Arguably, although the destruction of cities and their inhabitants was terrible enough, and the exploitation of indigenous peoples extreme even by the standards of Aztec civilization - sufficiently brutal to shock some Spaniards - it was the slow but inexorable erosion of New World cultures that not only defined the post-Columbian era, but set a precedent as far as European encounters with - and later within - the Americas were concerned. From the period of the earliest European exploration onward, the relationship between incomer and indigene was positioned on the cusp of contradictory impulses on the part of the Europeans. From an economic perspective, the indigenous peoples seemed ideal for exploitation. From a religious one, they were ripe for conversion. Europeans had little interest in acclimatizing themselves culturally to the environment of the New World, but nor had they thought through the implications of acculturating the indigenous populations to European norms. This uneasy juxtaposition of the non-European as both potential convert and alien “other” defined not just Spanish colonization efforts, but the colonization impulse as a whole across the Americas between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Additional developments within Europe itself must also be factored into the European impact on post-Columbian America. Not the least of these was the rise of print culture, which scholars perceive as one of the fundamental building blocks of the modern nation. The development of printing from the fifteenth century onward resulted in a wealth of words, woodcuts, and, crucially, maps being available to an ever-increasing percentage of the European populations. Within Europe itself, much of the early print culture proved the means of dissemination of clashing clerical perspectives, but images were as significant as words when Europeans looked across the Atlantic, images that helped them orientate themselves in that environment. As a human activity generally, but certainly in the age of European exploration, mapmaking often says more about the society producing the map than the landscape being mapped. Early maps frequently served a military purpose or, in the case of the Americas, functioned quite literally as treasure maps. One example is Battista Agnese’s world map of c. 1544 with its clearly defined routes to the Spanish silver mines of the New World, its outline of Magellan’s global circumnavigation, but its rather hazy depiction of the land to the north -the land that would, in time, become the United States of America (Figure i.i).
Early maps of the Americas represented tangible representations of the extent, and limitations, of European geographical knowledge. They were also physical manifestations of the European imagination as far as the Americas were concerned. As Agnese’s 1544 map reveals, North America really was an unknown quantity, terra incognita, in the sixteenth century. South America, by contrast, was portrayed as a landscape of economic opportunities, but a dangerous one. Such additional information as was available beyond early maps tended toward the sensationalist. Those publications that followed in the wake of Columbus’s voyages presented images of the New World in which neither Spanish colonizers nor indigenous populations were presented in a particularly flattering light. Insofar as these images fed into the European imagination of the Americas, they revealed the stuff of nightmares. Many of them came out of the studio of Dutch-born engraver Theodor de Bry and his sons, who produced a multivolume study (1590-1618) of European-American encounters, illustrating such publications such as J. de Lery Le Voyage au Brezil de Jean de Lery 1556-1558 (1578). A Protestant French minister and writer, de Lery had accompanied a colonizing expedition to Brazil that later settled near the indigenous Tupinamba tribe. What de Lery witnessed there shocked him, in particular how the Tupinamba “killed, cut up, roasted and ate some of their enemy.” Rendered visually by de Bry, his description probably shocked his readers as well.
Although both de Lery’s descriptions and de Bry’s images of New World peoples were not consistently unsettling, and frequently focused on peaceful domestic scenes, de Bry’s images of the European-American encounters were often brutally graphic, and especially graphic about Spanish brutality. He depicted the Spanish colonizers in much the same way as he would later portray the Tupinamba, as in the engravings that accompanied Bartolome de Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542) (Figure 1.2). In this case, the clue was in the title. De Bry’s images for Las Casas’s work were not drawn from an overactive imagination, but reflected the subject of at least some of the texts emanating from Europe’s New World exploratory ventures.
Las Casas, a Dominican priest who had taken part in the violence on Hispaniola and in Cuba, wrote from the heart and from personal experience when he described the horrific treatment meted out to the natives by Spanish colonists. In turning against such behavior, Las Casas
Zi
was ahead of his time. Yet his solution - which he later regretted - to the barbarities he had both witnessed and participated in before concluding that America’s indigenous peoples deserved to be recognized, and treated, as equals was simply to replace one subject of exploitation with another -to replace native with African slaves.
The English at Home, and Abroad
Spanish cruelty toward natives in the early stages of European settlement in the Americas, although highlighted in the work of Las Casas, was not especially or unusually harsh within the context of the period. Those nations that sought to challenge Spanish dominance in the Americas, and particularly England, had little reason to feel superior to the Spanish, given that neither at home or abroad did they hold the moral high ground when it came to fulfilling their expansionist ambitions. Unfortunately for the indigenous natives in the Americas, late-sixteenth-century England’s approach to the whole issue of expansion, colonization, and conquest was driven by a close-knit group of Protestant West Country aristocratic adventurers such as Walter Ralegh, his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and his cousin Richard Grenville. Their views on English expansion could best be described as aggressive and their approach to other cultures intolerant. It was informed by what these men already knew - or thought they knew - about the Americas and about Spanish colonization efforts there. What they knew came from published accounts, including Spanish historian Peter Martyr Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo (On the New World), which began publication in 1511. The first Eight Decades were published in 1530 but translated, at least partially, by Richard Eden in 1555 as The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India. Yet before they turned to the idea of conquering a land across the Atlantic, one closer to home attracted their attention: Ireland.
In the English case, the infighting that ensued between Catholics and Protestants, ushered in by the Reformation and exacerbated by the monarchical instability that followed the early death of Henry VIII, carried over into English relations with Catholic Ireland. Ireland’s inhabitants were frequently perceived as threatening alien “others,” and as a consequence treated in a fashion distressingly similar to that experienced by America’s natives more than three thousand miles away. The repercussions of this, for America’s history, were profound. The Catholic Irish, potentially a threat to the Protestant supremacy, had long been pawns in the ongoing power struggle between Spain and England. With the ascension to the English throne of Elizabeth I (1558), efforts to bring Ireland under the rule of the Crown intensified. This need not necessarily have impacted on England’s later American colonization activities, except for the fact that many of those sent by Elizabeth to impose her will in Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s were the same men who she would later send to extend her influence across the Atlantic.