(more beyond) on a banderole flag, and later, a Spanish crown floating above it. The king and his contemporaries would have recognized the columns as the Pillars of Hercules, which the mythical hero erected at the known boundaries of Europe and North Africa. Beyond these pillars, the legend told, lay the great mysteries of the unknown. By designing an emblem that claimed this untapped potential as part of Spain’s imperial destiny, Charles permanently and publicly marked what he imagined would be a glorious future of Spanish expansion in the New World and beyond.26
But for all his enthusiasm, Charles was well aware that remaking the myth of Hercules required a bit of revision. The symbol needed to convey a sense of emboldening, not fear of what lurked in the vast “out there” where man had yet to venture. So he enlisted Spanish historian Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa to do a key bit of public relations. In his popular History of the Incas, Sarmiento reworked the myth of Hercules and the pillars, claiming that though Hercules had originally inscribed the columns with Ultra Gades nil, or “there is nothing beyond Cádiz,” after the discovery of America, Charles sent workers to correct the inscription accordingly. According to Sarmiento, the king ordered Gades (Latin for Cádiz) and nil (“nothing”) removed, replacing them with a new inscription: ne plus ultra, which Sarmiento translated as “farther beyond there are many lands.” Placing this symbol on the Atlantic’s most commonly circulated coin was an obvious claiming of Spain’s leading role in the ever-expanding universe of man’s consciousness. It reflected the emperor and empire’s wildly optimistic hopes for the immeasurable potential of Spain’s “New World.” It was a tactile reflection of a utopian moment when the world seemed full of promise and possibility.27
Politically and economically, the so-called Spanish Conquest certainly delivered. In just forty-one years, the Spanish had “discovered” the Indies and conquered the great Aztec and Inca nations. They captured staggering amounts of gold and silver, which they piled onto treasure fleets that cut across the ocean waves, relentlessly pursued by pirates and buccaneers. Columbus’s prognostications about the vast untapped resources of America—especially the mineral ones—seemed thrillingly prophetic. A land with so much wealth in gold and silver could readily become a utopia like those that the Renaissance authors had imagined.
Yet amid such fabulous wealth and excess, a small minority of Spaniards was starting to realize that in the everyday lives of most people in colonial Spanish America, utopia was very far from reality. In his Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, first published in Seville in 1552, conquistador-turned-Dominican-friar Bartolomé de Las Casas vividly recalled the atrocities of Spanish behavior toward the Indians, describing how Spaniards “smilingly” maimed, tortured, and enslaved innocent natives.28 It was not long before the rest of Europe caught wind of Las Casas’s accounts, and by the end of the century, his work had been republished and translated so many times that it was accessible in some form to “nearly anyone literate in his own language.” In the seventeenth century, Dutch printer Theodor de Bry published ten more lavish editions of the Brief Account with woodcut engravings featuring sensational images of Las Casas’s most vivid scenes, such as a Spaniard dashing an Indian baby against a rock and an Indian chief being burned at the stake. These lurid images helped make the book an “unquestioned commercial and propagandistic success” that would ultimately become the “cornerstone” of the Black Legend of Spain’s singular cruelty in the New World.29
Even if Las Casas’s work was purposely provocative, he reported on the grim reality of the encounter between the old world and the new in America. But as he might well have imagined, the horrors of the early conquest soon gave way to less shocking—but equally insidious—injustices to native peoples. The imagined utopia slipped further from reach as an Indian slave trade flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century in Central America, with Spaniards exporting chattel slaves to Panama and Peru. Once the idea was first articulated in the 1512 Laws of Burgos, Indian family and kinship groups were periodically broken up and relocated into settlements called reducciones, where the Spanish imagined that they could be more easily monitored for “correct” behavior—and forced to pay tribute and labor duties. Natives were also bound to the Spanish through the encomienda system, which rewarded Spanish conquistadores for their service to the Crown by giving them Indian vassals to use as laborers. Spanish legislators reasoned that as vassals, the Indians owed tribute, in the form of cash, goods, or labor, for the “privilege” of being governed by Spaniards. Some met these duties through a practice known as the mita in Peru and the repartimiento de Indios in New Spain, wherein they were forced to work in rotational labor drafts in fields, workshops, or mines for two to four months out of the year.30
By the 1530s, the injustices against the Indians had multiplied so many times that Spanish bureaucrat Vasco de Quiroga penned a treatise about the legal and ethical wrongs of Indian treatment in New Spain and sent it off to Madrid. In addition to listing countless injustices, Quiroga’s Information on the Law provided a blueprint for how the Crown might raise an improved society from the ashes of destruction in America. To conceive of this new colony, Quiroga drew on one of the visionary works of his day: Thomas More’s Utopia. Like More, he imagined a society composed of extended families that shared community property. Children would receive free primary education, as well as instruction in farming techniques and Christian doctrine. The towns that he would create for the Indians would feature free hospitals to care for the elderly and infirm. They would be overseen by just Spanish officials and priests. The Indians who came to reside in his so-called pueblo-hospitales had to contribute to the communal lifestyle by working in trades, crafts, or agriculture. They were even given rights over their property, so they were able to pass it on to their children. Quiroga had faith in his agenda because he was convinced that the Indians were a childlike, uncorrupted race whose souls could be carefully molded—like “soft wax”—through evangelization and proper socialization.31
To make his utopian vision a reality, Quiroga purchased portions of the land that he needed and requested that local landowners donate the rest. He relied on the Indians themselves to help erect the settlements: they would build the thatched huts that would be their homes, they would adorn the churches where they would worship, and they would farm the fields that would provide them with sustenance. To further entice them, he offered baptisms and hosted games and activities for children. Soon Indians who had no prior sustained contact with Spaniards were voluntarily arriving at Santa Fé de México, Santa Fé de Laguna, and Santa Fé del Rio—and choosing to stay. Quiroga ensured that the towns and the hospitals would have a steady supply of Spanish priests when he founded the College of San Nicolás in Pátzcuaro, which would train clerics in native languages. By 1534, news of his efforts had reached Madrid, and Charles signed a royal decree granting his projects official approval. Two years later, he was rewarded when he was promoted to become bishop of Michoacán. Quiroga’s utopia enjoyed the support of the Crown, administrators in America, and the townspeople themselves. The hospitals operated for thirty years. By 1570, the town of Santa Fé de México was home to around 500 Indians. Their descendants still live nearby.32
Although Quiroga’s utopia flourished, it failed to inspire a more systematic improvement in the way Indians were treated in colonial Spanish America. Labor drafts, special taxes, seizure of communal land, and violent persecution of native customs continued. By the mid-eighteenth century, Spanish ministers were forced to recognize that though their financial and political problems extended beyond America, revamping colonial policy—and especially its treatment of the Indians—was Spain’s best hope at reversing its downward spiral. In 1743, Spanish minister José del Campillo y Cossío submitted to King Philip V a comprehensive plan for economic reform in the Indies, called the New System of Economic Government for America. Campillo suggested that Spain follow the lead of the French and the English in reconceiving its colonies. The Americas, he argued, should no longer be viewed as “overseas kingdoms” or portions of Spain that happened to lie an ocean away. Rather, they should have their own laws and statutes that reflected their status as colonies whose purpose was to provide Spain with raw materials and a market for finished commercial goods.33 Campillo argued that the
