Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 by John H. Elliott Page A

fullest sense of the word; they had to work out some kind of relationship with the peoples who already inhabited it; they had to sustain and develop their communities within an institutional framework which was only partly of their own devising; and they had to establish an equilibrium between their own developing needs and aspirations, and those of the metropolitan societies from which they had sprung. At once liberated and constrained by their American environment, their responses would be conditioned both by the Old World from which they came, and by the New World which they now set out to master and make their own.
     
     

    CHAPTER 2

    Occupying American Space
    Europeans engaged in the conquest and settlement of America were confronted by a challenge of almost inconceivable immensity - the mastering of American space. As described by William Burke in his Account of the European Settlements in America, first published in 1757, `America extends from the North pole to the fifty-seventh degree of South latitude; it is upwards of eight thousand miles in length; it sees both hemispheres; it has two summers and a double winter; it enjoys all the variety of climates which the earth affords; it is washed by the two great oceans."
    As Burke indicates, American space varied enormously in its physical and climatic characteristics. There was not one America but many, and these different Americas lent themselves to different styles of settlement and exploitation.' Far to the north, Basque or English fishermen attracted from the fifteenth century by the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland, would be faced by a bleak and inhospitable coastal landscape. Further south, the view of land from the sea was more encouraging. The Reverend Francis Higginson, writing home to his friends in England in 1629, observed the `fine woods and green trees by land and these yellow flowers painting the sea', which `made us all desirous to see our new paradise of New England, whence we saw such fore-running signals of fertility afar off'.' Inland, however, lay dark forests, and the frightening unknown. To the south again was the Chesapeake Bay and Virginia, described by Captain Smith as `a country in America that lieth between the degrees of 34 and 44 of the north latitude', where `the summer is hot as in Spain; the winter cold as in France and England. '4
    The Spaniards who reached the Caribbean and moved onwards into central and southern America were faced with landscapes and climates of extreme contrasts - tropical islands in the Antilles, barren scrubland in the Yucatan peninsula, the volcanic high plateau or altiplano of northern and central Mexico, and the dense tropical vegetation of the central American isthmus. While there was a climatic unity to the tropical world of the Caribbean islands and central America, southern America was a continent of violent extremes, and nowhere more than in Peru, as the great Jesuit writer, Jose de Acosta, noted in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies at the end of the sixteenth century: `Peru is divided into three long and narrow strips, the plains, the sierras and the Andes. The plains run along the sea-coast; the sierra is all slopes, with some valleys; the Andes are dense mountains ... It is astonishing to see how, in a distance of as little as fifty leagues, equally far from the equator and the pole, there should be such diversity that in one part it is almost always raining, in one it almost never rains, and in the other it rains during one season and not another.'s
    Distances in this South American world were vast, and were made still vaster by the impossible character of so much of the terrain. In the kingdom of New Granada, for instance, the combination of a hot, damp climate and dramatic changes of level between the Magdalena valley and the Cordillera Oriental of modern Colombia meant that after a sixty-day transatlantic crossing from Seville to the Caribbean port city of Cartagena, it took a minimum