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

of another thirty days to cover the thousand kilometres from Cartagena to Santa Fe de Bogota.6
    How were the Spaniards, and those other Europeans who followed them, to take possession of so much space? The mastering of America, as effected by Europeans, involved three related processes: the symbolic taking of possession; physical occupation of the land, which entailed either the subjection or the expulsion of its indigenous inhabitants; and the peopling of the land by settlers and their descendants in sufficient numbers to ensure that its resources could be developed in conformity with European expectations and practices.
    Symbolic occupation
    The symbolic taking of possession tended to consist in the first instance of a ceremonial act, the nature and extent of which were likely to be as much conditioned by circumstance as by national tradition.' The Spanish and the English alike accepted the Roman Law principle of res nullius, whereby unoccupied land remained the common property of mankind, until being put to use. The first user then became the owner.' According to the thirteenth-century Castilian legal code of the Siete Partidas, `it rarely happens that new islands arise out of the sea. But if this should happen and some new island appears, we say that it should belong to him who first settles it.'9 A similar principle would govern land titles in Spanish colonial America: possession was conditional on occupation and use.1° In claiming sovereignty, however, the Spaniards, unlike the English, had little or no need of the doctrine of res nullius, since their title was based on the original papal concession to the Spanish crown. Arriving, moreover, in lands for the most part already well settled by indigenous populations, their principal preoccupation would be to justify their lordship over peoples rather than land.i" In this, the most serious objections faced by the crown would come from within Spain itself, rather than from foreign rivals who lacked the power to enforce their own counter-claims.
    Even if claims to sovereignty were entirely valid in the eyes of those who made them, the formal taking of possession by some form of ceremony constituted a useful statement of intent, directed at least as much to other European princes as to the local population. Both in Castile and England, taking possession of a property was traditionally accompanied by symbolic acts, such as beating the bounds, cutting branches, or scooping up earth. When the Castilians seized Tenerife in the Canary Islands in 1464, Diego de Herrera secured the formal submission of the local chiefs. He then had the royal standard raised, and made a circuit of two leagues, `stamping the ground with his feet as a sign of possession and cutting the branches of trees .. .'12 Columbus makes no mention of such a ceremony following his landfall at San Salvador, but he raised the standard of Ferdinand and Isabella, and had the solemn declaration of their rights to the island duly notarized. Subsequently, as he noted in his journal, he did the same in the other islands: `I did not wish to pass by any island without taking possession of it, although it might be said that once one had been taken, they all were."3
    The delimitation of the areas allocated respectively to the crowns of Castile and Portugal by the bull Inter Caetera of 4 May 1493 did not preclude ceremonial assertions of possession when captains and commanders set foot on new soil. In his instructions to Pedro Margarit, dated 9 April 1494, Columbus ordered that, wherever he went, `along all the roads and footpaths' he should have `high crosses and boundary stones erected, and also crosses on the trees and crosses in any other appropriate place, where they cannot fall down ... because, praise be to God, the land belongs to Christians, and this will serve as a permanent memorial, and you should also place on some tall and large trees the names of their Royal Highnesses. 114 Comparable rituals occurred as the