The contexts of conquest
Patricia Seed’s Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640, achieves two goals simultaneously. First, the author has crafted an admirably brief synthesis of the motives and methods of the five European powers who played significant roles in the exploration and conquest of the Americas: the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. Second, and equally important, Seed delineates the various ways in which the European representatives (official and unofficial, as it were) in the New World interacted with and interpreted the motives of the others. She promotes a simple, common sense idea that nevertheless needed to be explicitly states, at least to this reader: the “ceremonies of possession” were not so much to impress the indigenous inhabitants, but to make a statement to their own governments and those of their rivals.
We’ve seen this before, of course, with Cortes and the creation of the cabildo. The Veracruz cabildo was established to justify the presence and actions of Cortes and his men; it had nothing to do with the Mexica or Tlascalans. These ceremonies were sometimes preordained by the European governments, as in the case of Columbus, who had been given precise instructions. Others simply operated on the fly, as it were, and drew on their own experience and instincts to create ceremonies of possession where none existed. Seed’s point is clear: there was no “European” in North or South America, only an Englishman, Spaniard, et cetera. While the five European powers operated with similar tools (such as ships and cannons) “they did not share a common understanding of even the political objectives of military action” (3). While one is tempted to quip that similar problems can be witnessed in our own time, Patricia Seed’s comment serves to illustrate the truly unprecedented nature of the Conquest.
The intersection of ceremony, language, and law enabled the infant colonial “institutions” to create both authority and legitimacy—two different but mutually dependent things with different manifestations form each colonial power. The English, according to Seed, found legitimization in the altering of the landscape; physical inhabitation and “improvement” of the land gave legitimacy to its acquisition (32). The Portuguese, on the other hand, had adopted many of the celestial navigation knowledge form the Arab World, and pioneered much knowledge of their own, alone among the powers of Europe. In short, the Portuguese believed they had intellectually earned the right to conquest (133).
Throughout, Seed writes in an easygoing, lucid style. It is not difficult to see why this book is now in its 13th printing. Even the geographical and astronomical explanations are written plainly, free of jargon. There is one problem with the book, however, although I am unable to determine its significance. Throughout, Seed claims that the ceremonies of possession were mutually unintelligible among the European colonial powers, de to difference in language and culture, among other things. This was no doubt true to a degree. After all, the Dutch viewed the world very differently than the Spanish. However, I wonder if she may not be oversimplifying in order to sustain her argument. Most educated Europeans of the time were at least moderately multilingual, and mariners, at least, have a language and vocabulary of their own—the reason the Genoese Columbus could make himself intelligible in any sailor’s bar in the Mediterranean. Just because Europeans approached possession and justification differently form other Europeans, and considered their methods along to be authentic, does not necessarily mean that the actions of others were completely baffling to them.
Or does it? I don’t pretend to know. I do know that this book, on this reading at least, struck me as valuable and intriguing, and certainly worth re-examining in the future.
