[Clemenza]

You forget a very salient point about Spanish and Portuguese colonization: The Spanish (and to a greater extent) the Portuguese did not send women during the early era of colonization. For the first century of Portuguese rule in Brazil, settlers were almost exclusively male, and had no choice but to engage in relations with the native Indians, to say nothing of the Africans who were imported from west Africa. Some of these relations were "blessed" by the church, most were not.

It wasn't until the late 18th century that Portuguese settlers began bringing wives, an a large wave of immigration from Europe in the late 19th/early 20th century served to increase the population of whites in Brazil. Nevertheless, the fact that Brazil has a multi-racial plurality says more about the fact that white female immigration was nil in the first century and a half of settlement than anything else.

[Cicero]

Good point. The difference was that the Conquistadores thought of themselves as conquerors, whereas the pilgrims thought of themselves as pilgrims or colonists.

They were not so much soldiers for the Spanish crown as we would now think of soldiers, but fighting entrepreneurs with followers who offered a deal to the Spanish crown: We’ll conquer the new world for Spain if you give us a fair share of the land and loot and let us enrich ourselves. In return we’ll give the crown land and loot.

The chief aim of the earliest Conquistadores was land, gold, and wealth. Many or most of them went with the intention of becoming rich and then returning to Spain eventually with their new wealth.

The Pilgrims wanted to get out from under English rule and worship according to their own preferences without a king or bishops to tell them what to do, which meant that they had an original intention of going, settling, and staying.