again throughout the 1680s. One attack, in 1682, destroyed the small fort of San Marcos, located near the convergence of the Wakulla and St. Marks Rivers, near the northern Gulf Coast of Florida. The Spanish were under orders not to retaliate, however, because it would violate their peace deal with the English.46 This frustrated the governors of Florida and Cuba, who used a Spanish privateer, Alejandro Tomás de Léon, to organize a retaliation on their behalf. The expedition left St. Augustine in May 1686 and burned down a settlement known as Stuart Town (or Stuart’s Town), south of Charles Town, before going on to attack and plunder plantations along the coast.47 Such back-and-forth raids continued by land and sea throughout the later part of the seventeenth century.

  Throughout this turbulent time, the Spanish in St. Augustine were working on a new fort, spurred into action by an attack in 1668. They broke ground on the Castillo de San Marcos fort in 1672, though its completion would take another couple of decades. It was designed to be another link in Spain’s extensive defense system, connecting San Marcos to the older forts, including San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz, and the Castillo San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico. San Marcos was more modest than these other fortifications, though a vast improvement on its predecessor. Each of the fort’s four corners featured a diamond-shaped bastion, with rounded sentry boxes, called garitas, on each of them. Although its style was in line with the design of the other forts, San Marcos’s materials were unique: it was built using coquina, a type of limestone rock consisting of tiny compressed shells. The true test of the fortress’s strength would come soon enough.

  WHILE THE ENGLISH and Dutch were making inroads along the Atlantic seaboard, the French had changed direction. Huguenots in Spanish Florida had been only one arm of France’s involvement in the Americas; as early as 1534, Jacques Cartier explored around Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River, claiming the area for France, though his attempts to set up a trading post failed. After further intermittent efforts, the French finally enjoyed some success in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain erected a settlement at Q
uebec.

  From there, they spread in two directions. First, they moved into what they called New France, along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and toward the Great Lakes, where they were trapping animals and trading lucrative furs; they also went into the southern part of the Mississippi valley. In addition, as the English and Dutch had done, they took some Caribbean islands, including Martinique (1635), Guadeloupe (1635), and, by the end of the seventeenth century, Saint-Domingue (1697), which was the eastern third of Spanish Santo Domingo.

  Spain may have been successful driving the French out of Florida but now faced a similar problem in the Gulf of Mexico. The Spanish had explored much of the Gulf and considered it part of their territory, though it remained sparsely settled. Thus, when René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, decided to start his travels on the Mississippi River in February 1682, there was no Spaniard to stop him. La Salle, who traversed much of French America, also believed in the dream of a passage to the Pacific. Hoping to find it, his party of twenty-two Frenchmen and eighteen Native Americans, seven of whom were women, set out from where the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers meet, just north of modern St. Louis. On their way south, they passed today’s Missouri, Ohio, and Arkansas Rivers, before arriving near the mouth of the Mississippi in April.48 There was no obvious route west, but undeterred, they claimed the area that surrounded the Mississippi River for Louis XIV, calling it La Louisiane.

  La Salle had returned to France the following year to make his case to the crown for settlement in this territory, departing once again in 1684 with four ships and some three hundred people. Navigational miscalculations in the Gulf of Mexico put the project in jeopardy: rather than landing at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1685, La Salle arrived at present-day Matagorda Bay, Texas, some four hundred miles west. The French built a rudimentary fort, and La Salle spent the next two years exploring the region by land and sea, trying to find the location of the Mississippi River, as well as now looking for the overland route to the celebrated silver mines of northern Mexico.49