Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John H. Elliott Page A
Authors: John H. Elliott
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were accustomed. The dissolving effects of space, at work from the outset, gave rise to responses which would eventually produce societies that, although still recognizably European, appeared sufficiently different to justify their being described as `American'.
These responses were determined by a combination of metropolitan tradition and local circumstance, and would vary by region as well as by nationality. The New England response, for example, was to differ in important ways from that of Virginia. But in so far as the differences between New England and Virginia were conditioned by local topography, these paled into insignificance when set against the enormous geographical and climatic differences between the areas of Spanish and British colonization on the American mainland. The Spaniards were faced with jungles, mountain ranges and deserts which made William Bradford's `hideous and desolate wilderness' of New England49 look like a garden of Eden by comparison.
The Spaniards, too, lacked great rivers like the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio and the St Lawrence to take settlers deep into the interior. Yet in spite of the apparently overwhelming geographical disadvantages they encountered, the Spaniards had fanned out through the continent within a generation of the capture of Tenochtitlan. The English, on the other hand, although faced with a more benevolent geography, had a preference for clustering close to the Atlantic seaboard until the eighteenth century; only in the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys, and in parts of the Chesapeake region, did settlement of the interior begin from the outset.50 It is a striking commentary on English predilections that, for the first twenty years of its existence, the inhabitants of Dedham in Massachusetts, with immense spaces around them, continued to parcel out tiny house lots, and disposed in all of less than 3,000 acres of lands' It seems ironical that New England colonists who saw themselves as charged with an `errand into the wilderness' should so resolutely have turned their backs upon it.
The determination of the Spaniards to range far and wide through American space, in spite of the vast distances and terrible hardships involved, can be attributed partly to their ambitions and expectations, and partly to long-established Iberian traditions. Unlike the English, they soon became aware that just over the horizon were to be found large polities and densely settled lands. There was early evidence, too, of the existence of deposits of gold and silver, for which the settlers of Jamestown were to hunt in vain. Hunger for riches and lordship and a restless ambition for fame lured conquistadores like Hernando de Soto, in his epic journey through the American South between 1539 and 1542, deep into the interior in ways that few Englishmen after Sir Walter Raleigh were willing to emulate. `Why', asked Captain John Smith, `should English men despair and not do so much as any? ... Seeing honour is our lives ambition, and our ambition after death, to have an honourable memory of our life . .. '52 But appeals to honour seem to have fallen on deaf ears among English settlers who saw all around them apparently vacant land awaiting occupation. In particular, New Englanders, according to William Wood writing in 1634, were `well contented and look not so much at abundance as at competency'.53 `Competency' as an ideal left little room for glory.
'Competency'- the willingness to settle for a life-style that brought sufficiency rather than riches - was an aspiration that was not confined to English, or some English, colonists. Letters exchanged between sixteenth-century Spanish settlers in the Indies and their relatives back home suggest that the relatively modest ambition of pasar mejor - becoming better off - was seen by Spaniards as a good enough reason for risking the hazards of a transatlantic crossing, just as it was by their English equivalents. `This is a good land for those who
These responses were determined by a combination of metropolitan tradition and local circumstance, and would vary by region as well as by nationality. The New England response, for example, was to differ in important ways from that of Virginia. But in so far as the differences between New England and Virginia were conditioned by local topography, these paled into insignificance when set against the enormous geographical and climatic differences between the areas of Spanish and British colonization on the American mainland. The Spaniards were faced with jungles, mountain ranges and deserts which made William Bradford's `hideous and desolate wilderness' of New England49 look like a garden of Eden by comparison.
The Spaniards, too, lacked great rivers like the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio and the St Lawrence to take settlers deep into the interior. Yet in spite of the apparently overwhelming geographical disadvantages they encountered, the Spaniards had fanned out through the continent within a generation of the capture of Tenochtitlan. The English, on the other hand, although faced with a more benevolent geography, had a preference for clustering close to the Atlantic seaboard until the eighteenth century; only in the Hudson and Connecticut River valleys, and in parts of the Chesapeake region, did settlement of the interior begin from the outset.50 It is a striking commentary on English predilections that, for the first twenty years of its existence, the inhabitants of Dedham in Massachusetts, with immense spaces around them, continued to parcel out tiny house lots, and disposed in all of less than 3,000 acres of lands' It seems ironical that New England colonists who saw themselves as charged with an `errand into the wilderness' should so resolutely have turned their backs upon it.
The determination of the Spaniards to range far and wide through American space, in spite of the vast distances and terrible hardships involved, can be attributed partly to their ambitions and expectations, and partly to long-established Iberian traditions. Unlike the English, they soon became aware that just over the horizon were to be found large polities and densely settled lands. There was early evidence, too, of the existence of deposits of gold and silver, for which the settlers of Jamestown were to hunt in vain. Hunger for riches and lordship and a restless ambition for fame lured conquistadores like Hernando de Soto, in his epic journey through the American South between 1539 and 1542, deep into the interior in ways that few Englishmen after Sir Walter Raleigh were willing to emulate. `Why', asked Captain John Smith, `should English men despair and not do so much as any? ... Seeing honour is our lives ambition, and our ambition after death, to have an honourable memory of our life . .. '52 But appeals to honour seem to have fallen on deaf ears among English settlers who saw all around them apparently vacant land awaiting occupation. In particular, New Englanders, according to William Wood writing in 1634, were `well contented and look not so much at abundance as at competency'.53 `Competency' as an ideal left little room for glory.
'Competency'- the willingness to settle for a life-style that brought sufficiency rather than riches - was an aspiration that was not confined to English, or some English, colonists. Letters exchanged between sixteenth-century Spanish settlers in the Indies and their relatives back home suggest that the relatively modest ambition of pasar mejor - becoming better off - was seen by Spaniards as a good enough reason for risking the hazards of a transatlantic crossing, just as it was by their English equivalents. `This is a good land for those who
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