Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (94 page)

1. England and its overseas possessions finally switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. The transition in the American colonies went smoothly, partly because the presence of so many immigrants from continental Europe meant that many colonial Americans had become used to operating the Julian and Gregorian calendars simultaneously. See Mark M. Smith, `Culture, Commerce and Calendar Reform in Colonial America', WMQ, 3rd set., 55 (1998), pp. 557-84.

2. For the total figure of about 530 Europeans on Cortes's expedition see Hugh Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico (London, 1993), p. 151, n. 36.

3. Francisco Lopez de Gemara, Cortes. The Life of the Conqueror by his Secretary, trans. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), p. 66. For the events of the conquest, see Thomas, The Conquest, and Hernan Cortes, Letters from Mexico, trans. and ed. Anthony Pagden (New Haven and London, 1986).

4. Jose Luis Martinez (ed.), Documentos cortesianos (4 vols, Mexico City, 1990-2), 1, p. 55 (Doc. 1, `Instrucciones de Diego Velazquez a Hernan Cortes', clause 55). See also Francisco Morales Padron, `Descubrimiento y toma de posesion', Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 12 (1955), pp. 321-80 for the ceremonial acts by which Spaniards took possession.

5. See Martinez (ed.), Documentos, 1, and Jose Luis Martinez, Hernan Cortes (Mexico City, 1990), pp. 141-3.

6. See John H. Elliott, `Cortes, Velazquez and Charles V, in Cortes, Letters from Mexico, pp. xi-xxxvii, for this and Cortes's further manoeuvres.

7. Gemara, Cortes, pp. 138-9.

8. Cortes, Letters from Mexico, pp. 85-6 and 98-9.

9. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 64.

10. John Parker, Books to Build an Empire (Amsterdam, 1965), pp. 45, 94.

11. Francisco Lopez de Gemara, The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India, now called New Spayne (London, 1578). The book was republished in 1596. See the introduction by L. B. Simpson to his translation of Gemara, Cortes, p. xvii, and Parker, Books to Build an Empire, pp. 87-8.

12. Gemara, Cortes, p. 184; The Pleasant Historie, pp. 230 and 232.

13. Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, facsimile edn (2 vols, Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1965), 2, p. 715 (here, as elsewhere in the book, I have modernized the spelling).

14. Parker, Books to Build, p. 105.

15. E. G. R. Taylor, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (2 vols, Hakluyt Society, 2nd set., 76-7, London, 1935), 2, p. 275.

16. D. B. Quinn (ed.), The Roanoke Voyages (2 vols, Hakluyt Society, 2nd set., 104-5, London, 1955), 1, p. 6, and see for the Roanoke enterprise David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke. Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1985).

17. Henry R. Wagner, The Rise of Fernando Cortes (Los Angeles, 1944), pp. 27-8; Martinez, Hernan Cortes, pp. 128-9.

18. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols, New Haven, 1934-8; repr. 1964), 1, ch. 4; David Beers Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (London, 1974), ch. 18; and see Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire (Cambridge, MA, 1967), for merchant and gentry investment.

19. Hugh Thomas, in his Conquest of Mexico, pp. 129-30, seems to have established that he sailed in 1506 and not, as is normally stated, in 1504.

20. The story is recounted by the sixteenth-century chronicler, Cervantes de Salazar. See J. H. Elliott, Spain and its World, 1500-1700 (New Haven and London, 1989), ch. 2 ('The Mental World of Hernan Cortes'), pp. 33-4.

21. For Newport's life, about which relatively little is known, see Kenneth R. Andrews, `Christopher Newport of Limehouse, Mariner', WMQ, 3rd set., 11 (1954), pp. 28-41, and his Elizabethan Privateering (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 84-6.

22. No complete list is available, but a partial list is provided by Captain John Smith in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour (3 vols, Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1986), 1, pp. 207-9.

23. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975), p. 84.

24. Robert Himmerich y Valencia, The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555 (Austin, TX, 1991), p. 29.

25. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana, ed. Joaquin Ramirez Cabanas (3 vols, Mexico City, 1944), 3, p. 239.

26. Himmerich, Encomenderos, p. 10.

27. Alden Vaughan, American Genesis. Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston and Toronto, 1975), p. 31.

28. M. I. Finley, `Colonies - an Attempt at a Typology', TRHS, 5th set., 26 (1976), pp. 167-88.

29. Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony. Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560-1800 (Baltimore, 1988), p. 13.

30. A possible distinction between a plantation and a colony, meaning the people who settled and worked the land, appears in a letter written by Emmanuel Downing in 1633, when he writes that Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his co-partners `have these many years laboured to make a plantation in New England', and `have of late made claim to the very ground where Mr. Winthrop, with a colony, hath built and planted . . .' (cited by Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop. America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford, 2003), p. 233).

31. From The Planter's Plea (Anon., 1630), in Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner (eds), The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (New York and London, 1997), p. 100. `Settler', as a word interchangeable with `planter', first appeared at the end of the seventeenth century.

32. Jaime Eyzaguirre, Ideario y ruta de la emancipacidn chilena (Santiago de Chile, 1957), p. 27.

33. Philip L. Barbour (ed.), The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606-1609 (2 vols, Hakluyt Society, 2nd set., 136-7, Cambridge, 1969), 1, doc. 1, p. 24 (Letters Patent to Sir Thomas Gates and Others, 10 April 1606).

34. Milagros del Vas Mingo, Las capitulaciones de Indias en el siglo XVI (Madrid, 1986), doc. 10.

35. Taylor, Writings of the Two Hakluyts, 2, doc. 47, p. 330.

36. Smith, Works, 1, p. 205; Vaughan, American Genesis, p. 27.

37. For the early Spanish interest in this region, see Paul E. Hoffman, A New Andalucia and a Way to the Orient. The American Southeast During the Sixteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA and London, 1990).

38. For Ajacan see Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie (eds), The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570-1572 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1953), and Charlotte M. Gradie, `Spanish Jesuits in Virginia. The Mission that Failed', The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 96 (1988), pp. 131-56. Also David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 71-3. For `Don Luis de Velasco' and his identification with Opechancanough, Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699 (New York and Oxford, 1989), pp. 14-20. The identification is much contested. See Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas 's People. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman, OK and London, 1990), pp. 18-19.

39. Smith, Works, 1, p. 206. For relations between the settlers and the Powhatan in the first years of Jamestown, see Martin H. Quitt, `Trade and Acculturation at Jamestown, 1607-1609: the Limits of Understanding', WMQ, 3rd set., 52 (1995), pp. 227-58.

40. Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, 1, doc. 13, p. 88 (A Relation ... 21 May-21 June 1607').

41. Alexander Brown, The Genesis of the United States (2 vols, London, 1890), 1, doc. lxxxix, p. 299; Wesley Frank Craven, `Indian Policy in Early Virginia', WMQ, 3rd set., 1 (1944), pp. 65-82, at p. 65.

42. Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Ithaca, NY and London, 1970), pp. 230-1. For a recent brief survey of interpretations of the Alexandrine bulls, see Guy Bedouelle, `La Donation alexandrine et le traite de Tordesillas', in 1492. Le choc des deux mondes (Acres du Colloque international organise par la Commission Nationale Suisse pour l'UNESCO, Geneva, 1992), pp. 193-209.

43. See Juan Lopez de Palacios Rubins, De las Islas del mar oceano, ed. S. Zavala and A. Millares Carlo (Mexico and Buenos Aires, 1954), pp. cxxiv-cxxvi; James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order. The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 136-9; Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 3.

44. Richard Hakluyt, `Discourse of Western Planting' (1584) in Taylor, Writings of the Two Hakluyts, 2, p. 215.

45. D. B. Quinn (ed.), The Voyages and Colonizing Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (Hakluyt Society, 2nd set., vols 83-4, London, 1940), 2, p. 361.

46. William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (Hakluyt Society, 2nd set., vol. 103, London, 1953), pp. 9-10.

47. Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp. 76-7.

48. Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 278-80 ('On the American Indians', 3.1).

49. William Crashaw's Sermon of 21 February 1609 (i.e. 1610 New Style) in Brown, Genesis of the United States, 1, doc. cxx, p. 363.

50. Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, 1, doc. 4, p. 51.

51. Ibid., p. 52.

52. Ian K. Steele, Warpaths. Invasions of North America (Oxford, 1994), p. 41.

53. James Axtell, After Columbus. Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford, 1988), ch. 10 ('The Rise and Fall of the Powhatan Empire').

54. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1975), pp. 23-4; Axtell, After Columbus, p. 186.

55. For a review of the debate on the population of pre-conquest Mexico see Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico, appendix 1; Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia. A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln, NE and London, 1997), p. 26, for Powhatan.

56. Smith, Works, 1, p. 173.

57. For early relations between Powhatan and the English, in addition to Rountree, Pocahontas 's People, Gleach, Powhatan's World, and Axtell, After Columbus, ch. 10, see April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia. Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004), ch. 1.

58. Strachey, Travell into Virginia, p. 106.

59. See the interpretation in Gleach, Powhatan's World, pp. 109-22.

60. Smith, Works, 1, p. 55.

61. Axtell, After Columbus, p. 129.

62. Elliott, Spain and its World, pp. 36-8; James Lockhart (ed.), We People Here. Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Repertorium Columbianum, 1, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1993), p. 17; Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings (Tucson, AZ, 1989), pp. 226-30.

63. Smith, Works, 1, pp. 236-7.

64. Barbour, Jamestown Voyages, 1, doc. 1, p. 28.

65. Ibid., 1, doc. 17, p. 107 (letter from William Brewster, 1607).

66. Ibid., 1, doc. 21, p. 113.

67. Ibid., 1, doc. 14, p. 101.

68. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, pp. 76-7.

69. Smith, Works, 1, p. 327.

70. For a recent account of `the Great Massacre of 1622' in the context of Powhatan culture, see Gleach, Powhatan's World, ch. 6. Gleach prefers the word coup to massacre. Other historians speak of an uprising (see his Introduction, pp. 4-5). No single word can be found to cover all interpretations.

71. As in James Lang's Conquest and Commerce.

72. See R. R. Davies, The First English Empire. Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093-1343 (Oxford, 2000), for an acute analysis of English expansion into medieval Wales and Ireland as a colonizing and annexing process.

73. Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland. A Pattern Established, 1565-1576 (New York, 1976), p. 118.

74. For a brief account in English of the Reconquista, see D. W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London and New York, 1978).

75. For European voyages of exploration before Columbus, see the surveys by J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe (Oxford, 1988), and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus. Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492 (London, 1987).

76. See in particular Vitorino De Maghalaes Godinho, A economia dos descobrimentos henriquinos (Lisbon, 1962), ch. 5, and Peter Russell, Prince Henry `the Navigator'. A Life (New Haven and London, 2000).

77. For the Canary Islands, see Felipe Fern andez-Armesto, The Canary Islands after the Conquest (Oxford, 1982).

78. See Verlinden, Beginnings of Modern Colonization, ch. 1.

79. Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, ed. and trans. B. W. Ife (Warminster, 1990), pp. 133-5.

80. Juan Perez de Tudela, Las armadas de Indias y los origenes de la politica de colonizacion, 1492-1505 (Madrid, 1956), pp. 82-5.

81. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Cambridge, 1966), remains fundamental for Hispaniola and its fate. For a more recent survey, based on the results of archaeological investigation, see Kathleen Deagan and Jose Maria Cruxent, Columbus's Outpost among the Tainos. Spain and America at La Isabela, 1492-1498 (New Haven and London, 2002). Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold. The Rise of the Spanish Empire (London, 2003), provides a comprehensive survey of early Spanish activities in the Caribbean and on the central American mainland.

82. See Mario Gongora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1975), ch. 1.

83. For example, when describing the city of Cholula in his second letter: `I counted from a mosque more than 430 towers in this city, and they were all of mosques' (Hernan Cortes, Cartas y documentos (ed. Mario Sanchez-Barba (Mexico City, 1963), p. 51).

84. Gongora, Studies, p. 2; Cortes, Letters from Mexico, p. 40.

85. Ursula Lamb, Frey Nicolas de Ovando. Gobernador de las Indias, 1501-1509 (Madrid, 1956).