Spanish Seaborne Empire by John Horace Parry

Author:John Horace Parry [Parry, John Horace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307822857
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-05T06:00:00+00:00

PART III • THE COST OF EMPIRE

CHAPTER 11

Demographic catastrophe

IN EVERY province of the Indies the European invasion was followed by a steep decline in the numbers of the native population. In the greater Antillean islands the decline began very shortly after the invasion and was clearly perceptible to Spanish observers within a decade or so of the first settlements. Missionary chroniclers attributed the high death-rate to ill-treatment and over-work. They hoped that legislation and stricter royal control would arrest the decline. Both missionaries and officials were struck by what they described as the physical weakness of the Tainos. They thought that a stronger race would be better able to bear the labour of cultivation and gold-washing, and for this reason advocated the import of African slaves to ease the burden upon the natives. Their hopes were disappointed. Within a century the Indian population of the greater islands was extinct.

On the mainland the conquistadores found, to all appearance, stronger peoples. Cortés and his companions were greatly struck by the warlike prowess of the Aztecs and their tributaries, and by the remarkable feats of Indian runners in carrying messages between the coast and the capital. In the area which became New Spain—roughly the area between the isthmus of Tehuántepec and the Chichimec frontier running in a sagging curve from Pánuco to Culiacán—the inhabitants at the time of the conquest formed sophisticated, settled, highly regimented societies, vastly different from the small and primitive groups in the islands. To the invaders the population appeared not only strong and well organised but also very numerous. All the early Spanish accounts stress the size of the towns and their proximity one to another, especially on the shores of the lake of Texcoco, the crowds thronging the markets, the streams of passers-by on the causeways, the great fleets of canoes on the lake. The lake-side towns, it is true, with their fertile chinampas and their abundant tribute income, were exceptional; but the countryside also was populous. Indian peasants lived on a simple and monotonous diet, consisting chiefly of maize; they had no domestic animals of consequence, and ate very little meat. Maize is a productive crop, and on such a diet two or three acres of reasonably good land sufficed to maintain an average family. Moreover, the methods of intensive hoe cultivation made it possible to till marginal land, which with more developed tools would have been unusable. Most cultivable land was in fact cultivated. Throughout most of the area, except in parts too high, rough and steep even for hoe cultivation, all the evidence indicates an extremely dense rural population; denser, indeed, in many places than it is today. Peasants were confined to a low level of subsistence, not only by pressure of population on land but also by the tribute exactions of their local nobilities and of the Aztec triple alliance, which took from them most of their surplus of food and almost all their production of valuable goods such as cotton cloth and cacao.

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