Clash of Cultures: InterpretingMurder in Early MarylandNew World conquest sparked unexpected, oftenembarrassing contests over the alleged superiority ofEuropean culture. Not surprisingly, the colonizers insistedthey brought the benefits of civilization to the primi-tive and savage peoples of North America. NativeAmericans never shared this perspective, voicing astrong preference for their own values and institutions.In early seventeenth-century Maryland the struggle overcultural superiority turned dramatically on how best topunish the crime of murder, an issue about which bothNative Americans and Europeans had firm opinions.

The actual events that occurred at Captain WilliamClaiborne’s trading post in 1635 may never be known.Surviving records indicate that several young males iden-tified as Wicomess Indians apparently traveled toClaiborne’s on business, but to their great annoyance,they found the proprietor entertaining SusquehannockIndians, their most hated enemies. The situation deterio-rated rapidly after the Susquehannock men ridiculed theWicomess youths, “whereat some of Claiborne’s peoplethat saw it, did laugh.” Unwilling to endure public humil-iation, the Wicomess later ambushed the Susquehannockgroup, killing five, and then returned to the trading postwhere they murdered three Englishmen.

Wicomess leaders realized immediately thatsomething had to be done. They dispatched a trusted

messenger to inform the governor of Maryland that theyintended “to offer satisfaction for the harm . . . done tothe English.” The murder of the Susquehannock wasanother matter, best addressed by the Native Americansthemselves. The governor praised the Wicomess forcoming forward, announcing that “I expect that thosemen, who have done this outrage, should be deliveredunto me, to do with them as I shall think fit.”

The Wicomess spokesman was dumbfounded. Thegovernor surely did not understand basic NativeAmerican legal procedure. “It is the manner amongstus Indians, that if any such like accident happens,” heexplained, “we do redeem the life of a man that is soslain with a 100 Arms length of Roanoke (which is asort of Beads that they make, and use for money.)” Thegovernor’s demand for prisoners seemed doubly imper-tinent, “since you [English settlers] are here strangers,and coming into our Country, you should rather con-form your selves to the Customs of our Country, thanimpose yours upon us.” At this point the governorhastily ended the conversation, perhaps uncomfortablyaware that if the legal tables had been turned and themurders committed in England, he would be the oneloudly defending “the Customs of our Country.”

����

Europeans sailing in the wake of Admiral ChristopherColumbus constructed a narrative of superiority that

survived long after the Wicomess had been dispersed—a fatethat befell them in the late seventeenth century. The story

NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

O U T L I N E

• Native American Histories Before Conquest • A World Transformed • West Africa: Ancient and Complex Societies • Europe

on the Eve of Conquest • Imagining a New World • The French Claim Canada • The English Enter the Competition • An

Unpromising Beginning: Mystery at Roanoke • Conclusion: Campaign to Sell America � FEATURE ESSAY The Columbian

Exchange and the Global Environment: Ecological Revolution

1

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3

recounted first in Europe and then in the United Statesdepicted heroic adventures, missionaries, and soldiers sharingWestern civilization with the peoples of the New World andopening a vast virgin land to economic development. Thefamiliar tale celebrated material progress, the inevitable spreadof European values, and the taming of frontiers. It was ahistory crafted by the victors—usually by white leaders such asMaryland’s governor—and by the children of the victors toexplain how they had come to inherit the land.

This narrative of events no longer provides an adequateexplanation for European conquest and settlement. It is notso much wrong as partisan, incomplete, even offensive.History recounted from the perspective of the victorsinevitably silences the voices of the victims, the peopleswho, in the victors’ view, foolishly resisted economic andtechnological progress. Heroic tales of the advance ofWestern values only serve to deflect modern attention awayfrom the rich cultural and racial diversity that characterized

Europeans imagined a New World that often bore little relation to reality. This early engravingdepicts the coast of North America as a dangerous place where hostile Indians, bizarre navigationalhazards, and sea monsters greeted English sailors.

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North American societies for a very long time. More dis-turbing, traditional tales of European conquest also obscurethe sufferings of the millions of Native Americans who per-ished, as well as the huge numbers of Africans sold in theNew World as slaves.

By placing these complex, often unsettling, experienceswithin an interpretive framework of creative adaptations—rather than of exploration or settlement—we go a long waytoward recapturing the full human dimensions of conquestand resistance. While the New World often witnessed tragicviolence and systematic betrayal, it allowed ordinary peopleof three different races and many different ethnic identitiesopportunities to shape their own lives as best they couldwithin diverse, often hostile, environments.

It should be remembered that neither the NativeAmericans nor the Africans were passive victims of Europeanexploitation. Within their own families and communitiesthey made choices, sometimes rebelling, sometimes accom-modating, but always trying to make sense in terms of theirown cultures of what was happening to them. Of course,that was precisely what the Wicomess messenger tried to tellthe governor of Maryland.

Native American Histories BeforeConquestAs almost any Native American could have informed thefirst European adventurers, the peopling of America didnot begin in 1492. In fact, although European invaderssuch as Columbus proclaimed the discovery of a “NewWorld,” they really brought into contact three worlds—Europe, Africa, and America—that in the fifteenth centurywere already old. Indeed, the first migrants reached theNorth American continent some fifteen to twenty thou-sand years ago. The precise dating of this great human trekremains a hotly contested topic. Although some archaeolo-gists maintain that settlement began as early as thirtythousand years ago, the scientific evidence in support ofthis thesis currently is not persuasive. However this debateeventually resolves itself; no one doubts that NativeAmericans have recorded a very long history in NorthAmerica. Their social and cultural development over theperiod was as complex as any encountered in the so-calledOld World.

Environmental conditions played a major part in thestory. Twenty thousand years ago the earth’s climate wasconsiderably colder than it is today. Huge glaciers, oftenmore than a mile thick, extended as far south as the presentstates of Illinois and Ohio and covered broad sections ofwestern Canada. Much of the world’s moisture was trans-formed into ice, and the oceans dropped hundreds of feetbelow their current levels. The receding waters created aland bridge connecting Asia and North America, a regionnow submerged beneath the Bering Sea that modernarchaeologists named Beringia.

4 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

Even at the height of the last Ice Age, much of the farNorth remained free of glaciers. Small bands of spear-throwingPaleo-Indians pursued giant mammals (megafauna)—woolly mammoths and mastodons, for example—acrossthe vast tundra of Beringia. These hunters were the firsthuman beings to set foot on a vast, uninhabited continent.Because these migrations took place over a long period oftime and involved small, independent bands of highlynomadic people, the Paleo-Indians never developed a senseof common identity. Each group focused on its own imme-diate survival, adjusting to the opportunities presented byvarious microenvironments.

The material culture of the Paleo-Indians differed littlefrom that of other Stone Age peoples found in Asia, Africa,and Europe. In terms of human health, however, somethingoccurred on the Beringian tundra that forever altered thehistory of Native Americans. For reasons that remainobscure, the members of these small migrating groupsstopped hosting a number of communicative diseases—smallpox and measles being the deadliest—and althoughNative Americans experienced illnesses such as tuberculo-sis, they no longer suffered the major epidemics that undernormal conditions would have killed a large percentage oftheir population every year. The physical isolation of thevarious bands may have protected them from the spread ofcontagious disease. Another theory notes that epidemicshave frequently been associated with prolonged contactwith domestic animals such as cattle and pigs. Since thePaleo-Indians did not domesticate animals, not even horses,they may have avoided the microbes that caused virulentEuropean and African diseases.

Whatever the explanation for this curious epidemio-logical record, Native Americans lost inherited immunitiesthat later might have protected them from many contagiousgerms. Thus, when they first came into contact withEuropeans and Africans, Native Americans had no defenseagainst the great killers of the Early Modern world. And, asmedical researchers have discovered, dislocations resultingfrom war and famine made the Indians even more vulnera-ble to infectious disease.

The Environmental Challenge: Food, Climate,and CultureSome twelve thousand years ago global warming substan-tially reduced the glaciers, allowing nomadic hunters topour into the heart of the North American continent.Within just a few thousand years, Native Americans hadjourneyed from Colorado to the southern tip of SouthAmerica. Blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply ofmeat, the early migrants experienced rapid populationgrowth. As archaeologists have discovered, however, thesudden expansion of human population coincided withthe loss of scores of large mammals, many of them thespear-throwers’ favorite sources of food. The animals thatdied out during this period included mammoths and

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Sea Ice

Continental GlaciationAlpine Glaciation

Rocky Mountains

PA C I F I C O C E A N

NORTH AMERICA

Siberia

Beringia

Possible migration routes

Glaciated areas

Present day shorelines

Land areas

ROUTES OF THE FIRST AMERICANS The peopling of North America began about twentythousand years ago, during an ice age, and continued for many millennia. Land bridges created bylower sea levels during glaciation formed a tundra coastal plain over what is now the Bering Strait,between Asia and North America.

mastodons; camels and, amazingly, horses were eradicatedfrom the land. The peoples of the Great Plains did notobtain horses until the Spanish reintroduced them in theNew World in 1547. Some archaeologists have suggestedthat the early Paleo-Indian hunters bear responsibilityfor the mass extinction of so many animals. It is moreprobable that climatic warming, which transformedwell-watered regions into arid territories, put the largemammals under severe stress, and the early humans sim-ply contributed to an ecological process over which theyultimately had little control.

The Indian peoples adjusted to the changing environ-mental conditions. As they dispersed across the NorthAmerican continent, they developed new food sources, atfirst smaller mammals and fish, nuts and berries, and then

about five thousand years ago, they discoveredhow to cultivate certain plants. Knowledge ofmaize (corn), squash, and beans spread northfrom central Mexico. The peoples living in theSouthwest acquired cultivation skills long beforethe bands living along the Atlantic Coast. The

shift to basic crops—a transformation that is sometimestermed the Agricultural Revolution—profoundly alteredNative American societies. The availability of a more reli-able store of food helped liberate nomadic groups from the

Native American Histories Before Conquest 5

insecurities of hunting and gathering. It was during thisperiod that Native Americans began to produce ceramics, avaluable technology for the storage of grain. The vegetableharvest made possible the establishment of permanent vil-lages, that often were governed by clearly defined hierar-chies of elders and kings, and as the food supply increased,the Native American population greatly expanded, espe-cially around urban centers in the Southwest and in theMississippi Valley. Although the evidence is patchy, scholarscurrently estimate that approximately four million NativeAmericans lived north of Mexico at the time of the initialencounter with Europeans.

Mysterious DisappearancesSeveral magnificent sites in North America provide powerfultestimony to the cultural and social achievements of nativepeoples during the final two thousand years before Europeanconquest. One of the more impressive is Chaco Canyon onthe San Juan River in present-day New Mexico. The massivepueblo was the center of Anasazi culture, serving bothpolitical and religious functions, and it is estimated that itscomplex structures may have housed as many as fifteenthousand people. The Anasazi sustained their agriculturethrough a huge, technologically sophisticated network ofirrigation canals that carried water long distances. They also

Pre-ColumbiaSocieties of the

Americas

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6 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

constructed a transportation system connecting ChacoCanyon by road to more than seventy outlying villages. Someof the highways were almost a hundred miles long.

During this period equally impressive urban centersdeveloped throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.In present-day southern Ohio, the Adena and Hopewellpeoples—names assigned by archaeologists to distinguishdifferences in material culture—built large ceremonialmounds, where they buried the families of local elites.Approximately a thousand years after the birth of Christ,the groups gave way to the Mississippian culture, a loose

collection of communities dispersed along theMississippi River from Louisiana to Illinois thatshared similar technologies and beliefs. Cahokia,a huge fortification and ceremonial site inIllinois that originally rose high above the river,represented the greatest achievement of the

Mississippian peoples. Covering almost twenty acres,Cahokia once supported a population of almost twentythousand, a city rivaling in size many encountered in latemedieval Europe. As one archaeologist observed, Cahokiawas “as spectacular as any of the magnificent Mexican civi-lizations that were its contemporaries.”

Recent research reveals that the various Native Americanpeoples did not live in isolated communities. To be sure, overthe millennia they developed many different cultural andsocial practices, reflecting the specific constraints of localecologies. More than three hundred separate languages hadevolved in North America before European conquest. Butmembers of the groups traded goods over extremely long dis-tances. Burial mounds found in the Ohio Valley, for example,have yielded obsidian from western Wyoming, shells fromFlorida, mica quarried in North Carolina and Tennessee, andcopper found near Lake Superior.

Yet however advanced the Native American cultures ofthe southwest and Mississippi Valley may have been, bothcultures disappeared mysteriously just before the arrival ofthe Europeans. No one knows what events brought down thegreat city of Cahokia or persuaded the Anasazi to abandonChaco Canyon. Some scholars have suggested that climaticchanges coupled with continuing population growth put toomuch pressure on food supplies; others insist that chronicwarfare destabilized the social order. It has even been arguedthat diseases carried to the New World by the first Europeanadventurers ravaged the cultures. About one point moderncommentators are in full agreement: The breakdown ofMississippian culture caused smaller bands to disperse, con-struct new identities, and establish different political struc-tures. They were the peoples who first encountered theEuropeans along the Atlantic coast and who seemed to thenewcomers to have lived in the same places and followedthe same patterns of behavior since the dawn of time.

Aztec DominanceThe stability resulting from the Agricultural Revolutionallowed the Indians of Mexico and Central America tostructure their societies in more complex ways. Like the Incawho lived in what is now known as Peru, the Mayan and Toltecpeoples of Central Mexico built vast cities, formed governmentbureaucracies that dominated large tributary populations, anddeveloped hieroglyphic writing as well as an accurate solarcalendar. Their cities, which housed several hundred thousandpeople, greatly impressed the Spanish conquerors. Bernal Díazdel Castillo reported, “When we saw all those [Aztec] townsand villages built in the water, and other great towns on dryland, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, wewere astounded. . . . Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whetherit was not all a dream.”

ReconstructedView ofCahokia

The center of the Anasazi culture was Chaco Canyon.Pueblo Bonita was the largest of Chaco’s twelve towns.The pueblo rose five stories high on walls made ofadobe and faced with sandstone slabs. More than650 living quarters and storage rooms surrounded thecentral plaza. Roads extending some four hundredmiles linked Pueblo Bonita to outlying pueblos.

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Native American Histories Before Conquest 7

Aztec human sacrifice depicted in the Codex Magliabechiano, asixteenth-century Spanish account of the lives of the nativeMexicans. The ritual sacrifices performed by Aztec priests wereassociated with worship of the sun god—each offering was con-sidered a sacred debt payment.

Not long before Columbus began his first voyageacross the Atlantic, the Aztec, an aggressive, warlike people,swept through the Valley of Mexico, conquering the greatcities that their enemies had constructed. Aztec warriorsruled by force, reducing defeated rivals to tributary status.In 1519, the Aztecs’ main ceremonial center, Tenochtitlán,contained as many as two hundred fifty thousand people ascompared with only fifty thousand in Seville, the port fromwhich the early Spaniards had sailed. Elaborate human sac-

rifice associated with Huitzilopochtli, the Aztecsun god, horrified Europeans, who apparentlydid not find the savagery of their own civiliza-tion so objectionable. The Aztec ritual killingswere connected to the agricultural cycle, andthe Indians believed the blood of their victims

possessed extraordinary fertility powers. A fragment of anAztec song-poem captures the indomitable spirit that oncepervaded this militant culture:

Proud of itselfis the city of Mexico-Tenochtitlán.Here no one fears to die in war.This is our glory. . . .Who could conquer Tenochtitlán?Who could shake the foundation of heaven?

Eastern Woodland CulturesIn the northeast region along the Atlantic coast, the Indiansdid not practice intensive agriculture. These peoples,numbering less than a million at the time of conquest,generally supplemented farming with seasonal hunting andgathering. Most belonged to what ethnographers term theEastern Woodland Cultures. Small bands formed villagesduring the warm summer months. The women cultivatedmaize and other crops while the men hunted and fished.

During the winter, difficulties associated with feeding somany people forced the communities to disperse. Eachfamily lived off the land as best it could.

Seventeenth-century English settlers were most likelyto have encountered the Algonquian-speaking peoples whooccupied much of the territory along the Atlantic coastfrom North Carolina to Maine. Included in this large lin-guistic family were the Powhatan of Tidewater Virginia, theNarragansett of Rhode Island, and the Abenaki of northernNew England.

Despite common linguistic roots, however, the scatteredAlgonquian communities would have found communica-tion extremely difficult. They had developed very differentdialects. A sixteenth-century Narragansett, for example,would have found it hard to comprehend a Powhatan. Themajor groups of the Southeast, such as the Creek, belongedto a separate language group (Muskogean); the Indians ofthe eastern Great Lakes region and upper St. Lawrence Valleygenerally spoke Iroquoian dialects.

Linguistic ties had little effect on Indian politics.Algonquian groups who lived in different regions, exploiteddifferent resources, and spoke different dialects did notdevelop strong ties of mutual identity, and when their owninterests were involved, they were more than willing to allythemselves with Europeans or “foreign” Indians againstother Algonquian speakers. Divisions among Indian groupswould in time facilitate European conquest. Local NativeAmerican peoples greatly outnumbered the first settlers,and had the Europeans not forged alliances with theIndians, they could not so easily have gained a foothold onthe continent.

However divided the Indians of eastern North Americamay have been, they shared many cultural values andassumptions. Most Native Americans, for example, definedtheir place in society through kinship. Such per-sonal bonds determined the character of eco-nomic and political relations. The farmingbands living in areas eventually claimed byEngland were often matrilineal, which meant ineffect that the women owned the planting fieldsand houses, maintained tribal customs, and hada role in tribal government. Among the nativecommunities of Canada and the northern GreatLakes, patrilineal forms were much more common. In thesegroups, the men owned the hunting grounds that the familyneeded to survive.

Eastern Woodland communities organized diplomacy,trade, and war around reciprocal relationships thatimpressed Europeans as being extraordinarily egalitarian,even democratic. Chains of native authority were looselystructured. Native leaders were such renowned publicspeakers because persuasive rhetoric was often their onlyeffective source of power. It required considerable oratoricalskills for an Indian leader to persuade independent-mindedwarriors to support a certain policy.

Aztec RainGod, Tlaloc

The FirstAmericans:Locations ofMajor IndianGroups and

Culture Areasin the 1600s

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8 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

Before the arrival of the white settlers, Indian wars wereseldom very lethal. Young warriors attacked neighboringbands largely to exact revenge for a previous insult or thedeath of a relative, or to secure captives. Fatalities, whenthey did occur, sparked cycles of revenge. Some captiveswere tortured to death; others were adopted into the com-munity as replacements for fallen relatives.

A World TransformedThe arrival of large numbers of white men and women onthe North American continent profoundly altered NativeAmerican cultures. Change did not occur at the samerates in all places. Indian villages located on the Atlanticcoast came under severe pressure almost immediately;inland groups had more time to adjust. Wherever theylived, however, Indians discovered that conquest strainedtraditional ways of life, and as daily patterns of experiencechanged almost beyond recognition, native peoples hadto devise new answers, new responses, and new ways tosurvive in physical and social environments that erodedtradition. Historian James Merrell reminded us that theIndians found themselves living in a world that from theirperspective was just as “new” as that which greeted theEuropean invaders.

Cultural NegotiationsNative Americans were not passive victims of geopoliticalforces beyond their control. So long as they remained healthy,they held their own in the early exchanges, and although theyeagerly accepted certain trade goods, they generally resistedother aspects of European cultures. The earliest recordedcontacts between Indians and explorers suggest curiosityand surprise rather than hostility. A Southeastern Indianwho encountered Hernando de Soto in 1540 expressedawe (at least that is what a Spanish witness recorded):“The things that seldom happen bring astonishment.Think, then, what must be the effect on me and mine, thesight of you and your people, whom we have at no timeseen . . . things so altogether new, as to strike awe andterror to our hearts.”

What Indians desired most was peaceful trade. The ear-liest French explorers reported that natives waved fromshore, urging the Europeans to exchange metal items forbeaver skins. In fact, the Indians did not perceive themselvesat a disadvantage in these dealings. They could readily seethe technological advantage of guns over bows and arrows.Metal knives made daily tasks much easier. And to acquiresuch goods they gave up pelts, which to them seemed inabundant supply. “The English have no sense,” one Indianinformed a French priest. “They give us twenty knives likethis for one Beaver skin.” Another native announced that

PACIFICOCEAN

ATLANTICOCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

Ohio R.Colorado R

.

Col

umbi

a R

.

Rio Grande

Missouri R. G r e a t L a k e s

Mississippi R

.

St. L

awre

nce

R.

NORTHWESTCOAST

CALIFORNIA

NORTHERNMEXICO

SOUTHWEST

GREAT BASIN

PLATEAU

GREAT PLAINS

SOUTHEAST

SUB-ARCTIC

EASTERNWOODLAND

ChinookChehalisQuinault

Makah

YakimaSpokane

Colville

OkanaganKutenai

TillamookUmpqua

YurokCayuse

Klamath

ModocShastaMaidu

Hupa

Pomo

MiwokCostanoan

Yokuts

NorthernPaiute

NezPerce

Flathead

Shoshoni

Bannock

Goshute

SouthernPaiute

ChumashSerrano

Cahuilla

Ute

Hopi

YumaPapago

Mohave

PimaMaricopa

CochimiOpata

Seri

Cahita

Yaqui

Tarahumara

Concho

LipanApache

MescaleroApacheWestern

Apache

ZuñiPueblo

Navajo JicarillaApache

Wichita

Karankawa

Tonkawa

Caddo

Illinois

Miami Erie

Pawnee

Comanche

Kiowa

Iowa

Arapaho

Kansa

Sioux

Chippewa(Ojibwa)

Chippewa(Ojibwa)

Menominee

SaukFox

WinnebagoKickapoo

Potawatomi

Shawnee

TuteloPowhatan

Lenni-Lenape(Delaware)

Cherokee

ChickasawQuapaw

CreekChoctaw

Natchez ApalacheeBiloxiAtakapa

Calusa

Yamasee

Timucua

Tuscarora

Catawba

Huron

Ottawa

Algonquin

Susquehannock

Iroquois

WampanoagMassachusetts

Narragansett

Pennacook

Abenaki

Mahican

Malecite

Micmac

Mohaw

k

Oneida

Onondaga

Cayuga

Seneca

Blackfoot

Gros Ventre

MandanArikara

Hidatsa

Assiniboin

CheyennePonca

Omaha

Osage

Missouri

Kiowa

Yavapi

Equator

PACIFICOCEAN

Aztec

NORTHAMERICA

SOUTHAMERICA

Maya

Inca

0 150 300 kilometers

0 150 300 miles

THE FIRST AMERICANS: LOCATION OF MAJOR INDIAN GROUPS AND CULTUREAREAS IN THE 1600S Native Americans had complex social structures, religious systems, andsophisticated agricultural techniques before they came into contact with Europeans.

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A World Transformed 9

“the Beaver does everything perfectly well: it makes kettles,hatchets, swords, knives, bread . . . in short, it makes every-thing.” The man who recorded these observations remindedFrench readers—in case they had missed the point—thatthe Indian was “making sport of us Europeans.”

Trading sessions along the eastern frontier were reallycultural seminars. The Europeans tried to make sense out ofIndian customs, and although they may have called thenatives “savages,” they quickly discovered that the Indiansdrove hard bargains. They demanded gifts; they set the timeand place of trade.

The Indians used the occasions to study the newcom-ers. They formed opinions about the Europeans, some flat-tering, some less so, but they never concluded from theirobservations that Indian culture was inferior to that of thecolonizers. They regarded the beards worn by Europeanmen as particularly revolting. As an eighteenth-centuryEnglishman said of the Iroquois, “They seem always to haveLooked upon themselves as far Superior to the rest ofMankind and accordingly Call themselves Ongwehoenwe,i.e., Men Surpassing all other men.”

For Europeans, communicating with the Indians wasalways an ordeal. The invaders reported having gaineddeep insight into Native American cultures through sign

languages. How much accurate informationexplorers and traders took from these crudeimprovised exchanges is a matter of conjec-ture. In a letter written in 1493, Columbusexpressed frustration: “I did not understandthose people nor they me, except for whatcommon sense dictated, although they were

saddened and I much more so, because I wanted to havegood information concerning everything.”

In the absence of meaningful conversation, Europeansoften concluded that the Indians held them in high regard,perhaps seeing the newcomers as gods. Such one-sidedencounters involved a good deal of projection, a mentalprocess of translating alien sounds and gestures into mes-sages that Europeans wanted to hear. Sometimes the adven-turers did not even try to communicate, assuming fromsuperficial observation—as did the sixteenth-centuryexplorer Giovanni da Verrazzano—“that they have no reli-gion, and that they live in absolute freedom, and that every-thing they do proceeds from Ignorance.”

Ethnocentric Europeans tried repeatedly to “civilize”the Indians. In practice that meant persuading natives to

dress like the colonists, attend white schools, livein permanent structures, and, most important,accept Christianity. The Indians listened moreor less patiently, but in the end, they usuallyrejected European values. One South Carolinatrader explained that when Indians were asked

to become more English, they said no, “for they thought ithard, that we should desire them to change their mannersand customs, since they did not desire us to turn Indians.”

To be sure, some Indians were strongly attracted toChristianity, but most paid it lip service or found it irrele-vant to their needs. As one Huron told a French priest, “Itwould be useless for me to repent having sinned, seeing thatI never have sinned.” Another Huron announced that hedid not fear punishment after death since “we cannot tellwhether everything that appears faulty to Men, is so in theEyes of God.”

Among some Indian groups, gender figured signifi-cantly in a person’s willingness to convert to Christianity.Native men who traded animal skins for European goodshad more frequent contact with the whites, and theyproved more receptive to the arguments of missionaries.But native women jealously guarded traditional culture, asystem that often sanctioned polygamy—a husband hav-ing several wives—and gave women substantial authorityover the distribution of food within the village. FrenchJesuits seemed especially eager to undermine the inde-pendence of Native American women. Among otherdemands, missionaries insisted on monogamous mar-riages, an institution based on Christian values but thatmade little sense in Indian societies where constant war-fare against the Europeans killed off large numbers ofyoung males and increasingly left native women withoutsufficient marriage partners.

The white settlers’ educational system proved nomore successful than their religion was in winning cul-tural converts. Young Indian scholars deserted stuffyclassrooms at the first chance. In 1744, Virginia offeredseveral Iroquois boys a free education at the College ofWilliam and Mary. The Iroquois leaders rejected the invi-tation because they found that boys who had gone to col-lege “were absolutely good for nothing being neitheracquainted with the true methods of killing deer, catchingBeaver, or surprising an enemy.”

Even matrimony seldom eroded the Indians’ attach-ment to their own customs. When Native Americans andwhites married—unions the English found less desirablethan did the French or Spanish—the European partner usu-ally elected to live among the Indians. Impatient settlerswho regarded the Indians simply as an obstruction toprogress sometimes developed more coercive methods,such as enslavement, to achieve cultural conversion. Again,from the white perspective, the results were disappointing.Indian slaves ran away or died. In either case, they did notbecome Europeans.

Threats to Survival: Trade and DiseaseOver time, cooperative encounters between the NativeAmericans and Europeans became less frequent. TheEuropeans found it almost impossible to understand theIndians’ relation to the land and other natural resources.English planters cleared the forests and fenced the fieldsand, in the process, radically altered the ecological systemson which the Indians depended. The European system of

Columbus,Letter to Luis

de Sant’ Angel(1493)

Two-Step:Inform YourGrandmother

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10 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

land use inevitably reduced the supply of deer and otheranimals essential to traditional native cultures.

Dependency also came in more subtle forms. TheIndians welcomed European commerce, but like so manyconsumers throughout recorded history, they discoveredthat the objects they most coveted inevitably brought theminto debt. To pay for the trade goods, the Indians huntedmore aggressively and even further reduced the populationof fur-bearing mammals.

Commerce eroded Indian independence in other ways.After several disastrous wars—the Yamasee War in SouthCarolina (1715), for example—the natives learned thatdemonstrations of force usually resulted in the suspensionof normal trade, on which the Indians had grown quitedependent for guns and ammunition, among other things.A hardened English businessman made the point quitebluntly. When asked if the Catawba Indians would harm histraders, he responded that “the danger would be . . . littlefrom them, because they are too fond of our trade to lose itfor the pleasure of shedding a little English blood.”

It was disease, however, that ultimately destroyed thecultural integrity of many North American tribes. Europeanadventurers exposed the Indians to bacteria and virusesagainst which they possessed no natural immunity.Smallpox, measles, and influenza decimated the NativeAmerican population. Other diseases such as alcoholismtook a terrible toll.

Within a generation of initial contact with Europeans,the Carib Indians, who gave the Caribbean its name, werevirtually extinct. The decimation of Native American

peoples was an aspect of ecological transfor-mation known as the Columbian Exchange.European conquerors exposed the Indians toseveral new fatal diseases; the Indians intro-duced the invaders to marvelous plants such ascorn and potatoes, which altered the course of

European history. (See the Feature Essay, “The ColumbianExchange and the Global Environment: EcologicalRevolution,” pp. 12–13.)

The Algonquian communities of New England experi-enced appalling rates of death. One Massachusetts colonistreported in 1630 that the Indian peoples of his region“above twelve years since were swept away by a great &grievous Plague . . . so that there are verie few left to inhab-ite the Country.” Settlers possessed no knowledge of germtheory—it was not formulated until the mid-nineteenthcentury—and speculated that a Christian God had provi-dentially cleared the wilderness of heathens.

Historical demographers now estimate that some tribessuffered a 90 to 95 percent population loss within the firstcentury of European contact. The population of the ArawakIndians of Santo Domingo, for example, dropped fromabout 3,770,000 in 1496 to only 125 in 1570. The death of somany Indians decreased the supply of indigenous laborers,

who were needed by the Europeans to work themines and to grow staple crops such as sugar andtobacco. The decimation of native populationsmay have persuaded colonists throughout theNew World to seek a substitute labor force inAfrica. Indeed, the enslavement of blacks hasbeen described as an effort by Europeans to“repopulate” the New World.

Indians who survived the epidemics often found thatthe fabric of traditional culture had come unraveled. Theenormity of the death toll and the agony that accompaniedit called traditional religious beliefs and practices into ques-tion. The survivors lost not only members of their families,but also elders who might have told them how properly tobury the dead and give spiritual comfort to the living.

Some native peoples, such as the Iroquois, who lived along way from the coast and thus had more time to adjustto the challenge, withstood the crisis better than did thosewho immediately confronted the Europeans and Africans.Refugee Indians from the hardest hit eastern communitieswere absorbed into healthier western groups. Howeverhorrific the crisis may have been, it demonstrated power-fully just how much the environment—a source of oppor-tunity as well as devastation—shaped human encountersthroughout the New World.

West Africa: Ancient and ComplexSocietiesDuring the era of the European slave trade, roughly fromthe late fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, anumber of enduring myths about sub-Saharan WestAfrica were propagated. Even today, commentators claimthat the people who inhabited this region four hundredyears ago were isolated from the rest of the world and hada simple, self-sufficient economy. Indeed, some scholarsstill depict the vast region stretching from the SenegalRiver south to modern Angola as a single cultural unit, asif at one time all the men and women living there musthave shared a common set of African political, religious,and social values.

Sub-Saharan West Africa defies such easy generaliza-tions. The first Portuguese who explored the African coastduring the fifteenth century encountered a great variety ofpolitical and religious cultures. Many hundreds of yearsearlier, Africans living in this region had come into contactwith Islam, the religion founded by the ProphetMuhammad during the seventh century. Islam spreadslowly from Arabia into West Africa. Not until A.D. 1030 dida kingdom located in the Senegal Valley accept the Muslimreligion. Many other West Africans, such as those inancient Ghana, resisted Islam and continued to observetraditional religions.

New WorldPlants

NativeAmericanPopulation

Loss,1500–1700

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West Africa: Ancient and Complex Societies 11

As Muslim traders from North Africa and theMiddle East brought a new religion to parts of WestAfrica, they expanded sophisticated trade networks thatlinked the villagers of Senegambia with urban centers innorthwest Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, and Cyrenaica. Greatcamel caravans regularly crossed the Sahara carryingtrade goods that were exchanged for gold and slaves.Sub-Saharan Africa’s well-developed links with Islamsurprised a French priest who in 1686 observed Africanpilgrims going “to visit Mecca to visit Mahomet’s tomb,although they are eleven or twelve hundred leagues dis-tance from it.”

West Africans spoke many languages and organizedthemselves into diverse political systems. Several populousstates, sometimes termed “empires,” exercised loose controlover large areas. Ancient African empires such as Ghanawere vulnerable to external attack as well as internal rebel-lion, and the oral and written histories of this region recordthe rise and fall of several large kingdoms. When Europeantraders first arrived, the list of major states would haveincluded Mali, Benin, and Kongo. Many other Africans livedin what are known as stateless societies, really largelyautonomous communities organized around lineage struc-tures. In these respects, African and Native American cul-tures had much in common.

Whatever the form of government, men and womenconstructed their primary social identity within well-defined lineage groups, which consisted of persons claimingdescent from a common ancestor. Disputes among mem-bers of lineage groups were generally settled by clan elders.The senior leaders allocated economic and humanresources. They determined who received land and whomight take a wife—critical decisions because within the vil-lages of West Africa, women and children cultivated thefields. The communities were economically self-sufficient.Not only were they able to grow enough food to feed them-selves, but they also produced trade goods, such as iron,kola, and gum.

The first Europeans to reach the West African coastby sail were the Portuguese. Strong winds and currentsalong the Atlantic coast moved southward, which meant aship could sail with the wind from Portugal to West Africawithout difficulty. The problem was returning. Advancesin maritime technology allowed the Portuguese to over-come these difficulties. By constructing a new type ofship, one uniting European hull design with lateen (trian-gular) sails from the Middle East, Portuguese caravelswere able to navigate successfully against African windsand currents. During the fifteenth century, Portuguesesailors discovered that by sailing far to the west, often asfar as the Azores, they could, on their return trips toEurope, catch a reliable westerly wind. Columbus was evi-dently familiar with the technique. Before attempting tocross the Atlantic Ocean, he sailed to the Gold Coast, and

on the way, he undoubtedly studied the wind patternsthat would carry his famed caravels to the New World andback again.

The Portuguese journeyed to Africa in search of goldand slaves. Mali and Joloff officials were willing partners inthis commerce but insisted that Europeans respect traderegulations established by Africans. They required theEuropeans to pay tolls and other fees and restricted the for-eign traders to conducting their business in small forts orcastles located at the mouths of the major rivers. Local mer-chants acquired some slaves and gold in the interior andtransported them to the coast where they were exchangedfor European manufactures. Transactions were calculatedin terms of local African currencies: A slave would beoffered to a European trader for so many bars of iron orounces of gold.

Artists in West Africa depicted the European traders whoarrived in search of gold and slaves. This sixteenth-centuryBenin bronze relief sculpture shows two Portuguese men.

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�Both Native Americans andEuropeans found each other to bethe most exotic people they hadever encountered.

The most immediate biologicalconsequence of contact between thepeople of Europe, Africa, and theNew World was the transfer ofdisease. Within a year ofColumbus’s return from theCaribbean, syphilis appeared inEurope for the first time and becameidentified as the American disease,even though as we now know, itcame originally from West Africa.By 1505, syphilis had spread allthe way to China.

The effect of Old World diseasesin the Americas was catastrophic.Native Americans had little naturalimmunity to common African and

European diseases becauseAmerica remained biologicallyisolated after the reimmersion of theBering land bridge. When theywere exposed to influenza, typhus,measles, and especially smallpox,they died by the millions. Indeed,European exploration of Americaset off the worst demographicdisaster in world history. Within fiftyyears of the first contact, epidemicshad virtually exterminated the nativepopulation of Hispaniola anddevastated the densely populatedValley of Mexico.

Also unsettling, but by no meansas destructive, was the transfer ofplants and animals from the OldWorld to the New. Spanishcolonizers carried sugar andbananas across the Atlantic, and in

The Columbian Exchange and the GlobalEnvironment Ecological Revolution

FEATURE ESSAY

Modern Americans often speakof the degradation of the globalenvironment in apocalyptic terms,as if the current generationconfronts a unique challenge inworld history. No doubt, manychemical compounds producedduring the twentieth century haveproved far more toxic than theirinventors ever imagined. Butcontemporary concerns about thefuture of the planet should not causeus to lose sight of the historicalsweep of these problems. We arecertainly not the first society toexperience a massive ecologicaltransformation caused by theinevitable intervention of humanbeings into the processes of nature.Recapturing an earlier moment ofenvironmental history—known asthe Columbian Exchange—remindsus that the moral dimensions ofchange are often a matter ofperspective. What one groupproclaims as providential progressmay strike others as utter disaster.

The first major “ecologicalrevolution” occurred as a directresult of New World explorationduring the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies. The earliest explorers hadexpected America to be anextension of Europe, a placeinhabited by familiar plants andanimals. They were surprised. Theexotic flora of the New World,sketched from sixteenth-centurydrawings, included the food staplemaize and the succulent pineapple.Equally strange to European eyeswere buffalo, rattle snakes, catfish,and the peculiar absence of horsesand cattle. No domestic animal wascommon to both sides of the Atlanticexcept the dog. And perhaps themost striking difference wasbetween the people themselves.

12 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

These drawings made soon after the conquest testify to the lethal impact of common OldWorld diseases, particularly smallpox, on Native Americans.

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����time these crops transformed theeconomies of Latin America. Evenmore spectacular was the success ofEuropean animals in America.During the sixteenth century, pigs,sheep, and cattle arrived aspassengers on European ships, andin the fertile New Worldenvironment, they multiplied morerapidly than they had in Europe.Some animals survived shipwrecks.On Sable Island, a small, desolateisland off the coast of Nova Scotia,one can still see the small, longhairedcattle, the successors of the earliestcattle transported to America. Otheranimals escaped from the ranches ofNew Spain, generating new breedssuch as the fabled Texas longhorn.

No European animal moreprofoundly affected NativeAmerican life than the horse. Oncecommon in North America, thehorse mysteriously disappearedfrom the continent sometime duringthe last Ice Age. The early Spanishexplorers reintroduced the horse to

North America, and the sight of thislarge, powerful animal at firstterrified the Indians. Mountedconquistadores discovered that ifthey could not frighten Indian foesinto submission, they could simplyoutmaneuver them on horseback.The Native Americans of theSouthwest quickly adapted thehorse to their own use. Sedentaryfarmers acquired new hunting skills,and soon the Indians were ridingacross the Great Plains in pursuit ofbuffalo. The Comanche, Apache,Sioux, and Blackfoot tribes—just toname a few—became dependenton the horse. Mounted Indianwarriors galloped into battle,unaware that it was their whiteadversaries who had brought thehorse to America.

Equally dramatic was the effectof American crops on European andAfrican societies. From his first trip tothe New World, Columbus broughtback a plant that revolutionized thediets of both humans and animals—maize. During the next century,American beans, squash, and sweetpotatoes appeared on Europeantables. The pepper and tomato, otherNew World discoveries, added adistinctive flavor to Mediterraneancooking. Despite strong prohibitions

on the use of tobacco (in Russia, auser might have his noseamputated), European demand fortobacco grew astronomically duringthe seventeenth century. The potatocaught on more slowly in Europebecause of a widespread fear thatroot crops caused disease. The mostrapid acceptance of the white potatocame in Ireland, where it became adiet staple in the 1600s. Irishimmigrants—unaware of thegenealogy of this native Americancrop—reintroduced the potato intoMassachusetts Bay in 1718. And inWest Africa, corn gradually replacedtraditional animal feeds of low yield.

These sweeping changes inagriculture and diet helped reshapethe Old World economies. Partlybecause of the rich new sources ofnutrition from America, thepopulation of Europe, which hadlong been relatively stable, nearlydoubled in the eighteenth century.Even as cities swelled and industriesflourished, European farmers wereable to feed the growingpopulation. In many ways, theseeds and plants of the New Worldwere far more valuable in Westerneconomic development than all thesilver of Mexico and Peru.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION1. How would you contrast the

environmental changes ofColumbus’s time with those we areexperiencing today?

2. Should the historian assign blamefor the rapid spread of infectiousdisease among the NativeAmericans after contact withEuropeans? Why or why not?

3. Do you think the ColumbianExchange had a more profoundeffect on the Old or the New World?

West Africa: Ancient and Complex Societies 13

Europeans brought animals such asdomestic cattle and horses to the NewWorld. The reintroduction of the horse toNorth America, where it had once thrivedand then disappeared, had a profoundimpact on Native Americans.

Two examples of Old World–New Worldspecies exchange. Maize (corn) became aEuropean dietary staple in the centuriesafter contact with America, while the OldWorld dandelion stepped off invaders’ships in the crusted mud of English orSpanish boots and spread far beyond thenewcomers’ initial cultural dominions,becoming today’s most familiar weed.

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14 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

European slave traders accepted these termslargely because they had no other choice. TheAfrican states fielded formidable armies, andoutsiders soon discovered they could notimpose their will on the region simply bydemonstrations of force. Moreover, local dis-

eases proved so lethal for Europeans—six out of ten ofwhom would die within a single year’s stay in Africa—thatthey were happy to avoid dangerous trips to the interior.The slaves were usually men and women taken captive dur-ing wars; others were victims of judicial practices designedspecifically to supply the growing American market. By1650, most West African slaves were destined for the NewWorld rather than the Middle East.

Even before Europeans colonized the New World, thePortuguese were purchasing almost a thousand slaves a yearon the West African coast. The slaves were frequently forced

to work on the sugar plantations of Madeira (Portuguese)and the Canaries (Spanish), Atlantic islands on whichEuropeans experimented with forms of unfree labor thatwould later be more fully and more ruthlessly established inthe American colonies. It is currently estimated thatapproximately 10.7 million Africans were taken to the NewWorld as slaves. The figure for the eighteenth century aloneis about 5.5 million, of which more than one-third camefrom West Central Africa. The Bight of Benin, the Bight ofBiafra, and the Gold Coast supplied most of the others.

The peopling of the New World is usually seen as astory of European migrations. But in fact, during everyyear between 1650 and 1831, more Africans thanEuropeans came to the Americas. As historian Davis Eltiswrote, “In terms of immigration alone . . . America was anextension of Africa rather than Europe until late in thenineteenth century.”

African SlaveTrade,

1500–1870

Equator

SAHARA DESERT

SENEGALVALLEY

Ivory Coast

Slave CoastGold Coast

Black Sea

Caspian S

ea

AT L A N T I CO C E A N

I N D I A NO C E A N

Mediterranean Sea

FRANCE

SPAINPORTUGAL

MOROCCO

ALGIERS TUNISIA

TRIPOLI

MALI

GHANA

KONGO

ANGOLA

BENINBIAFRA

JOLOFFSENEGAMBIAN

STATES

CYRENAICA

EUROPE

AFRICA

Portuguese

Dutch

Major overlandtrade routes

French

British

0 500 1000 kilometers

0 500 1000 miles

TRADE ROUTES IN AFRICA African trade routes were well established by the late1600s. Trade restrictions—and a deadly disease environment—confined Europeansettlements primarily to coastal regions.

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Europe on the Eve of Conquest 15

Europe on the Eve of ConquestIn ancient times, the West possessed a mythical appeal topeople living along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.Classical writers speculated about the fate of Atlantis, a fabledWestern civilization that was said to have sunk beneath theocean. Fallen Greek heroes allegedly spent eternity in anuncharted western paradise. But because the ships of Greeceand Rome were ill designed to sail the open ocean, the landsto the west remained the stuff of legend and fantasy. In thefifth century, an intrepid Irish monk, St. Brendan, reportedfinding enchanted islands far out in the Atlantic. He evenclaimed to have met a talking whale named Jasconius, whoallowed the famished voyager to cook ameal on his back.

In the tenth century, Scandinavianseafarers known as Norsemen or Vikingsactually established settlements in theNew World, but almost a thousand yearspassed before they received credit for theiraccomplishment. In the year 984, a bandof Vikings led by Eric the Red sailed westfrom Iceland to a large island in the NorthAtlantic. Eric, who possessed a fine senseof public relations, named the islandGreenland, reasoning that others wouldmore willingly colonize the iceboundregion “if the country had a good name.”A few years later, Eric’s son Leif founded asmall settlement he named Vinland at alocation in northern Newfoundland nowcalled L’Anse aux Meadows. At the time,the Norse voyages went unnoticed byother Europeans. The hostility of Native

Americans, poor lines of communication, climatic cooling,and political upheavals in Scandinavia made maintenance ofthese distant outposts impossible. At the time of his first voy-age in 1492, Columbus seemed to have been unaware ofthese earlier exploits.

Building New Nation-StatesAt the time of the Viking settlement, other Europeans wereunprepared to sponsor transatlantic exploration. Norwould they be in a position to do so for several morecenturies. Medieval kingdoms were loosely organized, anduntil the early fifteenth century, fierce provincial loyalties,

Local African rulers allowed Europeantraders to build compounds along the WestAfrican coast. Constructed to expedite theslave trade, each of these so-called slave facto-ries served a different European interest.Cape Coast Castle, which changed hands sev-eral times as rival nations fought for its con-trol, became one of the largest slave tradingposts in the world after the British capturedand reinforced it in 1665.

Materials excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland,provide evidence of a Viking settlement in North America. Using the materials excavatedat the site, archaeologists have reconstructed the typical Norse dwellings, which had turfwalls and roofs and wooden doors and doorframes.

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16 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

widespread ignorance of classical learning, and dreadfulplagues such as the Black Death discouraged people fromthinking expansively about the world beyond their ownimmediate communities.

In the fifteenth century, however, these conditionsbegan to change. Europe became more prosperous, politi-cal authority was more centralized, and the Renaissancefostered a more expansive outlook among literate peoplein the arts and sciences. The Renaissance encouraged—first in Italy and later throughout Europe—bold new cre-ative thinking that challenged the orthodoxies of theMiddle Ages. A major element in the shift was the slow butsteady growth of population after 1450. Historians areuncertain about the cause of the increase—after all, nei-ther the quality of medicine nor sanitation improvedmuch—but the result was a substantial rise in the price ofland, since there were more mouths to feed. Landlordsprofited from these trends, and as their income expanded,they demanded more of the luxury items, such as spices,silks, and jewels, that came from distant Asian ports.Economic prosperity created powerful new incentives forexploration and trade.

This period also witnessed the centralization of politi-cal authority under a group of rulers whom historiansrefer to collectively as the New Monarchs. Before the mid-fifteenth century, feudal nobles dominated small districtsthroughout Europe. Conceding only nominal allegiance tolarger territorial leaders, the local barons taxed the peas-ants and waged war pretty much as they pleased. They alsodispensed what passed for justice. The New Monarchschallenged the nobles’ autonomy. The changes thataccompanied the challenges came slowly, and in many areasviolently, but the results altered traditional political rela-tionships between the nobility and the crown, and betweenthe citizen and the state. The New Monarchs of Europerecruited armies and supported these expensive organiza-tions with revenues from national taxes. They created effec-tive national courts. While these monarchs were oftendespotic, they personified the emergent nation-states ofEurope and brought a measure of peace to local communi-ties weary of chronic feudal war.

The story was the same throughout most of westernEurope. The Tudors of England, represented by Henry VII(r. 1485–1509), ended a long civil war known as the War ofthe Roses. Louis XI, the French monarch (r. 1461–1483),strengthened royal authority by reorganizing state finances.The political unification of Spain began in 1469 with themarriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile,setting off a nation-building process that involved drivingboth the Jews and Muslims out of Spain. These strong-willed monarchs forged nations out of groups of indepen-dent kingdoms. If political centralization had not occurred,the major European countries could not possibly have gen-erated the financial and military resources necessary forworldwide exploration.

A final prerequisite to exploration was reliable technicalknowledge. Ptolemy (second century A.D.) and other ancientgeographers had mapped the known world and had evendemonstrated that the world was round. During the MiddleAges, however, Europeans lost effective contact with classicaltradition. Within Arab societies, the old learning had sur-vived, indeed flourished, and when Europeans eventuallyrediscovered the classical texts during the Renaissance, theydrew heavily on the work of Arab scholars. This “new” learn-ing generated great intellectual curiosity about the globe andabout the world that existed beyond the Mediterranean.

The invention of printing from movable type by JohannGutenberg in the 1440s greatly facilitated the spread of tech-nical knowledge. Indeed, printing sparked a communicationsrevolution whose impact on the lives of ordinary people wasas far-reaching as that caused by telephones, television, andcomputers in modern times. Sea captains published theirfindings as quickly as they could engage a printer, and by thebeginning of the sixteenth century, a small, though growing,number of educated readers throughout Europe were wellinformed about the exploration of the New World. Theprinting press invited Europeans to imagine exciting oppor-tunities that they had hardly perceived when the Vikingssailed the North Atlantic.

Imagining a New WorldBy 1500, centralization of political authority and advancesin geographic knowledge brought Spain to the first rank as aworld power. In the early fifteenth century, though, Spainconsisted of several autonomous kingdoms. It lacked richnatural resources and possessed few good seaports. In fact,there was little about this land to suggest its people wouldtake the lead in conquering and colonizing the New World.

By the end of the century, however, Spain suddenlycame alive with creative energy. The union of Ferdinandand Isabella sparked a drive for political consolidation that,because of the monarchs’ fervid Catholicism, took on thecharacteristics of a religious crusade. Spurred by the mili-tant faith of their monarchs, the armies of Castile andAragon waged holy war—known as the Reconquista—against the independent states in southern Spain that earlierhad been captured by Muslims. In 1492, the Moorish(Islamic) kingdom of Granada fell, and, for the first time incenturies, the entire Iberian peninsula was united underChristian rulers. Spanish authorities showed no tolerancefor people who rejected the Catholic faith.

During the Reconquista, thousands of Jews and Moorswere driven from the country. Indeed, Columbus undoubt-edly encountered such refugees as he was preparing for hisfamous voyage. From this volatile social and political envi-ronment came the conquistadores, men eager for personalglory and material gain, uncompromising in matters ofreligion, and unswerving in their loyalty to the crown.They were prepared to employ fire and sword in any cause

01 Chapter 44562 11/2/09 8:51 AM Page 16

interested as Columbus in reaching Cathay, they elected tovoyage around the continent of Africa instead of followingthe route suggested by Columbus. They suspected thatColumbus had substantially underestimated the circum-ference of the earth and that for all his enthusiasm, hewould almost certainly starve before reaching Asia. ThePortuguese decision eventually paid off quite handsomely.In 1498, one of their captains, Vasco da Gama, returnedfrom the coast of India carrying a fortune in spices andother luxury goods.

Undaunted by rejection, Columbus petitioned Isabellaand Ferdinand for financial backing. They were initially nomore interested in his grand design than the Portuguesehad been. But time was on Columbus’s side.Spain’s aggressive New Monarchs envied thesuccess of their neighbor, Portugal. Columbusboldly played on the rivalry between the coun-tries, talking of wealth and empire. Indeed, for aperson with little success or apparent support,he was supremely confident. One contemporaryreported that when Columbus “made up hismind, he was as sure he would discover what he did dis-cover, and find what he did find, as if he held it in a chamberunder lock and key.”

Columbus’s stubborn lobbying on behalf of the“Enterprise of the Indies” gradually wore down oppositionin the Spanish court, and the two sovereigns provided himwith a small fleet that contained two of the most famous car-avels ever constructed, the Niña and the Pinta, as well as thesquare-rigged nao Santa Maria. The indomitable admiral setsail for Cathay in August 1492, the year of Spain’s unification.

Educated Europeans of the fifteenth century knewthe world was round. No one seriously believed that

Imagining a New World 17

sanctioned by God and king, and these adventurers car-ried European culture to the most populous regions of theNew World.

Long before Spaniards ever reached the West Indies,they conquered the indigenous peoples of the CanaryIslands, a strategically located archipelago in the easternAtlantic. The harsh labor systems the Spanish developed inthe Canaries served as models of subjugation in America.Indeed, the Spanish experience paralleled that of theEnglish in Ireland. An early fifteenth-century Spanishchronicle described the Canary natives as “miscreants . . .[who] do not acknowledge their creator and live in part likebeasts.” Many islanders quickly died of disease; others werekilled in battle or enslaved. The new Spanish landholdersintroduced sugar, a labor-intensive plantation crop. Thelandowners forced slaves captured in Africa to provide thelabor. This oppressive process was driven by dreams of greatwealth, and would be repeated many times by Europeancolonists through the centuries.

Myths and RealityIf it had not been for Christopher Columbus (CristoforoColombo), of course, Spain might never have gained anAmerican empire. Little is known about his early life. Bornin Genoa in 1451 of humble parentage, Columbus soondevoured the classical learning that had so recently beenrediscovered and made available in printed form. Hemastered geography, and—perhaps while sailing the coastof West Africa—he became obsessed with the idea ofvoyaging west across the Atlantic Ocean to reach Cathay, asChina was then known.

In 1484, Columbus presented his plan to the king ofPortugal. However, while the Portuguese were just as

This 1507 map of the world drawn by Martin Waldseemüller incorporated data from thevoyages of Italian adventurer Amerigo Vespucci, who asserted that the New World was aseparate continent. Waldseemüller gave Vespucci more credit than he deserved and namedthe continent “America,” rather than “Columbia” in honor of Christopher Columbus.

Privileges andPrerogativesGranted toChristopherColumbus

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18 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

Columbus and his crew would tumble off the edge of theearth. The concern was with size, not shape. Columbusestimated the distance to the mainland of Asia to be about3,000 nautical miles, a voyage his small ships wouldhave no difficulty completing. The actual distance is10,600 nautical miles, however, and had the New Worldnot been in his way, he and his crew would have run outof food and water long before they reached China, as thePortuguese had predicted.

After stopping in the Canary Islands to refit the ships,Columbus continued his westward voyage in early September.When the tiny Spanish fleet sighted an island in the Bahamasafter only thirty-three days at sea, the admiral concluded he

had reached Asia. Since his mathematical calcula-tions had obviously been correct, he assumed hewould soon encounter the Chinese. It neveroccurred to Columbus that he had stumbled upona new world. He assured his men, his patrons, andperhaps himself that the islands were indeed partof the fabled “Indies.” Or if not the Indies them-

selves, then they were surely an extension of the great Asianlandmass. He searched for the splendid cities Marco Polo haddescribed, but instead of meeting wealthy Chinese, Columbusencountered Native Americans, whom he appropriately, ifmistakenly, called “Indians.”

After his first voyage of discovery, Columbus returned tothe New World three more times. But despite his considerable

courage and ingenuity, he could never find the treasure hisfinancial supporters in Spain angrily demanded. Columbusdied in 1506 a frustrated but wealthy entrepreneur, unawarethat he had reached a previously unknown continent separat-ing Asia from Europe. The final disgrace came in 1500 withthe publication of a sensationalist account of AmerigoVespucci’s travels across the Atlantic that contained falsifieddates to suggest that Vespucci had visited the mainland priorto other explorers such as Columbus and Henry Cabot. Thismisleading account convinced German mapmakers that itwas Vespucci who had proved America to be a new continentdistinct from Asia. Before the misconception could be corrected, the name America gained general acceptancethroughout Europe.

Only two years after Columbus’s first voyage, Spain andPortugal almost went to war over the anticipated treasure ofAsia. Pope Alexander VI negotiated a settlement thatpleased both kingdoms. Portugal wanted to exclude theSpanish from the west coast of Africa and, what was moreimportant, from Columbus’s new route to “India.” Spaininsisted on maintaining complete control over lands discov-ered by Columbus, which then still were regarded as exten-sions of China. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided theentire world along a line located 270 leagues west of theAzores. Any new lands discovered west of the line belongedto Spain. At the time, no European had ever seen Brazil,which turned out to be on Portugal’s side of the line. (To

From theJournal ofChristopherColumbus

Equator Equator

Frobisher1576

Gilbert1583

Cartier 1535

Verrazano 1524

Cabot1497

Columbus 1492

La Salle1679–1682

de Soto 1539–1542

Coronado1540–1542

Cortés1519

Magellan 1519–1521

da Gam

a

1497–1498

Dias 1487

del Cano

1522

Magellan 1521

Line

of D

emar

catio

nT

reat

y of

Tor

desi

llas

1494

PA C I F I CO C E A N

PA C I F I CO C E A N AT L A N T I C

O C E A N

I N D I A NO C E A N

PA C I F I CO C E A N

England

France

SpainPortugal

NORTHAMERICA

SOUTHAMERICA

AFRICA

EUROPE

ASIA

AUSTRALIA

French

English

Portuguese

Spanish

Hispaniola

PA C I F I CO C E A N

Gulf ofMexico

Columbus

1492 Cortés 1519

AztecEmpire

MayaEmpire

TenochtitlánVera Cruz

Cuba

VOYAGES OF EUROPEAN EXPLORATION The routes of the major voyagers to the NewWorld and Asia. Early explorers established land claims for the competing European states.

01 Chapter 44562 11/2/09 8:52 AM Page 18

Imagining a New World 19

this day, Brazilians speak Portuguese.) The treaty failed todiscourage future English, Dutch, and French adventurersfrom trying their luck in the New World.

The Conquistadores: Faith and GreedSpain’s new discoveries unleashed a horde of conquistadoreson the Caribbean. These independent adventurers carvedout small settlements on Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, andPuerto Rico in the 1490s and early 1500s. They were not

interested in creating a permanent society in theNew World. Rather, they came for instant wealth,preferably in gold, and were not squeamishabout the means they used to obtain it. BernalDíaz, one of the first Spaniards to migrate to theregion, explained he had traveled to America “to

serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were indarkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do.” In lessthan two decades, the Indians who had inhabited theCaribbean islands had been exterminated, victims ofexploitation and disease.

For a quarter century, the conquistadores concen-trated their energies on the major islands that Columbushad discovered. Rumors of fabulous wealth in Mexico,however, aroused the interest of many Spaniards, includ-ing Hernán Cortés, a minor government functionary inCuba. Like so many members of his class, he dreamed ofglory, military adventure, and riches that would trans-form him from an ambitious court clerk into an honoredhidalgo. On November 18, 1518, Cortés and a small armyleft Cuba to verify the stories of Mexico’s treasure. Eventssoon demonstrated that Cortés was a leader of extraordi-nary ability.

His adversary was the legendary Aztec emperor,Montezuma. The confrontation between the two powerful

personalities is one of the more dramatic of early Americanhistory. A fear of competition from rival conquistadores cou-pled with a burning desire to conquer a vast new empire droveCortés forward. Determined to push his men through anyobstacle, he scuttled the ships that had carried them to Mexicoin order to prevent them from retreating. Cortés led his bandof six hundred followers across rugged mountains and on theway gathered allies from among the Tlaxcalans, a tributarypeople eager to free themselves from Aztec domination.

In matters of war, Cortés possessed obvious techno-logical superiority over the Aztec. The sound of gunfireinitially frightened the Indians. Moreover, Aztec troopshad never seen horses, much less armored horses carryingsword-wielding Spaniards. But these elements would havecounted for little had Cortés not also gained a psychologi-cal advantage over his opponents. At first, Montezumathought that the Spaniards were gods, representatives ofthe fearful plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl. Instead ofresisting immediately, the emperor hesitated. WhenMontezuma’s resolve hardened, it was too late. Cortés’svictory in Mexico, coupled with other conquests in SouthAmerica, transformed Spain, at least temporarily, into thewealthiest state in Europe.

From Plunder to SettlementFollowing the conquest of Mexico, renamed New Spain, theSpanish crown confronted a difficult problem. Ambitiousconquistadores, interested chiefly in their own wealth andglory, had to be brought under royal authority, a task easierimagined than accomplished. Adventurers like Cortés werestubbornly independent, quick to take offense, and thousandsof miles away from the seat of imperial government.

The crown found a partial solution in the encomiendasystem. The monarch rewarded the leaders of the conquest

Discovery andExploration

Indian Slaves Working at a Spanish Sugar Plantationon the Island of Hispaniola (1595) by Theodore deBry. Some contemporaries condemned the brutalSpanish treatment of the Native Americans.

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20 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

with Indian villages. The people who lived in the settle-ments provided the encomenderos with labor tribute inexchange for legal protection and religious guidance. Thesystem, of course, cruelly exploited Indian laborers. Onehistorian concluded, “The first encomenderos, withoutknown exception, understood Spanish authority as provi-sion for unlimited personal opportunism.” Cortés alone wasgranted the services of more than twenty-three thousandIndian workers. The encomienda system made the colo-nizers more dependent on the king, for it was he wholegitimized their title. In the words of one scholar, the neweconomic structure helped to transform “a frontier of plun-der into a frontier of settlement.”

Spain’s rulers attempted to maintain tight personalcontrol over their American possessions. The volume ofcorrespondence between the two continents, much of itconcerning mundane matters, was staggering. All docu-ments were duplicated several times by hand. Because thetrip to Madrid took many months, a year often passedbefore receipt of an answer to a simple request. But some-how the cumbersome system worked. In Mexico, officialsappointed in Spain established a rigid hierarchical order,directing the affairs of the countryside from urban centers.

The Spanish also brought Catholicism to the NewWorld. The Dominicans and Franciscans, the two largestreligious orders, established Indian missions throughoutNew Spain. Some friars tried to protect the NativeAmericans from the worst forms of exploitation. One

courageous Dominican, Fra Bartolomé de lasCasas, published an eloquent defense of Indianrights, Historia de las Indias, which amongother things questioned the legitimacy ofEuropean conquest of the New World. LasCasas’s work provoked heated debate in Spain,and while the crown had no intention of repu-

diating the vast American empire, it did initiate certainreforms designed to bring greater “love and moderation”to Spanish-Indian relations. It is impossible to ascertainhow many converts the friars made. In 1531, however, anewly converted Christian reported a vision of the Virgin,a dark-skinned woman of obvious Indian ancestry, whobecame known throughout the region as the Virgin ofGuadalupe. This figure—the result of a creative blendingof Indian and European cultures—served as a powerfulsymbol of Mexican nationalism in the wars for indepen-dence fought against Spain almost three centuries later.

About two hundred fifty thousand Spaniards migrated tothe New World during the sixteenth century. Another twohundred thousand made the journey between 1600 and 1650.Most colonists were single males in their late twenties seekingeconomic opportunities. They generally came from the poor-est agricultural regions of southern Spain—almost 40 percentmigrating from Andalusia. Since so few Spanish womenmigrated, especially in the sixteenth century, the men oftenmarried Indians and blacks, unions which produced mestizos

and mulattos. The frequency of interracial marriage indicatedthat, among other things, the people of New Spain were moretolerant of racial differences than were the English who settledin North America. For the people of New Spain, social stand-ing was affected as much, or more, by economic worth as itwas by color. Persons born in the New World, even those ofSpanish parentage (criollos), were regarded as socially inferiorto natives of the mother country (peninsulares).

Spain claimed far more of the New World than it couldpossibly manage. Spain’s rulers regarded the Americancolonies primarily as a source of precious metal, and

The Virgin of Guadalupe is perhaps the best-known religioussymbol of Mexico. The image reflects the sixteenth-centuryencounter between Europeans and Indians. The Virgin Mary wasalready an important religious figure among the Spanish whenthey arrived in America. Like the Indian Juan Diego to whom sheis said to have appeared and offered hope, comfort, and protec-tion, the Virgin is dark skinned. This 1531 representation showsher clothed in a robe adorned with stars and surrounded by acrown of sunrays. Each year hundreds of thousands of peoplevisit the shrine of the Virgin at Tepeyac, outside Mexico City.

Bartolomé delas Casas, “Ofthe Island ofHispaniola”

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The French Claim Canada 21

down the Mississippi River, and nine years later, Sieur de LaSalle traveled all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. In the earlyeighteenth century, the French established small settlements inLouisiana, the most important being New Orleans. Thespreading French influence worried English colonists livingalong the Atlantic coast, for it appeared the French were aboutto cut them off from the trans-Appalachian west.

Catholic missionaries also depended on Indian cooper-ation. Canadian priests were drawn from two orders, theJesuits and the Recollects, and although measuring theirsuccess in the New World is difficult, it seems they con-verted more Indians to Christianity than did their EnglishProtestant counterparts to the south. Like the fur traders,the missionaries lived among the Indians and learned tospeak their languages.

The French dream of a vast American empire sufferedfrom serious flaws. The crown remained largely indifferentto Canadian affairs. Royal officials stationed in New Francereceived limited and sporadic support from Paris. An evengreater problem was the decision to settle what seemed tomany rural peasants and urban artisans a cold, inhospitableland. Throughout the colonial period, Canada’s Europeanpopulation remained small. A census of 1663 recorded amere 3,035 French residents. By 1700, the figure had reachedonly 15,000. Men far outnumbered women, thus making ithard for settlers to form new families. Moreover, because ofthe colony’s geography, all exports and imports had to go

between 1500 and 1650, an estimated 200 tons of gold and16,000 tons of silver were shipped back to the Spanish trea-sury in Madrid. This great wealth, however, proved a mixedblessing. The sudden acquisition of so much money stimu-lated a horrendous inflation that hurt ordinary Spaniards.They were hurt further by long, debilitating European warsfunded by American gold and silver. Moreover, instead ofdeveloping its own industry, Spain became dependent onthe annual shipment of bullion from America, and in 1603,one insightful Spaniard declared, “The New World con-quered by you, has conquered you in its turn.” This some-what weakened, although still formidable, empire wouldeventually extend its territorial claims north to Californiaand the Southwest (see Chapter 4).

The French Claim CanadaFrench interest in the New World developed slowly. Morethan three decades after Columbus’s discovery, KingFrancis I sponsored the unsuccessful efforts of Giovanni daVerrazzano to find a short water route to China, via anorthwest passage around or through North America. In1534, the king sent Jacques Cartier on a similar quest. Therocky, barren coast of Labrador depressed the explorer. Hegrumbled, “I am rather inclined to believe that this is theland God gave to Cain.”

Discovery of a large, promising waterway the follow-ing year raised Cartier’s spirits. He reconnoitered the Gulf

of Saint Lawrence, traveling up the magnificentriver as far as modern Montreal. Despite hishigh expectations, however, Cartier got nocloser to China, and discouraged by the harshwinters, he headed home in 1542. Not untilsixty-five years later did Samuel de Champlainresettle this region for France. He foundedQuebec in 1608.

As was the case with other colonial powers, the Frenchdeclared they had migrated to the New World in search ofwealth as well as in hopes of converting the Indians toChristianity. As it turned out, these economic and spiritualgoals required full cooperation between the French and theNative Americans. In contrast to the English settlers, whoestablished independent farms and who regarded theIndians at best as obstacles in the path of civilization, theFrench viewed the natives as necessary economic partners.Furs were Canada’s most valuable export, and to obtain thepelts of beaver and other animals, the French wereabsolutely dependent on Indian hunters and trappers.French traders lived among the Indians, often taking nativewives and studying local cultures.

Frenchmen known as coureurs de bois (forest runners),following Canada’s great river networks, paddled deep into theheart of the continent in search of fresh sources of furs. Someintrepid traders penetrated beyond the Great Lakes into theMississippi Valley. In 1673, Père Jacques Marquette journeyed

This seventeenth-century woodcut depicts Samuel deChamplain’s fortified camp at Quebec on the St. LawrenceRiver. Champlain founded Quebec for France in 1608.SOURCE: North Wind Picture Archives.

JacquesCartier, FirstContact withthe Indians

(1534)

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through Quebec. It was relatively easy, therefore, for crownofficials to control that traffic, usually by awarding fur-trad-ing monopolies to court favorites. Such practices createdpolitical tensions and hindered economic growth.

The English Enter the CompetitionThe first English visit to North America remains shrouded inmystery. Fishermen working out of Bristol and other western

English ports may have landed in Nova Scotiaand Newfoundland as early as the 1480s. Thecodfish of the Grand Banks undoubtedly drewvessels of all nations, and during the summermonths some sailors probably dried and saltedtheir catches on Canada’s convenient shores. JohnCabot (Giovanni Caboto), a Venetian sea captain,

completed the first recorded transatlantic voyage by anEnglish vessel in 1497, while attempting to find a northwestpassage to Asia.

Cabot died during a second attempt to find a directroute to Cathay in 1498. Although Sebastian Cabot contin-ued his father’s explorations in the Hudson Bay region in1508–1509, England’s interest in the New World waned. Forthe next three-quarters of a century, the English peoplewere preoccupied with more pressing domestic and reli-gious concerns. When curiosity about the New Worldrevived, however, Cabot’s voyages established England’sbelated claim to American territory.

Birth of English ProtestantismAt the time of Cabot’s death, England was not prepared tocompete with Spain and Portugal for the riches of theOrient. Although Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch,brought peace to England after a bitter civil war, the countrystill contained too many mighty subjects, powerful localmagnates who maintained armed retainers and who oftenpaid little attention to royal authority. Henry possessed nostanding army; his small navy intimidated no one. To besure, the Tudors gave nominal allegiance to the pope inRome, but unlike the rulers of Spain, they were notcrusaders for Catholicism.

A complex web of international diplomacy alsoworked against England’s early entry into New World colo-nization. In 1509, to cement an alliance between Spain andEngland, the future Henry VIII married Catherine ofAragon. As a result of this marital arrangement, Englishmerchants enjoyed limited rights to trade in Spain’sAmerican colonies, but any attempt by England at inde-pendent colonization would have threatened those rightsand jeopardized the alliance.

By the end of the sixteenth century, however, conditionswithin England had changed dramatically, in part as a resultof the Protestant Reformation. As they did, the Englishbegan to consider their former ally, Spain, to be the greatestthreat to English aspirations. Tudor monarchs, especially

Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) and his daughter Elizabeth I(r. 1558–1603), developed a strong central administration,while England became more and more a Protestant society.The merger of English Protestantism and English national-ism affected all aspects of public life. It helped propelEngland into a central role in European affairs and was cru-cial in creating a powerful sense of an English identityamong all classes of people.

Popular anticlericalism helped spark religious refor-mation in England. Although they observed traditionalCatholic ritual, the English people had long resented payingmonies to a pope who lived in far-off Rome. Early in thesixteenth century, criticism of the clergy grew increasinglyvocal. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the most powerful prelatein England, flaunted his immense wealth and unwittinglybecame a symbol of spiritual corruption. Parish priestswere objects of ridicule. Poorly educated men for the mostpart, they seemed theologically ignorant and perpetuallygrasping. Anticlericalism did not run as deep in England asit had in Martin Luther’s Germany, but by the late 1520s,the Catholic Church could no longer take for granted theallegiance of the great mass of the population. The people’sgrowing anger is central to an understanding of the EnglishReformation. Put simply, if ordinary men and womenthroughout the kingdom had not accepted separation fromRome, then Henry VIII could not have forced them to leavethe church.

The catalyst for Protestant Reformation in Englandwas the king’s desire to rid himself of his wife, Catherine ofAragon, who happened to be the daughter of the formerking of Spain. Their marriage had produced a daughter,Mary, but, as the years passed, no son. The need for a maleheir obsessed Henry. He and his counselors assumed afemale ruler could not maintain domestic peace, andEngland would fall once again into civil war. The answerseemed to be remarriage. Henry petitioned Pope ClementVII for a divorce (technically, an annulment), but theSpanish had other ideas. Unwilling to tolerate the publichumiliation of Catherine, they forced the pope to procras-tinate. In 1527, time ran out. The passionate Henry fell inlove with Anne Boleyn, who later bore him a daughter,Elizabeth. The king decided to divorce Catherine with orwithout papal consent.

The final break with Rome came swiftly. Between 1529and 1536, the king, acting through Parliament, severed allties with the pope, seized church lands, and dissolved manyof the monasteries. In March 1534, the Act of Supremacyboldly announced, “The King’s Majesty justly and rightfullyis supreme head of the Church of England.” The entireprocess, which one historian termed a “state reformation,”was conducted with impressive efficiency. Land formerlyowned by the Catholic Church passed quickly into privatehands, and within a short period, property holdersthroughout England had acquired a vested interest inProtestantism. Beyond breaking with the papacy, Henry

Henry VII,Letters of

Patent Grantedto John Cabot

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The English Enter the Competition 23

showed little enthusiasm for theological change. ManyCatholic ceremonies survived.

The split with Rome, however, opened the door toincreasingly radical religious ideas. The year 1539 saw thepublication of the first Bible in English. Before then theScripture had been available only in Latin, the language ofan educated elite. For the first time in English history, ordi-nary people could read the word of God in the vernacular. Itwas a liberating experience that persuaded some men andwomen that Henry had not sufficiently reformed theEnglish church.

With Henry’s death in 1547, England entered a periodof acute political and religious instability. Edward VI,Henry’s young son by his third wife, Jane Seymour, cameto the throne, but he was still a child and sickly besides.Militant Protestants took advantage of the political uncer-tainty, insisting the Church of England remove every traceof its Catholic origins. With the death of young Edward in1553, these ambitious efforts came to a sudden halt.Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, next ascended the throne.Fiercely loyal to the Catholic faith of her mother,Catherine of Aragon, Mary I vowed to return England tothe pope.

However misguided were the queen’s plans, she pos-sessed her father’s iron will. Hundreds of Protestants wereexecuted; others scurried off to the safety of Geneva andFrankfurt, where they absorbed the most radical Calvinistdoctrines of the day. When Mary died in 1558 and was

succeeded by Elizabeth, the “Marian exiles” flocked backto England, more eager than ever to rid the Tudor churchof Catholicism. Mary had inadvertently advanced thecause of Calvinism by creating so many Protestant mar-tyrs, reformers burned for their faith and now celebratedin the woodcuts of the most popular book of the period,John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, commonly known as theBook of Martyrs (1563). The Marian exiles served as theleaders of the Elizabethan church, an institution thatremained fundamentally Calvinist until the end of the six-teenth century.

Militant ProtestantismBy the time Mary Tudor came to the throne, the vast popularmovement known as the Reformation had swept acrossnorthern and central Europe, and as much as any of the latergreat political revolutions, it had begun to transform thecharacter of the modern world. The Reformation started inGermany when, in 1517, a relatively obscure German monk,Martin Luther, publicly challenged the central tenets ofRoman Catholicism. Within a few years, the religious unityof Europe was permanently shattered. The Reformationdivided kingdoms, sparked bloody wars, and unleashed anextraordinary flood of religious publication.

Luther’s message was straightforward, one ordinarypeople could easily comprehend. God spoke through theBible, Luther maintained, not through the pope or priests.Scripture taught that women and men were saved by faith

John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), depicting the sufferings of English dissenters executedunder the Catholic queen Mary. It provided powerful propaganda for the advance of theProtestant faith.

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alone. Pilgrimages, fasts, alms, indulgences—none of thetraditional ritual observances could assure salvation. Theinstitutional structure of Catholicism was challenged asLuther’s radical ideas spread rapidly across northernGermany and Scandinavia.

After Luther, other Protestant theologians—religious thinkers who would determine the course of religiousreform in England, Scotland, and the early Americancolonies—mounted an even more strident attack onCatholicism. The most influential of these was John Calvin,a lawyer turned theologian, who lived most of his adult lifein the Swiss city of Geneva. Calvin stressed God’s omnipo-tence over human affairs. The Lord, he maintained, chosesome persons for “election,” the gift of salvation, while con-demning others to eternal damnation. A man or womancould do nothing to alter this decision.

Common sense suggests that such a bleak doctrine—known as predestination—might lead to fatalism or hedo-nism. After all, why not enjoy the world’s pleasures to thefullest if such actions have no effect on God’s judgment?But many sixteenth-century Europeans did not sharemodern notions of what constitutes common sense.Indeed, Calvinists were constantly “up and doing,” search-ing for signs that they had received God’s gift of grace. Theuncertainty of their eternal state proved a powerful psy-chological spur, for as long as people did not knowwhether they were scheduled for heaven or hell, theyworked diligently to demonstrate that they possessed atleast the seeds of grace.

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)contained a powerful statement of the new faith, and histeachings spawned religious movements in most northernEuropean countries. In France, the reformed Protestantswere known as Huguenots. In Scotland, people of Calvinistpersuasion founded the Presbyterian Church. And inseventeenth-century England and America, most of thosewho put Calvin’s teachings into practice were called Puritans.

Woman in PowerQueen Elizabeth demonstrated that Henry and his advisershad been mistaken about the capabilities of female rulers.She was a woman of such talent that modern biographersfind little to criticize in her decisions. She governed theEnglish people from 1558 to 1603, an intellectually excitingperiod during which some of her subjects took the firsthalting steps toward colonizing the New World.

Elizabeth recognized her most urgent duty as queen wasto end the religious turmoil that had divided the country fora generation. She had no desire to restore Catholicism. Afterall, the pope openly referred to her as a woman of illegiti-mate birth. Nor did she want to re-create the church exactlyas it had been in the final years of her father’s reign. Rather,Elizabeth established a unique institution, Catholic in muchof its ceremony and government but clearly Protestant indoctrine. Under her so-called Elizabethan settlement, the

queen assumed the title “Supreme Head of the Church.”Some churchmen who had studied with Calvin in Genevaurged her to drop immediately all Catholic rituals, but sheignored these strident reformers. The young queen under-stood she could not rule effectively without the full supportof her people, and as the examples of Edward and Marybefore her demonstrated, neither radical change nor wide-spread persecution gained a monarch lasting popularity.

The state of England’s religion was not simply a domes-tic concern. One scholar aptly termed this period ofEuropean history “the Age of Religious Wars.” Catholicismand Protestantism influenced the way ordinary men andwomen across the continent interpreted the experiences ofeveryday life. Religion shaped political and economic activ-ities. Protestant leaders, for example, purged the Englishcalendar of the many saints’ days that had punctuated theagricultural year in Catholic countries. The Reformationcertainly had a profound impact on the economic develop-ment of Calvinist countries. Max Weber, a brilliant Germansociologist of the early twentieth century, argued in hisProtestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism that a gnawingsense of self-doubt created by the doctrine of “predestina-tion” drove Calvinists to extraordinary diligence. They gen-erated large profits not because they wanted to become rich,but because they wanted to be doing the Lord’s work, toshow they might be among God’s “elect.”

Indeed, it is helpful to view Protestantism and Catholicismas warring ideologies, bundles of deeply held beliefs thatdivided countries and families much as communism and capi-talism did during the late twentieth century. The confronta-tions between the two faiths affected Elizabeth’s entire reign.Soon after she became queen, Pope Pius V excommunicatedher, and in his papal bull Regnans in Exelsis (1570), he strippedElizabeth of her “pretended title to the kingdom.” Spain, themost fervently Catholic state in Europe, vowed to restoreEngland to the “true” faith, and Catholic militants constantlyplotted to overthrow the Tudor monarchy.

Religion, War, and NationalismSlowly, but steadily, English Protestantism and Englishnational identity merged. A loyal English subject in thelate sixteenth century loved the queen, supported theChurch of England, and hated Catholics, especially thosewho happened to live in Spain. Elizabeth herself came tosymbolize this militant new chauvinism. Her subjectsadored the Virgin Queen, and they applauded when herfamed “Sea Dogs”—dashing figures such as Sir FrancisDrake and Sir John Hawkins—seized Spanish treasureships in American waters. The English sailors’ raids werelittle more than piracy, but in this undeclared state of war,such instances of harassment passed for national victories.There seemed to be no reason patriotic Elizabethansshould not share in the wealth of the New World. Witheach engagement, each threat, each plot, Englishnationalism took deeper root. By the 1570s, it had become

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An Unpromising Beginning: Mystery at Roanoke 25

obvious the English people were driven by powerfulideological forces similar to those that had moved theSpanish subjects of Isabella and Ferdinand almost acentury earlier.

In the mid-1580s, Philip II, who had united theempires of Spain and Portugal in 1580, decided thatEngland’s arrogantly Protestant queen could be toleratedno longer. He ordered the construction of a mighty fleet,hundreds of transport vessels designed to carry Spain’sfinest infantry across the English channel. When one ofPhilip’s lieutenants viewed the Armada at Lisbon in May1588, he described it as la felicissima armada, the invinci-ble fleet. The king believed that with the support ofEngland’s oppressed Catholics, Spanish troops wouldsweep Elizabeth from power.

It was a grand scheme; it was an even grander failure. In1588, a smaller, more maneuverable English navy dispersedPhilip’s Armada, and severe storms finished it off. Spanishhopes for Catholic England lay wrecked along the rockycoasts of Scotland and Ireland. English Protestants inter-preted victory in providential terms: “God breathed andthey were scattered.”

An Unpromising Beginning:Mystery at RoanokeBy the 1570s, English interest in the New World had revived.An increasing number of wealthy gentlemen were in anexpansive mood, ready to challenge Spain and reap theprofits of Asia and America. Yet the adventurers whodirected Elizabethan expeditions were only dimly aware ofCabot’s voyages, and their sole experience in settling distantoutposts was in Ireland. Over the last three decades of thesixteenth century, English adventurers made almost everymistake one could possibly imagine. They did, however,acquire valuable information about winds and currents,supplies and finance.

Sir Walter Ralegh’s experience provided all English colo-nizers with a sobering example of the difficulties that awaitedthem in America. In 1584, he dispatched two captains to thecoast of present-day North Carolina to claim land granted tohim by Elizabeth. The men returned with glowing reports,no doubt aimed in part at potential financial backers. “Thesoile,” declared Captain Arthur Barlow, “is the most plenti-full, sweete, fruitfull, and wholesome of all the world.”

Ralegh diplomatically renamed this marvelous regionVirginia, in honor of his patron, the Virgin Queen. Indeed,highly gendered vocabulary figured prominently in theEuropean conquest of the New World. As historianKathleen M. Brown explained, “Associations of the landwith virgin innocence reinforced the notion that Virginiahad been saved from the Spaniard’s lust to be conquered bythe chaste English.” Elizabeth encouraged Ralegh in privateconversation but rejected his persistent requests for money.With rumors of war in the air, she did not want to alienate

Philip II unnecessarily by sponsoring a colony on land longago claimed by Spain.

Ralegh finally raised the funds for his adventure, buthis enterprise seemed ill-fated from the start. Despite care-ful planning, everything went wrong. The settlement waspoorly situated. Located inside the Outer Banks—perhapsto avoid detection by the Spanish—the Roanoke colonyproved extremely difficult to reach. Even experienced navi-gators feared the treacherous currents and storms off CapeHatteras. Sir Richard Grenville, the leader of the expedi-tion, added to the colonists’ troubles by destroying anentire Indian village in retaliation for the suspected theft ofa silver cup.

Grenville hurried back to England in the autumn of1585, leaving the colonists to fend for themselves. Althoughthey coped quite well, a peculiar series of accidents trans-formed Ralegh’s settlement into a ghost town. In the springof 1586, Sir Francis Drake was returning from a Caribbeanvoyage and decided to visit Roanoke. Since an anticipated

John White depicted fishing techniques practiced by theAlgonquian Indians of the present-day Carolinas. In the canoe,dip nets and multipronged spears are used. In the background,Indians stab at fish with long spears. At left, a weir traps fish bytaking advantage of the river current’s natural force.

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26 CHAPTER 1 NEW WORLD ENCOUNTERS

shipment of supplies was overdue, the colonists climbedaboard Drake’s ships and went home.

In 1587, Ralegh launched a second colony. This timehe placed in charge John White, a veteran administratorand talented artist, who a few years earlier had produced amagnificent sketchbook of the AlgonquianIndians who lived near Roanoke. Once again,Ralegh’s luck turned sour. The Spanish Armadasevered communication between England andAmerica. Every available English vessel waspressed into military service, and between1587 and 1590, no ship visited the Roanokecolonists. When rescuers eventually reachedthe island, they found the village deserted. The fate of the“lost” colonists remains a mystery. The best guess is thatthey were absorbed by neighboring groups of natives,some from as far as the southern shore of the James River.

Conclusion: Campaign to SellAmericaHad it not been for Richard Hakluyt the Younger, whopublicized explorers’ accounts of the New World, the dreamof American colonization might have died in England.Hakluyt, a supremely industrious man, never saw America.Nevertheless, his vision of the New World powerfullyshaped English public opinion. He interviewed captainsand sailors upon their return from distant voyages andcarefully collected their stories in a massive book titled ThePrincipall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of theEnglish Nation (1589).

The work appeared to be a straightforward descriptionof what these sailors had seen across the sea. That was itsstrength. In reality, Hakluyt edited each piece so it woulddrive home the book’s central point: England neededAmerican colonies. Indeed, they were essential to the nation’sprosperity and independence. In Hakluyt’s America, therewere no losers. “The earth bringeth fourth all things inaboundance, as in the first creations without toil or labour,”he wrote of Virginia. His blend of piety, patriotism, and self-interest proved immensely popular, and his Voyages wentthrough many editions.

Hakluyt’s enthusiasm for the spread of English tradethroughout the world may have blinded him to theaspirations of other peoples who actually inhabited thosedistant lands. He continued to collect testimony fromadventurers and sailors who claimed to have visited Asiaand America. In an immensely popular new edition of hiswork published between 1598 and 1600 and entitled theVoyages, he catalogued in extraordinary detail thecommercial opportunities awaiting courageous andambitious English colonizers. Hakluyt’s entrepreneurialperspective served to obscure other aspects of theEuropean Conquest, which within only a short amount of

� C H R O N O L O G Y �

24,000–17,000 B.C. Indians cross the Bering Straitinto North America

2000–1500 B.C. Agricultural Revolutiontransforms Native American life

A.D. 1001 Norsemen establish a smallsettlement in Vinland(Newfoundland)

1030 Death of War Jaabi (king ofTakrur), first Muslim ruler inWest Africa

1450 Gutenberg perfects movable type

1469 Marriage of Isabella andFerdinand leads to theunification of Spain

1481 Portuguese build castle at Elminaon the Gold Coast of Africa

1492 Columbus lands atSan Salvador

1497 Cabot leads first Englishexploration of North America

1498 Vasco da Gama of Portugalreaches India by sailingaround Africa

1502 Montezuma becomes emperorof the Aztecs

1506 Columbus dies in Spain afterfour voyages to America

1517 Martin Luther’s protest sparksReformation in Germany

1521 Cortés defeats the Aztecs atTenochtitlán

1529–1536 Henry VIII provokes EnglishReformation

1534 Cartier claims Canadafor France

1536 Calvin’s Institutes published

1540 Coronado explores theSouthwest for Spain

1558 Elizabeth I becomes queenof England

1585 First Roanoke settlementestablished on coast of NorthCarolina

1588 Spanish Armada defeated bythe English

1608 Champlain founds Quebec

John White,Letter toRichardHakluyt(1590)

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Conclusion: Campaign to Sell America 27

time would transform the face of the New World. He paidlittle attention, for example, to the rich cultural diversityof the Native Americans; he said not a word about thepain of the Africans who traveled to North and SouthAmerica as slaves. Instead, he and many other polemicistsfor English colonization led the ordinary men andwomen who crossed the Atlantic to expect nothing lessthan a paradise on earth. By fanning such unrealisticexpectations, Hakluyt persuaded European settlers that

America Past and Present OnlineTo find more resources for this chapter, please go towww.MyHistoryLab.com.

the New World was theirs for the taking, a self-servingview that invited ecological disaster and continuoushuman suffering.

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