What are they learning, and what are they learning to look for? How do the mapmakers represent the European presence and rivalry in North America? How are the maps political "texts"? How do they reveal the European mindset for future exploration and colonization? By , what does the New World appear to offer Europe? To the native inhabitants, what do the Europeans appear to offer?
What motivated the Europeans' explorations? What were they looking for? What led them to deem an expedition a failure or success? How did the Europeans interpret the natural world they encountered? How did their experience of the New World comport with their expectations?
From their capital of Cuzco in the Andean highlands, through conquest and negotiation, the Inca built an empire that stretched around the western half of the South American continent from present day Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina. They built steppes to farm fertile mountain soil and by the s they managed a thousand miles of Andean roads that tied together perhaps twelve million people.
But like the Aztecs, unrest between the Incas and conquered groups created tensions and left the empire vulnerable to foreigners. Smallpox spread in advance of Spanish conquerors and hit the Incan empire in With men, he deceived Incan rulers and took control of the empire and seized the capital city, Cuzco, in Disease, conquest, and slavery ravaged the remnants of the Incan empire.
After the conquests of Mexico and Peru, Spain settled into empire. A vast administrative hierarchy governed its new holdings: royal appointees oversaw an enormous territory of landed estates and Indian laborers and administrators regulated the extraction of gold and silver and oversaw their transport across the Atlantic in Spanish galleons.
Meanwhile Spanish migrants poured into the New World. Spaniards, often single, young, and male, emigrated for the various promises of land, wealth, and social advancement. Laborers, craftsmen, soldiers, clerks, and priests all crossed the Atlantic in large numbers. Indians, however, always outnumbered the Spanish and the Spaniards, by both necessity and design, incorporated native Americans—unequally—into colonial life. An elaborate racial hierarchy marked Spanish life in the New World.
Their descendants, New World-born Spaniards, or criollos , occupied the next rung and rivaled the peninsulares for wealth and opportunity. Mestizos —a term used to describe those of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage—followed. Like the French later in North America, the Spanish tolerated and sometimes even supported interracial marriage.
There were simply too few Spanish women in the New World to support the natural growth of a purely Spanish population. The Catholic Church endorsed interracial marriage as a moral bulwark against bastardy and rape.
By , mestizos made up a large portion of the colonial population. By the early s, more than one-third of all marriages bridged the Spanish-Indian divide. Largely separated by wealth and influence from the peninsulares and criollos , however, mestizos typically occupied a middling social position in Spanish New World society. Slaves and Indians occupied the lowest rungs of the social ladder. After Bartolome de las Casas and other reformers shamed the Spanish for their harsh Indian policies in the s, the Spanish outlawed Indian slavery.
In the s, the encomienda system of land-based forced-labor gave way to the repartimiento , an exploitative but slightly softer form of forced wage-labor.
Many manipulated the Casta System to gain advantages for themselves and their children. Croix and then Quebec, the French left an unoccupied zone on the eastern edge of the continent.
The English, Dutch, and Swedes focused their North American colonization efforts in that gap between the French and Spanish, but only after the military power of Spain was diminished by the failure of its sleet the Spanish Armada to conquer England in The Spanish were aggressive in protecting their claims to the New World, but did not have the resources to colonize the entire North American coastline.
Lack of available soldiers prevented Spain from challenging all the European competitors occupying "northern Florida," and even Caribbean islands were left with few Spanish settlers. Spanish occupiers came to America immediately after completing their year reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The extension of the reconquista to North Africa was blocked when local tribes in Morocco were able to defend their territories and culture, including the Muslim faith.
The Portuguese, encouraged by Prince Henry the Navigator, were the first Iberians to explore far offshore. They conquered Ceuta and set up forts on the West African coast. The Berbers in North Africa blocked the land route south, but the ocean highway was open to Portuguese ship captains.
Sailing south of the Sahara Desert could open direct trade for the gold of Mali, bypassing the middlemen who brought it to the Mediterranean coast. The potential for other trading opportunities led the Portuguese to explore even further south along the west cost of Africa.
They were the first European nation to bypass the land routes controlled by Muslims, opening shipping routes to the source of spices. The Portuguese had the expertise to explore westward into the Atlantic Ocean as well, but the capacity of that small country was limited.
Portugal lacked the population and military capacity even to occupy the territories they "discovered" in Africa. They also found the trade in gold and slaves from Africa, and the trade in spices from East Asia, sufficiently rewarding.
Sailing into the unknown regions of the Atlantic Ocean on a speculative "what might be out there" journey was a low priority, when the already-known opportunities in Africa and Asia were so valuable.
Spain had a different perspective. The Portuguese success in Asia also caused the Spanish to look for a path to the Spice Islands, ideally a route not already dominated by their neighbor on the Iberian peninsula. The Spanish did establish tiny enclaves in North Africa such as Melilla, but also directed their expansion westward towards North America.
Columbus miscalculated the distance to the Indies, and saw an opportunity to create a new trading route via the Atlantic Ocean. After lengthy negotiations, Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella supported Columbus's initial journey west.
Their dream was to open a new route across the Atlantic Ocean to get access to the spices, without paying high costs to deal with rivals. The Muslims already controlled the land route, and the Portuguese already controlled the sea route via Africa. Supporting an Italian willing to sail west into the unknown was a speculative investment for Ferdinand and Isabella, but offered the best opportunity for Spain.
After Columbus returned in , Spanish leaders quickly recognized their opportunity to obtain wealth from the New World and surpass the Portuguese.
The Spanish did not limit their explorations to the Caribbean, or their economic strategy to finding just gold. Enslaving the Native Americans was a quick path to profits, first by shipping them to Spain and then forcing them to labor on Caribbean islands. In contrast to the colonization pattern of the English, the Spanish rarely sent a fleet of ships loaded with colonists directly from Spain to the North American continent. Ponce de Leon made the first attempt to create a permanent colony in North America after Columbus's discovery, eight years after he led the first major European exploration of the North American continent into Florida in He returned in with people to start a settlement near modern-day Tampa.
On that trip, Ponce de Leon brought seeds to plant and livestock cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, and goats to support the colonists. The first Spanish effort to permanently settle in North America failed. The local Calusa tribe successfully resisted his attempt to occupy their territory.
Ponce de Leon abandoned the colonization project and returned to Cuba, where he died from an arrow wound that he had suffered in Florida.
Settlement initiatives by the English, starting in at Roanoke Island, came long after the Spanish efforts to start colonies in the 's.
Augustine, a full-scale and permanently-occupied town in North America. The Spanish chose to focus their investment in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, but they did explore all of the North American shoreline. After various ships mapped the edge of the continent from the Caribbean to Newfoundland, Spain sent expeditions that explored inland from the Florida and Carolina coast to the Mississippi River and Mexico. That same year, Captain Pedro de Quejo mapped the coastline from Florida to Delaware, sailing along the Virginia shore on that trip but capturing no slaves.
One Spanish slavehunter was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon. Chicora spun tall tales about mineral wealth in the New World, and succeeded in getting a trip back home. Ayllon's first attempt at settlement involved a six-ship expedition with people.
It left from Hispaniola the island shared today by Haiti and the Dominican Republic in Virginia was mapped as part of the land of Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon in , while Estevao Gomes's name was assigned to New England on the secret master map kept in Spain Padron Real for informing ship captains before they sailed Source: Library of Congress, Carta universal en que se contiene todo lo que del mundo se ha descubierto fasta agora by Diego Ribero, Ayllon had invested his personal fortune, but mismanaged the project.
The settlers did not choose their final site until October, when it was too late to plant crops. The local inhabitants were not friendly or enthusiastic about trading for food. The colonists got sick and hungry, and then Ayllon died. After just three months, the survivors returned to Hispaniola and San Miguel de Guadelupe was another colonization failure. Ayllon's colony, in what today is Georgia, was the second attempt by any European nation to create a permanent settlement in North America, following Ponce de Leon's effort near what today is Tampa.
The next major expedition to North America was also led by a Spaniard seeking to become rich from new discoveries. In , Panfilo de Narvaez took soldiers on his expedition through Florida. Like Ponce de Leon, they landed at the site of modern Tampa. After marching north through the peninsula, they spent the winter at Apalachee modern Tallahassee.
The re-supply ships and the land party failed to link up, leaving the land expedition on its own. The Spanish ended up traveling west along the Gulf Coast, seeking to get to any settlement in Mexico. Eight years later in , the only four people to survive the trip including Cabeza de Vaca and a black slave known as Estaban reached Mexico City.
The next Spanish investment in exploring North America was Hernando de Soto's party between to It traveled inland from Tampa. Finding Juan Ortiz, a survivor of Narvaez expedition, provided de Soto a translator and guide. Hernando de Soto's group went much deeper into the interior of today's southeastern United States, and came close to the modern-day boundaries of Virginia. In , his explorers camped at the Native American town of Xuala near what is now the town of Morganton, North Carolina.
The Spanish then turned west and headed towards Mexico. Hernando de Soto came close to Virginia in , and 27 years later a party from the Juan Pardo expedition may have crossed what is the modern state boundary to modern-day Saltville Map: Library of Congress, Carte de la Louisiane et du cours du Mississipi The impact of the Spanish as they travelled through Native American communities must have been dramatic.
Local leaders and their followers were seized and forced to obey de Soto's commands, including serving as guides and bearers of Spanish supplies. The Spanish had swords, armor, guns, horses, large mastiff dogs trained to maim people, and sufficient military capacity to go wherever they desired. Those who had been leaders lost status, since they clearly lacked the power to protect their followers. After the Spanish moved on to dominate another Native American community, those left behind who had survived the visit must have struggled to rebuild their society.
After the disruption of de Soto, old assumptions of authority and obligation may have been replaced by new alliances and allegiances. The political and religious patterns discovered by later English colonists may have been created over just the last three generations. The Native American cultures disrupted by the English fur traders and settlers during the 's and 's may have existed since the mid's. The first Europeans to penetrate the interior of the Carolinas were not peace-loving, sensitive men.
The behavior of the Spanish reflected their cultural assumptions of being "better" than the Native Americans, carrying their Catholic faith into the interior of the continent. It is unlikely that the Native Americans, forced to provide food for the Spanish and to carry their supplies, welcomed their visitors as suggested in one book about North Carolina history: 6. The mountains were first explored by Europeans when a Spanish expedition under Hernando de Soto arrived in He reported the area to be pleasant and spent a month resting his horses and enjoying the hospitality of the natives.
Hernando de Soto's expedition brought Spanish goods into Native American communities, and some items must have been traded through the Piedmont into Virginia.
The soldiers probably brought diseases as well, such as influenza and malaria. Those diseases can spread to other people, but would not trigger pandemics that would depopulate the region.
The damage done by those diseases would have been limited to just a small number of Native Americans living near the path of the exploration party. The Spanish men who made it to Xuala had already lived though the stage of smallpox when they could have infected others, and de Soto's expedition may not have brought pandemic-causing diseases. The soldiers were adults who had survived the killer infections, and could no longer transmit them. Much later, English colonists in the Carolinas set up a slave trade to capture Native Americans.
If the Spanish had not already brought depopulating diseases, the English did. Pandemics during the English colonization period killed most of the people within Native American towns. The drastic decline of population in the Carolina Piedmont and Tennessee River watershed triggered reorganization of Native American communities, leading to formation of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and other tribes.
The depopulation reduced the opportunity to capture slaves locally. The difficulty of enslaving Native Americans led Carolinians to increase imports of black slaves from Africa. Spain dominated exploration of North America for a century.
For the first six decades of the 's, France, England, and the Netherlands lacked the capacity to create colonies in the New World.
The pressure for Spain to occupy North America was minimal. The Spaniards focused on pillaging the native tribes in Mexico and South America of their gold and silver, sending shiploads of looted wealth back across the Atlantic Ocean. Portugal chose to focus on Brazil and the African slave trade, after dividing its claims to the New World with Spain under the Treaty of Tordesillas in However, European rivals were able to capture Spanish ships carrying New World wealth back home even when the nations were not officially at war.
To support the intercept-the-Spanish-treasure-fleet efforts, those European nations did consider establishing bases in North America. The Spanish recognized the threat, but did not have a large enough population in the Western Hemisphere to plant settlements everywhere.
Expanding to the north and planting settlements in "Florida" was a low priority. The Spanish did not try to build bases in the latitude of Virginia, far north along the Atlantic coast from the Caribbean, for two reasons:. Spanish treasure fleets returning to Europe used the Gulf Stream to go north past Florida perhaps as far as New York in order to catch westerly winds across the North Atlantic, so an English colony in Virginia was a threat because it could support potential pirates Source: Geographicus, Ocean Atlantique ou Mer du Nord by Pierre Mortier, The Spanish did see a need to establish a foothold on the North American continent, in the province they called Florida.
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