Abstract
This essay examines the lives and maritime crossings of two early modern missionaries—one Irish and one English—who represent a small but significant number of men from these countries whose Catholicism led them on an imperial itinerary from England and Ireland to Spain and then on to the New World. The Catholic connection between Spain, England, and Ireland viewed through a hydrocolonial lens allows us to glimpse the complex relationship among religion, imperialism, and colonial ambitions in the early modern world. This lens permits us to reframe how European rivalries and alliances underscored this global Catholic network as well as how these shifting relationships intensified the violence they inflicted on the Natives they encountered in the Americas.
Your well-built Ships , companions of the Sunn,
As they were Chariots to his fiery beams,
Which oft the Earths circumference have runn,
And now lie moar’d in Severn, Trent, and Tems,
Shall plough the Ocean with their gilded Stems,
And in their hollow bottoms you convay
To Lands inrich’d with gold, with pearls and gems,
But above all, where many thousands stay
Of wronged Indians, whom you shall set free
From Spanish yoke, and Romes Idolatry.
—Thomas Chaloner, “Upon this Worthy Work of his Most Worthy Friend, the Author”
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Notes
- 1.
There are a large number of studies that focus on the Irish Colleges in Spain and Portugal. See for example Enrique García’s Hernán’s “Irish Clerics in Madrid,” Thomas O’Connor’s “Irish Collegians in Spanish Service (1560–1803),” Patricia O’Connell’s The Irish College of Alcalá de Henares, and James O’Boyle’s The Irish Colleges on the Continent: Their Origin and History. There is an equally extensive scholarship on the English colleges in the Iberian Peninsula including Berta Cano-Echevarría and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo “Educating for Martyrdom: British Exiles in the English College at Valladolid,” Sáez-Hidalgo’s “St. Alban’s English College, Valladolid: Enclave or Doorway to the Reception of English Books in Spain?” and Michael E. Williams’s St. Alban’s College Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain.
- 2.
Catherine Armstrong’s careful reading of the text demonstrates Chaloner’s inaccuracy in attributing Gage’s comments purely to his own eyewitness observations. She describes how many of his descriptions rely heavily on previously published Spanish texts including those by López de Gómara and Fernández de Oviedo.
- 3.
Pérez de Ribas spent decades in New Spain in both the missions and the cities before writing his extensive treatises on the New World Jesuit experience.
- 4.
The Jesuit historian Ernest Burrus describes how the Jesuit Francis Xavier’s initial missionary activities and the Society’s subsequent missions to Brazil, Florida, Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines, set off “among the youth of Europe an extraordinary chain reaction, inspiring many to enter the Society and firing others already in the Order to volunteer for the foreign missions” (336).
- 5.
Burrus explains how these documents are found in the Fondo Gesuitico. The word Indipetae comes from the fact that these missives were categorized as petitions to go to the Indies.
- 6.
Both the English and Irish students at the Catholic colleges on the continent were expected to return home to minister to the Catholic faithful in their own country and convert those who had abandoned their faith. Phillip III offered each young man who returned to his homeland mission the sum of 10 pounds in the form of a viaticum. Not only was there a financial incentive embedded in the return home, but students were also obliged to swear an oath, promising that upon completion of their studies they would fulfill this obligation. The oath declared the following: “Mindful of the benefits that God our Lord has done me, first and foremost in having me removed from my homeland, which is so beset by heresies, and in having made me a member of his Catholic Church, wishing not to be ungrateful for so great a mercy of the Lord, have resolved to offer myself entirely to his divine service, to the extent that I can, in fulfillment of the aims of this college. And thus I promise and swear by Almighty God, that I am prepared in my soul, in as far as his divine grace will aid me, to receive holy orders in good time, and to return to England to seek, win, and convert the souls of my neighbors as and when the superiors of this college, according to its institute, judges it good, commanding me so in the Lord” (Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England’: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation. Ed. Spenser Weinreich. Brill, 2017: 666).
- 7.
In contrast to some of the other Irish migrants in the New World, Irish clerical migration was classified as legal. It was not easy, however, for Irish clerics to migrate since they needed both their superior’s permission and that of the King and were supposed to have spent a “lengthy period” living in Spain before this permission could be granted (97). O’Connor explains that the network of Irish colleges established in Spain beginning in 1590 “provided means for Irish clergy not intent on returning home, to take up a ministry in Spain or the Empire (97).
- 8.
Thomas O’Connor explains that in the seventeenth century “a diversification of the Irish presence in Iberia saw the Irish become increasingly mobile within the Spanish Empire” (87). In addition to missionaries, he mentions soldiers and other visitors of whom he has found traces in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Amazon River valley, and the Pacific coast of Peru (87).
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Kirk, S. (2022). English and Irish Missionaries in New Spain: A Hydrocolonial Reading of Religion and Empire. In: Moraña, M. (eds) Hydrocriticism and Colonialism in Latin America. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08903-9_3
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