Chapter Two

When Worlds Collide, 1492–1590

Chapter Focus Questions

What was the European background of American colonization?How did the Spanish create a New World empire and extend it into North America?What was the large-scale intercontinental exchange of peoples, crops, animals, and diseases?What was the French role in the beginnings of the North American fur trade?How did the English create their first overseas colonies in Ireland and America?

American Communities: The English and Algonquians at Roanoke

How did European imperialist goals create conflicts with Indians?

The First Colony of RoanokeMap: The Roanoke Colony in 1585Colony off the North Carolina coast founded by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585Goal was to find wealth: furs, gold or silver, and plantation agriculture Indians seen as laborersConflict with Algonquians led to abandonment of colony by English

The Lost Colony at RoanokeNew colony set up in 1585 aiming for better relations with Algonquians.Conflicts occurred, leading to John White's return to England for support.Three years later, White returned to Roanoke.Found colony destroyed and no trace of colonists.Colonists may have created the first mixed community of English and Indians in North America.

European Communities

What characterized European communities?

European CommunitiesAgricultural society with many new advances in farming technologyFeudal system divided land into small areas owned by landlords.Peasants paid tribute and performed labor.Majority of population Christian; small Jewish minority persecutedHarsh living conditions: famine prevalent.Plague wiped out one-third of Europe's population, 1347–1353.

The Merchant Class and the New Monarchies

Map: Western Europe in the Fifteenth CenturyEuropean expansion fueled by population increase and commercial growthWestern European states emerged with monarchs as centers of powerAlliance between monarchies and merchants paved way for European expansion

The Renaissance

Intellectual and artistic flowering in Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century

The Crusades stimulated Italian trade with Asia.Compass, gunpowder, movable type were introduced to Europe.Muslims reintroduced Greek and Roman learning to Europeans.

The Renaissance celebrated human possibility.Inquisitive and acquisitive spirit of Renaissance helped motivate exploration.

A French peasant labors in the field before a spectacular castle in a page taken from the

illuminated manuscript Tres Riches Heures, made in the fifteenth century for the duc de Berry. In

1580 the essayist Montaigne talked with several American Indians at the French court who

“noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves

were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty” and “found it strange that

these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by

the throat or set fire to their houses.” SOURCE:Photograph by Giraudon,Art Resource,N.Y.

MAP 2.1 Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century By the middle of the century, the monarchs of western Europe had unified their realms and begun to build royal bureaucracies

and standing armies and navies. These states, all with extensive Atlantic coastlines, sponsored the voyages that inaugurated the era of European colonization.

Portuguese Explorations

Prince Henry the Navigator established academy to train seafarers.

By the mid-fifteenth century most Europeans knew that the Earth was a spherical globe.

Portuguese trading voyages tried to reach Indies by sailing around Africa.1488: established several colonies and reached southern tip of Africa.Established Atlantic slave trade1498: Vasco Da Gama sails around Africa to Indies.

A central figure in this development was the king’s son, Prince Henry, known to later

generations as “the Navigator.” In the spirit of Renaissance learning, the prince established an academy of eminent geographers, instrument makers,

shipbuilders, and seamen at his institute at The astrolabe, an instrument used for

determining the precise position of heavenly bodies was introduced into early modern Europe by the Arabs. This is one of the

earliest examples, an intricately-engraved brass astrolabe produced by a master

craftsman in Syria in the thirteenth century. SOURCE:Smithsonian Museum,DC

Columbus Reaches the AmericasColumbus planned to travel to the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean.In 1492, Spain agreed to finance Columbus

They were in need of new lands to conquer and plunderIn October 1492, Columbus arrived at Caribbean islands.Columbus returned to Spain with talk of wealth and proposed inhabitants be enslaved.

“many spices and great mines of gold”Discovered clockwise circulation of Atlantic winds and currents.

This ship, thought to be similar to Columbus’s Niña, is a caravel, a type of vessel developed by the

naval experts at Henry the Navigator’s institute at Sagres Point

in Portugal. To the traditional square-rigged Mediterranean ship, they added the “lateen” sail of the

Arabs, which permitted much greater maneuverability. Other

Asian improvements, such as the stern-post rudder and multiple

masting, allowed caravels to travel farther and faster than any earlier

ships, and made possible the invasion of America.

SOURCE:Drawing by Bjorn Landstrom from The Ship .Dell Publishing.

The New World

Later Columbus voyages marked by violent slave raiding and obsession with goldNative populations were decimated and virtually eliminated by the 1520s.

Without slave population, colonies entered depressionSpanish were dissatisfied and ordered arrest of Columbus

Columbus died in 1506 still thinking that he had opened the new way to the Indies.After sailing to the Caribbean in 1499, Amerigo Vespucci described lands as a New World.

The Spanish in the Americas

Map: The Invasion of AmericaWho participated in the invasion of Americas?Where did they go?

This image accompanied Columbus’s account of his

voyage, which was published in Latin and reissued in many other

languages and editions that circulated throughout Europe

before 1500. The Spanish King Ferdinand is shown directing the voyage to a tropical island, where the

natives flee in terror. Columbus’s impression of

Native Americans as a people vulnerable to

conquest shows clearly in this image. SOURCE:The Granger Collection.

The Invasion of AmericaSpanish armies marched across Caribbean islands, slaughtering inhabitants.

Encomienda system established• Indians labor and Spanish lords protect Indians• Turned into slave system

In 1517, Spanish under Hernan Cortes reached Mexico, home of Aztec empire.

Aztecs dominated Central Mexico, extracting tribute and sacrificing human captives.Cortes allied with subject peoples and conquered Aztec empire, aided by disease.

Wealth was the driving force behind conquest

MAP 2.2 The Invasion of America In the sixteenth century, the Spanish first invaded the Caribbean and used it to stage their successive wars of conquest in North and South

America. In the seventeenth century, the French, English, and Dutch invaded the Atlantic coast. The Russians, sailing across the northern Pacific, mounted the last of the colonial

invasions in the eighteenth century.

The Destruction of the Indies

Spanish horses, guns, and steel overcame Indian resistance.Las Casas blamed Spanish for cruelty and deaths of millions of Indians.

The “Black Legend”Only a small portion of the deaths can be attributed to warfare.Famine, lower birth rates, and epidemic diseases were largely responsible for the radical reduction in native populations.

This map of Tenochititlan, published in 1524 and attributed to the celebrated engraver Albrecht Dürer, shows the city before its destruction, with the principal Aztec temples in the main square, cause-ways connecting the city to the mainland, and an acqueduct supplying

fresh water. The information on this map must have come from Aztec sources, as did much of the intelligence Cortés relied on for the Spanish conquest.

The Decline of the Indian Population

Chart: North America's Indian and Colonial Populations in the seventeenth and eighteenth CenturiesThe population of Mexico fell from 25 million in 1519 to one million a century later.By the twentieth century, native population had fallen by 90 percent.“Virgin Soil Epidemics”

Diseases were the greatest killer of Indians

The Cruelties Used by the Spaniards on the Indians, from a 1599 English edition of The Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas. These scenes were copied from a series of engravings produced by Theodore de Bry that accompanied an earlier edition.

SOURCE:British Library.

This drawing of victims of the smallpox epidemic that struck the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1520 is taken from the Florentine Codex, a postconquest history written and illustrated by

Aztec scribes. “There came amongst us a great sickness, a general plague,” reads the account, “killing vast numbers of people. It covered many all over with sores: on the face, on the head, on the chest, everywhere. . . . The sores were so terrible that the victims could not lie face down, nor on their backs, nor move from one side to the other. And when they tried to

move even a little, they cried out in agony.” SOURCE:The Granger Collection.

Intercontinental Exchange

Exchanges between Old and New Worlds occurredEuropean diseases decimated Indian populations.American precious metals

• Runaway inflation• Stimulated commerce• Lowered standard of living for most Europeans

American crops to Europe- corn, potatoes, cotton, chocolate, tobaccoEuropean crops to America- wheat, sugar, rice, horses, cattle

FIGURE 2.1 North America’s Indian and Colonial Populations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries The primary factor in the decimation of native peoples was epidemic

disease, brought to the New World from the Old. In the eighteenth century, the colonial population overtook North America’s Indian populations.

SOURCE:Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington,DC: Government Printing Office,1976),8,1168;Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press,1987),32.

The First Europeans in North America

In 1519, first of several unsuccessful colonization attempts failed in Florida.Europeans were searching for slaves and the rumored cities of wealth.In 1539, Hernan DeSoto traveled throughout South, spreading disease that depopulated and weakened Indian societies.In 1539, Francisco de Coronado searched for lost cities of gold in Southwest.Explorers failed to find great cities and turned back.

European Exploration of the Americas

Map: European Exploration, 1492–1591In the century after Columbus came to the Americas, Europeans had explored:

most of the Atlantic coast of North America;much of the Pacific coast of North America; andthe interior of southeastern and southwestern North America.

MAP 2.3 European Exploration, 1492–1591

By the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans had

explored most of the Atlantic coast of North

America and penetrated into the interior in the

disastrous expeditions of de Soto and Coronado.

The Spanish New World Empire

By late sixteenth century, the Spanish had a powerful American empire.200,000 Europeans and 125,000 Africans lived in Spanish colonies.Population was racially mixed.Council of the Indies governed empire but local autonomy prevailed.

FIGURE 2.2 The African, Indian, and European Populations of the Americas In the 500 years since the European invasion of the Americas, the population has included varying

proportions of Native American, European, and African peoples, as well as large numbers of persons of mixed ancestry. SOURCE:Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones,Atlas of World Population History (New York:Penguin,1978),280.

Fish and Furs

Abundant fish in Grand Banks of North Atlantic led Europeans to explore North American coastal waters.French were first to explore eastern North American and established claims to lands of CanadaEuropean-Indian relations based on trade, especially furs.Disease and wars over hunting grounds reduced Indian populations.Indians became dependent on European manufactured goods.

This watercolor of Jacques le Moyne, painted in 1564, depicts the friendly relations between the Timucuas of coastal Florida and the colonists of the short-lived French colony of Fort

Caroline. The Timucuas hoped that the French would help defend them against the Spanish, who plundered the coast in pursuit of Indian slaves.

SOURCE:Jacques Le Moyne,Rene de Loudonniere and Chief Athore ,1564 (watercolor),The New York Public Library,New York.

The Protestant Reformation and the First French Colonies

German priest Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation in 1517.Protestant John Calvin followers in France were called Huguenots.

Huguenots were largely merchants and members of the middle class.Huguenots planted first French colonies in South Carolina and Florida in an effort to find religious refuge.

French enjoyed good relations with Indians.Spanish destroyed French colony in Florida.

The French, under the command of Jean Ribault, land at the mouth of the St. Johns River inFlorida. The image shows the local Timucua people welcoming the French, It is likely that theTimucuas viewed the French as potential allies against the Spanish, who had plundered the

coast many times in pursuit of slaves. SOURCE:Colored engraving,1591,by Theodor de Bry after a now lost drawing by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues;The Granger Collection.

Sixteenth-Century England

Enclosure movement stimulated English colonization.Expanded woolen trade and cost growing number of farmers their land, creating large unemployed population.

King Henry VIII established the Protestant Church of England.“Bloody Mary” murdered hundreds of Protestants.Queen Elizabeth I encouraged supporters to subdue Irish Catholics to prevent any invasion efforts by Spain.

Brutal, vicious invasion led to conquest of Ireland, setting English pattern of colonization.

The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, painted by an unknown artist in 1648. The queen places her hand on the globe, symbolizing the rising seapower of England. Through the open

windows, we see the battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the destruction of the Spanish ships in a providential storm, interpreted by the queen as an act of divine

intervention. SOURCE:Elizabeth I ,Armada portrait,ca.1588 (oil on panel),by English School.Private collection/The Bridgeman Art Library International,Ltd.

Early English Efforts in the Americas

English “Sea Dogs” raided Spanish New World fleets.Rivalry with Spain led Queen Elizabeth I to found colonies.

Colonies could provide bases to raid the Spanish, free England from reliance on trade with Asia, and provide a home for the homeless.

Some colonization efforts failed including expeditions to Newfoundland and Roanoke.Spain became angry that the English were taking territory that had been set aside by the pope for Catholics.

Spanish Armada defeated by English fleet in 1588, halting Spanish monopoly on Americas.

The care that John White brought to his painting is evident in this watercolor of an Algonquian mother

and daughter (1585). The woman’s fringed deerskin skirt is edged with white beads,and the decoration on her face and upper arms seems to be tattooed. The little wooden doll in the girl’s hand was a gift

from White. All the Indian girls, wrote Thomas Harriot, “are greatly dellighted with puppetts and

babes which were brought out of England.” SOURCE:John White (1570 –93),“Woman and Child of Pomeiooc.” Watercolor.British Museum,London.The Bridgeman Art

Library International Ltd.