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Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the Indies 1579-1600

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Peter Boyd-Bowman
Peter Boyd-Bowman*
Affiliation:
SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York
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Extract

This article examines the data contained in the last volume of our five-part index of 16th Century Spanish emigrants to the New World. Originally entitled the Indice geobiográfico de 40, 000 pobladores españoles de América en el siglo XVI, the series in fact now furnishes biographical data on a total of roughly 55,000 individual men, women, and children, known to have emigrated to the Indies before 1600, whose birthplace we have identified from contemporary records. So far we have found publishers only for the first two of these five useful reference volumes, however a series of articles in both Spanish and English have presented our findings on each of the roughly twenty-year periods into which we have divided that all-important century during which Spanish colonial society was first taking shape. Though in conducting this basic research our primary goal has always been a linguistic one, i.e., to shed light on the early dialect differentiation of New World Spanish, the work is designed to be of use to historians and sociologists also.

Type
Articles
Information
The Americas , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , July 1976 , pp. 78 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1976

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References

1 Boyd-Bowman, Peter: Indice geobiográfico de 40,000 pobladores españoles de América en el siglo XVI. Vol. I (1493–1519)Google Scholar Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Bogotá, 1964.- Vol. II (1520–1539). Editorial Jus, México D.F., 1968. (Both volumes may be ordered from the Editorial Jus, Plaza de Abasolo No. 14, Col. Guerrero, México 3, D.F.) Vols. III (1540–1559), IV (1560–79) and V (1580–1600) are typescripts ready for publication. In addition we have published several articles on the same subject, both in English and Spanish: “Regional Origins of the Earliest Spanish Colonists of America,” PMLA (Dec. 1956), 1152–1163, “La procedencia regional de los primeros colonizadores españoles de América,” Mundo Hispánico, Madrid (Oct. 1957); “La emigración peninsular a América: 1520–39,” Historia Mexicana (Dec. 1963), 165–92) “La procedencia de los españoles de América: 1540–59,” Historia Mexicana (Sept. 1967), 37–71;Google Scholar “La emigración española a América: 1560–79,” in Studia Hispanica in Honorem R. Lapesa, Vol. II, 123–147 Google Scholar. Four of these articles, including the last, are now available in English under the title of Patterns of Spanish Emigration to the New World 1493–1580. Council on International Studies, SUNY at Buffalo. Special Studies No. 34.97 pp. + 9 charts. $2.50.

2 The 229 foreigners were made up of 143 Portuguese (plus a further 6 from the Azores), 28 Italians (plus another 21 from Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily), 14 Flemings, 6 Greeks, 2 each from England, Ireland, Germany and France, and 1 each from Albania, the Netherlands and Guinea.

3 In this period our sources have abandoned the sometimes ambiguous term vecino de in favor of natural de, which means, unequivocally, “born in.’

4 Salamanca, Valladolid, Medina del Campo, Segovia and Burgos.

5 The term Tierra Firme at this time most often meant the Isthmus of Panama, but we have several contemporary references in which the term clearly also embraced the Caribbean coast of New Granada, including Cartagena, e.g., “va a Tierra Firme para que desde la ciudad de Cartagena….” or “Cartagena de las Yndias, costa de Tierra Firme” (A.G.I., Contratación, Legajo no. 5255,42 bis, 1598).

6 For the province and city of Seville it is an even lower 4.5% (71 out of 1573), a figure that reflects a relatively plebeian pattern of emigration from Seville itself.

7 Not included in our count because it falls just outside the scope of our study is a short list of 98 Spaniards plus 25 criollos who sailed to Santo Domingo between 1600 and 1608. (See A.G.I., Contratación no. 5256, unfoliated). Discounting the criollos, all but one of whom were returning natives of the island (the other one was from Isla Margarita), we are left with 98 genuine new emigrants of whom 64 (65.3%) were Andalusians, 22 (22.4%) were Extremeños, 4 (4.1%) were Basques, 3 (3.1%) were Old Castilians, another 3 (3.1%) New Castilians and 2 (2.0%) Leonese. There were no foreigners. This distribution reconfirms the heavy preponderance in the Antilles, noted in previous counts, of settlers from Andalusia. Forty-nine of the 64 Andalusians were from the single province of Seville, and all but three of these from the city of Seville proper. As usual, wherever the percentage of Andalusians was high, so was that of women (45.9%). Of these 45 women, 35 were Andalusians, 6 were from Extremadura, 1 from Madrid, the other 3 from the North. Thus among the Andalusians the females outnumbered the males 35 to 29, while among the sevillanos it was 27 to 22 !

8 Though chronologically it falls just outside the domain of our present study and has therefore been excluded from our statistics, we present here for the reader’s interest the regional origins of a small detachment of reinforcements that left Spain for Chile in 1600. (Medina, José Toribio de, Documentos…. Chile Segunda Serie, V, 231–7)Google Scholar. Among just 86 soldiers, all but 3 of whom gave readily identifiable birthplaces, every region of Spain was represented except for the Canary Islands, Valencia, and Navarre. The distribution was: Andalusia 23, New Castile 17, (11 from Ciudad Real alone), León 10, Old Castile 9, Extremadura 6, Galicia 6, the Basque provinces 3, Asturias, Aragon and Murcia 2 each, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands 1 each, plus 1 foreigner (Flemish). Here again the Andalusians represented just over a quarter of the total and there was a large contingent of New Castilians.

9 See Muro, Louis, “Soldados de Nueva España a Filipinas (1575)”, Historia Mexicana, XIX (1969), 466–491.Google Scholar

10 Cf. Boyd-Bowman, , “Spanish Emigrants to the Indies 1595–98: A Profile,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old (Ed. Fredi Chiapelli. Univ. of Calif. Press, 1976).Google Scholar

11 These letters, over 600 in number, were discovered by the colonial historian Prof. Heinrich Otte of the Freie Universität Berlin among supporting documents submitted to the royal authorities by seekers of permits to emigrate to the colonies. Each of the letters had been used to substantiate the fact that the petitioner had a spouse, relative or patron summoning him or her to the Indies for bona fide reasons. In the Archivo General de Indias, they may be located passim under Indiferente General Nos. 1209 ff., Nos. 1374 ff., Nos. 2048–2074, and Nos. 2077–2107. The work of transcribing the letters was carried out by Sra. Guadalupe Albi for Dr. Otte, to whom we are indebted for making a microfilm copy available as additional source material for our inquiry into early regional varieties of American Spanish (LASCODOCS, or the Linguistic Analysis of Spanish Colonial Documents).