38
Chapter 2 | Early Globalization: The Atlantic World, 1492?1650
DEFINING “AMERICAN”
Columbus?s Probanza de m?rito of 1493
The exploits of the most famous Spanish explorers have provided Western civilization with a narrative of
European supremacy and Indian savagery. However, these stories are based on the self-aggrandizing
efforts of conquistadors to secure royal favor through the writing of probanzas de m?ritos (proofs of
merit). Below are excerpts from Columbus?s 1493 letter to Luis de Sant?ngel, which illustrates how
fantastic reports from European explorers gave rise to many myths surrounding the Spanish conquest
and the New World.
This island, like all the others, is most extensive. It has many ports along the sea-coast
excelling any in Christendom?and many fine, large, flowing rivers. The land there is elevated,
with many mountains and peaks incomparably higher than in the centre isle. They are most
beautiful, of a thousand varied forms, accessible, and full of trees of endless varieties, so
high that they seem to touch the sky, and I have been told that they never lose their foliage.
. . . There is honey, and there are many kinds of birds, and a great variety of fruits. Inland
there are numerous mines of metals and innumerable people. Hispaniola is a marvel. Its
hills and mountains, fine plains and open country, are rich and fertile for planting and for
pasturage, and for building towns and villages. The seaports there are incredibly fine, as also
the magnificent rivers, most of which bear gold. The trees, fruits and grasses differ widely from
those in Juana. There are many spices and vast mines of gold and other metals in this island.
They have no iron, nor steel, nor weapons, nor are they fit for them, because although they
are well-made men of commanding stature, they appear extraordinarily timid. The only arms
they have are sticks of cane, cut when in seed, with a sharpened stick at the end, and they
are afraid to use these. Often I have sent two or three men ashore to some town to converse
with them, and the natives came out in great numbers, and as soon as they saw our men
arrive, fled without a moment?s delay although I protected them from all injury.
What does this letter show us about Spanish objectives in the New World? How do you think it might
have influenced Europeans reading about the New World for the first time?
The 1492 Columbus landfall accelerated the rivalry between Spain and Portugal, and the two powers vied
for domination through the acquisition of new lands. In the 1480s, Pope Sixtus IV had granted Portugal
the right to all land south of the Cape Verde islands, leading the Portuguese king to claim that the lands
discovered by Columbus belonged to Portugal, not Spain. Seeking to ensure that Columbus?s finds would
remain Spanish, Spain?s monarchs turned to the Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI, who issued two papal
decrees in 1493 that gave legitimacy to Spain?s Atlantic claims at the expense of Portugal. Hoping to
salvage Portugal?s Atlantic holdings, King Jo?o II began negotiations with Spain. The resulting Treaty of
Tordesillas in 1494 drew a north-to-south line through South America (Figure 2.5); Spain gained territory
west of the line, while Portugal retained the lands east of the line, including the east coast of Brazil.
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54
Chapter 2 | Early Globalization: The Atlantic World, 1492?1650
MY STORY
Bartolom? de Las Casas on the Mistreatment of Indians
Bartolom? de Las Casas?s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542 and published
ten years later, detailed for Prince Philip II of Spain how Spanish colonists had been mistreating natives.
Into and among these gentle sheep, endowed by their Maker and Creator with all the qualities
aforesaid, did creep the Spaniards, who no sooner had knowledge of these people than they
became like fierce wolves and tigers and lions who have gone many days without food or
nourishment. And no other thing have they done for forty years until this day, and still today
see fit to do, but dismember, slay, perturb, afflict, torment, and destroy the Indians by all
manner of cruelty?new and divers and most singular manners such as never before seen or
read or heard of?some few of which shall be recounted below, and they do this to such a
degree that on the Island of Hispaniola, of the above three millions souls that we once saw,
today there be no more than two hundred of those native people remaining. . . .
Two principal and general customs have been employed by those, calling themselves
Christians, who have passed this way, in extirpating and striking from the face of the earth
those suffering nations. The first being unjust, cruel, bloody, and tyrannical warfare. The
other?after having slain all those who might yearn toward or suspire after or think of freedom,
or consider escaping from the torments that they are made to suffer, by which I mean all the
native-born lords and adult males, for it is the Spaniards? custom in their wars to allow only
young boys and females to live?being to oppress them with the hardest, harshest, and most
heinous bondage to which men or beasts might ever be bound into.
How might these writings have been used to promote the ?black legend? against Spain as well as
subsequent English exploration and colonization?
Indians were not the only source of cheap labor in the Americas; by the middle of the sixteenth century,
Africans formed an important element of the labor landscape, producing the cash crops of sugar and
tobacco for European markets. Europeans viewed Africans as non-Christians, which they used as a
justification for enslavement. Denied control over their lives, slaves endured horrendous conditions.
At every opportunity, they resisted enslavement, and their resistance was met with violence. Indeed,
physical, mental, and sexual violence formed a key strategy among European slaveholders in their effort to
assert mastery and impose their will. The Portuguese led the way in the evolving transport of slaves across
the Atlantic; slave ?factories? on the west coast of Africa, like Elmina Castle in Ghana, served as holding
pens for slaves brought from Africa?s interior. In time, other European imperial powers would follow in
the footsteps of the Portuguese by constructing similar outposts on the coast of West Africa.
The Portuguese traded or sold slaves to Spanish, Dutch, and English colonists in the Americas, particularly
in South America and the Caribbean, where sugar was a primary export. Thousands of African slaves
found themselves growing, harvesting, and processing sugarcane in an arduous routine of physical labor.
Slaves had to cut the long cane stalks by hand and then bring them to a mill, where the cane juice was
extracted. They boiled the extracted cane juice down to a brown, crystalline sugar, which then had to be
cured in special curing houses to have the molasses drained from it. The result was refined sugar, while
the leftover molasses could be distilled into rum. Every step was labor-intensive and often dangerous.
Las Casas estimated that by 1550, there were fifty thousand slaves on Hispaniola. However, it is a mistake
to assume that during the very early years of European exploration all Africans came to America as slaves;
some were free men who took part in expeditions, for example, serving as conquistadors alongside Cort?s
in his assault on Tenochtitl?n. Nonetheless, African slavery was one of the most tragic outcomes in the
emerging Atlantic World.
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U.S. History
SENIOR CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS
P.SCOTT CORBETT, VENTURA COLLEGE
VOLKER JANSSEN, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY AT FULLERTON
JOHN M. LUND, KEENE STATE COLLEGE
TODD PFANNESTIEL, CLARION UNIVERSITY
PAUL VICKERY, ORAL ROBERTS UNIVERSITY
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