R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

Here, at length, we reach a point of view from which the general bearing of the New World on the parallel growth of European economics and politics on the one hand, and of religious theory, philosophical thought, and scientific advancement on the other, might be brought under observation. Our remarks must be confined to the latter group of topics. For during the period covered by this chapter the political system of Europe was not sensibly disturbed, while the economic changes produced by the discovery and conquest of the New World were as yet imperfectly developed. But the sudden shattering of the old geography produced by the Discovery reacted at once in a marked way on European habits of thought. Religion is man’s earliest philosophy; and what affects his habits of thought and alters his intellectual points of view cannot but modify his religious conceptions. The discovery of the New World, and its prospective employment as a place for the planting of new communities of European origin, greatly contributed to substitute for the medieval law of religious intolerance the modern principle of toleration. In the Old World the former theory had hitherto enjoyed general acceptance, and it rested on a logical basis. There was Scriptural warranty for the doctrine that the Supreme Being was a jealous God, visiting the sins of men not only upon their descendants to the third and fourth generation, but also upon the nation to which such men belonged; and it followed that to believe or conceive of Him, or to worship Him, otherwise than in accordance with the revelation graciously made by Him for the guidance of man, was something more than an offence against Himself. It was an intolerable wrong to society, for it exposed the pious many to the penalty incurred by an impious minority. Plague and pestilence, famine and destruction in war, were brought on a nation by religious apostasy; and it was therefore not merely lawful, but a national duty, to stamp out apostasy in its beginnings. The history of Christendom down to the Discovery of America is in the main one long series of more or less successful applications of this perfectly intelligible principle to the general conduct of human affairs. Had it not been for the New World, the Old World might perhaps to this day have been governed in accordance with it.

But the New World was virgin soil. All Christendom, with the approbation even of Jew and Islamite, would readily have united in the opinion that its gross aboriginal idolatries should be extinguished, and the worship of the One God introduced into it, in whatever form. And in the plantation or creation of new Christian communities in America the reason for intolerance as a necessary social principle no longer existed. Each colony—and colonies in this practically vacant continent could be planted at considerable distances from each other—could now settle its religious principles for itself, for it did so at its own risk. In this way the Old World found the solution of what in France and elsewhere had, by the middle of the sixteenth century, become a serious social and political difficulty. In France, in Germany, in England, the nation was coming to be divided into two hostile camps, Catholic and Protestant. Was the one half in each case to be extinguished by the other, in an internecine war? The banishment of the weaker party by migration—and already expatriation was substituted for the death penalty in the case of greater moral crimes than heresy—was a wise and merciful alternative. The French Protestants, who felt that the course of God’s dealings with man must on the whole be in their favour, were the first to think of a new career, in a new world perhaps revealed for the purpose, as the beginning of a better order of things, if not as the fulfilment of the destiny of the Reformed faith; and, as the triumph of the Catholic party in France became more and more probable, Protestant leaders cast anxious eyes towards the American shore, as a possible place of refuge for their people, should they be worsted in the struggle. An attempt of this nature was made, with the sanction and help of Coligny, the head of the Protestant party, by Nicolas Durand, better known by his assumed name of Villegagnon, a Knight of the Maltese Order who had served in the expedition of Charles V against Algiers, and who also distinguished himself as an author and an amateur theologian. Durand had resided at Nantes, where the propriety of providing a transatlantic refuge for Protestants, and the capabilities of the Brazilian coast, now frequently visited for commercial purposes by French seamen, were matters of common discussion. He resolved to be the first to carry such a scheme into effect; and he found ample support among the partisans of the Reformed religion, including Coligny, through whose influence he obtained a large pecuniary grant from the French King. In May 1555 he sailed with two ships for the coast of South Brazil, where he settled on an island, still known as Ilha de Villagalhao, near the mouth of the bay of Rio de Janeiro, two miles from the mainland. Durand named the country he proposed to occupy “Antarctic France.” The voyage was understood to mark, and did in fact mark, a new era in history. It was the actual beginning of the movement which brought to the New World, as a place where they might worship God in their own way, the Puritans of New England, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Catholics of Maryland. Scholars called it the Expedition of the Indonauts; and a French pedant, after the fashion of the time, celebrated its departure in an indifferent Greek epigram. God looked down, he said, from heaven, and saw that the corrupt Christians of Europe had utterly forgotten both Himself and His Son. He therefore resolved to transfer the Christian Mysteries to a New World, and to destroy the sinful Old World to which they had been entrusted in vain.

Preoccupied with the task of establishing themselves in India and the Far East, the Portuguese had for thirty years after the discovery of Brazil done almost nothing by way of reducing this district into possession. A few ships frequented the coast for the purpose of trading with the natives, and setting ashore criminals to take their chance of being adopted or eaten by them. The success of Madeira as a sugar-growing island suggested the extension of this form of enterprise in Brazil, to which attention had been drawn by a recent discovery of gold; and the soil, as in Madeira, was granted out in hereditary captaincies, each grantee receiving exclusive rights over 50 leagues of sea-board. Martim Affonso de Sousa, afterwards viceroy in India, obtained the first of the fiefs, and took possession in 1531. Eleven others followed, and in 1549 the direction of the whole colony was vested in a Governor-general, whose seat was fixed at Bahia. The Portuguese settlements were in North and Middle Brazil, and by choosing an insular site far to the south Durand expected to escape disturbance. His first care was to build a fort and mount his guns. He announced his arrival to the Church of Geneva, by whom two pastors were duly ordained and sent out with the next batch of emigrants. Durand began by sharing with these ministers the conduct of divine worship; and specimens of his extemporaneous prayers, in the course of which he gave thanks to God for mercifully visiting the mainland with a depopulating pestilence, whereby the enemies of the elect were destroyed, and the Lord’s path made straight, have come down to us. He devoted to theological studies the abundant leisure left him by his administration. Convinced by the arguments of Cyprian and Clement, he ordered that water should be mingled with the sacramental wine, directed salt and oil to be poured into the baptismal font, and forbade the second marriage of a pastor, fortifying himself in the position he thus assumed by argumentative appeals to Holy Scripture. When he at last publicly announced his adherence to the doctrine of transubstantiation, a breach between him and his Calvinist flock was inevitable. Only one among them, a voluble doctor of the Sorbonne whom he associated with himself in the office of the pulpit, supported his pretensions. When the scandalised colonists absented themselves from public worship, he proceeded to severe disciplinary measures; and in the end they quitted the island, threw themselves on the kindness of the savages of the mainland, and made their way to trading vessels in which they sailed for Europe. Thus the Indonaut colony, the first Protestant community in the New World, ended in a ludicrous failure.