ESTABLISHMENT OF COLONIAL EMPIRES
[Sidenote: Portugal]
When Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in 1499 with a cargo worth sixty times the cost of his expedition, the Portuguese knew that the wealth of the Indies was theirs. Cabral in 1500, and Albuquerque in 1503, followed the route of Da Gama, and thereafter Portuguese fleets rounded the Cape year by year to gain control of Goa (India), Ormuz, Diu (India), Ceylon, Malacca, and the Spice Islands, and to bring back from these places and from Sumatra, Java, Celebes, and Nanking (China) rich cargoes of "spicery." After the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517 the bulk of commerce was carried on by way of the Cape of Good Hope, for it was cheaper to transport goods by sea than to pay taxes to the Turks in addition to caravan cartage. Lisbon rapidly gained prominence as a market for Eastern wares.
The Portuguese triumph was short-lived. Dominion over half the world— for Portugal claimed all Africa, southern Asia, and Brazil as hers by right of discovery—had been acquired by the wise policy of the Portuguese royal house, but Portugal had neither products of her own to ship to Asia, nor the might to defend her exclusive right to the carrying trade with the Indies. The annexation of Portugal to Spain (1580) by Philip II precipitated disaster. The port of Lisbon was closed to the French, English, and Dutch, with whom Philip was at war, and much of the colonial empire of Portugal was conquered speedily by the Dutch.
[Sidenote: Spain]
On the first voyage of Columbus Spain based her claim to share the world with Portugal. In order that there might be perfect harmony between the rival explorers of the unknown seas, Pope Alexander VI issued on 4 May, 1493, the famous bull [Footnote: A bull was a solemn letter or edict issued by the pope.] attempting to divide the uncivilized parts of the world between Spain and Portugal by the "papal line of demarcation," drawn from pole to pole, 100 leagues west of the Azores. A year later the line was shifted to about 360 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Portugal had the eastern half of modern Brazil, Africa, and all other heathen lands in that hemisphere; the rest comprised the share of Spain.
For a time the Spanish adventurers were disappointed tremendously to find neither spices nor silks and but little gold in the "Indies," and Columbus was derisively dubbed the "Admiral of the Mosquitos." In spite of failures the search for wealth was prosecuted with vigor. During the next half century Haiti, called Hispaniola ("Spanish Isle"), served as a starting point for the occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba (1508), and other islands. An aged adventurer, Ponce de Leon, in search of a fountain of youth, explored the coast of Florida in 1513, and subsequent expeditions pushed on to the Mississippi, across the plain of Texas, and even to California.
Montezuma, ruler of the ancient Aztec [Footnote: The Aztec Indians of Mexico, like various other tribes in Central America and in Peru, had reached in many respects a high degree of civilization before the arrival of Europeans.] confederacy of Mexico, was overthrown in 1519 by the reckless Hernando Cortez with a small band of soldiers. Here at last the Spaniards found treasures of gold and silver, and more abundant yet were the stores of precious metal found by Pizarro in Peru (1531). Those were the days when a few score of brave men could capture kingdoms and carry away untold wealth.
In the next chapter we shall see how the Spanish monarchy, backed by the power of American riches, dazzled the eyes of Europe in the sixteenth century. Not content to see his standard waving over almost half of Europe, and all America (except Brazil), Philip II of Spain by conquering Portugal in 1580 added to his possessions the Portuguese empire in the Orient and in Brazil. The gold mines of America, the spices of Asia, and the busiest market of Europe—Antwerp—all paid tribute to his Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain.
By an unwise administration of this vast empire, Spain, in the course of time, killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The native Indians, enslaved and lashed to their work in Peruvian and Mexican silver mines, rapidly lost even their primitive civilization and died in alarming numbers. This in itself would not have weakened the monarchy greatly, but it appeared more serious when we remember that the high-handed and harassing regulations imposed by short-sighted or selfish officials had checked the growth of a healthy agricultural and industrial population in the colonies, and that the bulk of the silver was going to support the pride of grandees and to swell the fortunes of German speculators, rather than to fill the royal coffers. The taxes levied on trade with the colonies were so exorbitant that the commerce with America fell largely into the hands of English and Dutch smugglers. Under wise government the monopoly of the African trade-route might have proved extremely valuable, but Philip II, absorbed in other matters, allowed this, too, to slip from his fingers.
While the Spanish monarchy was thus reaping little benefit from its world-wide colonial possessions, it was neglecting to encourage prosperity at home. Trade and manufacture had expanded enormously in the sixteenth century in the hands of the Jews and Moors. Woolen manufactures supported nearly a third of the population. The silk manufacture had become important. It is recorded that salt-works of the region about Santa Maria often sent out fifty shiploads at a time.
These signs of growth soon gave way to signs of decay and depopulation. Chief among the causes of ruin were the taxes, increased enormously during the sixteenth century. Property taxes, said to have increased 30 per cent, ruined farmers, and the "alcabala," or tax on commodities bought and sold, was increased until merchants went out of business, and many an industrial establishment closed its doors rather than pay the taxes. Industry and commerce, already diseased, were almost completely killed by the expulsion of the Jews (1492) and of the Moors (1609), who had been respectively the bankers and the manufacturers of Spain. Spanish gold now went to the English and Dutch smugglers who supplied the peninsula with manufactures, and German bankers became the financiers of the realm.
The crowning misfortune was the revolt of the Netherlands, the richest provinces of the whole empire. Some of the wealthiest cities of Europe were situated in the Netherlands. Bruges had once been a great city, and in 1566 was still able to buy nearly $2,000,000 worth of wool to feed its looms; but as a commercial and financial center, the Flemish city of Antwerp had taken first place. In 1566 it was said that 300 ships and as many wagons arrived daily with rich cargoes to be bought and sold by the thousand commercial houses of Antwerp. Antwerp was the heart through which the money of Europe flowed. Through the bankers of Antwerp a French king might borrow money of a Turkish pasha. Yet Antwerp was only the greatest among the many cities of the Netherlands.
Charles V, king of Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century, had found in the Netherlands his richest source of income, and had wisely done all in his power to preserve their prosperity. As we shall see in Chapter III, the governors appointed by King Philip II in the second half of the sixteenth century lost the love of the people by the harsh measures against the Protestants, and ruined commerce and industry by imposing taxes of 5 and 10 per cent on every sale of land or goods. In 1566 the Netherlands rose in revolt, and after many bloody battles, the northern or Dutch provinces succeeded in breaking away from Spanish rule.
Spain had not only lost the little Dutch provinces; Flanders was ruined: its fields lay waste, its weavers had emigrated to England, its commerce to Amsterdam. Commercial supremacy never returned to Antwerp after the "Spanish Fury" of 1576. Moreover, during the war Dutch sailors had captured most of the former possessions of Portugal, and English sea-power, beginning in mere piratical attacks on Spanish treasure-fleets, had become firmly established. The finest part of North America was claimed by the English and French. Of her world empire, Spain retained only Central and South America (except Brazil), Mexico, California, Florida, most of the West Indies, and in the East the Philippine Islands and part of Borneo.
[Sidenote: Dutch Sea Power]
The Dutch, driven to sea by the limited resources of their narrow strip of coastland, had begun their maritime career as fishermen "exchanging tons of herring for tons of gold." In the sixteenth century they had built up a considerable carrying trade, bringing cloth, tar, timber, and grain to Spain and France, and distributing to the Baltic countries the wines and liquors and other products of southwestern Europe, in addition to wares from the Portuguese East Indies.
The Dutch traders had purchased their Eastern wares largely from Portuguese merchants in the port of Lisbon. Two circumstances—the union of Spain with Portugal in 1580 and the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain—combined to give the Dutch their great opportunity. In 1594 the port of Lisbon was closed to Dutch merchants. The following year the Dutch made their first voyage to India, and, long jealous of the Portuguese colonial possessions, they began systematically to make the trade with the Spice Islands their own. By 1602, 65 Dutch ships had been to India. In the thirteen years—1602 to 1615—they captured 545 Portuguese and Spanish ships, seized ports on the coasts of Africa and India, and established themselves in the Spice Islands. In addition to most of the old Portuguese empire,—ports in Africa and India, Malacca, Oceanica, and Brazil, [Footnote: Brazil was more or less under Dutch control from 1624 until 1654, when, through an uprising of Portuguese colonists, the country was fully recovered by Portugal. Holland recognized the Portuguese ownership of Brazil by treaty of 1662, and thenceforth the Dutch retained in South America only a portion of Guiana (Surinam).]—the Dutch had acquired a foothold in North America by the discoveries of Henry Hudson in 1609 and by settlement in 1621. Their colonists along the Hudson River called the new territory New Netherland and the town on Manhattan island New Amsterdam, but when Charles II of England seized the land in 1664, he renamed it New York.
Thus the Dutch had succeeded to the colonial empire of the Portuguese. With their increased power they were able entirely to usurp the Baltic trade from the hands of the Hanseatic (German) merchants, who had incurred heavy losses by the injury to their interests in Antwerp during the sixteenth century. Throughout the seventeenth century the Dutch almost monopolized the carrying-trade from Asia and between southwestern Europe and the Baltic. The prosperity of the Dutch was the envy of all Europe.
[Sidenote: Beginnings of English and French Explorations]
It took the whole sixteenth century for the English and French to get thoroughly into the colonial contest. During that period the activities of the English were confined to exploration and piracy, with the exception of the ill-starred attempts of Gilbert and Raleigh to colonize Newfoundland and North Carolina. The voyages of the Anglo- Italian John Cabot in 1497-1498 were later to be the basis of British claims to North America. The search for a northwest passage drove Frobisher (1576-1578), Davis (1585-1587), Hudson (1610-1611), and Baffin (1616) to explore the northern extremity of North America, to leave the record of their exploits in names of bays, islands, and straits, and to establish England's claim to northern Canada; while the search for a northeast passage enticed Willoughby and Chancellor (1553) around Lapland, and Jenkinson (1557-1558) to the icebound port of Archangel in northern Russia. Elizabethan England had neither silver mines nor spice islands, but the deficiency was never felt while British privateers sailed the seas. Hawkins, the great slaver, Drake, the second circumnavigator of the globe, Davis, and Cavendish were but four of the bold captains who towed home many a stately Spanish galleon laden with silver plate and with gold. As for spices, the English East India Company, chartered in 1600, was soon to build up an empire in the East in competition with the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the French, but that story belongs to a later chapter.
France was less active. The rivalry of Francis I [Footnote: See below, pp. 77 ff.] with Charles I of Spain had extended even to the New World. Verrazano (1524) sailed the coast from Carolina to Labrador, and Cartier (1534-1535) pushed up the Saint Lawrence to Montreal, looking for a northwest passage, and demonstrating that France had no respect for the Spanish claim to all America. After 1535, however, nothing of permanence was done until the end of the century, and the founding of French colonies in India and along the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi rivers belongs rather to the history of the seventeenth century.
[Sidenote: Motives for Colonization]
One of the most amazing spectacles in history is the expansion of Europe since the sixteenth century. Not resting content with discovering the rest of the world, the European nations with sublime confidence pressed on to divide the new continents among them, to conquer, Christianize, and civilize the natives, and to send out millions of new emigrants to establish beyond the seas a New England, a New France, a New Spain, and a New Netherland. The Spaniards in Spain to-day are far outnumbered by the Spanish-speaking people in Argentina, Chili, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Central America, and the Philippine Islands.
[Sidenote: Religion]
It was not merely greed for gold and thirst for glory which inspired the colonizing movement. To the merchant's eager search for precious metals and costly spices, and to the adventurer's fierce delight in braving unknown dangers where white man never had ventured, the Portuguese and Spanish explorers added the inspiration of an ennobling missionary ideal. In the conquest of the New World priests and chapels were as important as soldiers and fortresses; and its settlements were named in honor of Saint Francis (San Francisco), Saint Augustine (St. Augustine), the Holy Saviour (San Salvador), the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz), or the Holy Faith (Santa Fé). Fearless priests penetrated the interior of America, preaching and baptizing as they went. Unfortunately some of the Spanish adventurers who came to make fortunes in the mines of America, and a great number of the non-Spanish foreigners who owned mines in the Spanish colonies, set gain before religion, and imposed crushing burdens on the natives who toiled as slaves in their mines. Cruelty and forced labor decimated the natives, but in the course of time this abuse was remedied, thanks largely to the Spanish bishop, Bartolomé de las Casas, and instead of forming a miserable remnant of an almost extinct race, as they do in the United States, the Indians freely intermarried with the Spaniards, whom they always outnumbered. As a result, Latin America is peopled by nations which are predominantly Indian in blood, [Footnote: Except in the southern part of South America.] Spanish or Portuguese [Footnote: In Brazil.] in language, and Roman Catholic in religion.
The same religious zeal which had actuated Spanish missionary-explorers was manifested at a later date by the French Jesuit Fathers who penetrated North America in order to preach the Christian faith to the Indians. Quite different were the religious motives which in the seventeenth century inspired Protestant colonists in the New World. They came not as evangelists, but as religious outcasts fleeing from persecution, or as restless souls worsted at politics or unable to gain a living at home. This meant the dispossession and ultimate extinction rather than the conversion of the Indians.
[Sidenote: Decline of the Hanseatic League]
The stirring story of the colonial struggles which occupied the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will be taken up in another chapter; at this point, therefore, we turn from the expanding nations on the Atlantic seaboard to note the mournful plight of the older commercial powers—the German and Italian city-states. As for the former, the Hanseatic League, despoiled of its Baltic commerce by enterprising Dutch and English merchants, its cities restless and rebellious, gradually broke up. In 1601 an Englishman metaphorically observed: "Most of their [the league's] teeth have fallen out, the rest sit but loosely in their head,"—and in fact all were soon lost except Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg.
[Sidenote: Decay of Venice]
Less rapid, but no less striking, was the decay of Venice and the other Italian cities. The first cargoes brought by the Portuguese from India caused the price of pepper and spices to fall to a degree which spelled ruin for the Venetians. The Turks continued to harry Italian traders in the Levant, and the Turkish sea-power grew to menacing proportions, until in 1571 Venice had to appeal to Spain for help. To the terror of the Turk was added the torment of the Barbary pirates, who from the northern coast of Africa frequently descended upon Italian seaports. The commerce of Venice was ruined. The brilliance of Venice in art and literature lasted through another century (the seventeenth), supported on the ruins of Venetian opulence; but the splendor of Venice was extinguished finally in the turbulent sea of political intrigue into which the rest of Italy had already sunk.