Early 'Plantations': Settlers, Not Crops

From Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830, by John H. Elliott (Yale U. Press, 2006), Kindle Loc. 292-308:

Effectively, Cortes's company was composed of a cross-section of the residents of Cuba, which was deprived of nearly a third of its Spanish population when the expedition set sail. It was therefore well acclimatized to New World conditions, unlike Newport's party, which, within six months of arrival, had lost almost half its number to disease.

The fact that the company on board Newport's ships were styled `planters' was a clear indication of the purpose of the voyage. For the English in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts, `plantation' - meaning a planting of people - was synonymous with 'colony'. This was standard usage in Tudor Ireland, where `colonies' or `plantations' were the words employed to designate settlements of English in areas not previously subject to English governmental control. Both words evoked the original coloniae of the Romans - simultaneously farms or landed estates, and bodies of emigrants, particularly veterans, who had left home to `plant', or settle and cultivate (colere), lands elsewhere. These people were known as `planters' rather than `colonists', a term that does not seem to have come into use before the eighteenth century. In 1630, when the British had established a number of New World settlements, an anonymous author would write: `by a colony we mean a society of men drawn out of one state or people, and transplanted into another country.'

The Spanish equivalent of `planter' was poblador. In 1498, when Luis Roldan rebelled against the government of the Columbus brothers on Hispaniola, he rejected the name of colonos for himself and his fellow settlers of the island, and demanded that they should be known as vecinos or householders, with all the rights accruing to vecinos under Castilian law. A colon was, in the first instance, a labourer who worked land for which he paid rent, and Roldan would have none of this. Subsequent usage upheld his stand. During the period of Habsburg rule Spain's American territories, unlike those of the English, were not called `colonies'. They were kingdoms in the possession of the Crown of Castile, and they were inhabited, not by colonos, but by conquerors (conquistadores) and their descendants, and by pobladores, or settlers, the name given to all later arrivals.

The English, by contrast, were always `planters', not `conquerors'. The discrepancy between English and Spanish usage would at first sight suggest fundamentally different approaches to overseas settlement. Sir Thomas Gates and his fellow promoters of the Virginia Company had asked the crown to grant a licence, to make habitation plantation and to deduce a Colonic of sundry of our people' in `that part of America commonly called Virginia ...' There was no mention here of conquest, whereas the agreement between the Castilian crown and Diego Velazquez in 1518 authorized him to `go to discover and conquer Yucatan and Cozumel'. But the idea of conquest was never far away from the promoters of English colonization in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.