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There were other motives which lay behind these piratical aggressions of the French and English in Spanish America. The Spaniards, ever since the days of the Dominican monk and bishop, Las Casas, had been reprobated as the heartless oppressors and murderers of the native Indians. The original owners of the soil had been dispossessed and reduced to slavery. In the West Indies, the great islands, Cuba and Hispaniola, were rendered desolate for want of inhabitants. Two great empires, Mexico and Peru, had been subdued by treachery, their kings murdered, and their people made to suffer a living death in the mines of Potosi and New Spain. Such was the Protestant Englishman's conception, in the sixteenth century, of the results of Spanish colonial policy. To avenge the blood of these innocent victims, and teach the true religion to the survivors, was to glorify the Church militant and strike a blow at Antichrist. Spain, moreover, in the eyes of the Puritans, was the lieutenant of Rome, the Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, who harried and burnt their Protestant brethren whenever she could lay hands upon them. That she was eager to repeat her ill-starred attempt of 1588 and introduce into the British Isles the accursed Inquisition was patent to everyone. Protestant England, therefore, filled with the enthusiasm and intolerance of a new faith, made no bones of despoiling the Spaniards, especially as the service of God was likely to be repaid with plunder.

A pamphlet written by Dalby Thomas in 1690 expresses with tolerable accuracy the attitude of the average Englishman toward Spain during the previous century. He says:—"We will make a short reflection on the unaccountable negligence, or rather stupidity, of this nation, during the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI. and Queen Mary, who could contentedly sit still and see the Spanish rifle, plunder and bring home undisturbed, all the wealth of that golden world; and to suffer them with forts and castles to shut up the doors and entrances unto all the rich provinces of America, having not the least title or pretence of right beyond any other nation; except that of being by accident the first discoverer of some parts of it; where the unprecedented cruelties, exorbitances and barbarities, their own histories witness, they practised on a poor, naked and innocent people, which inhabited the islands, as well as upon those truly civilized and mighty empires of Peru and Mexico, called to all mankind for succour and relief against their outrageous avarice and horrid massacres.... (We) slept on until the ambitious Spaniard, by that inexhaustible spring of treasure, had corrupted most of the courts and senates of Europe, and had set on fire, by civil broils and discords, all our neighbour nations, or had subdued them to his yoke; contriving too to make us wear his chains and bear a share in the triumph of universal monarchy, not only projected but near accomplished, when Queen Elizabeth came to the crown ... and to the divided interests of Philip II. and Queen Elizabeth, in personal more than National concerns, we do owe that start of hers in letting loose upon him, and encouraging those daring adventurers, Drake, Hawkins, Rawleigh, the Lord Clifford and many other braves that age produced, who, by their privateering and bold undertaking (like those the buccaneers practise) now opened the way to our discoveries, and succeeding settlements in America."⁴²

On the 19th of November 1527, some Spaniards in a caravel loading cassava at the Isle of Mona, between Hispaniola and Porto Rico, sighted a strange vessel of about 250 tons well-armed with cannon, and believing it to be a ship from Spain sent a boat to make inquiries. The new-comers at the same time were seen to launch a pinnace carrying some twenty-five men, all armed with corselets and bows. As the two boats approached the Spaniards inquired the nationality of the strangers and were told that they were English. The story given by the English master was that his ship and another had been fitted out by the King of England and had sailed from London to discover the land of the Great Khan; that they had been separated in a great storm; that this ship afterwards ran into a sea of ice, and unable to get through, turned south, touched at Bacallaos (Newfoundland), where the pilot was killed by Indians, and sailing 400 leagues along the coast of "terra nueva" had found her way to this island of Porto Rico. The Englishmen offered to show their commission written in Latin and Romance, which the Spanish captain could not read; and after sojourning at the island for two days, they inquired for the route to Hispaniola and sailed away. On the evening of 25th November this same vessel appeared before the port of San Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, where the master with ten or twelve sailors went ashore in a boat to ask leave to enter and trade. This they obtained, for the alguazil mayor and two pilots were sent back with them to bring the ship into port. But early next morning, when they approached the shore, the Spanish alcaide, Francisco de Tapia, commanded a gun to be fired at the ship from the castle; whereupon the English, seeing the reception accorded them, sailed back to Porto Rico, there obtained some provisions in exchange for pewter and cloth, and departed for Europe, "where it is believed that they never arrived, for nothing is known of them." The alcaide, says Herrera, was imprisoned by the oidores, because he did not, instead of driving the ship away, allow her to enter the port, whence she could not have departed without the permission of the city and the fort.⁴³

This is the earliest record we possess of the appearance of an English ship in the waters of Spanish America. Others, however, soon followed. In 1530 William Hawkins, father of the famous John Hawkins, ventured in "a tall and goodly ship ... called the 'Polo of Plymouth,'" down to the coast of Guinea, trafficked with the natives for gold-dust and ivory, and then crossed the ocean to Brazil, "where he behaved himself so wisely with those savage people" that one of the kings of the country took ship with him to England and was presented to Henry VIII. at Whitehall.⁴⁴ The real occasion, however, for the appearance of foreign ships in Spanish-American waters was the new occupation of carrying negroes from the African coast to the Spanish colonies to be sold as slaves. The rapid depopulation of the Indies, and the really serious concern of the Spanish crown for the preservation of the indigenes, had compelled the Spanish government to permit the introduction of negro slaves from an early period. At first restricted to Christian slaves carried from Spain, after 1510 licences to take over a certain number, subject of course to governmental imposts, were given to private individuals; and in August 1518, owing to the incessant clamour of the colonists for more negroes, Laurent de Gouvenot, Governor of Bresa and one of the foreign favourites of Charles V., obtained the first regular contract to carry 4000 slaves directly from Africa to the West Indies.