and Spain were as longstanding as the winds from the southwest and concomitant trade. A lingering query is this: Did London’s subjugation of Ireland act as a precursor for the rise of sixteenth-century colonialism, or did London merely see Spain’s conquest of the Americas as a model to impose on Ireland (or both)?102
The intensifying conflict between and among England, Scotland, and Ireland stimulated the growth of an arms industry,103 which then proved to be quite useful in subjugating Africans and the Americas alike. Indeed, according to one analyst, “The colonists in America were the greatest weapon-using people of that epoch in the world.” But it was not just weapons—or technological determinism—that led to the massive defeats of indigenes; after all, by 1514 Mayans in the Yucatan repulsed the Spanish invaders in the face of cannon fire. However, what occurred was the would-be conquerors learning from their setbacks because some years later the matchlock arquebus, despite poor and often unreliable performance, supplanted the crossbow at the point of attack, not least because of its enhanced deadliness. By 1535 Spain had successfully standardized the martial matchlock arquebus and its ball to permit interchangeability, advantaging Madrid vis-à-vis its wide array of enemies.104 By 1537, as the arms race proceeded, the earliest breech-loading handguns had arisen in the vicinity of England, complementing the first mention of a handgun there, many decades earlier.105
These militarizing trends also proved essential in yet another development that marked the surge of London: the defenestration of Ireland, which at the beginning of the sixteenth century was essentially medieval and feudal but by century’s end was yet another appendage of the Crown in London,106 albeit after devastation that drove many of Eire’s finest sons and daughters across the Atlantic. Then there were the direct descendants of the Scots who colonized the north of Ireland during the reign of Henry VIII and to the time of William II, who wound up settling again, this time in Virginia, where they wreaked much havoc, a praxis honed decades earlier. Ulster, a byword for murderous conflict in the twentieth century, was their haven before descending upon North America.107 Conversely, the Reformation guaranteed that Catholic Spain and heavily Catholic Ireland would align against Protestant London, instigating immense conflict for years to come.108
There were good reasons to flee London in the sixteenth century. Many infants died because of the insalubriousness of urban life; if an indigene from North America had visited a typical town across the Atlantic, he or she would have been stunned by the proliferation of pollutants and the dearth of personal hygiene. Actually, the search for perfumes in Asia to deodorize this nostril-wrinkling problem led directly to navigation feats and colonialism itself. Dysentery, smallpox, cholera, plague—and worse—were generally diseases unknown in the precincts invaded by the English and their allies in the Americas, along with the horrid unsanitariness that rampaged in crowded cities on the northeast bank of the Atlantic. This stinking stew of rankness along with an unbalanced diet would have been a step backward if experienced by indigenes of the Americas. Families were suffering from famine, especially when the price of basic foodstuffs rose. Flight from the countryside generated a tidal wave of vagabonds in the cities. High rates of mortality curbed the ability of parents to show “undue” affection to children, to avoid the psychological backlash of early death of infants. The stratified nature of land ownership and the yawning chasm between rich and poor would have alienated many an indigene from North America, though this was precisely the system that was imposed in the “New World,” albeit on a racist basis.109
Given the ugly travails of Africans in the Americas, many of them, given the subsequent trajectory of white supremacy, would have been shocked by the underdevelopment of Western Europe. Certainly, given the prohibition of miscegenation that characterized the subsequent history of the United States, even today there are those who are taken aback by the existence of the “Black Prince of Florence,” Alessandro de’ Medici, who in 1532 with the backing of the Vatican and the Holy Roman Empire became the Duke of Florence at the tender age of nineteen. Of course, by 1537 he was murdered by his cousin, but even this was par for the course in terms of the customary palace intrigue that characterized royal life throughout the continent. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 1.5 percent of the population of what is now Italy were enslaved—which was not precisely coterminous with being African—although Sicily had a high percentage of enslaved Africans resident. The tawny “Black Prince” was the son of a dark-skinned mother and, consistent with the power dynamic of the era, at times dressed as a Turk, the meaning of which was unclear.110
What was clear then was the potency of the Turks, which at once kept Spain occupied and England in a state of pandering toward them. Ottomans battling Spaniards allowed Englishmen to prevail.
CHAPTER 3
Liquidation of Indigenes | Reliance on Africans | Tensions in London
By the 1540s, it had been almost a half century since the beginning of European invasions in the Americas. What was called the “Mixton War” took place in what was called New Galicia, in the heart of today’s Mexico—the states of Aguascalientes, Guananjuato, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, and Zacatecas—in a conflict that had thrown up sparks as early as 1524. Later, due north in what is now New Mexico, conversos, those who were Jewish “passing” as Christian, were blamed for fomenting slave raids, but “Mixton” was said to have a similar purpose. Because of the spectacular losses imposed on indigenes, in the war’s aftermath more enslaved Africans were delivered, which simply substituted one problem for another from the colonizer’s viewpoint.1
For our purposes here, note that the rampant bloodshed in this section of North America ill prepared indigenes for the siege warfare that culminated in their mass ouster in what is now New Mexico in the nineteenth century. And Spain’s detrimental reliance upon armed Africans was a partial product of privileging religious affiliation, which could at once attract Africans and repel non-Catholic Europeans, a trend that fell victim to the onrushing trend of “whiteness” construction, notably in North America, as perpetrated by London and their republican successors.
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF the 1500s, Spain authorized delivering enslaved Africans in the Americas, though it was not long thereafter that limitations were placed upon the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans since they seemed to have a proclivity to flee and influence indigenes. However, the monarch cancelled this initiative because many of the enslaved were good workers. So by 1510 the Spanish authorities authorized the arrival of non-Christian enslaved Africans from Guinea, and by 1518 the continuing slaughter of indigenes seemed to admit no alternative to admitting more Africans. Certainly, the deployment of Africans as footmen and warriors alike created numerous problems for the colonizer. Ultimately, the slaveholder was seeking to entice Africans to enforce his will on other Spaniards, the prospect of which, arising in London’s settlements in the 1770s, contributed mightily to the successful republican revolt, animated by a “whiteness” that served to disrupt the possibility of alliances across increasingly rigid racial lines.2
By 1532, the elite in Santo Domingo complained to the Crown that rogues and rebels among Africans belonging to the clergy had committed grave crimes, with some fleeing to monasteries on the island where the believers hid and defended them from molestation of any sort. Earlier the Africans demonstrated that they were not eternally bound to the Spaniards when a rebellion of the indigenes spearheaded by the cacique Enrique on the island was joined by Africans who fled the plantation to join them. These were the reputed Wolof rebels from today’s Senegal, who induced an equal number to join them on one of the earliest revolts of the enslaved in the hemisphere, a rebellion that may have lasted until 1533. Then, as already noted, there was the revolt with the Guale in the southeast quadrant of the North American mainland, which was followed by yet another trend that served to set “whiteness” in motion: by 1539, Frenchmen, working closely with African maroons in Cuba, attacked and burned Havana and attempted to seize neighboring Santiago. Interestingly, John Brown was emulating these adventurers by 1859, with similar impassioned response in both instances.
In what is now the U.S. Southwest, Spanish conquerors were clearing the ground for the eventual arrival of republicans by waging a brutal war against chichimecas, a generic term of contempt, a dehumanization of indigenes