Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by John Fiske

Spain and the Protestant revolt.

But if this lofty and ill-understood enthusiast failed in his search for the treasures of Cathay, it was at all events not long before Cortes and Pizarro succeeded in finding the treasures of Mexico and Peru, and the crusading scheme of Columbus descended as a kind of legacy to the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella, the magnanimous but sometimes misguided Charles, the sombre and terrible Philip. It remained a crusading scheme, but, no longer patterned after that of Godfrey and Tancred, it imitated the mad folly which had once extinguished in southern Gaul the most promising civilization of its age. Instead of a Spanish crusade which might have expelled the most worthless and dangerous of barbarians from eastern Europe, it became a Spanish crusade against everything in the shape of political and religious freedom, whether at home or abroad. The year in which Spanish eyes first beheld the carved serpents on Central American temples was the year in which Martin Luther nailed his defiance to the church door at Wittenberg. From the outworn crust of mediævalism the modern spirit of individual freedom and individual responsibility was emerging, and for ninety years all Europe was rent with the convulsions that ensued. In the doubtful struggle Spain engaged herself further and further, until by 1570 she had begun to sacrifice to it all her energies. Whence did Philip II. get the sinews of war with which he supported Alva and Farnese, and built the Armada called Invincible? Largely from America, partly also from the East Indies, since Portugal and her colonies were seized by Philip in 1580. Thus were the first-fruits of the heroic age of discovery, both to east and to west of Borgia's meridian, devoted to the service of the church with a vengeance, as one might say, a lurid vengeance withal and ruthless. By the year 1609, when Spain sullenly retired, baffled and browbeaten, from the Dutch Netherlands, she had taken from America more gold and silver than would to-day be represented by five thousand million dollars, and most of this huge treasure she had employed in maintaining the gibbet for political reformers and the stake for heretics. In view of this grewsome fact, Mr. Charles Francis Adams has lately asked the question whether the discovery of America was not, after all, for at least a century, fraught with more evil than benefit to mankind. One certainly cannot help wondering what might have been the immediate result had such an immense revenue been at the disposal of William and Elizabeth rather than Philip.

Nations are made wealthy, not by inflation but by production.

Such questions are after all not so simple as they may seem. It is not altogether clear that such a reversal of the conditions from the start would have been of unmixed benefit to the English and Dutch. After the five thousand millions had been scattered to the winds, altering the purchasing power of money in all directions, it was Spain that was impoverished while her adversaries were growing rich and strong. A century of such unproductive expenditure went far toward completing the industrial ruin of Spain, already begun in the last Moorish wars, and afterward consummated by the expulsion of the Moriscos. The Spanish discovery of America abundantly illustrates the truths that if gold were to become as plentiful as iron it would be worth much less than iron, and that it is not inflation but production that makes a nation wealthy. In so far as the discovery of America turned men's minds from steady industry to gold-hunting, it was a dangerous source of weakness to Spain; and it was probably just as well for England that the work of Cortes and Pizarro was not done for her.

Deepest significance of the discovery of America.

But the great historic fact, most conspicuous among the consequences of the discovery of America, is the fact that colonial empire, for England and for Holland, grew directly out of the long war in which Spain used American and East Indian treasure with which to subdue the English and Dutch peoples and to suppress the principles of civil and religious liberty which they represented. The Dutch tore away from Spain the best part of her East Indian empire, and the glorious Elizabethan sea kings, who began the work of crippling Philip II. in America, led the way directly to the English colonization of Virginia. Thus we are introduced to the most important aspect of the discovery of America. It opened up a fresh soil, enormous in extent and capacity, for the possession of which the lower and higher types of European civilization and social polity were to struggle. In this new arena the maritime peoples of western Europe fought for supremacy; and the conquest of so vast a field has given to the ideas of the victorious people, and to their type of social polity, an unprecedented opportunity for growth and development. Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more, some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. This is the deepest significance of the discovery of America; and a due appreciation of it gives to our history from its earliest stages an epic grandeur, as the successive situations unfold themselves and events with unmistakable emphasis record their moral. In the conflict of Titans that absorbed the energies of the sixteenth century, the question whether it should be the world of Calderon or the world of Shakespeare that was to gain indefinite power of future expansion was a question of incalculable importance to mankind.

The beginnings of the history of English-speaking America are thus to be sought in the history of the antagonism between Spain and England that grew out of the circumstances of the Protestant Reformation. It was as the storehouse of the enemy's treasure and the chief source of his supplies that America first excited real interest among the English people.

Voyages of the Cabots.

English ships had indeed crossed the Atlantic many years before this warfare broke out. The example set by Columbus had been promptly followed by John Cabot and his young son Sebastian, in the two memorable voyages of 1497 and 1498, but the interest aroused by those voyages was very short-lived. In later days it suited the convenience of England to cite them in support of her claim to priority in the discovery of the continent of North America; but many years elapsed before the existence of any such continent was distinctly known and before England cared to put forth any such claim. All that contemporaries could see was that the Cabots had sailed westward in search of the boundless treasures of Cathay, and had come home empty-handed without finding any of the cities described by Marco Polo or meeting any civilized men. So little work was found for Sebastian Cabot that he passed into the service of Spain, and turned his attention to voyages in the South Atlantic. Such scanty record was kept of the voyages of 1497 and 1498 that we cannot surely tell what land the Cabots first saw; whether it was the bleak coast of northern Labrador or some point as far south as Cape Breton is still a matter of dispute. The case was almost the same as with the voyage of Pinzon and Vespucius, whose ships were off Cape Honduras within a day or two after Cabot's northern landfall, and who, after a sojourn at Tampico, passed between Cuba and Florida at the end of April, 1498. In the one case, as in the other, the expeditions sank into obscurity because they found no gold.

The Newfoundland fisheries.