Other nations in the seventeenth century were not slow to follow the same course; and two circumstances contributed to make that course easy. One was the great length of coast line on both the Atlantic and Pacific slopes over which a surveillance had to be exercised, making it difficult to catch the interlopers. The other was the venal connivance of the governors of the ports, who often tolerated and even encouraged the traffic on the plea that the colonists demanded it.[36] The subterfuges adopted by the interlopers were very simple. When a vessel wished to enter a Spanish port to trade, the captain, pretending that provisions had run low, or that the ship suffered from a leak or a broken mast, sent a polite note to the governor accompanied by a considerable gift. He generally obtained permission to enter, unload, and put the ship into a seaworthy condition. All the formalities were minutely observed. The unloaded goods were shut up in a storehouse, and the doors sealed. But there was always found another door unsealed, and by this they abstracted the goods during the night, and substituted coin or bars of gold and silver. When the vessel was repaired to the captain's satisfaction, it was reloaded and sailed away.
There was also, especially on the shores of the Caribbean Sea, a less elaborate commerce called "sloop-trade," for it was usually managed by sloops which hovered near some secluded spot on the coast, often at the mouth of a river, and informed the inhabitants of their presence in the neighbourhood by firing a shot from a cannon. Sometimes a large ship filled with merchandise was stationed in a bay close at hand, and by means of these smaller craft made its trade with the colonists. The latter, generally in disguise, came off in canoes by night. The interlopers, however, were always on guard against such dangerous visitors, and never admitted more than a few at a time; for when the Spaniards found themselves stronger than the crew, and a favourable opportunity presented itself, they rarely failed to attempt the vessel.
Thus the Spaniards of the seventeenth century, by persisting, both at home and in their colonies, in an economic policy which was fatally inconsistent with their powers and resources, saw their commerce gradually extinguished by the ships of the foreign interloper, and their tropical possessions fall a prey to marauding bands of half-piratical buccaneers. Although struggling under tremendous initial disabilities in Europe, they had attempted, upon the slender pleas of prior discovery and papal investiture, to reserve half the world to themselves. Without a marine, without maritime traditions, they sought to hold a colonial empire greater than any the world had yet seen, and comparable only with the empire of Great Britain three centuries later. By discouraging industry in Spain, and yet enforcing in the colonies an absolute commercial dependence on the home-country, by combining in their rule of distant America a solicitous paternalism with a restriction of initiative altogether disastrous in its consequences, the Spaniards succeeded in reducing their colonies to political impotence. And when, to make their grip the more firm, they evolved, as a method of outwitting the foreigner of his spoils, the system of great fleets and single ports of call, they found the very means they had contrived for their own safety to be the instrument of commercial disaster.
II.—THE FREEBOOTERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
It was the French chronologist, Scaliger, who in the sixteenth century asserted, "nulli melius piraticam exercent quam Angli"; and although he had no need to cross the Channel to find men proficient in this primitive calling, the remark applies to the England of his time with a force which we to-day scarcely realise. Certainly the inveterate hostility with which the Englishman learned to regard the Spaniard in the latter half of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries found its most remarkable expression in the exploits of the Elizabethan "sea-dogs" and of the buccaneers of a later period. The religious differences and political jealousies which grew out of the turmoil of the Reformation, and the moral anarchy incident to the dissolution of ancient religious institutions, were the motive causes for an outburst of piratical activity comparable only with the professional piracy of the Barbary States.
Even as far back as the thirteenth century, indeed, lawless sea-rovers, mostly Bretons and Flemings, had infested the English Channel and the seas about Great Britain. In the sixteenth this mode of livelihood became the refuge for numerous young Englishmen, Catholic and Protestant, who, fleeing from the persecutions of Edward VI. and of Mary, sought refuge in French ports or in the recesses of the Irish coast, and became the leaders of wild roving bands living chiefly upon plunder. Among them during these persecutions were found many men belonging to the best families in England, and although with the accession of Elizabeth most of the leaders returned to the service of the State, the pirate crews remained at their old trade. The contagion spread, especially in the western counties, and great numbers of fishermen who found their old employment profitless were recruited into this new calling.[37] At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign we find these Anglo-Irish pirates venturing farther south, plundering treasure galleons off the coast of Spain, and cutting vessels out of the very ports of the Spanish king. Such outrages of course provoked reprisals, and the pirates, if caught, were sent to the galleys, rotted in the dungeons of the Inquisition, or, least of all, were burnt in the plaza at Valladolid. These cruelties only added fuel to a deadly hatred which was kindling between the two nations, a hatred which it took one hundred and fifty years to quench.
The most venturesome of these sea-rovers, however, were soon attracted to a larger and more distant sphere of activity. Spain, as we have seen, was then endeavouring to reserve to herself in the western hemisphere an entire new world; and this at a time when the great northern maritime powers, France, England and Holland, were in the full tide of economic development, restless with new thoughts, hopes and ambitions, and keenly jealous of new commercial and industrial outlets. The famous Bull of Alexander VI. had provoked Francis I. to express a desire "to see the clause in Adam's will which entitled his brothers of Castile and Portugal to divide the New World between them," and very early the French corsairs had been encouraged to test the pretensions of the Spaniards by the time-honoured proofs of fire and steel. The English nation, however, in the first half of the sixteenth century, had not disputed with Spain her exclusive trade and dominion in those regions. The hardy mariners of the north were still indifferent to the wonders of a new continent awaiting their exploitation, and it was left to the Spaniards to unfold before the eyes of Europe the vast riches of America, and to found empires on the plateaus of Mexico and beyond the Andes. During the reign of Philip II. all this was changed. English privateers began to extend their operations westward, and to sap the very sources of Spanish wealth and power, while the wars which absorbed the attention of the Spaniards in Europe, from the revolt of the Low Countries to the Treaty of Westphalia, left the field clear for these ubiquitous sea-rovers. The maritime powers, although obliged by the theory of colonial exclusion to pretend to acquiesce in the Spaniard's claim to tropical America, secretly protected and supported their mariners who coursed those western seas. France and England were now jealous and fearful of Spanish predominance in Europe, and kept eyes obstinately fixed on the inexhaustible streams of gold and silver by means of which Spain was enabled to pay her armies and man her fleets. Queen Elizabeth, while she publicly excused or disavowed to Philip II. the outrages committed by Hawkins and Drake, blaming the turbulence of the times and promising to do her utmost to suppress the disorders, was secretly one of the principal shareholders in their enterprises.
The policy of the marauders was simple. The treasure which oiled the machinery of Spanish policy came from the Indies where it was accumulated; hence there were only two means of obtaining possession of it:—bold raids on the ill-protected American continent, and the capture of vessels en route.[38] The counter policy of the Spaniards was also two-fold:—on the one hand, the establishment of commerce by means of annual fleets protected by a powerful convoy; on the other, the removal of the centres of population from the coasts to the interior of the country far from danger of attack.[39] The Spaniards in America, however, proved to be no match for the bold, intrepid mariners who disputed their supremacy. The descendants of the Conquistadores had deteriorated sadly from the type of their forbears. Softened by tropical heats and a crude, uncultured luxury, they seem to have lost initiative and power of resistance. The disastrous commercial system of monopoly and centralization forced them to vegetate; while the policy of confining political office to native-born Spaniards denied any outlet to creole talent and energy. Moreover, the productive power and administrative abilities of the native-born Spaniards themselves were gradually being paralyzed and reduced to impotence under the crushing obligation of preserving and defending so unwieldy an empire and of managing such disproportionate riches, a task for which they had neither the aptitude nor the means.[40] Privateering in the West Indies may indeed be regarded as a challenge to the Spaniards of America, sunk in lethargy and living upon the credit of past glory and achievement, a challenge to prove their right to retain their dominion and extend their civilization and culture over half the world.[41]
There were other motives which lay behind these piratical aggressions of the French and English in Spanish America. The Spaniards, ever since the days of the Dominican monk and bishop, Las Casas, had been reprobated as the heartless oppressors and murderers of the native Indians. The original owners of the soil had been dispossessed and reduced to slavery. In the West Indies, the great islands, Cuba and Hispaniola, were rendered desolate for want of inhabitants. Two great empires, Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by treachery, their kings murdered, and their people made to suffer a living death in the mines of Potosi and New Spain. Such was the Protestant Englishman's conception, in the sixteenth century, of the results of Spanish colonial policy. To avenge the blood of these innocent victims, and teach the true religion to the survivors, was to glorify the Church militant and strike a blow at Antichrist. Spain, moreover, in the eyes of the Puritans, was the lieutenant of Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, who harried and burnt their Protestant brethren whenever she could lay hands upon them. That she was eager to repeat her ill-starred attempt of 1588 and introduce into the British Isles the accursed Inquisition was patent to everyone. Protestant England, therefore, filled with the enthusiasm and intolerance of a new faith, made no bones of despoiling the Spaniards, especially as the service of God was likely to be repaid with plunder.
A pamphlet written by Dalby Thomas in 1690 expresses with tolerable accuracy the attitude of the average Englishman toward Spain during the previous century. He says:—"We will make a short reflection on the unaccountable negligence, or rather stupidity, of this nation, during the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI. and Queen Mary, who could contentedly sit still and see the Spanish rifle, plunder and bring home undisturbed, all the wealth of that golden world; and to suffer them with forts and castles to shut up the doors and entrances unto all the rich provinces of America, having not the least title or pretence of right beyond any other nation; except that of being by accident the first discoverer of some parts of it; where the unprecedented cruelties, exorbitances and barbarities, their own histories witness, they practised on a poor, naked and innocent people, which inhabited the islands, as well as upon those truly civilized and mighty empires of Peru and Mexico, called to all mankind for succour and relief against their outrageous avarice and horrid massacres.... (We) slept on until the ambitious Spaniard, by that inexhaustible spring of treasure, had corrupted most of the courts and senates of Europe, and had set on fire, by civil broils and discords, all our neighbour nations, or had subdued them to his yoke; contriving too to make us wear his chains and bear a share in the triumph of universal monarchy, not only projected but near accomplished, when Queen Elizabeth came to the crown ... and to the divided interests of Philip II. and Queen Elizabeth, in personal more than National concerns, we do owe that start of hers in letting loose upon him, and encouraging those daring adventurers, Drake, Hawkins, Rawleigh, the Lord Clifford and many other braves that age produced, who, by their privateering and bold undertaking (like those the buccaneers practise) now opened the way to our discoveries, and succeeding settlements in America."[42]