230 THE OCEAN RIVER 



Now in the sixteenth century seagoing regiments of con- 

 quistadors, from grandee to jailbird, backed by the crusading 

 zeal of the Church and the imperial will of the newly con- 

 solidated Spanish kingdoms, poured along the pathway of 

 the trades and the roots of the River into the Caribbean. 

 Though the way was by sea this was not a migration of mar- 

 iners or of a seagoing people, such as England was beginning 

 to unleash on the North American continent. The Spanish 

 were conquistadors, men who sought to control and exploit 

 rather than pioneer for themselves. Their government also 

 looked on the West Indies and the lands of the Spanish 

 Main as a region of inferior peoples and governments without 

 standing, fit only for conquest and rigid absentee control. 

 Part of this was due to the fixed class structure of Spanish 

 society and part to the fact that, when sugar was once intro- 

 duced as the main crop in the West Indies, a great body of 

 slave labor seemed the easiest way to get a quick return on 

 the investment. As small as the white population was, even 

 those few began to dwindle as plantations increased. Only 

 Barbadoes, because of its earlier settlement, had a higher 

 percentage of white population. This inability of Spain to 

 colonize through its people or to adjust its highly legalistic 

 and narrow concepts of control to new conditions made the 

 eventual loss of her Caribbean empire inevitable. 



The story of the British-Spanish battle for the Caribbean 

 is the story of the England of Elizabeth, a young nation 

 beginning to feel its strength, learning new techniques of 

 empire by firsthand experiment, while Spain, the older civili- 

 zation with apparently greater weight of initial power and 

 wealth, proceeded into a new environment with fixed and 

 traditional habits of action. In the long run fresh improvisa- 

 tion defeated rigid immobility. Various elements contributed 

 to the English and French power. Some of it can be laid to a 

 new release of national energy by the Reformation. Some of 



