Born in Blood and Fire

would decline, and in a hurry. Spanish colonization was a schizophrenic enterprise, driven first by the search for treasure, then in a quest for slaves, and later taking on a missionary cast.

The slave trade and the new diseases destroyed whole American Indian nations. Enslaved Indians died. To replace the dying Haitians, the Spanish imported tens of thousands more Indians from the Bahamas, which “are now deserted,” in the words of the Spanish historian Peter Martyr, reporting in 1516.71

The world’s newly discovered lands were thus to be divided between two Catholic nations, Portugal and Spain. Yet other newcomers had quite different ideas. From the early sixteenth century onward, two other rising Atlantic powers, Britain and Holland, both part of the Reformation that rejected papal authority, aggressively contested the papal treat