Bradford, Burns
"Latin America, a Concise Interpretative History."
Prentice Hall, U.S.A. 1972

The Origins of a Multiracial Society.

The New World provided a vast and varied stage upon which met men of three diverse and distant continents: Asia, Europe and Africa. Representative of the three races, they arrived at different times and for different reasons. They mixed, mingled, and miscegenated. Together they contributed the which confected the unique Latin American civilization.

THE LAND

Contemporary Latin America, a huge region of a continent and a half, stretching 7,000 miles southward from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, varies widely in its geographic and human composition. Geopolitically the region encompasses 18 Spanish-speaking republics, French-speaking Haiti, and Portuguese-speaking Brazil, a total of approximately 8 million square miles and a rapidly growing population exceeding 270 million. That population increases at the rate of nearly 3 percent a year. Still, Latin America is relatively underpopulated, although at least the two smallest states, Haiti and El Salvador, do suffer the effects of an over crowded population. The area is roughly twice the size of Europe with one-third of Europe's population. It occupies 19 percent of the world's land but contains only 7 per cent of the world's population.

Most of that area lies within the tropics. In fact, only one country, Uruguay has no territory in the tropics. South America reaches its widest point, 3,200 miles, just a few degrees south of the equator, unlike North America which narrows rapidly as it approaches the equator. The concept of an enervating climate is a false one. The cold Pacific Ocean currents refresh much of the west coast of Latin America, and the altitudes of the mountains and highlands offer a wide range of temperatures which belie the latitude. For centuries, and certainly long before the Europeans arrived, many of the region's most advanced civilizations flourished in the mountain plateaus and valleys. Today many of Latin America's largest cities are in the mountains or on mountain plateaus: Mexico City, Guatemala City, Bogota, Quito, La Paz, and Sao Paulo, to mention only a few. Much of Latin America's population, particularly in Middle America and along the west coast of South America, concentrates in the highland areas.

In Mexico and Central America, the highlands create a rugged backbone which runs through the center of most of the countries leaving coastal plains on either side. Part of that mountain system emerges in the Greater Antilles to shape the geography of the major Caribbean islands. In South America, to the contrary of Middle America, the mountains closely rim the Pacific coast, while the highlands skirt much of the Atlantic coast, making penetration into the flatter interior of the continent difficult. The Andes predominate. The world's longest continuous mountain barrier, it runs 4,000 miles down the west coast and fluctuates in width between 100 and 400 miles. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the hemisphere, rises to a majestic 23,000 feet along the Chilean-Argentine frontier. The formidable Andes have been a severe obstacle to exploration and settlement of the south American interior from the West. Along the east coast, the older Guiana and Brazilian Highlands average 2,600 feet in altitude and rarely reach 9,000 feet. Running southward from the Caribbean and frequently fronting on the ocean, they disappear in the extreme south of Brazil. Like the Andes, they too have inhibited penetration of the interior. The largest cities on the Atlantic side are all on the coast or like Sao Paulo within a very short distance of the ocean. In contrast to the west coast, the east boasts of some extraordinary natural harbors of which Todos os Santos Bay and Guanabara Bay, on which are located respectively the cities of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, are excellent examples.

Four mayor rivers networks, the Magdalena, Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata, flow into the Caribbean or Atlantic, providing an access into the interior missing on the west coast. The Amazon ranks as one of the world's most impressive river systems. Aptly referred to in Portuguese as the "river-sea," it is the largest river in volume in the world. Its volume exceeds that of the Mississippi 14 times. In places it is impossible to see from shore to shore and over a good part of its course the river averages 100 feet in depth. Running eastward from its source 18,000 feet up in the Andes, it is joined from both the north and south by more than 200 tributaries. Together this imposing river and its tributaries provide 25,000 miles of navigable water. The magnitude of the river always has excited the imaginations of the men who traveled on it. William Lewis Herndon, who sailed down the river in the mid-nineteenth century, marveled, as many had before and would after: "The march of the great river in its silent grandeur was sublime, but in the untamed might of its turbid waters, as they cut away its bands and tore down the gigantic denizens of the forest it was awful. I was reminded of our Mississippi at its topmost flood."

Farther to the south, the Plata network flows through some of the world's richest soil, the Pampas, a vast flat area shared by Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The river system includes the Uruguay, Paraguay, and Parana Rivers but it gets its name from the Rio de la Plata, a 180 mile-long estuary separating Uruguay and the Argentine province of Buenos Aires. The system drains a basin of over 1.5 million square miles. Shallow in depth, it still provides a vital communication and transportation link between the Atlantic coast and the southern interior of the continent.

No single country better illustrates the kaleidoscopic variety of Latin American geography than Chile, that long, lean land clinging to the Pacific shore for 2,600 miles. One of the world's bleakest and most forbidding deserts in the North gives way to rugged mountains with forests and alpine pastures. The Central Valley combines a Mediterranean climate with fertile plains, the heartland of Chile's agriculture and population. Moving southward, the traveler encounters dense mixed forests, heavy rainfall, and a cold climate, a warning of the glaciers and rugged coasts which lie beyond. Snow remains permanent in most of Tierra del Fuego.

THE INDIAN

The continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa contributed to the peopling of the Western Hemisphere, and, as one result, a greater racial mixing has resulted than in any other part of the world. From Asia came the first migrants in various waves between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. Anthropologists generally believe that they crossed from one continent to the other at the Bering Strait in pursuit of game animals. They slowly moved southward and dispersed throughout North and South America. Over the millennia, at an uneven rate, some advanced through hunting and fishing cultures to take up agriculture. At the same time they fragmented into myriad linguistic (estimates range up to 2,200 different languages) and cultural groups, although they maintained certain general physical features in common: straight black hair, dark eyes, a coppercolored skin, and a short stature.

Varied as the early American cultures were, a majority of them shared enough traits in common to permit a few generalizations. The family or clan units served as the basic social organization. All displayed a profound faith in supernatural forces which they believed shaped, influenced, guided their lives. For that reason, the shamans, men intimate with the supernatural, played important roles in the indigenous societies. They provided the contact between the mortal and the immortal, between man and the spirit. In most rituals and celebrations, the participants danced, sang, beat a drum, shook a rattle, and possibly played a flute. Common to the oral literature of most of the groups were stories of the cultural hero, the ancestor who taught the early members of the tribe their way of life, and the prankster whose exploits aroused both mirth and admiration. None of the early Americans possessed a sense of private ownership of land. Like the air he breathed, the land he used belonged to all. He revered the earth as sacred, not to be destroyed or mutilated but to be preserved for the use of future generations. Many artifacts, instruments, and implements were similar from Alaska to Cape Horn. For example, spears, bows and arrows, and clubs were the common weapons of warfare or for the hunt. Although these similarities are significant, the differences between the many cultures were enormous and impressive. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were between 15 million and 100 million inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. Scholars still heatedly debate the figures, and one can find forceful arguments favoring each extreme.

Mistaking the New World for Asia in 1492, Christopher Columbus called the inhabitants he met "Indians," a name which has remained to cause endless confusion. Exploration later indicated that the "Indians" of the New World belonged to a large number of cultural groups of which the most important were the Aztecs and Mayas of Mexico and Central America, the Carib of the Caribbean area, the Chibcha of Colombia, the Inca of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, the Araucanian of Chile, the Guarani of Paraguay, and the Tupi of Brazil. Of those, the Aztec, Maya, and Inca exemplify the most complex cultural achievements.

Two distinct periods, the Classic and the Late, mark the history of the Mayas During the Classic period, from the fourth to the tenth centuries A.D., the Mayas lived in Guatemala, and then they suddenly migrated to Yucatan, beginning the Late period in their civilization which lasted until the Spanish conquest. The exodus baffles anthropologists who most often suggest that the exhaustion of the soil in Guatemala limited the corn harvests and forced the Mayas to move in order to survive. Corn provided the basis for the Mayan civilization. All human activity, all religion centered on the planting, growing, and harvesting of corn. Efficient agricultural methods produced corn surpluses and hence the leisure for a large priestly class to dedicate its talents to religion and to scientific study. Extraordinary intellectual achievements resulted. The Mayas progressed from the pictograph to the ideograph and thus invented a type of writing, the only Indians in the hemisphere to do so. Sophisticated in mathematics, they discovered the zero and devised numeration by position. Astute observers of the heavens, they applied their mathematical skills to astronomy. Their careful studies of the heavens enabled them to predict eclipses, follow the path of the planet Venus and prepare a calendar more accurate than the one used in Europe. As the ruins of Copan, Tikal, Palenque, Chichen Itza, Mayapan, and Uxmal testify, the Mayas built magnificent temples. One of the most striking features of that architecture is the extremely elaborate carving and sculpture.

To the west of the Mayas, another native civilization, the Aztecs was expanding and flourishing in the fifteenth century. The Aztecs had migrated from the north in the early thirteenth century into the central valley of Mexico where they encountered and conquered some prosperous and highly advanced city-states. In 1325, they founded Tenochtitlan their beautiful capital, and from that religious and political capital they radiated outward to absorb other cultures until they controlled all of Central Mexico. The constant conquests gave prominence to the warriors and not surprisingly among the multiple divinities Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the sun, predominated. To propitiate him, as well as other gods, required human sacrifices, increasingly on a grander scale The Aztecs devised an elaborate and effective system of government, the pictograph, an accurate calendar, and an impressive architecture.

Largest, oldest, and best organized of the Indian civilizations was the Incan which flowered in the harsh environment of the Andes. By conquest, the empire extended in all directions from Cuzco, regarded as the center of the universe. It stretched nearly 3,000 miles from Ecuador into Chile and its maximum width measured 400 miles. Few empires have been more rigidly regimented or more highly centralized, a real miracle when one realizes that it was run without the benefit-or hindrance-of written accounts or records. The only accounting system was the qutpu, cords upon which knots were made to indicate specific mathematical units, although some scholars now claim the Incas wove some sort of code into the threads. The highly effective government rapidly assimilated newly conquered peoples into the empire. Entire populations were moved around the empire when security suggested that such relocations would be wise. Every subject was required to speak Quechua, the language of the court. In weaving, pottery, medicine, and agriculture, the achievements of the Incans were magnificent. They particularly excelled in agriculture. Challenged by a stingy soil, they developed systems of drainage, terracing, and irrigation and learned the value of fertilizing their fields.

Many differences separated those three high Indian civilizations, but at the same time some impressive similarities existed. Society was highly structured. The hierarchy of nobles, priests, warriors, artisans, farmers, and slaves was inflexible, although occasionally some mobility, the exception rather than the rule, did occur. At the pinnacle of that hierarchy stood the omnipotent emperor encased in the greatest respect and veneration. The sixteenth-century chronicler Cieza de León, in his own charming style, illustrated the awe in which the people held the Inca: "Thus the kings were so feared that, when they traveled over the provinces, and permitted a piece of the cloth to be raised which hung round their litter, so as to allow their vassals to behold them, there was such an outcry that the birds fell from the upper air where they were flying, insomuch that they could be caught in men's hands. All men so feared the king, that they did not dare to speak evil of his shadow." Little or no distinction existed between civil and religious authority so that for all intents and purposes church and state were one. The Incan and Aztec emperors were both regarded as representatives of the sun on earth and thus as dieties, a position probably held by the rulers of the Mayan city-states as well.

Royal judges impartially administered the laws of the empires and apparently enjoyed a reputation for their fairness. The sixteenth-century chroniclers who saw the judicial systems functioning invariably praised them. Cieza de León, for one, noted, "It was felt to be certain that those who did evil would receive punishment without fail and that neither prayers nor bribes would avert it." These civilizations rested on a firm rural base. Cities were rare, although a few existed with populations exceeding 100,000. They were centers of commerce, government, and religion. Eyewitness accounts as well as the ruins which still remain leave no doubt that some of the cities were well organized and contained splendid examples of impressive architecture. The sixteenth-century chronicles reveal that some of the cities astonished the first Spaniards who saw them. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Hernan Cortés into Tenochtitlan in 1519, gasped, "And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico [City], we were astounded. These great towns and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not a dream!" But the vast majority of the population engaged in agriculture and were not urban dwellers. The productivity of the land made possible an opulent court life and complex religious ceremonies. The farmers cultivated corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, manioc root, potatoes, as well as other crops. None of the Indian societies recognized individual ownership of land. Communal lands, the famed ejido of Mexico and the ayllu of Peru, were worked for the benefit of the state, religion, and community. The state thoroughly organized and directed the rural labor force. Advanced as those Indian civilizations were, however, not one learned the use of iron or discovered the wheel.

The spectacular achievements of these advanced farming cultures contrast sharply with the more elementary evolution of the hunting, gathering, and fishing cultures and the intermediate farming cultures among the Latin American Indians. The Tupi tribes, the single most important native element contributing to the early formation of Brazil, illustrate the status of the intermediate farming cultures.

The Tupí tribes tended to be very loosely organized. The small and temporary villages, often surrounded by a crude wooden stockade, were, when possible, located along a river bank. The Indians lived communally in large thatched huts in which they strung their hammocks in extended family or lineage groups of as many as 100 persons. Most of the tribes had at least a nominal chief, although some seemed to recognize a leader only in time of war and a few seemed to have no concept of a leader. More often than not, the shaman or medicine man was the most important and powerful tribal figure. He communed with the spirits, proffered advice, and prescribed medicines. The elementary religions abounded with good and evil spirits.

The men spent considerable time preparing for and participating in tribal wars. They hunted monkeys, tapirs, armadillos, and birds. They also fished, trapping the fish with funnel-shaped baskets, poisoning the water and collecting the fish, or shooting the fish with arrows. They cleared away the forest to plant crops. Nearly every year during the dry season, the men cut down trees, bushes, and vines, waited until they had dried, and then burned them, a method used throughout Latin America, then as well as now. The burning destroyed the thin humus and the soil was quickly exhausted. Hence, it was necessary constantly to clear new land and eventually the village moved in order to be near virgin soil. In general, although not exclusively, the women took charge of planting and harvesting crops and of collecting and preparing the food. Manioc was the principal cultivated crop. Maize, beans, yams, peppers, squash, sweet potatoes, tobacco, pineapples, and occasionally cotton were the other cultivated crops. Forest fruits were collected.

To the first Europeans who observed them, those Indians seemed to live an idyllic life. The tropics required little or no clothing. Generally nude, the Tupi developed the art of body ornamentation and painted elaborate and ornate geometric designs on themselves. Into their noses, lips, and ears, they inserted stone and wooden artifacts. Feathers from the colorful forest birds provided an additional decorative touch. Their gay nude appearance prompted the Europeans to think of them as innocent children of nature. The first chronicler of Brazil, Pero Vaz de Caminha, marveled to the king of Portugal, "Sire, the innocence of Adam himself was not greater than these people's." In the beginning, the Europeans overlooked the grim affinity of the Indians for fighting and cannibalism to emphasize their inclinations to dance and sing. More extensive contact with the Indians caused later chroniclers to tell quite a different tale in which the Indians emerged as wicked villains, brutes who desperately needed the civilizing hand of Europe.

The Tupí, like many similar or simpler cultures, never achieved more than a rudimentary civilization, in no way comparable to the remarkable civilizations of their contemporaries, the Aztecs, Mayas, or the Incas. They possessed no well-established tribal organization; their agriculture was primitive; they did not know how to use stone to build; they lacked any animal for transportation; they had no written means of communication. On the other hand, they had adapted well to their tropical environment, and they had much to teach the European invaders in the utilization of the land, its rivers, and their products.

THE EUROPEAN

As the sixteenth century approached the European invader was not far off. Europe, on the eve of a commercial revolution, searched for new trade and new lands. Merchants dreamed of breaking the Arab and Italian monopolies of trade with Asia, thereby sharing the lucrative profits from spices, precious stones, pearls, dyes, silks, tapestries, porcelains, and rugs coveted by wealthy Europeans. Portugal led the quest for those new trade routes.

Like the neighboring kingdoms in Spain, Portugal had been the crossroads of many peoples-Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, and Moslems-and had blended together their cultures. The last of the many invaders of the peninsula, the Moslems, had begun their conquest of Iberia in 711. The Christians initiated their crusade to reconquer the peninsula in 732 at the Battle of Tours and intermittently continued it until Granada fell in 1492.

Portugal, to assert its independence, had to free itself both of Moslem control and Castilian claims. In 1139, Afonso Henriques of the House of Burgundy used for the first time the title "King of Portugal," a title officially recognized in 1179 by the Pope, then arbiter of such matters. The new state struggled to expel the Moslems and finally succeeded in driving their remaining armies from the Algarve, the far south in 1250. Neighboring Castile, deeply involved in its own campaign against the Moors reluctantly recognized the existence of Portugal. The task of consolidating the new state fell to King Denis, whose long reign, 1279-1325, marked the emergence of Europe's first modern national state.

Portugal became for a time Europe's foremost sea power. Its location, perched on the westernmost tip of continental Europe, was well suited for that role. Most of the sparse population, less than a million in the fifteenth century, inhabited the coastal area. They faced the great, grey, open sea and nearby Africa. At peace at home and with no imminent foreign threats to prepare for, Portugal could turn its attention outward. In a society dominated by the Church, religious motives for expansion played at least a superficially important role. The Lusitanians hoped to defeat the enemies of their faith in Africa and to carry the word of God to that continent. They sought to circumvent Moorish domains in order to attack their enemy from the rear. They also wanted to make contact with a potential ally, the oft-mentioned Prester John, sovereign of a Christian kingdom somewhere in Africa. Thus it was in heretical Africa the Portuguese initiated their overseas expansion in 1415 with the conquest of strategic Ceuta, guardian of the opening to the Mediterranean. However, the commercial reasons for expansion were probably more compelling than the religious ones. Lisbon as the entrepôt of Asian merchandise created a vision of wealth which dazzled men of all classes.

The first to appreciate fully that the ocean was not a barrier but a vast highway of commerce was Prince Henry (1394-1460), known as "the Navigator" to English writers although he was a confirmed landlubber. That provident prince, significant as the symbol of Portuguese maritime expansion, surrounded himself with navigators, cosmographers, and scholars at his residence on Sagres Peninsula, the westernmost tip of Portugal. Listening to the expert advice of his day, he defined Portugal's policy of exploration: systematic voyages outward, each based on the intelligence collected from the former voyager and each traveling beyond its predecessor. The improvements in geographic, astronomical, and navigational knowledge which characterized a century of accelerating seaborne activity facilitated the task of the men of Sagres. In a moment of great maritime triumph, the Portuguesa launched the caravel, a ship which could tack, and, thus, sail against the wind. As a direct consequence of those improvements and with the encouragement of Prince Henry, the Lusitanians sailed farther and farther out to sea and away from their base. They reached the Madeira Islands by 1418 or 1420, the Azores between 1427 and 1432, Cape Bojador by 1434, and at the time of the death of the prince were sailing the Gulf of Guinea, some 3,000 miles down the African coast. Then, three decades later, in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and pointed the way to a water route to India.

News from Christopher Columbus that he had reached India by sailing west in 1492 momentarily disturbed the Portuguese who were on the verge of reaching the Orient by circumnavigating Africa. Unlike Portugal, Spain had earned little reputation for maritime prowess. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, some Spanish expeditions plied the African coast, one of which laid Spanish claims to the Canary Islands. Most Spanish energy, however, had been expended internally on the struggle against the Moors and on the effort of unification. The marriage of Isabel of Castile to Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 forged the major link in Spanish unity. Thereafter, first the external and then the internal policies of Castile and Aragon harmonized. Those two monarchs increased the power of the crown by humbling both the nobility and the municipal governments. They equated religious with political unification and expelled those Jews and Moors who refused to embrace the Roman Catholic faith. The infamous inquisition sternly enforced religious conformity. When Isabel died in 1504, Ferdinand ruled as king of Aragon and regent of Castile.

At the same time as the two monarchs were unifying Spain, they accelerated the struggle to expel the Moors. In 1492, Granada, the last Moorish domain on the Iberian Peninsula, fell. Providentially, in that same year, Columbus opened a new horizon for the Spaniards. The energy, talent, and drive which previously had gone into the reconquest, that holy and political campaign allying cross and sword for eight centuries, were invested immediately in overseas expansion. The Spaniards carried with them many of the ideas-religious intolerance and fervor, suspicion of foreigners, more prestige for the soldier than the farmer- as well as many of the institutions-viceroyalty, captaincy-general, the posts of visitador and adelantado-developed during the long reconquest.

The return of Columbus from his first voyage intensified rivalry between Spain and Portugal, both of which sought to guard their own sea lanes and prohibit the incursion of the other. War threatened until diplomacy triumphed. At Tordesillas in 1494, representatives of the two monarchs agreed to divide the world. An imaginary line running pole to pole 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands gave Portugal everything discovered for 180 degrees east and Spain everything for 180 degrees west. With the exception of an interest in the Philippines, Spain concentrated its attention on the Western Hemisphere. Within the half of the world reserved for Portugal, Vasco da Gama discovered the long-sought water route to India. His protracted voyage in 1497-99 joined East and West by sea for the first time. Subsequent voyages by Columbus in 1493-96, 1498-1500, and 1502-4, suggested the extent of the lands he had discovered but proved that in fact he had not reached India. Portugal, at least for the moment, monopolized the only sea lanes to India, and that monopoly promised to enrich the realm. The cargo Vasco de Gama brought back to Lisbon repaid 60 times over the original cost of the expedition. For the time being, the Portuguese maritime routes were proving to be far more lucrative than those of the Spaniards. The kings of Portugal became rich merchants and the Portuguese turned to the sea as never before. Pedro Alvares Cabral received command of the fleet being prepared to follow up the exploit of da Gama. While sailing to India in 1500, the fleet veered off course and Cabral discovered and claimed Brazil, which later was found to fall within the half of the world the Tordesillas treaty allocated to Portugal. Along the coasts of South America, Africa, and Asia, the Portuguese eagerly established their commercial-not colonial-empire. The Chief Cosmographer of the Realm boasted, "The Portuguese discovered new islands, new lands, new seas, new people; and what is more, new sky and new stars." It was a glorious age for Portugal, and one of the great epic poets of all times, Luis de Camoes, composed The Lusiads to commemorate the achievements.

The discovery of the Americas was an accident, the unforeseen byproduct of an Iberian search for new maritime routes and desire for direct trade with the East. At first, the discovery did not seem particularly rewarding. The Western Hemisphere loomed up as an undesirable barrier to a direct water route to Asia. Furthermore, the native inhabitants displayed scant interest in trading with the Iberian merchants.

CONFRONTATION AND CONQUEST

The discoveries of Columbus and Cabral brought the Iberians face to face with the Indians of the New World. The confrontation puzzled each side and awoke a great deal of mutual curiosity. The Iberians referred back to Biblical and classical literature in an effort to explain to themselves who the Indians were; for their part, at least one group of Indians identified the Europeans with prophetic utterances that a bearded white man would emerge one day from the ocean.

Since commerce had motivated those oceanic explorations which resulted in the discoveries, the Iberians hoped to trade with the inhabitants they encountered. The peoples of the simple societies of the Caribbean and along the coast of eastern South America showed scant inclination for such commercial intercourse. In fact, they had little to offer the Iberians and required even less from them. The Portuguese soon found along the coast rich stands of brazilwood, a wood which gave the newly discovered land its name and furnished an excellent red dye much in demand by the new European textile industries. The crown established a monopoly over its exploitation and eagerly sold its rights to merchants. Fernao de Noronha was the first to buy the contract, and in 1503 he dispatched ships to fetch the dyewood. The ship captains bartered with the Indians, exchanging trinkets for the brazilwood they cut. A lucrative trade in the wood developed during the sixteenth century. In addition to its limited economic role, Brazil served strategically for many decades as the guardian of the western flank of the prized trade route to the Orient. So long as Portugal held a monopoly over that seaborne trade, Brazil received only minimal attention.

On the other hand, for three decades after Columbus's discovery, Spain searched the eastern coast of the New World for a westward passage, a route other European states began to seek as well. Columbus made three long voyages touching the largest Caribbean islands and coasting along the shores of Northern South America and Central America. In 1513, Juan Ponce de León reconnoitered the coast of Florida and that same year Vasco Nunez de Balboa marching across Panama came upon the Pacific Ocean which he promptly claimed for his monarch. The desire to get to that ocean by some water route intensified. In 1516, Juan Diaz de Solis discovered the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, while in the following two years Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba and Juan de Grijalva sailed along the coast of Yucatan.

At the same time the Spaniards began to settle some of the major Caribbean islands. On his second voyage Columbus transported men and supplies to establish the first such colony. On the northern coast of Hispaniola, he marked out a grid pattern for a town, set up a municipal government, divided up the land among the colonists, and assigned Indians to each settler to work their land. He thereby established a pattern of colonization faithfully imitated in the succeeding decades wherever the Spaniards went in the New World. Many of the new arrivals searched hopefully for gold, but the islands yielded little. Others turned to agriculture. The monarchs encouraged the migration of artisans and farmers to the New World. In his instructions to one governor departing for the Indies in 1513, the Spanish king ordered him to take "farmers so that they may attempt to plane the soil." Similar orders were repeated frequently. Sugar cane was planted as early as 1493. By 1520, it was a profitable industry with at least 28 sugar mills operating on Hispaniola. Domestic animals imported onto the islands multiplied rapidly. Ships returning to Spain carried sugar and hides. The monarch and merchants of Spain sought to encourage such trade. In 1503, Ferdinand sanctioned the establishment of the Casa de Contratacion in Seville to oversee the commerce between Spain and the New World. Nonetheless, much of the agricultural production in Spanish America, at least during the first century and a half, went to feed the colonists and to provide supplies for conquest, expansion, and further settlement.

The Spanish pattern of exploration and settlement changed after 1521, a year marking the circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan and the conquest of central Mexico by Hernan Cortés. The long voyage begun by Magellan in 1519 but concluded by Juan Sebastian del Cano in 1521, after Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippine Islands, proved-at last-that it was indeed possible to reach Asia by sailing west. His expedition had found the way around the barrier of North and South America but it had proven also that the westward passage was longer and more difficult than the African route used by the Portuguese. At the same time Spain realized it did not need the route to India. Conquered Mexico revealed that the New World held far more wealth in the form of the coveted gold and silver than the Spaniards could hope to reap from trade with Asia. Spanish opinion changed from deprecating the New World as an obstacle to the East to considering it as a rich treasure chest. No longer considered simply a way station on the route to Asia, America became the center of Spanish attention.

History provides few epics of conquest more remarkable than Cortes's sweep through Mexico. His capture of the opulent Aztec empire initiated a period of conquest during which Spain defeated the major Indian nations and made their inhabitants subject to the Castilian monarch. Generally those conquests were private undertakings, the result of a contract, known as a capitulación, signed between the monarch and the aspiring conquistador who was given the title of adelantado. The adelantados invested their own money into their enterprises, and like any investor they expected a handsome return on their money. Diverse other motives propelled them as well. By subjugating new peoples to the crown, they hoped to win royal titles, preferments, and positions. By introducing heathens to Christianity they sought to assure God's favor now as well as guarantee for themselves a fitting place in the life hereafter. The adelantados by no means wandered around the Americas unchecked by the monarchs. Royal officials accompanied all the private expeditions to insure respect for the crown's interests and fulfillment of the capitulación.

The conquest of large empires by a relatively few Spaniards proved to be surprisingly easy. Gunpowder and the horse, both of which startled the Indians, were tremendous tactical advantages, at least initially. Furthermore, the Spaniards found the Indians divided among themselves. In Mexico, the tribes subjugated by the Aztecs were only too happy to join with the Spaniards to defeat their Indian enemies. In the Incan empire, rivalry between two claimants to the crown already had split the empire. The introduction of European diseases decimated the ranks of the Indians who lacked immunity to them. For those reasons, Spanish conquest spread rapidly after Cortes's victory. Central America fell to the Spaniards by 1525. Yucatan, after putting up a bitter resistance, surrendered to the invaders in 1545. Between 1513 and 1543, the Spaniards explored and claimed the territory in North America between the Carolinas and Oregon. In fact, two-thirds of the territory of the continental United States was at one time claimed by Spain. By the time George Washington was inaugurated as President, Spain had colonized a far greater area, ranging from San Francisco to Santa Fé to San Antonio to St. Augustine, than that encompassed by the original 13 states.

Spain's expansion into South America was equally prodigious. Once again the adelantados knew little or nothing of the lands they invaded. Yet they were ready to face anything, and they triumphed over everything. Inspired by the success of Cortés and excited by rumors of a wealthy kingdom along the west coast of South America, Francisco Pizarro sailed south from Panama to initiate Spanish conquest of that continent. Only on his third attempt, in 1531-32, did he succeed in penetrating the Incan heartland, but it was still not until 1535 that Pizarro completed his conquest of the Incan empire. The wealth he encountered surpassed that which Cortés had found in Mexico. From Peru, other expeditions fanned out into South America: Sebastian de Benalcazar seized Ecuador in 1533, Pedro de Valdivia conquered the central valley of Chile in 1540-41, and Gonzalo Pizarro crossed the Andes to explore the upper Amazon in 1539. From that expedition Francisco de Orellana and a small band of men floated down the Amazon, reaching the Atlantic Ocean in 1542.

Spanish attention in South America focused on Peru and most of the other explorations, conquests, and settlements of South America radiated from that center. Two exceptions were the Caribbean coast and the Plata region. Settlement of the northern coast began from the Caribbean. Charles V granted a large section of the Venezuelan coast to the Welsers of Augsburg in 1528 in return for financial aid, but that banking house failed to colonize it successfully and in 1546 the grant was rescinded. Several small settlements were made along the Colombian coast, and in 1536 Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada set out to conquer the Chibcha Indians in the mountainous interior and he brought that highly civilized Indian kingdom within the Spanish pale of empire. The de la Plata attracted some interest first as a possible westward passage to the Orient and later as a possible route to the mines of Peru. Pedro de Mendoza searched in 1535-36 to open such a route and the early settlements in the Platine basin date from his efforts.

Spanish dominion of the New World expanded with amazing rapidity. Within half a century after Columbus' discovery, Spanish adelantados had explored and conquered or claimed the territory from approximately 40 degrees north-Oregon, Colorado, and the Carolinas-to 40 degrees south-mid-Chile and Argentina-with the exception of the Brazilian coast. Spanish settlers had colonized in scattered nuclei an impressive share of that territory. Reflecting the Spanish preference for urban living, those settlers already had founded many of Latin America's major cities: Havana, 1519; Mexico City, 1521; Quito, 1534; Lima, 1535; Buenos Aires, 1536 (refounded in 1580); Asuncion, 1537; Bogotá, 1538; and Santiago, 1541. The Spaniards built Mexico City and Bogotá where Indian cities had long existed, not an uncommon practice. The rich silver and gold mines of Mexico and Peru stimulated the economy, but the economy enjoyed a sounder base than that. Gold and silver were preferred exports; agriculture provided the basis for exploration and expansion. Wherever the Spaniards settled they introduced domesticated animals and new crops. Stock raising turned once unproductive lands into profitable grazing areas, and the introduction of the plow made it possible to exploit land unmanageable under the hoe culture of the Indians. The crown encouraged agriculture by sending seeds, plants, animals, tools, and technical experts to the New World.

Immediately visible was the European influence on the New World and its inhabitants. The Europeans transplanted their social, economic, and political institutions across the ocean. They required the Indians to swear allegiance to a new king, worship a new God, speak a new language, and alter their work habits. In the process of exploiting the Indians, the Europeans also deculturated and disorganized them, forcing them into the role of European peasants. Their labor they were forced to give but their loyalty they held in reserve. The gulf between the master and the peasant has seldom been bridged in Latin America.

In the confrontation of the New and Old Worlds, the Americas also influenced the course of events in Europe. The abundance of gold and silver shipped from Mexico, Peru, and Brazil caused prices to rise in Europe and helped to finance industrialization. Introduced into Europe were new products: tobacco, rubber, cacao, and cotton (today's commercial cottons derive principally from those cultivated by the American Indians); new plants: potatoes and corn, two of the four most important food crops of the world; and drugs: quinine, coca used in cocaine and novocaine, curare used in anesthetics, datura used in pain relievers, and cascara used in laxatives. The Americas forced upon European scholars new geographic, botanical, and zoological information, much of which contradicted the classical writers. As one result, scholars questioned hoary concepts. Those contradictions came at about the same time Copernicus published his heliocentric theory (1543) and thus helped to usher in an age of modern science. The vast extension of empire in the New World strengthened the European monarchs, who derived wealth and thus independence from their overseas domains and generally exercised greater power overseas than at home. Such great empires required innovation and revision of governmental institutions. The struggles over boundaries in the New World agitated the European courts and more than once threw European diplomacy into a crisis. Art, music, and literature sooner or later expressed Indian themes. It has been estimated that nearly 50,000 Indian words were incorporated into Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French. The New World was not simply the passive recipient of European civilization; rather it modified and changed Europe's civilization and contributed to the development of the Old World.

To adapt to their new environment, the European settlers depended heavily on the Indians and were not reticent to learn from the conquered. Initially, only Iberian males arrived. The female was noticeably rare during the first half-century of conquest. Her scarcity conferred a sexual license on the virile conquerors, who promptly took up with Indian women. As a result there appeared almost at once a "new race," the mestizo, a blend of European and Indian well adapted physically and psychologically to the land. Borrowing the essential from the diverse cultures of both parents, the mestizos accelerated the amalgamation of two cultures. However, the Indians provided more than sexual gratification. They showed the Europeans the best methods to hunt and fish, the value of the drugs the forests offered, the quickest way to clear the lands, and how to cultivate the crops of the New World. When necessary, the Europeans adopted the light boats skillfully navigated by the Indians on the inland waters and copied the methods used by the Indians to build simple, serviceable structures. As a concession to the tropics, the Europeans adopted the Indian hammock-as did the navies of the world. One early arrival to Brazil noted his delight with the hammock in these words: "Would you believe that a man could sleep suspended in a net in the air like a bunch of hanging grapes? Here this is the common thing. I slept on a mattress but my doctor advised me to sleep in a net. I tried it, and I will never again be able to sleep in a bed, so comfortable is the rest one gets in the net." In truth, the Europeans depended heavily on the Indians during the early decades of settlement in order to accommodate to the novel conditions. Thomas Turner, an Englishman who lived in Brazil for two years at the end of the sixteenth century, summed up that dependence in his observation, "The Indian is a fish in the sea and a fox in the woods, and without them a Christian is neither for pleasure or profit fit for life or living."

The Indian at first was the principal source of labor. Reluctant to engage in manual work, the conquerors and the settlers who followed them persisted in coercing others to do it for them. The Europeans forced the natives to paddle their canoes; to guide them through the interior; to plant, tend, and harvest their sugar, wheat, tobacco, and cotton; to guard their cattle and sheep; to mine their gold and silver; and to wait upon them in their homes. In short, the Indians were the instruments by which wealth was created in the new colonies and as such were indispensable to the Europeans.

When the Indian proved inadequate or where his numbers were insufficient, particularly in the Caribbean and Brazil, the colonists began to look elsewhere for their labor supply. Soon their attention focused on Africa as the most likely source for labor. At that moment the black was introduced into the New World.

THE AFRICAN

Africa, the second largest continent, offers extremes of contrasts: mountains and savannas, deserts and jungles. Three impressive river networks, the Nile, Congo, and Zambesi, add to the variety. The relatively small population contributes further to the diversity. Divided into hundreds of tribes, their cultures range from the primitive through the sophisticated. The improving quality and greater quantity of studies of the African past reveal that many groups developed highly complex societies. The base of the social structure was the family. Many of the societies were rigidly hierarchical. Kings ruled the tribes, and in the larger and more complex societies did so through chiefs and subchiefs. The economy was agricultural but many artistic and mechanical skills were well developed: woodcarving, bronzework, basketry, gold smithing, weaving, and iron- working. One European visitor to the Gambia Coast marveled, "The blacksmiths make all sorts of tools and instruments for tillage, etc. as also weapons and armour, being indifferent skillful at hardening of iron, and whetting it on common stones." Trade was carried on in organized markets. Indeed, commerce was well developed on local and regional levels and in some instances reached transcontinental proportions.

Repeated invasions by the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs brought foreigners to Africa as early as 1100 B.C The fall of Ceuta in 1415 heralded new European incursions. The commercial potential-gold, ivory, cotton, and spices-attracted the Europeans who soon enough discovered that the black man himself was the continent's most valuable export. Between 1441 and 1443, the Portuguese began to transport the blacks to Europe for sale. It was only by such force that the blacks left their continent.

From the very beginning, some blacks from the Iberian peninsula participated in the explorations and conquests of the Americas. It is believed that the first African slaves reached the New World as early as 1502. Later, the slave trade, carried on with the sanction of the Iberian monarchs, brought large numbers of blacks directly from Africa to the New World. Probably the first shipments of slaves arrived in Cuba in 1512 and in Brazil in 1538, and they continued until Brazil abolished its slave trade in 1850 and Spain finally terminated the slave trade to Cuba in 1866. A majority of the three million slaves sold into Spanish America and five million into Brazil over a period of approximately three centuries came from the west coast of Africa between the Ivory Coast and South Africa. Blacks could be found in all parts of Latin America and formed a large part of the population. They quickly became and remained the major work force in the Caribbean and in Brazil. Their presence dominated the plantations which they worked and their influence spread quickly to the "big house" where the African women served as cooks, wet nurses, and companions of the lady of the house, while the black children romped with white children. African influence also permeated the cities where the blacks worked as domestic servants, peddlers, mechanics, and artisans. In the sixteenth century, blacks outnumbered whites in Lima, Mexico City, and Salvador da Bahia, the three principal cities of the Western Hemisphere.

Handicapped by the removal of all their possessions when taken into slavery, the Africans, uprooted and brutalized, still were able to contribute handsomely to the formation of a unique civilization in the New World. First and foremost was the black himself: his strength, his skill, and his intelligence. He utilized his former skills and his intelligence permitted him to master new ones quickly. In fact, he soon exercised-and in some cases perfected-all the trades and crafts of the Europeans. Visitors to the Caribbean and Brazil remarked on the diversity of skills mastered and practiced by the blacks. They were masons, carpenters, smithies, lithographers, sculptors, artists, locksmiths, cabinetmakers, jewelers, and cobblers. Around the plantations and in the cities, those black craftsmen, artisans, and mechanics became an indispensable ingredient in the New World society.

Herdsmen in Africa, the blacks mounted horses to become cowboys in the New World. They followed the cattle into the Brazilian hinterlands and helped to occupy the rich platine pampas. In these, as well as other ways, they participated in the conquest and settlement of the interior. In Brazil after the discovery of gold, the blacks were transported into Minas Gerais to mine the gold which created the Luso-Brazilian prosperity of the eighteenth century. In fact, they allegedly introduced the wooden pan into the gold-washing process to improve it. From the plantations and mines, they helped to transport the raw products of the land to the ports where other blacks loaded the wealth of Latin America onto ships which carried it to the markets of Europe. The blacks were even expected to defend the system which exploited them. In doing so, they sacrificed their blood to protect the Luso-Spanish empires at Havana, San Juan, Cartagena, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere.

The blacks possessed a leadership talent which the slave system never fully tapped. It became evident when the runaway slaves organized their own communities, known variously as palenques or cumbes in Spanish America and quilombos in Brazil, or when slaves revolted against their masters. The extent of those slave rebellions is still unknown and awaits the careful investigation of future scholars. An authority on the blacks in Mexico points out that black slave revolts occurred there in 1537, 1546, 1570, 1608, 1609, 1611, 1612, and 1670. One viceroy informed his monarch that the blacks in New Spain sought "to buy their liberty with the lives of their masters." According to our present knowledge, most of the slave revolts in Brazil took place in the early nineteenth century. Between 1807 and 1835, there were nine revolts or attempted revolts. Brilliant black leadership directed the slaves to freedom in Haiti, a story considered later along with the other independence movements.

Mixing with both European and Indian, the Africans contributed their blood to the accelerating racial mixture of the New World. Mulattoes, the cross of white and black, sambos, the cross of Indian and black, and myriad other interracial types resulting from the combination of the mixed descendants of white, black, and Indian appeared immediately after the introduction of the African slaves. Illustrative of the extent of the mixture of white and black was the population of Salvador da Bahia at the end of the colonial period. In 1803, the city boasted of a population of approximately 100,000, of which 40,000 were black, 30,000 white, and another 30,000 mulatto. The Brazilian social historian Gilberto Freyre once remarked, "Every Brazilian, even the fairest blond, bears in his soul, if not in both his soul and body-for there are many in Brazil whose whiteness hides a tint of black dye-the shadow, or at least the imprint, of the Negro."

It would be difficult to think of any activity concerned with the formation and development of society in Latin America in which the blacks did not participate. Few institutions were more fundamental to or stronger in Latin American society than the Church, which proved not to be immune to African influences. The blacks helped to smooth away some of the asceticism of churchgoing by enlivening some of the religious festivals. They drew them out into the streets and enhanced them with folkplays, dances, and music. Much of the contribution was rooted in syncretism by which they sought to fuse their own beliefs with those of the Roman Catholic Church. They did, in fact, develop a syncretized religion, still very visible in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil. Wherever the Africans went in the New World, they modified the culinary and dietary habits of those around them. Many of the rice and bean dishes so common in Latin America have African origins. Yams, okras, cola nuts, and palm oil are but a few of the contributions of the African cooks. They also employed new utensils in the kitchen, such as the wooden spoon and the mortar and pestle. The Africans introduced thousands of words into the Spanish and Portuguese languages and helped to soften the pronunciation of both. Their proverbs, riddles, tales, and myths mixed with those of Europeans and Indians to form the richly varied folklore of Latin America. The music, whether classical or popular, bears the imprint of African melodies. The blacks continued to sing the songs they remembered from their homelands and to accompany themselves they introduced a wide range of percussion instruments. With the music went dances. The samba, frevo, and merengue descend from African imports.

With the forced migration of the blacks to the New World, the racial tryptich-Mongoloid, Caucasian, and Negroid-was complete. Each contributed to the formation of a unique civilization representing a blend of the three. Overlaying that civilization were some powerful institutions imported unchanged from the Iberian Peninsula.