Transcript
The Shore Has a History
April 26, 1607 → 1561
Before dawn on April 26, 1607, three English ships reached the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and a young colonist named George Percy wrote:
George Percy …about foure a clocke in the morning, wee descried the Land of Virginia…
That night, as the English walked back to their boats at Cape Henry, men came down from the hills and shot arrows at them. The arrows badly wounded two men before English gunfire drove the attackers back into the woods.
The English were not the first Europeans to sail into this bay.
Forty-six years earlier, in 1561, a Spanish ship had stopped here, and a young man named Paquiquineo sailed away on it. Spain baptized him in Mexico City, renamed him Don Luis, and took nine years to bring him home.
He finally came home in 1570 with a group of Spanish missionaries, and within days he left them. That winter, he and other men from the bay killed the missionaries, and nobody knows exactly why.
A Passage Home
1561–1566 · later testimony, from 1568
In September 1561, Paquiquineo reached Seville, the river port where the fleets from Spain's American colonies unloaded their silver.
Compasses, better maps and sturdier ships had made regular ocean crossings possible. Spain kept sending them for silver and gold, for Catholic converts, and to stay ahead of rival kingdoms.
King Philip II received him at court in Madrid and sent him home with a group of Dominican friars. The friars took him first to New Spain, Spain's colony in Mexico, and he stayed there for four years.
In Mexico City he fell gravely ill, and at his baptism he took the name of the viceroy, Don Luis de Velasco. To Spanish officials, a baptized man from the Chesapeake was a guide who could lead missionaries to his people.
After 1492, Spanish ships carried plants, animals and diseases between the Americas and the rest of the world, after thousands of years apart. Spaniards brought wheat, cattle, horses and pigs to the Americas, and maize and potatoes traveled the other way, to Europe, Africa and Asia. Those American crops fed millions over the following centuries, but the diseases struck at once.
Smallpox reached Mexico in 1520, where no one had ever had it, and a Spanish friar named Motolinía later described what it did:
Toribio de Benavente Many others died of starvation, because, as they were all taken sick at once, they could not care for each other…
The epidemic struck Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, during its war with Cortés, who took the city in 1521 with many Native allies.
For sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, European traders bought captives from West African rulers and merchants and shipped them across the Atlantic. Epidemics made Native workers scarce, and the profits from sugar kept the slave trade growing for centuries. Pick one crossing to see who gained from it and who paid.
Miles Philips, an English sailor left ashore in Mexico in 1568, later described who did the work there:
Miles Philips …serued by Indians weekly, and by Negroes which be their slaues during their life.
Native workers served by the week, while enslaved Africans served for life.
After the conquest, the Spanish crown rewarded colonists with encomiendas, grants of the tribute and labor of Native towns. In return they were supposed to protect those towns and teach them Christianity, but in practice they forced the people to work.
Native and African workers also dug silver, New Spain's richest export, at mines like Zacatecas, north of Mexico City. Their Spanish masters later sent Philips and other English prisoners to the mines as overseers of the Native and African workers, and he wrote:
Miles Philips · on the silver mines In which mines many of vs did profite and gaine greatly…
Spain shipped the silver home, where it paid for wars and imports and passed into the hands of merchants and bankers across Europe.
Move through Mexico from 1519 to 1566 and watch conquest, epidemics and forced labor strike one after another.
In Mexico City, Paquiquineo lived among Spaniards, Native people and Africans, and many of their children had mixed ancestry. Colonists ranked everyone by ancestry in a caste system, and they put Spaniards at the top. Colonists usually ranked a mestizo, a child of Spanish and Native parents, below Spaniards but above Native people and Africans.
Native towns still chose their own leaders, ran their own markets and sued Spanish colonists in the king's courts. Many workers ran away, and Philips wrote that Native and African laborers watched every day for a chance to escape. The colony could not run without their work, and that gave them room to bargain.
The Bay He Couldn't Find
1565–1566
In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Spain's new governor of Florida, wanted to build a fort on Paquiquineo's bay. Like many Europeans, he hoped a waterway across North America led to the Pacific, which the Spanish called the South Sea.
Menéndez · letter of October 15, 1565 And if this arm of the sea, as is certainly believed, does go to the South Sea, it is near China…
There was no such waterway, and China was about seven thousand miles away.
Menéndez also had a rival to drive out: France had planted a colony of French Protestants in Florida, on land Catholic Spain claimed. In 1565 he destroyed their fort, and at Matanzas Inlet he ordered the killing of French Protestants who had surrendered.
In August 1566, Menéndez sent Paquiquineo north with two Dominican friars and a group of soldiers, and his orders counted on Paquiquineo's word:
Menéndez · his written orders …all the people of that territory are his friends and the vassals of his three brothers.
Menéndez had never seen the bay, so the whole plan rested on a young man who had been away from it for five years.
Contrary winds kept the ship out of the bay, so it landed farther south, and after a hurricane it sailed for Spain with Paquiquineo aboard. He spent the next few years in Spain, waiting for another chance to go home.
No Soldiers
1570
He got that chance in 1570, when Jesuits, priests and brothers of a Catholic missionary order, set out to found a mission on his bay. They sailed from Santa Elena, Spain's small outpost in what is now South Carolina, with Paquiquineo as their guide. Their leader, Father Juan Baptista de Segura, chose to bring no soldiers, so the mission depended on Paquiquineo and his people.
Brother Juan de la Carrera, who kept the outpost's stores, had doubted the plan from the start, and thirty years later he wrote:
Carrera · recalling 1570, in 1600 …the Indian did not satisfy me, and judging from what he had told me, I saw that he was a liar.
Segura went ahead anyway, and he brought along a boy from Santa Elena, Alonso de Olmos, to serve Mass.
Risen from the Dead
September 1570–February 1571
In September 1570, the Jesuits landed on the Chesapeake, in a region the Spanish called Ajacán, and Paquiquineo was home after nine years. The mission's second priest, Father Luis de Quirós, described the welcome in a letter:
Luis de Quirós They seemed to think that Don Luis had risen from the dead and come down from heaven
But the country he came home to had changed while he was gone.
Luis de Quirós We find the land of Don Luis in quite another condition than expected…
Luis de Quirós …not because he was at fault in his description of it, but because Our Lord has chastised it with six years of famine and death
Quirós wrote that fewer people lived there, but their leaders wished to die where their fathers had died and begged the Jesuits to stay.
The Jesuits' food was running low, so Segura added a plea to the letter the ship carried back to Cuba:
Juan Baptista de Segura send us with all speed a shipload of grain, but no other trifles
At first, people the Jesuits met had shared what little they had, but Quirós noticed a change:
Luis de Quirós now they are reluctant when they see they receive no trinkets for their ears of corn.
In a hungry year, the bay's farmers wanted trade goods for their corn, the way Native towns had long traded with one another.
In 1572, a Jesuit named Juan Rogel wrote down what Alonso told him about those first days:
Juan Rogel · letter, August 28, 1572 Don Luis abandoned them, since he did not sleep in their hut more than two nights…
Paquiquineo had gone to live with his relatives, and the Jesuits had lost their guide and interpreter.
Without an interpreter, the Jesuits struggled to get food from their neighbors and spent a hungry winter. Segura sent for Paquiquineo more than once, but he stayed away.
In February 1571, Segura sent Quirós and two companions to bring Paquiquineo back. On the way back, Paquiquineo and other men killed all three, and a few days later they killed everyone left at the mission except Alonso.
A local chief protected Alonso and offered him a home:
Juan Rogel · reporting Alonso, 1572 The chief told the boy to stay and he would treat him well and hold him as a son.
Alonso lived with the bay's people for the next year and a half.
The Account
August 1572
In August 1572, Menéndez came back to the bay with soldiers and a Jesuit priest, Juan Rogel. His men seized several local men, including Paquiquineo's uncle, a chief, and offered to free them in exchange for Alonso.
Two Native men brought Alonso to the ship, and Rogel wrote that the boy had changed:
Juan Rogel · letter, August 28, 1572 He is very fluent in the language and had almost forgotten his Spanish.
Before sailing back to port, the pilot steered toward a crowd on the shore as if to talk, then ordered his men to fire.
Juan Rogel · letter, August 28, 1572 I believe many of them were killed, and this was done without any knowledge of mine until it happened.
Rogel was writing to his Jesuit superior, and he made sure to say the shooting was not his doing.
Menéndez demanded that the captives' people hand over Paquiquineo and his brothers, but none of them ever came in. According to accounts written years later, Rogel baptized the captives, with Alonso translating, and then Menéndez hanged them from the ship's rigging.
Paquiquineo stayed out of Spanish hands, and no one knows what became of him. In Mexico, Spain had conquered an empire and set its people to work, but on this bay it could not keep one small mission alive. Spain never planted another mission or colony on the Chesapeake.
Another Arrival
1606–1607
Thirty-five years later, in April 1607, three English ships sailed into the same bay.
A joint-stock company, the Virginia Company of London, had paid for the voyage by selling shares to investors. King James I gave the company a charter, but private investors put up the money, sharing the risk and any profit. American silver fed Europe's shift from feudalism, where wealth meant land, toward capitalism, where people invested money to make more.
King James's charter of 1606 let the company settle Virginia lands that were, in its words, not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People To the English crown, land that no Christian prince or people held was open to claim, though Native nations had farmed there for centuries.
The company even told the settlers which river to choose, because the English, like Menéndez, still hoped for a water route to the Pacific:
Newport · reading the Company's 1606 instructions make Choise of that which bendeth most towards the northwest for that way shall You soonest find the other Sea
Four days after the attack at Cape Henry, the English rowed ashore at Kecoughtan, a town near the mouth of the James River. Kecoughtan was one of about thirty peoples who paid tribute to a paramount chief, Wahunsenacah, whom the English called Powhatan.
George Percy of their bread which they make of their Maiz or Gennea wheat, they would not suffer us to eat unlesse we sate down
That same week, men on this bay had attacked the English, and here the people of Kecoughtan made them sit down to share corn bread.
Like Menéndez and the Jesuits before them, the English soon came to depend on the bay's people for corn and for guides. By 1607, Atlantic voyages had transformed the Americas through disease, conquest and forced labor, but Native nations still limited what Europeans could do.
Pick the claim about disease, forced labor and Native power that you could best defend with evidence.
Then test it: sort the evidence, from smallpox in 1520 to Kecoughtan in 1607, into what changed and what limited the change.