During the 15th and 16th centuries Puerto Rico remained a second-rate colony as the Spanish focused their attention on their more lucrative holdings in the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru.
Before contact with Europeans, at least thirty thousand Taino inhabited Puerto Rico. The island seems to have been the cultural hearth for the eastern Taino. The ancestors of the Taino first reached the island around 200 B. c. The ceremonial ballgame played by the Taino seems to have begun on Puerto Rico. They also built substantial dance courts and ceremonial temples. Petroglyphs often adorned large stones that lined the dance and ball courts, and in some cases they carved effigies of their gods on these stones. The Taino also built roadways as their population expanded into the interior to make transportation and communication easier.
Christopher Columbus first landed on the smallest member of the Greater Antilles in November 1493. The first colonization of the island began in 1508, when Juan Ponce de Leon brought 42 colonists to the island and founded the village of Caparra. Immediately there was a dispute over who controlled Puerto Rico. In 1511 the highest Spanish court, the Consejo de Castilla, gave administration of the colony to Diego Columbus. He sold his interest in the colony to the Crown in 1536, and over time Native labor assignments, disease, and abortive rebellions significantly reduced the Taino population on the island. The Crown used civilian authorities to administer to the colony from 1545 to 1564, and in 1564 a captain-general was put in command of Puerto Rico. San Juan, the capital of the colony, experienced constant raids and threats from Dutch, English, and French privateers, with the worst attacks coming in 1595 and 1598 by the English and in 1625 by the Dutch.
The colony’s economy depended upon the mining of placer GOLD until the 1530s, when the gold ran out, and then the island shifted to a subsistence mode. In 1512 the Spanish introduced sugar cultivation, but the colony did not have the resources to support its growth as an economic base. As a result, the colonists shifted to growing ginger in the early years and tobacco and cacao by the 1600s. It was not until the 18th century that Puerto Rico became a major sugar producer and an important cog in the Spanish colonial system.
Further reading: Helmut Blume, The Caribbean Islands, trans. Johannes Maczewski and Ann Norton (London: Longman, 1974); Arturo Morales Carrion, ed., Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1983); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (New York: Methuen, 1986); Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Fall of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).
—Dixie Ray Haggard
Purchas, Samuel (1577-1626) minister, editor A LoNdoN-based minister who edited and published travel accounts in order to encourage the English colonization of North America.
Born in Thaxted, Essex, Purchas attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, receiving his B. A. in 1597 and his M. A. in 1600. Although he held various ministerial positions, Purchas spent much of his time and energy gathering travel accounts. In 1613 he published Purchas his Pilgrimage in London, an account based on his reading of perhaps 700 distinct accounts. In his note to the reader at the front of the book, he made his intentions clear: “I here bring Religion from Paradise to the Arke,” he wrote, “and thence follow her round about the World, and (for her sake) observe the World it selfe, with the severall Countries and peoples therein; the Cheife Empires and States; their private and publique Customes; their manifold chances and changes; also the wonderfull and most remarkable effects of Nature; Events of Divine and Humane Providence, Rarities of Art; and whatsoever I find by relations of Historians, as I passe, most worthie the writing. Religion is my more proper aime, and therefore I insist longer on the description of whatsoever I finde belonging thereto).]” He then proceeded to lay out the contents of his massive book in four parts. The first part dealt with the “Relations and Theologicall discoveries of Asia, Africa, and America.” The second section included texts relating to Europe. He filled the third and fourth parts with what he called a “Christian and Ecclesiasticall Historie” from antiquity to the present. Purchas relied on 700 different sources for this book, but the text reflects his rewriting and use of these accounts. In that sense it was a dramatic departure from the strategy used earlier by the Venetian compiler GiovANNi Battista Ramusio or Purchas’s English predecessor, Richard Hakluyt the Younger.
Sometime after he completed the work for his book, Purchas met Hakluyt, who offered Purchas the use of books and manuscripts that Purchas used for a second edition of his Pilgrimage, published in London in 1614. Those loans, in addition to other materials Purchas had gathered, allowed him to draw on approximately 1,000 authorities for the second edition. He spent the mid-1610s acquiring more works, quite possibly from Hakluyt, who died on November 23, 1616. In 1617 he published the third edition of his Pilgrimage. This volume included yet more new accounts, including accounts of events during the early 1610s. His versions of travel accounts, like those that had appeared in Hakluyt’s work, shaped other commentators’ understanding of the earth. Thus, when Peter Heylyn published his Microcosmus, or a little description of the great world in Oxford in 1621, he drew much of his material from Purchas’s work.
In January 1625 the London printer Henry Fetherstone printed Purchas’s greatest effort, a work now entitled Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes. Published in four volumes, this book represented two kinds of shifts for Purchas. First, he had access to a far greater number of travel accounts than he had earlier. Second, he followed Hakluyt’s strategy of publishing versions of travelers’ accounts in their own words. When Purchas gave a copy of his work to King James I, the king asked him the difference between the new work and the old (which, he mentioned, he had read seven times). Though the books were similar in many ways, they “differ in the object and subject,” Purchas responded, the 1625 Pilgrimage “being mine own in matter (though borrowed) and in forme of words and method: Whereas my Pilgrims are the Authors themselves, acting their owne parts in their own words, onely furnished by me with such necessaries as that stage further required, and ordered according to my rules; here is a Pilgrimage to the Temples of the Worlds Citie, religionis ergo, with obvious and occasional! view of other things; there is a full Voyage, and in a method of Voyages, the whole Citie of the World, propounded together with the Temples; here the soule and some accessories, there the body and soule of the remoter World).]” Or, as one scholar later noted, the first book was a work of religious geography, the second a collection of materials to be used to compile a history.
Purchas never gained the reputation that Hakluyt achieved, but whatever the relative merits of their work, one fact is clear: An audience existed to purchase these enormous collections of travel accounts. Purchas, like
Hakluyt, brought to the attention of readers the exploits of travelers such as the Englishman Andrew Battel, who went to Africa, cast doubt on the report of David Ingram’s alleged journey from Florida to Canada, and provided, in a remarkable part of his 1625 work, an entire history of Mexico told through a series of pictures. Purchas also had an ability to get his hands on texts that had enormous significance at the time. His great work included, for example, all of the major narratives relating to the journey of Henry Hudson, who had led exploratory journeys for the English in 1607 and 1608, for the Dutch in 1609 (when he made his famous trip to modern-day New York), and again for the English in 1610. That last expedition went badly. Hudson’s crew rebelled in June 1611 and put him and a small group of his mates into a small ship (known as a shallop), casting them into James Bay. Purchas managed to obtain narratives from each journey, including Hudson’s last known journal entries and other documents relating to his voyages. By doing so, he proved that he was, if not Hakluyt’s equal, then at least successful in finding ways to print crucial manuscripts.
By the time he died the English settlements at Virginia had become more stable after their precarious start, and a group of English Puritans, known as Pilgrims, had begun their colonization of New England. Purchas died in September 1626 and was buried at St. Martin’s Church in Ludgate.
Further reading: Loren E. Pennington, ed., The T-archas Handbook: Studies in the Life, Times, and Writings of Samuel T-archas, 1577—1626, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd Ser., 185-186 (London, Hakluyt Society, 1997).
World History
