Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (19 page)

The judges, no doubt battered and bruised by Las Casas's five-day reading of his inordinately long Latin treatise of apology for the Indians, never delivered their verdict. Yet if Las Casas and his supporters failed in their prime purpose of elevating the status and conditions of life of the Indians, they did succeed in creating a moral climate in which the crown was forcefully reminded of its obligation to defend them against their oppressors and do what it could to improve their lot. In 1563 the Indians were formally classified as miserabiles. This classification gradually acquired a juridical content, as special judges were appointed to handle Indian cases in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, and legal assistance was provided for Indians who wished to lodge complaints.'12 Subsequently, in 1573, Philip II promulgated a long set of ordinances, drawn up by the President of the Council of the Indies, Juan de Ovando, that were designed to regulate any further territorial expansion.113 The ordinances came late in the day, and new-style 'pacification' often proved to be little more than a euphemism for old-style `conquest'. Both the convocation of the Valladolid debate, however, and the legislation that followed it, testify to the Spanish crown's commitment to ensuring `justice' for indigenous subject populations - a commitment for which, in its continuity and strength, it is not easy to find parallels in the history of other colonial empires.

Las Casas was primarily known in other parts of Europe for his harrowing Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which first appeared in English translation in 1583. A new translation, dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, was published in London under the emotive title of The Tears of the Indians in 1656, following the conquest of Jamaica and the outbreak of war with Spain. 114 The name of Las Casas was therefore well known to English readers, and not least to John Eliot, who to some extent would follow consciously in his steps. But there was less opportunity for the emergence of an effective Las Casas in the British world, where there was no encomendero class exploiting a large work-force of nominally free Indians, and no powerful group of missionaries to keep up the pressure on the secular authorities. Nor, in a world of colonial legislative assemblies, was there an over-arching system of royal control which would allow the crown to intervene, by legislative and executive action, on the Indians' behalf.

Those Indians who found themselves living within the confines of English settlements were gradually brought within the legislative purview of colonial societies. During the first decades of settlement in Puritan New England an effort was made to ensure fair treatment for the Indians under English law. Notions of fairness and reciprocity were deeply rooted in both Algonquian Indian and Puritan society, even if their interpretation could well differ in specific instances, and Algonquians, although holding to their own legal autonomy, would on occasion turn of their own free will to the colonial courts, especially for mediation in disputes. In 1656 Massachusetts appointed a commissioner for Indian affairs - a post comparable to that of Protector of the Indians with which the Spaniards experimented in the early stages of the colonization of the mainland"' - and by the 1670s juries composed of six Indians and six whites were pronouncing on criminal cases that arose between Algonquians and settlers. 116 But after King Philip's War of 1675-6 the Indian courts set up by the New England colonists were dismantled, `overseers' were assigned to deal with Indian affairs, and Indian legal rights were steadily eroded.117 Spanish justice, on the other hand, gave Indians at least a chance of fighting for their rights all the way to the summit of the judicial system; and Spanish judges, who personally administered justice and enjoyed a high degree of discretion in the hearing and assessing of evidence and the choice of punishment, showed a flexibility in their approach to crime, whether the case was one of drunken disorder or domestic violence and homicide, that contrasted sharply with the severity of New England's courts."

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.

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