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.21The strategy of dividing natives against each other would be theprincipal means by which all European conquerors would initiatetheir pillage and depredations, in the Americas and the rest ofthe world.The story of Spanish conquest, and of the Portuguese in Brazil,the Dutch in Guyana and what is now New York, the French in theCaribbean and Canada and the British throughout North America,follows essentially the same plot.As the peoples of the Americaswere subjugated, their lands taken and their riches carried off, theEuropeans intensified their own murderous rivalries with each other,all aimed at further conquests throughout the planet.While theSpanish would be the first Europeans to establish colonies in NorthAmerica in Florida and the southwest it was of course, theBritish who put their cultural, linguistic and imperial stamp uponwhat would become the United States.Scandinavians had beaten Columbus to the New World arrivingin what is now Greenland and Canada centuries before he did,but those colonies disappeared for reasons that remain open tospeculation perhaps warfare with the natives, or inability to adaptto climate change, or both.After 1492 numerous mariners stoppedat various points along the North American coast, trading withnatives, kidnapping many as slaves and depositing their germs.FACED WITH ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DISRUPTION AT HOME,THE BRITISH JOIN THE GAME OF EMPIREAt fi rst natives of North America were not concerned about thenewcomers, seeing them as weak and incapable of surviving in BY THE SWORD WE SEEK PEACE 27their attempted settlements, but also as treacherous.In fact, theSpanish attempted to establish a colony very near to what wouldlater become the first British colony of Jamestown, but were drivenoff.Like the Tlaxcaltecs of Mexico, the peoples encountered bythe British in their fi rst colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts the Powhatan and Wampanoag attempted to use the coloniststo advantage in their own relations with rival tribes.As was thecase in Mexico and Peru, the British were quite successful in theirstrategy of divide and rule.Though the assistance of natives was atfirst crucial to British colonists very survival, the newcomers, whoeventually came in overwhelming numbers, ended up defeating andexploiting friend and foe alike.Despite their initial assurances tothe natives that they wished to live side by side in peace with them,dispossessing savages from their ancestral lands was the colonialintent from the beginning.In his narrative of the Jamestown settlement, Captain JohnSmith said that he told Wahunsonacock, whom the British calledPowhatan, as they also called the people he led, that the colonists hadcome only temporarily to repair ships.But the Virginia Companywas a joint-stock, profiteering enterprise, a forebear of the moderncorporation, and the colonists carried with them specific instructionsthat they were to establish a permanent settlement in order tochallenge Spain s Catholic empire.23 The British were latecomersto Atlantic empire.Indeed, Columbus had approached the Britishcrown for funds to make his transatlantic crossing but had beenturned away.A century after Columbus, Cortez and Pizarro, Britainwas contesting Spain and France for mastery of the Caribbean,establishing plantations and naval bases in Jamaica, the Bahamasand other islands, and employing piracy against Spanish galleonscarrying the loot plundered from Mexico and Peru.The Spanishhad already established a permanent colony at San Augustin (St.Augustine) Florida, and the French were in control of the St.Lawrence River and south-eastern Canada, and one goal of theBritish was to pre-empt these two enemies.Religion was a factor since England had rejected the papacyand Catholicism and had turned toward many different strandsof Protestantism, and much rhetoric was expended in the claimthat Protestant Britain had a mission to bring the true faith to theheathen and impede the reach of Catholicism.Puritanism wouldbecome especially important in the British colonies of New Englandand would put an indelible stamp upon the American nationalpsyche
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