440-year-old document sheds new light on native population decline under Spanish colonial rule

[R. Alan Covey, Geoff Childs, and Rebecca Kippen, "Dynamics of Indigenous Demographic Fluctuations: Lessons from Sixteenth-Century Cusco, Peru." Current Anthropology 52:3 (June 2011).]

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The disasters started before the Spanish got there, particularly the plague of hanta virus.

The English loved to write about how brutal the Spanish were, with the result that we don't know how rigid their colonial administrators really were.

Under the English on the Eastern Seaboard, about 95% of the Indians were dead by 1648 and there all the colonial administrators were either pirates, religious fanatics or merry bands of homosexuals (friends of King James).

Speaking of the Spanish and old documents...

I was under the impression that the French, Spanish, Scottish and Irish all intermarried with the natives, but the English were tee pee crawlers.

Don't know if that is true or not, but there are an awful lot of people with native blood and not that many with English surnames!

The earliest ships here generally didn't carry women. If you needed women you dealt with the natives or pirates.

Pirates had women. Actually, they may have had quite a substantial settlement in Maryland in the early 1600s. A partial "census" revealed up to 20,000 Europeans there as the struggling English colony of Jametown got into business.

BTW, about 90% of the early immigrants to Jamestown died of disease. There's a hill there with 60,000 burials from that period.

That's only marginally better than the Indian survival rate from the same diseases and conditions.

A Spaniard named Cruz kept a diary of his life in Jamestown. He'd earlier been at the Spanish settlement on the James River, and when that town closed down he moved to Jamestown (and became an Episcopal and settled there).

His situation was considered quite normal. As we recall all the Protestants in Europe were, at that time, working with the Spanish to stop the Turks from taking the Balkans, and moving into Austria. They were all buddy-buddy.

Even John Smith had been a POW under the Turks. then they held the 30 years war and that reshuffled the decks.

Historical Review: Megadrought And Megadeath In 16th Century Mexico (Hemorrhagic Fever)

Someone posted here recently that the Calvinist Hungarians were in league with the Turks against Austria.

Juan Hanchocas what the other hand is doing.

They're always mixing up the Protestants with the Transylvanians ~ hey, the Transylvanians were the Protestants. Vlad the Impaler was Catholic but he was supposed to be Orthodox.

Did you realize the amount of propaganda generated about that guy just because he elected to not attend church where other people told him to?

I don't believe a thing non-hunkies say about hunkies ~

Recently i've been looking at a number of geographic locations in North America that have my surname in whole or in part in their official name.

Examining those spots, and taking a good look at where we know early ancestors (1600/1700s folks) made permanent encampments or habitations, I noticed a pattern forming ~ you could draw a line from one to the other and along a number of those lines there were Spanish boundary stones ~ or other mysterious stones with evidence of human finishing or carving done more than a couple of centuries ago.

We all know that the English and French (and their allies) began settling the Eastern Seaboard (St. Lawrence Valley, Maritines, New England, New York, Virginia and the Carolanas) just about the same time ~ early 1600s.

I figured the mysterious line I found probably had something to do with whatever it was that resulted in Europeans other than the Spanish and Portuguese having a right to settle in North America.

So, I looked up 1600 Spain and found Philip II King of Spain. This guy was essentially the richest man in the world. He'd sent two main armadas against England in earlier wars, and maybe sent five other smaller armadas. He'd certainly had a bad attitude toward England.

He'd actually been King of England for a while when he was married to Queen Mary, but she died. Elizabeth was the next one up, and then James, and Philip II actually asked Elizabeth to marry him.

She turned him down.

Well, one thing led to the other and Philip found his attention focused on the Eastern Mediterranean. He thought it was time to clear the seas of Moslem navies and figured out a way to dispose of the Ottoman navy.

The technique was simple. First, he created what became known as the Holy League as a mutual treaty with Venice. That allowed OTHER EUROPEANS, all of whom had had run-ins with Philip II and his armies and navies, to participate in what came next. All the Mediterranean nationstates able to participate did so, but France didn't

The Holy League sent ships and soldiers.

Next, he undertook to destroy the entire Ottoman main fleet and did so at the Battle of Lepanto. The forces of the Holy League had gathered earlier at Messina.

Philip had also inherited the title of King of Jerusalem from his father, ~ and that had come down through the family all the way back to Geoffrey of Bouillion who led a sucessful Crusade to drive the Seljuk Turks out of the Levant.

That was a good 550 years or so earlier, but a significant "sign" ~ certainly to Philip but also to the Turks!

Immediately following Philip II was Philip III of Spain, who is usually identified as Philip II of Portugual. Reading through voluminous sources about these two men it's pretty obvious they are frequently confounded into one Philip with two bodies.

Wiki says of him in a lead in: "The Treaty of London, signed on 18 August O.S. (28 August N.S.) 1604 ...... concluded the nineteen-year Anglo-Spanish War. The negotiations took place at Somerset House in London and are sometimes known as the Somerset House Conference. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, her successor James I quickly sought to end the long and draining conflict. Philip III of Spain, who also had inherited the war from his predecessor, Philip II, warmly welcomed the offer and ordered the commencement of the difficult negotiations that followed.

With Henry IV in charge in France, warfare in italy exterminated, and in general a bankrupt treasury in Spain, peace reigned, and it was possible to move ahead to divide and develop North America.

Spain gave up the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia North to Nova Scotia to England (and Scotland). Preparations were made to memorialize a boundary along the highest points in the Eastern Cordillera called the Appalachian mountains. Two companies were formed ~ one for the South from roughly Northern Florida to the Virginia/North Carolina line. (which was wiped out by the Tuscarora and Cherokee in 2 years time), and another for the North from the Virginia/North Carolina border area all the way to Maine (aka Acadia). They planted a number of boundary stones. I know of two that've been identified, and there are probable locations for several others that I'm aware of.

The Northern Boundary between Britain and France was drawn along the St Lawrence, but any memorialization there was up to the Brits and French and I am unaware of them taking any pains to do that ~ which means it probably wasn't done.

The Spanish border with France was placed along the Ohio River. Yet other boundary markers were placed, again by the Spanish.

A note on this practice ~ for the preceding 9 centuries Spanish kings and nobles had been in the practice of placing large numbers of boundary stones around their domains and estates lest future litigation result in a loss. They'd found a well-marked border paid major dividends. With principalities changing hands between Moslems and Christians numerous times over the centuries, everybody knew what was at stake if you couldn't identify your property lines.

So, the Spanish marked boundaries even in raw unpopulated wilderness. This wasn't to warn off trespassers ~ more to prepare evidence for use in court!

This gets us to the rest of the Spanish and French boundaries. The Spanish ran the line to the confluence of the Mississippi/Ohio with the Upper Mississippi/Missouri rivers, and ran the line right on up to a spot they may or may not have seen themselves ~ near lake Itasca. Spain claimed everything on the Left Bank for themselves, and South of the portion called the Ohio River. From lake itasca they ran the line DUE NORTH through what is now Kensington, Minnesota.

Well darned!

We know where that one is, right?

Avoiding the drainage area of the Great Lakes (French territory), they then ran a line all the way to the 55th Parallel on a roughly NW direction (which I take to be magnetic North ~ although their earlier work in Minnesota from Itasca to Kensington certainly indicated they could certainly find true North as well.

If King Philip III's surveyors actually marked the lines up through the Prairies into what is now Northern Saskatchewan that'd make their trip one of the great treks of history.

We don't know all that much about that journey but the Spaniards did mark the boundary between New Spain and the English colonial areas, Marking the other lines may have been difficult, but there are signs that they did it.