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The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 3 · pp. 53–95
This chapter explains how the Atlantic Ocean became a connecting highway between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It starts with the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, whose sailors, soldiers, and merchants built the first Atlantic empires. It then follows the Columbian Exchange, the conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, the Atlantic slave trade, and Spain's colonial systems and expeditions into the north. Throughout, it shows how those empires were organized by hierarchies of class, race, and status, and how Indigenous and African peoples shaped, resisted, and survived them.
The Columbian Exchange was the movement of plants, animals, microbes, and people between the Old World and the Americas after 1492. Once ships crossed the Atlantic regularly, crops, livestock, and diseases traveled with them. So did languages and religions, carried by the people who moved. One historian called the result "a new world for all." But the new cultures that emerged were made by people surviving pain, loss, and upheaval. (p. 53)
Around the year 1400, almost nobody would have bet on Spain and Portugal becoming world powers. The Iberian Peninsula was a struggling corner of Europe. Yet within about two centuries these kingdoms ran overseas empires. Why Europe expanded, and how capitalism developed, are among the hardest questions historians try to answer. What is clear is that the Iberians managed their empires through social hierarchies. (p. 53)
Global connection did not begin in 1492. Between 800 and 1400 CE, Polynesians sailed huge canoes across the Pacific and settled Hawai'i. They carried family members, seedlings, animals, and tools. Meanwhile, Arab traders had been active around the Indian Ocean since the 1000s. They spread sailing technology, Islam, and writing. (p. 53)
China also sent ships far from home. From 1405 to 1433, the Ming government launched seven expeditions under the admiral Zheng He. The fleets carried tens of thousands of sailors and soldiers on ships larger than any in the Mediterranean. Their goals were to open trade and show off Ming power. Some voyages reached East Africa, where the Swahili city-states traded with the Islamic world. After 1433, China's leaders turned inward to focus on a land empire. This left the seas open to other powers. (pp. 53–54)
The Norse also crossed the Atlantic. They settled Iceland and southern Greenland, where several thousand people raised livestock, fished, and traded with Norway. Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson reached Newfoundland. But the Vinland colony failed in about ten years. It was isolated and short of resources, and it faced harsh weather, food shortages, and resistance from the Inuit. Few outside Scandinavia heard of these voyages. For centuries afterward, only Basque, English, and Norman fishers visited the north Atlantic now and then. (pp. 54–55)
Most European merchants looked east, toward Asia. Traders from Genoa and Venice ran outposts in Constantinople, which gave them access to the Black Sea and the Silk Road. The Crusades, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, failed to win the Holy Land. But they increased European interest in Asian trade. Marco Polo, a Venetian, spent twenty-five years traveling in central Asia and China. His account gave Europeans their first real picture of China. In the 1300s, the Mongol-enforced peace known as the Pax Mongolica made long-distance trade safe. Porcelain, spices, silks, and tea reached European markets, and merchant wealth grew. Ideas traveled along with goods. Europeans rediscovered Greek, Roman, and Muslim learning in the Renaissance, or "rebirth," and the first universities and printed books followed. (p. 55)
Two shocks ended this commercial connection. The Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague, struck first. Then the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453. Merchants who still wanted Asian goods, led by the Genoese, began looking for other routes. This search pushed them toward the Atlantic. (p. 55)
European rulers were competing for resources and markets. The strongest warlords took over smaller territories and called themselves dukes, kings, or even emperors, borrowing the prestige of ancient Rome. They struck deals with the church and sold offices to nobles to gather power in their own hands. (p. 55)
Constant war also tied kings to merchants. Armies cost money. Merchants had cash on hand, and unlike the church and nobility, they paid most taxes. Over the early modern period (1400–1800), monarchs who controlled the army and taxation built nation-states. These states had the resources to expand overseas. (pp. 55–56)
In 1469, Fernando of Aragon married Isabel of Castile, joining two of the strongest Iberian kingdoms. Soon afterward, Granada fell. It was Europe's last independent Muslim city-state. Its surrender ended eight centuries of on-and-off fighting, later remembered as the Reconquista ("reconquest"). In reality, that long period included trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. With the war over, the monarchs could look overseas. (p. 56)
After victory, however, tolerance ended. Spain ordered the remaining Muslims (the Moors) and Sephardic Jews to convert to Christianity or leave. Starting in 1496, Portugal tried the same with its Jewish population. Converts were called New Christians. The Catholic Church created the Inquisition to check whether their faith was sincere. This mix of grudging tolerance and violent repression shaped how Iberians later treated peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (p. 56)
With their military and merchants under control, Iberian rulers wanted to bypass the Islamic world and reach African and Asian markets directly. Portugal acted first and most aggressively. Prince Henry, known as "the Navigator," wanted the African gold and spices that the Moors of Morocco controlled. In 1415, he sponsored an attack on the Moroccan port of Ceuta. This gave Portugal a foothold in North Africa and, it was hoped, a link to the caravans that carried gold across the Sahara. Portugal then seized more ports and built forts. These served as bases for raids to capture slaves and livestock. (p. 57)
Portugal's rulers spent heavily to win access to African gold and spices. Part of that effort went into better technology. Two inventions mattered most. The astrolabe was an instrument for finding latitude, meaning how far north or south a ship was. Sailors used it along with the magnetic compass, an idea that came from China. Together the two tools made steering across open water far more exact. (p. 57)
The caravel was the second breakthrough. This ship used triangular lateen sails, first developed by Arab sailors, so it could turn and change course easily. It also sat deep in the water, which let it carry large cargoes. That mix made it strong enough for the rough Atlantic. (p. 57)
Tools alone were not enough. Sailors also needed to understand the ocean's wind patterns and currents. Many routes were one-way trips unless a crew knew how to get home. Mariners from Italy and Iberia learned that a ship bound for West Africa (which Europeans called Guinea) had to sail west, far out into the open sea, before it could catch a current that carried it to the coast. On the other side of the ocean, the Gulf Stream could carry a ship home from North America. (p. 57)
This knowledge was bought with failures. In 1291, the Vivaldi brothers of Venice sailed into the Atlantic hoping to reach India. They never returned. Their fate shows how dangerous it was to sail without knowing the winds. (p. 57)
The Azores, Madeiras, Canaries, and Cape Verde Islands were the first overseas colonies of Spain and Portugal. They had two roles. They were bases from which ships could reach sub-Saharan Africa and later cross the Atlantic. They were also models. Methods tried there, such as invasion, enslavement, and plantation farming, were repeated in the Americas. (p. 57)
The Canaries show this well. Europeans had forgotten them for centuries, though Roman geographers called them the Fortunate Isles. In the early 1400s, Norman knights backed by the kings of Castile and Portugal invaded. They used divide-and-rule tactics, which means they set local groups against each other to gain a foothold. (p. 57)
The islands' native people, the Guanches, were distantly related to the Berbers. They had been cut off from Europe and Africa for thousands of years. Invaders hunted them as slaves, and new diseases ravaged them. Survivors were absorbed into Iberian society. This population disaster previewed what later happened to many Native American peoples. (p. 58)
The Guanches were not simply helpless, though. Using mostly stone-age weapons, a Guanche force defeated a Spanish army on Tenerife in 1494 and inflicted nearly a thousand casualties. Even so, the conquest was finished in 1497. The victory showed that European power had limits, but not that it could be stopped for long. (p. 58)
The conquered islands were also the first place in the Atlantic world where enslaved workers grew sugar on large plantations. The story starts in the Mediterranean. In the 1300s and 1400s, trading powers such as Genoa, Venice, Catalonia, and Aragon took part in the sugar and slave trade of the eastern Mediterranean. In the Muslim Mediterranean, plantations used mainly enslaved Africans and enslaved Slavic-speaking Eastern Europeans. Italian merchants served as go-betweens, and the Portuguese learned sugar growing from them. (p. 58)
Sugar is hard to grow, but the Portuguese found fertile, defensible land on the Atlantic islands. They planted it in the rich volcanic soil of the Madeiras and São Tomé, where it brought huge profits. From São Tomé, the methods and the harsh labor system of the plantation were carried to Brazil and the Caribbean. So the path ran from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands and then to the Americas. (pp. 58–59)
For a long time, Europeans knew Africa mostly through Muslim or Italian go-betweens, such as Ibn Battuta, Alvise Cadamosto, and Leo Africanus. The Catalan Atlas, made around 1375, shows how Europeans imagined West Africa: a land with rich rulers and endless gold. It pictures Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, wearing a gilded crown and holding a scepter and a golden orb. (p. 59)
The picture rests on a real event. On his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca, Musa spent so freely in Egypt that the price of gold reportedly fell for several years. Europeans also had a second reason to look south. Rumors said a lost crusader had founded a Christian kingdom near present-day Ethiopia. (p. 59)
Africa was as varied as the Americas. Its people lived in stateless bands, small towns, and large empires. They followed Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and thousands of animistic faiths. As elsewhere, most people thought of themselves in local terms, tied to extended family. Sub-Saharan societies from Mali to Tanzania were not isolated, since Islamic trade networks linked them to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. (p. 59)
Islam came to West Africa in stages. In the 700s, Arab armies conquered North Africa from Egypt to Morocco. From there, merchants and religious teachers carried the faith south across the Sahara to the Sahel, an Arabic word meaning "shore." It is the belt where desert meets savanna. (p. 59)
The Sahara had once been a barrier, but camels and oases made it a highway. A caravan could cross in about two months. On the Niger River, the cities of Gao and Timbuktu grew wealthy trading gold, slaves, and salt. From the 1100s to the 1500s, the western Sahel was the heart of empires such as Mali and Songhay. By the 1300s, Timbuktu had several mosques and was known for Islamic learning as well as trade. (pp. 59–61)
Why did kings convert? Some early converts hoped Islam could help when traditional rituals failed to end droughts or other crises. Islam also came with Arabic writing and a law code meant for everyone, tools that helped rulers tax, trade, and collect tribute. Conversion also told the Muslim Mediterranean that a ruler wanted to do business, as Mansa Musa's example shows. Because the appeal was strongest for rulers and merchants, Islam in sub-Saharan Africa stayed mostly an elite and urban religion until the 1800s. (pp. 60–61)
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to build lasting ties with African societies. In the 1400s they set up small coastal bases called feitorias ("factories"). Each usually held only a few dozen men. They traded in gold, enslaved people, and spices, and the profits paid for the next round of exploration down the coast (p. 61).
This slow, stop-and-start effort led to bigger voyages. In 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, reached East Africa and India, and came home two years later. In 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral was sent to follow him, but winds pushed his ships far west and he landed in Brazil. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had drawn an imaginary line dividing the Atlantic between Spain and Portugal. Brazil fell on Portugal's side, so Portugal could claim it (p. 61).
At first Brazil mattered little. Portuguese and French ships stopped there to resupply and to trade with Native peoples for dyewood. From the 1530s the Portuguese crown backed real colonization and drove out the French. Settlers built small permanent coastal towns, tried making sugar, and raided Indigenous peoples for slaves. Brazil changed when São Tomé's merchants, hit by slave uprisings and droughts, moved there. They brought money, enslaved Africans, and sugar-making skills, which turned Brazil into a sugar-and-slavery colony. Events in Kongo (modern Angola) kept shaping Brazil's supply of labor (p. 61).
Kongo and Portugal began as partners. King Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptized in 1491 and took the name João I, honoring King João II of Portugal. Embassies went to Lisbon, his successor Afonso I kept the friendship going, and one Kongolese prince was trained in Rome and made a bishop (p. 61). Yet Christianity stayed mostly an elite practice among the royal family, nobles, and courtiers. Most people in central Africa kept their animist religions. Kongolese Catholicism also absorbed local customs such as honoring ancestors (p. 62).
Marriage tied the two sides together too. The Portuguese who stayed on the coast were few and nearly all men, so merchants married elite African women. Their families formed a bicultural Luso-African merchant community centered at São Tomé, Cape Verde, and Luanda. Gold, ivory, and malagueta pepper were valued goods, but trade in enslaved people became the most profitable (p. 62).
The Atlantic slave trade lasted from the fifteenth century to the late nineteenth. Over 12 million Africans, from hundreds of languages and cultures, were seized and shipped to the Americas, mostly to Brazil and the Caribbean (p. 62). North American readers often miss this. Between 1500 and 1800, about three Africans reached the Americas for every European. Many more died in the wars and raids that slaving caused. The trade also changed over time. Some African states refused to join it, and Benin took part for only a few decades. Overall, it treated human beings as goods, built racism into law and custom, created huge fortunes, and reshaped the whole Atlantic World (pp. 62–63).
Historians now look to labor demand to explain how it began. After the Guanche people of the Canaries were destroyed or absorbed, Portuguese planters needed workers for sugar, a crop that takes enormous labor. Portuguese sailors had been kidnapping people on the Senegambian coast since the 1440s and selling them in Seville and Lisbon. Because European peasants did the farm work, these captives mostly became household servants for wealthy families. When sugar plantations spread across the Atlantic islands, enslaved Africans became their main workforce (p. 63).
Africans controlled much of the trade even though Africans were also its victims. Early on, African leaders sold war captives, who by custom lost their freedom, in exchange for guns, iron, and manufactured goods. Slavery was then a byproduct of war. As profits rose, though, capturing people became the main reason for fighting. The trade also reached debtors and people accused of witchcraft. A Portuguese Jesuit in Senegambia observed that witches would be "uncovered daily" as long as they were sold. Sixteenth-century Africans and Europeans did not think in terms of today's racial or national identities (pp. 63–64).
Misconception: Some think Europeans enslaved Africans mainly to rescue them, or that racism came first and drove the trade. In fact, profit drove Atlantic slavery. Europeans claimed they were saving people from paganism by converting them. That claim was hypocritical, and it was later covered over by denying Black humanity, which deepened racism. Justifications were made up as needed to pursue wealth (p. 64).
In the 1560s, nomadic warriors called the Jagas invaded Kongo. Portuguese troops helped King Álvaro I beat them, but the price was more Portuguese interference. Kongo's kings were wary of the slave trade, yet São Tomé's merchants demanded steady supplies of war captives (p. 64). In 1575 Paulo Dias de Novais began conquering inland from Luanda, marching up the Kwanza River, taking captives, making alliances, and building forts. After he died in 1589, the crown took over by sending royal governors and more soldiers. These governors served short three-year terms in a deadly disease environment, wanted quick riches, and sided with slavers from Brazil and São Tomé (pp. 64–65).
Portuguese forces from Brazil retook Angola from the Dutch, who held much of Portugal's empire between the 1620s and 1640s. This tightened Angola's ties to Brazil, often beyond Lisbon's control. In 1665, at the Battle of Mwbila, Portugal and its Jaga allies killed Kongo's King Antonio I. A century of civil wars followed in Angola, Kongo, and nearby states, and they produced hundreds of thousands of captives for Brazil's sugar plantations (p. 65).
Christopher Columbus was a Genoese mariner trained under Portuguese navigators. He married into a Madeira planter's family and had worked in West Africa's gold and slave trade. He died in 1506 still believing the Caribbean islands lay near Japan. Calling him the hero of an "Age of Discovery" hides how gradual and uncertain European expansion really was (p. 65).
Misconception: Columbus did not prove the earth was round. Educated Europeans and Asians already knew it was. The real debate was its size. Columbus underestimated the globe by about two-thirds and thought a westward voyage to Asia was possible. Ships would really have run out of food and water, but an unknown continent lay in the way and saved him (pp. 65–66).
The Taínos spoke an Arawakan language and lived on Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. They farmed corn, yams, and cassava and traded in busy towns. Their rivals, the Kalinagos (Caribs), used canoes and fighting skill to control a trading and raiding zone from northern South America to the Lesser Antilles (p. 66).
Columbus described the Taínos as gentle innocents who could be conquered with few men. The Caribs, whose name gave us "cannibal," he painted as fierce savages. This contrast helped justify conquering the Taínos and enslaving the Caribs (pp. 66–67).
Spain's colonization then followed a clear path. Columbus saw gold ornaments on Taíno elites and left men on Hispaniola to find the source. He returned in 1493 with seventeen ships and over a thousand men. When gold ran short and Taíno leaders refused tribute, the Spaniards enslaved people to work gold fields and later sugar plantations. Columbus's 1496 cargo included over three hundred branded Taínos. Disease and violence destroyed the Taínos within a few decades (p. 67).
The next generation of conquistadors, including Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, launched their expeditions from these Caribbean bases. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who fought with Cortés, said they came to serve God and the king and to get rich. Religious justification and greed went together (p. 67).
The Mexicas, whom we call the Aztecs, were migrants from the north. They moved into the Valley of Mexico and turned a series of alliances into an empire. Their capital, Tenochtitlán, was founded in 1325 on natural and human-made islands in Lake Texcoco. Farmers fed the city with chinampas, artificial islands built by dredging rich sediment from the lake bottom and piling it up over time. A huge pyramid temple stood at the center, with smaller temples and palaces around it, so the city was sacred as well as a capital (p. 68).
The Aztecs did not rule every subject people directly. They allied with two other city-states and governed through a loose, decentralized network. Subject peoples paid regular tribute and supplied soldiers. Tribute covered everyday goods like corn and beans and luxuries like jade, cacao, and gold. This system made enemies. Neighbors such as the Tarascans and the Maya city-states resented Aztec power, and those rivalries mattered a great deal once the Spanish arrived (p. 68).
Hernán Cortés was a notary who had grown rich in the conquest of Cuba. In 1519 he defied Cuba's governor and landed about 600 men on the Mexican coast, founding Veracruz. The book stresses that his main tools were diplomacy, treachery, and alliance politics, not guns or horses. A Native translator he called Doña Marina (La Malinche in Mexican memory) helped him gather information and allies. By exploiting political divisions, he recruited Native allies and marched to the capital. The Spanish entered peacefully, and Cortés took Emperor Montezuma hostage to control the empire's gold and silver. The Aztecs eventually revolted, and Montezuma was killed. The Spanish then fled in the bloody retreat called la noche triste. Cortés regrouped, recruited more Native troops, and besieged the city in 1521 (p. 69).
The 85-day siege cut off food and fresh water. Starvation set in, and smallpox spread through the city, leaving many people too sick to move. When the city fell, Spanish soldiers and their Mesoamerican allies looted the temples and killed about fifteen thousand people. Disease and warfare worked together to bring down the Aztecs (p. 69).
Farther south, the Incas ruled from Cuzco in the Andes. Their empire was much larger than the Aztecs'. It stretched from present-day Ecuador to central Chile and Argentina. Generals, bureaucrats, and engineers ran its provinces. Farmers cut terraces into mountainsides, and by the 1400s about a thousand miles of roads and bridges linked perhaps twelve million people. As in Mesoamerica, conquered groups resented their rulers, which left the empire open to invaders (p. 69).
Epidemics traveled along trade routes ahead of the Spanish and hit the Incas in 1525. They killed Emperor Huayna Capac and many of his family. His sons Huascar and Atahualpa then fought a war over who would rule. Francisco Pizarro landed a small force and used the same methods as Cortés: deceit and Native allies. He executed Atahualpa and took Cuzco in 1533. Even so, the conquest dragged on. Pizarro had to defeat Atahualpa's generals, and rival Spanish factions fought a civil war, both sides using mostly Native troops. Pizarro was assassinated in 1541. His brother Gonzalo then led a revolt that could have created a kingdom separate from Spain. The last independent Inca ruler, in the jungle east of Peru, was not defeated until 1572 (pp. 70–71).
Charles V was already king of Spain when he became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. His lands ran from Austria to Castile. Wealth from the conquests let him dream of a universal monarchy, a power not seen since ancient Rome. Like Rome, though, his empire was a patchwork of regions and cultures that was hard to manage (pp. 71–72).
The Spanish built on the roads and cities of the Native empires. They saw cities as a way to impose law and order. Mexico City was raised on the ruins of Tenochtitlán, and stones from the Templo Mayor went into a cathedral and the viceroy's palace. In 1573 Philip II ordered that new towns have a grid of wide streets around a central plaza lined with a church and government buildings. In practice, many towns appeared haphazardly wherever silver was found (p. 72).
Potosí, in modern Bolivia, is the best example. Silver was found there in the 1540s, and within a few years over two hundred thousand people lived in shanties and mining camps. The 1546 silver find at Zacatecas in northern Mexico added to the flow. This silver paid for Spain's armies and fleets, which mattered even more once the Protestant Reformation strengthened English and Dutch resistance to Spain (p. 72).
The encomienda was the main labor system. The crown gave Spanish colonists, called encomenderos, the work and tribute of Indigenous people, usually the adults of several villages. These grants could be divided and inherited, so they built the fortunes of conquistadors and their heirs. The system abused Native workers. It also threatened to create a colonial nobility outside royal control, so Charles V and his successors tightened their grip (p. 72).
Bartolomé de Las Casas, a planter who became a friar, sailed to the Americas in 1502 and later wrote a harsh account of Spanish cruelty. He also reported that Hispaniola's Native population, which he put at about three million, had nearly vanished by the 1520s. Dutch and English propagandists later used such reports to build the Black Legend, which pictured Spaniards and Catholics as uniquely cruel and greedy. The book points out that no European colonial power was free of hypocrisy, though the destruction was enormous (pp. 72–74).
Partly because of Las Casas, the crown issued the New Laws in 1542. They canceled many conquistador privileges and banned new encomiendas. Encomenderos in Peru rebelled under Gonzalo Pizarro, and the crown crushed the revolt. It then replaced the encomienda with the repartimiento, meant as a milder tribute system. Many abuses continued. Still, the crown learned that it could rule by mixing harsh punishment with compromise with local elites (p. 74).
Spain governed through two viceroyalties: New Spain (1535) and Peru (1544). Viceroys were high-ranking nobles born in Spain who reported to the Council of the Indies in Seville. Several bodies shared power with them:
(p. 74)
About 225,000 Spaniards crossed to the Americas in the 1500s. Many were young single men looking for land, wealth, and a better social position. Indigenous people were always the majority, so they had to be included in colonial life. In theory they formed a separate república de indios, run by their traditional leaders. Many left encomienda labor for cities like Cuzco, Lima, and Mexico City to find work. Living in cities and adopting Spanish ways did not give them equality (p. 74).
Spanish society in the Americas was patriarchal. The ideal was a senior man who protected his wife, children, and servants, and who got labor and obedience in return. For nobles, this ideal reached its fullest form on large estates with an urban home and rural land worked by servants and slaves. But there were too few Spanish women for a purely European-descended population to grow naturally (pp. 75–76).
Spanish men therefore formed relationships with Black and Native women, and many of these were coerced. Iberia already had legal rules for children born outside marriage, and Spain also had a long history of Muslim–Christian contact. Spanish authorities sometimes tolerated or even supported interracial marriages. Mixed-race children were baptized and recognized, but they stayed in a lower position, and the line between servant and relative was often blurry (p. 76).
These patterns led to the sistema de castas, a hierarchy of ethno-racial groups based on supposed "purity of blood." It was regularized in the mid-1600s but grew from older practices of excluding Moors and Jews. Spaniards (españoles) sat at the top. Below them came criollos (American-born colonists) and mestizos, a flexible term for people of mixed European, Black, and Indigenous ancestry. Real life was messier than the system. A wealthy father could protect his mestizo children from prejudice, and rich mestizos could marry Europeans to "whiten" a family line. On frontiers such as Spanish Texas or Portuguese Brazil, mestizo families often stressed their European side to set themselves apart from Native peoples (p. 76).
By the early 1700s, over a third of marriages joined Spanish and Indigenous partners. The result was mestizaje, a blended culture mixing African, Iberian, and Indigenous languages, religions, clothing, and food (p. 76). A symbol of this blending is the Virgen de Guadalupe. In 1531, Juan Diego reported seeing the Virgin Mary as a dark-skinned woman who spoke Nahuatl. Stories of miracles spread, and she became a national icon for the new mestizo society (pp. 76, 78).
In 1546, Basque prospectors found silver near Zacatecas, which became Mexico's counterpart to Potosí and helped fund the Habsburgs. Mining damaged the land. Forests were burned for smelters, mercury and slag were left behind, and huge sheep flocks overgrazed grasslands, leading to drought and erosion (p. 78).
Silver also set off the Chichimeca War (1550–1600). Chichimeca was a Nahuatl word close in meaning to "barbarian." In fact the Chichimecas were an alliance of nations defending their homelands against miners, ranchers, and slavers. Their guerrilla tactics forced Spain to send troops, build forts, and escort silver convoys. The king approved a war of "fire and blood" that allowed enslaving prisoners, but this only hardened resistance. By 1585 the war was a stalemate (pp. 78–79).
Disease made the invasion far deadlier. Native Americans had been isolated from Old World animals and epidemics, so they lacked acquired immunity. Smallpox, typhus, influenza, measles, and other diseases spread. War, slavery, sexual violence, trauma, and malnutrition made recovery harder. Some scholars estimate that up to 90 percent of the population died within about 150 years, a catastrophe called the Great Dying (p. 79).
Entradas were privately funded military expeditions sent north from Spanish America to find Indigenous empires to plunder. Veteran conquistadors led them, with soldiers, priests, guides, enslaved people, and many livestock. In 1513, Ponce de León landed in Florida seeking gold and slaves and was killed by a Calusa poisoned arrow (p. 79).
Cabeza de Vaca. Storms and the Gulf Stream pushed the 1528 Narváez expedition onto Florida's west coast. Misunderstandings, such as the bishop burning the Tocobaga's carefully wrapped dead, turned hosts hostile. The Apalachee were a large, hierarchical chiefdom centered on Anhaica, with farming, long-distance trade, and perhaps 30,000–34,000 people. Their organized resistance forced the Spaniards back, and they held a stronghold in the area into the 1700s (pp. 80–81). Rafts then wrecked on the Texas coast. The Karankawa first helped the survivors, but the relationship turned into enslavement. Cabeza de Vaca later worked as a trader and healer, and in 1535 he performed the first recorded surgery in the Southwest. He learned six Native languages and adapted to Indigenous life. His tales of interior cities inspired more expeditions (pp. 82–83).
Coronado and the Pueblos. Pueblo peoples farmed in ways suited to the desert, using dry farming or irrigation ditches. Western Pueblos were matrilineal, with women owning homes and fields, while eastern Pueblos were organized by moieties. Drought and crowding in the 1300s pushed migration and the building of multistory adobe homes (p. 83). Coronado's 1540–1542 entrada read the Requerimiento, a 1513 decree claiming Spain's divine right to Native lands. The Zuni resisted and Hawikuh was destroyed. Spaniards besieged about a dozen towns, and their guide, the Turk, led them toward Kansas to lose them. With no sugar climate and no large empires to exploit, the interior gave Spain little reason for new invasions (pp. 83, 85).
California. Its Native peoples lived in six cultural areas with about one hundred dialects. Acorns fed the south and center, northern groups hunted and gathered, and coastal Chumash and others relied on seafood and canoes. Cabrillo reached San Diego in 1542, but permanent Spanish settlement waited until Serra's mission and presidio in 1789 (pp. 85–86).
Because war was costly, Spain moved in the late 1500s toward pacification and conversion. Philip II's 1573 reforms stressed peaceful subjugation. The Reformation made Catholic converts more valuable, since they replaced Protestant subjects lost in Europe. Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries learned languages, challenged shamans, and pushed Natives into settled villages with European-style farming (pp. 86–87).
In 1598, Juan de Oñate led about four hundred settlers, soldiers, and friars into New Mexico and based them at San Juan. When Acoma resisted, his troops killed nearly half its 1,500 people, cut a foot off men over fifteen, and enslaved women and children. This was meant to rule by fear. The colony failed, but the Franciscans stayed (pp. 87–88).
The friars banned kachina dolls and prayer sticks. They also tried to reduce women's power. Pueblo women's authority came from farming and fertility, and sexuality was seen as natural. Missionaries punished premarital sex and polygamy and separated men and women. Pueblos accepted added town governments but kept their own and combined old and new practices (pp. 88–89). Santa Fe, founded in 1610, was the first permanent European settlement in the Southwest. It stayed poor and isolated, with no mines, and relied on Pueblo tribute and Apache slaves. By the 1630s, about fifty friars ran dozens of missions with only a few hundred converts, and discontent was building (p. 89).
Europeans in the Americas found plenty of land but too few workers. Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships carried enslaved Africans from the west and west-central coasts, where captives were traded for goods such as beads, cloth, rum, firearms, and metal wares. Native Americans, meanwhile, forged middle grounds, fought back, and adapted. Some changes, like adopting Spanish, caused little conflict, while attacks on Indigenous religion caused much more (pp. 89, 91).
