Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (10 page)

The new names were quick to be recorded on maps, like John Smith's New England map of 1616. Cartography, too, was a symbolic taking of possession, at once recording the imposition of European rule by the eradication of indigenous names, and asserting national rights to American territory against European rivals. From the very beginnings of overseas discovery and settlement the Spanish crown had shown a keen interest in obtaining detailed information about the character and extent of its newly acquired territories. As with so much else in sixteenth-century Spain, it was the reign of Philip II, a monarch with a Renaissance thirst for knowledge combined with a passion for detail and for accurate representation, that first saw a serious attempt to bring method and system to what had previously been a haphazard process.37 In 1571 a new post of `principal cosmographer of the Indies' was created. The first holder, Juan Lopez de Velasco, was charged with producing a definitive chronicle and atlas of the New World, and Francisco Dominguez, a Portuguese cartographer, was sent out to New Spain to create survey maps. This first and apparently abortive initiative was followed in 1573 by the famous project, inspired by the great reforming president of the Council of the Indies, Juan de Ovando, for a massive questionnaire addressed to local officials throughout Spanish America, requesting the most detailed information about the character, the history and the resources of their communities, together with maps. The somewhat sporadic results of this cartographical exercise, which reflected an indigenous as well as a colonial vision of Spanish New World communities, duly found their way to Spain, where the crown's obsession with concealing knowledge of its American possessions from its rivals ensured that the maps remained hidden away in the archives.38

It was not for another 150 years that the British imperial authorities displayed a comparable interest in the acquisition and production of maps. At the end of the seventeenth century the Board of Trade possessed no more than a few maps, and it was only after the Peace of Utrecht, under the pressure of intercolonial rivalries, that changes began to occur. In 1715 the Board began searching for maps of the colonies, and requested copies of the best maps available in France. In view of the unsuccessful nature of the search, it noted `the necessity of sending an able person from hence to take a survey, and make exact maps of all the several colonies from north to south, which the French have done for themselves, from whence they reap great advantages whilst we continue in the dark'.39

Yet the lack of official interest did not preclude the making and dissemination of maps of British America in the seventeenth century, although the quality of these, in comparison with those produced by the Dutch in the same period, was poor. 41 Maps of Puritan New England reflected the establishment and growth of the `New English Canaan', constituting a sacred geography for the elect.4' But, even more important, a map with reassuring English words and names, like that included in John Smith's depiction of New England, served as a useful instrument for promoting colonization in a society where the attractions of transatlantic migration had to be sold to potential emigrants. To keep these matters secret, in the manner of the Spaniards, would simply have imposed an additional obstacle to settlement overseas.

The various maps of British North America represented a public affirmation of the new ownership of the land. But land that was claimed still had to be physically occupied, and there was a wide gap between cartographical affirmation and what was actually happening on the ground. Technically, in both Spanish and British America, the land was vested in the crown once its sovereignty had been proclaimed. It was then for the crown to arrange for its allocation, in order to attach settlers to the soil. There were various ways in which this could be done. One was to give commanders and colonizers powers to distribute plots of land once possession had been taken. In 1523, for instance, the Spanish crown, in capitulating with Vazquez de Ayllon for the exploration of Florida, authorized him to distribute `water, lands, and building lots (solares)'.42 Similarly, on his Newfoundland expedition of 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in conformity with his letters patent issued by the queen by virtue of her royal authority, `granted in fee farm divers parcels of land lying by the waterside' at St John's harbour .41

An alternative method, to which the British crown several times resorted, was to issue charters to groups of interested individuals who constituted themselves into companies, like the Massachusetts Bay Company of 1629. The nearest to company colonization in Spanish America was the authorization given in 1528 to two Sevillian agents of the German commercial house of the Welser for the discovery, conquest and settlement of Venezuela, but the name of the Welser seems to have been carefully kept out of the agreement, allowing them to disclaim responsibility for the actions of their company agents and representatives.44 More frequently the British crown, less concerned than the Spanish crown with the retention of close control over its American possessions, would make proprietary grants to chosen patentees, like George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, whose son Cecilius received the seals and charter for the colonization of Maryland in 1632.41 Proprietors in turn would proceed to allocate land on the terms most likely to prove attractive to settlers, while conserving as many rights to themselves as they could. But the process of land acquisition and settlement remained considerably more haphazard in British than in Spanish America. Some English colonies - Plymouth, Connecticut and Rhode Island - received no royal charters, and this only enhanced the ambiguities surrounding their rights to settle in Indian territory. At least in the initial stages of settlement, these New England colonists sought to resolve their legal and moral dilemmas by negotiating land purchases from the Indians.46

There could, however, be no lasting settlement of American land without the establishment and acceptance of some form of civil authority. On landing on the coast of Mexico in June 1519, Cortes's first action was to found the town of Vera Cruz. His purpose in doing this was to establish a civil authority, which would both legitimate his past and future actions, and lay the foundations for permanent Spanish settlement in Montezuma's realms. `The new alcaldes [mayors] and officers', writes Gomara, `accepted their wands of authority and took possession of their offices, and at once met in council, as is customary in the villages and towns of Castile.'47 A similar process was at work when the Mayflower dropped anchor off Provincetown in November 1620. In this instance the Pilgrims before going ashore agreed to `covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation'.48 They went on to elect John Carver as their Governor, just as the town council of Vera Cruz went on to elect Cortes as Captain and Justicia Mayor.

Spaniards and Englishmen therefore regarded the reconstitution of European civil society in an alien environment as the essential preliminary to their permanent occupation of the land. As participants in the same western tradition, both these colonizing peoples took it for granted that the patriarchal family, ownership of property, and a social ordering that as nearly as possible patterned the divine were the essential elements of any properly constituted civil society. But both were to find that American conditions were not always conducive to their re-creation on the farther shores of the Atlantic in the forms to which they were accustomed. The dissolving effects of space, at work from the outset, gave rise to responses which would eventually produce societies that, although still recognizably European, appeared sufficiently different to justify their being described as `American'.

These responses were determined by a combination of metropolitan tradition and local circumstance, and would vary by region as well as by nationality. The New England response, for example, was to differ in important ways from that of Virginia. But in so far as the differences between New England and Virginia were conditioned by local topography, these paled into insignificance when set against the enormous geographical and climatic differences between the areas of Spanish and British colonization on the American mainland. The Spaniards were faced with jungles, mountain ranges and deserts which made William Bradford's `hideous and desolate wilderness' of New England49 look like a garden of Eden by comparison.

The Spaniards, too, lacked great rivers like the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio and the St Lawrence to take settlers deep into the interior. Yet in spite of the apparently overwhelming geographical disadvantages they encountered, the Spaniards had fanned out through the continent within a generation of the capture of Tenochtitlan. The English, on the other hand, although faced with a more benevolent geography, had a preference for clustering close to the Atlantic seaboard until the eighteenth century; only in the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys, and in parts of the Chesapeake region, did settlement of the interior begin from the outset.50 It is a striking commentary on English predilections that, for the first twenty years of its existence, the inhabitants of Dedham in Massachusetts, with immense spaces around them, continued to parcel out tiny house lots, and disposed in all of less than 3,000 acres of lands' It seems ironical that New England colonists who saw themselves as charged with an `errand into the wilderness' should so resolutely have turned their backs upon it.

The determination of the Spaniards to range far and wide through American space, in spite of the vast distances and terrible hardships involved, can be attributed partly to their ambitions and expectations, and partly to long-established Iberian traditions. Unlike the English, they soon became aware that just over the horizon were to be found large polities and densely settled lands. There was early evidence, too, of the existence of deposits of gold and silver, for which the settlers of Jamestown were to hunt in vain. Hunger for riches and lordship and a restless ambition for fame lured conquistadores like Hernando de Soto, in his epic journey through the American South between 1539 and 1542, deep into the interior in ways that few Englishmen after Sir Walter Raleigh were willing to emulate. `Why', asked Captain John Smith, `should English men despair and not do so much as any? ... Seeing honour is our lives ambition, and our ambition after death, to have an honourable memory of our life . .. '52 But appeals to honour seem to have fallen on deaf ears among English settlers who saw all around them apparently vacant land awaiting occupation. In particular, New Englanders, according to William Wood writing in 1634, were `well contented and look not so much at abundance as at competency'.53 `Competency' as an ideal left little room for glory.

'Competency'- the willingness to settle for a life-style that brought sufficiency rather than riches - was an aspiration that was not confined to English, or some English, colonists. Letters exchanged between sixteenth-century Spanish settlers in the Indies and their relatives back home suggest that the relatively modest ambition of pasar mejor - becoming better off - was seen by Spaniards as a good enough reason for risking the hazards of a transatlantic crossing, just as it was by their English equivalents. `This is a good land for those who want to he virtuous, hard-working and well-respected', wrote a settler in Mexico in 1586 about the prospects that awaited a young man thinking of emigrating from Spain.54 But the presence in Spanish-occupied lands of precious metals and a docile labour force served to perpetuate in the Hispanic world conceptions of wealth in terms of booty and lordship that were instinctive to those nurtured in the traditions created by the prolonged medieval movement of the Reconquista against Islamic Spain.-51 For new arrivals in the Spanish Indies, the ever-present possibility of a sudden bonanza served as a continuing inducement to move on.

The corollary of this was that Spanish settlers, or at least first-generation Spanish settlers, would set much less value on land as a desirable commodity in itself than the settlers of seventeenth-century English America. It was vassals, rather than land, that they wanted, and it would have been neither desirable nor practicable to clear of their indigenous inhabitants such densely settled lands as those of central Mexico.56 Those Spaniards who commanded the services of tribute-paying Indians could look forward to enjoying a seigneurial income and life-style without the trouble of developing large estates, for which in any event there were few market outlets until the immigrant population became large enough to generate new wants. Consequently, the subjugation of those regions most densely settled by the indigenous population was the immediate priority for the conquistadores and first settlers from Spain, since these were the regions that offered the best hope of lordship over vassals, and hence the easy route to riches.

The Spanish settlement of America was therefore based on the domination of peoples, and this involved taking possession of vast areas of territory. In the nature of things, such areas could only be thinly settled by the colonists, and it was natural that, if only for purposes of self-protection, they should band together in towns. But the early predisposition of Spanish colonial society in the Indies to assume an urban form can also be traced back to established practice and collective attitudes. When Ferdinand and Isabella despatched Nicolas de Ovando to Hispaniola in 1501 to restore order to a colony that had descended into anarchy, they instructed him to establish cities at appropriate locations on the islands? This would help to provide rootless colonists with a fixed point and focus. A policy of urbanization in the Indies was consonant, too, with the practices developed during the Reconquista in medieval Spain, where the southward movement of the Castilians was based on cities and towns which were granted jurisdiction by the crown over large areas of hinterland.

Spaniards in any event shared the Mediterranean predisposition towards urban life, and it was not by accident that Cortes's compact for civil government when landing in Mexico, unlike the civil compact of the Mayflower Pilgrims, assumed from the outset an urban form. The ideal of the city as a perfect community was deeply rooted in the Hispanic tradition, and for human beings to live far away from society was regarded as contrary to nature. Following the Roman tradition, too, cities were seen as visible evidence of imperium, and memories of the Roman Empire were never far away from the minds of Spanish captains and bureaucrats.