Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Read Online Free PDF

learn that he `proclaimed a Parliament', after which `Mutezuma and the burgesses of Parliament in order yielded themselves for vassals of the King of Castile, promising loyalty'."
    A few years later, Richard Hakluyt the younger, who had emerged as the principal promoter and propagandist of English overseas empire, reminded the readers of his Principall Navigations how `Hernando Cortes, being also but a private gentleman of Spain ... took prisoner that mighty Emperor Mutezuma in his most chief and famous city of Mexico, which at that instant had in it above the number of 500,000 Indians at the least, and in short time after obtained not only the quiet possession of the said city, but also of his whole Empire."3 The taking of possession had hardly been `short' or `quiet', but Hakluyt's message was clear enough.
    A few Elizabethans were coming to realize, as Cortes himself had realized after observing the devastation by his compatriots of the islands they had ravaged in the Caribbean, that the acquisition of empire demanded a firm commitment to settle and colonize. The preface to John Florio's 1580 English translation of Jacques Cartier's account of his discovery of Canada (New France) informed English readers that `the Spaniards never prospered or prevailed but where they planted';14 and in his Discourse of Western Planting of 1584 Richard Hakluyt cited with approbation Gomara's remarks on the folly of Cortes's predecessor, Juan de Grijalva, who, on reaching the coast of Yucatan, failed to found a settlement.'5 In that same year an English expedition identified Roanoke Island, off the coast of what was later to become North Carolina, as a base for privateering attacks on the Spanish West Indies. But Walter Raleigh, for one, saw its potential as a base not only for privateering but also for colonization, and in the following year Roanoke was to become the setting for England's first serious, although ultimately abortive, attempt at transatlantic settlement (fig. 4).16
    Although Raleigh's Roanoke colony ended in failure, it would provide valuable lessons for the more sustained Jacobean programme of colonization that was to begin with Christopher Newport's expedition of 1606-7. But the loss of the colony meant that, lacking any base in the Americas, Newport's expedition, unlike that of Cortes, had to be organized and financed from the home country. The Cortes expedition had been funded in part by Diego Velazquez out of his resources as governor of Cuba, and in part by private deals between Cortes and two wealthy islanders who advanced him supplies on credit. 17 The Newport expedition was financed and organized by a London-based joint-stock company, the Virginia Company, which received its charter from James VI and I in April 1606, granting it exclusive rights to settle the Chesapeake Bay area of the American mainland. Under the same charter a Plymouth-based company was given colonizing rights further to the north. Although funding was provided by the investors, many of whom were City merchants, the appointment of a thirteenman royal council with regulatory powers gave the Company the assurance of state backing for its enterprise.18
    Where Cortes, therefore, was nominally serving under the orders of the royal governor of Cuba, from whom he broke free at the earliest opportunity, Newport was a company employee. The company chose more wisely than the governor of Cuba. Cortes was too clever, and too ambitious, to be content with playing second string. His father, an Extremaduran hidalgo, or minor nobleman, had fought in the campaign against the Moors to reconquer southern Spain. The son, who learnt Latin and seems to have mastered the rudiments of the law while a student in Salamanca, made the Atlantic crossing in 1506, at the age of twenty-two.19 When Cortes left for the Indies it was hardly his intention to serve out his life as a public notary. Like every impoverished hidalgo he aspired to fame and fortune, and is said to have