THE SPANISH PIONEERS

FRANCISCO PIZARRO.

THE

SPANISH PIONEERS

BY

CHARLES F. LUMMIS

AUTHOR OF "A NEW MEXICO DAVID," "STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY," ETC.

Illustrated

SIXTH EDITION

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1914
Copyright
By Charles F. Lummis
a.d. 1893
TO
ONE OF SUCH WOMEN AS MAKE HEROES AND
KEEP CHIVALRY ALIVE IN OUR LESS
SINGLE-HEARTED DAYS:
ELIZABETH BACON CUSTER

In pronouncing the Spanish names give—

The views presented in this book have already taken their place in historical literature, but they are certainly altogether new ground for a popular work. Because it is new, some who have not fully followed the recent march of scientific investigation may fear that it is not authentic. I can only say that the estimates and statements embodied in this volume are strictly true, and that I hold myself ready to defend them from the standpoint of historical science.

I do this, not merely from the motive of personal regard toward the author, but especially in view of the merits of his work, its value for the youth of the present and of the coming generations.

AD. F. BANDELIER.

PREFACE.

It is because I believe that every other young Saxon-American loves fair play and admires heroism as much as I do, that this book has been written. That we have not given justice to the Spanish Pioneers is simply because we have been misled. They made a record unparalleled; but our text-books have not recognized that fact, though they no longer dare dispute it. Now, thanks to the New School of American History, we are coming to the truth,—a truth which every manly American will be glad to know. In this country of free and brave men, race-prejudice, the most ignorant of all human ignorances, must die out. We must respect manhood more than nationality, and admire it for its own sake wherever found,—and it is found everywhere. The deeds that hold the world up are not of any one blood. We may be born anywhere,—that is a mere accident; but to be heroes we must grow by means which are not accidents nor provincialisms, but the birthright and glory of humanity.

We love manhood; and the Spanish pioneering of the Americas was the largest and longest and most marvellous feat of manhood in all history. It was not possible for a Saxon boy to learn that truth in my boyhood; it is enormously difficult, if possible, now. The hopelessness of trying to get from any or all English text-books a just picture of the Spanish hero in the New World made me resolve that no other young American lover of heroism and justice shall need to grope so long in the dark as I had to; and for the following glimpses into the most interesting of stories he has to thank me less than that friend of us both, A. F. Bandelier, the master of the New School. Without the light shed on early America by the scholarship of this great pupil of the great Humboldt, my book could not have been written,—nor by me without his generous personal aid.

C. F. L.

CONTENTS.

I. The Broad Story.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Pioneer Nation [17]
II. A Muddled Geography [25]
III. Columbus the Finder [36]
IV. Making Geography [43]
V. The Chapter of Conquest [56]
VI. A Girdle Round the World [71]
VII. Spain in the United States [78]
VIII. Two Continents Mastered [90]
II. Specimen Pioneers.
I. The First American Traveller [101]
II. The Greatest American Traveller [117]
III. The War of the Rock [125]
IV. The Storming of the Sky-City [135]
V. The Soldier Poet [144]
VI. The Pioneer Missionaries [149]
VII. The Church-builders in New Mexico [158]
VIII. Alvarado's Leap [170]
IX. The American Golden Fleece [181]
III. The Greatest Conquest.
I. The Swineherd of Truxillo [203]
II. The Man Who Would Not Give Up [215]
III. Gaining Ground [225]
IV. Peru As It Was [238]
V. The Conquest of Peru [246]
VI. The Golden Ransom [257]
VII. Atahualpa's Treachery and Death [265]
VIII. Founding a Nation.—the Siege of Cuzco [275]
IX. The Work of Traitors [284]

I.

THE BROAD STORY.

HOW AMERICA WAS FOUND AND TAMED.

THE SPANISH PIONEERS.

I.

THE PIONEER NATION.

It is now an established fact of history that the Norse rovers had found and made a few expeditions to North America long before Columbus. For the historian nowadays to look upon that Norse discovery as a myth, or less than a certainty, is to confess that he has never read the Sagas. The Norsemen came, and even camped in the New World, before the year 1000; but they only camped. They built no towns, and practically added to the world's knowledge nothing at all. They did nothing to entitle them to credit as pioneers. The honor of giving America to the world belongs to Spain,—the credit not only of discovery, but of centuries of such pioneering as no other nation ever paralleled in any land. It is a fascinating story, yet one to which our histories have so far done scant justice. History on true principles was an unknown science until within a century; and public opinion has long been hampered by the narrow statements and false conclusions of closet students. Some of these men have been not only honest but most charming writers; but their very popularity has only helped to spread their errors wider. But their day is past, and the beginnings of new light have come. No student dares longer refer to Prescott or Irving, or any of the class of which they were the leaders, as authorities in history; they rank to-day as fascinating writers of romance, and nothing more. It yet remains for some one to make as popular the truths of American history as the fables have been, and it may be long before an unmistaken Prescott appears; but meantime I should like to help young Americans to a general grasp of the truths upon which coming histories will be based. This book is not a history; it is simply a guideboard to the true point of view, the broad idea,—starting from which, those who are interested may more safely go forward to the study of details, while those who can study no farther may at least have a general understanding of the most romantic and gallant chapter in the history of America.

We have not been taught how astonishing it was that one nation should have earned such an overwhelming share in the honor of giving us America; and yet when we look into the matter, it is a very startling thing. There was a great Old World, full of civilization: suddenly a New World was found,—the most important and surprising discovery in the whole annals of mankind. One would naturally suppose that the greatness of such a discovery would stir the intelligence of all the civilized nations about equally, and that they would leap with common eagerness to avail themselves of the great meaning this discovery had for humanity. But as a matter of fact it was not so. Broadly speaking, all the enterprise of Europe was confined to one nation,—and that a nation by no means the richest or strongest. One nation practically had the glory of discovering and exploring America, of changing the whole world's ideas of geography, and making over knowledge and business all to herself for a century and a half. And Spain was that nation.

It was, indeed, a man of Genoa who gave us America; but he came as a Spaniard,—from Spain, on Spanish faith and Spanish money, in Spanish ships and with Spanish crews; and what he found he took possession of in the name of Spain. Think what a kingdom Ferdinand and Isabella had then besides their little garden in Europe,—an untrodden half world, in which a score of civilized nations dwell to-day, and upon whose stupendous area the newest and greatest of nations is but a patch! What a dizziness would have seized Columbus could he have foreseen the inconceivable plant whose unguessed seeds he held that bright October morning in 1492!

It was Spain, too, that sent out the accidental Florentine whom a German printer made godfather of a half world that we are barely sure he ever saw, and are fully sure he deserves no credit for. To name America after Amerigo Vespucci was such an ignorant injustice as seems ridiculous now; but, at all events, Spain sent him who gave his name to the New World.

Columbus did little beyond finding America, which was indeed glory enough for one life. But of the gallant nation which made possible his discovery there were not lacking heroes to carry out the work which that discovery opened. It was a century before Anglo-Saxons seemed to waken enough to learn that there really was a New World, and into that century the flower of Spain crowded marvels of achievement. She was the only European nation that did not drowse. Her mailed explorers overran Mexico and Peru, grasped their incalculable riches, and made those kingdoms inalienable parts of Spain. Cortez had conquered and was colonizing a savage country a dozen times as large as England years before the first English-speaking expedition had ever seen the mere coast where it was to plant colonies in the New World; and Pizarro did a still greater work. Ponce de Leon had taken possession for Spain of what is now one of the States of our Union a generation before any of those regions were seen by Saxons. That first traveller in North America, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, had walked his unparalleled way across the continent from Florida to the Gulf of California half a century before the first foot of our ancestors touched our soil. Jamestown, the first English settlement in America, was not founded until 1607, and by that time the Spanish were permanently established in Florida and New Mexico, and absolute masters of a vast territory to the south. They had already discovered, conquered, and partly colonized inland America from northeastern Kansas to Buenos Ayres, and from ocean to ocean. Half of the United States, all Mexico, Yucatan, Central America, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, New Granada, and a huge area besides, were Spanish by the time England had acquired a few acres on the nearest edge of America. Language could scarcely overstate the enormous precedence of Spain over all other nations in the pioneering of the New World. They were Spaniards who first saw and explored the greatest gulf in the world; Spaniards who discovered the two greatest rivers; Spaniards who found the greatest ocean; Spaniards who first knew that there were two continents of America; Spaniards who first went round the world! They were Spaniards who had carved their way into the far interior of our own land, as well as of all to the south, and founded their cities a thousand miles inland long before the first Anglo-Saxon came to the Atlantic seaboard. That early Spanish spirit of finding out was fairly superhuman. Why, a poor Spanish lieutenant with twenty soldiers pierced an unspeakable desert and looked down upon the greatest natural wonder of America or of the world—the Grand Cañon of the Colorado—three full centuries before any "American" eyes saw it! And so it was from Colorado to Cape Horn. Heroic, impetuous, imprudent Balboa had walked that awful walk across the Isthmus, and found the Pacific Ocean, and built on its shores the first ships that were ever made in the Americas, and sailed that unknown sea, and had been dead more than half a century before Drake and Hawkins saw it.

England's lack of means, the demoralization following the Wars of the Roses, and religious dissensions were the chief causes of her torpidity then. When her sons came at last to the eastern verge of the New World they made a brave record; but they were never called upon to face such inconceivable hardships, such endless dangers as the Spaniards had faced. The wilderness they conquered was savage enough, truly, but fertile, well wooded, well watered, and full of game; while that which the Spaniards tamed was such a frightful desert as no human conquest ever overran before or since, and peopled by a host of savage tribes to some of whom the petty warriors of King Philip were no more to be compared than a fox to a panther. The Apaches and the Araucanians would perhaps have been no more than other Indians had they been transferred to Massachusetts; but in their own grim domains they were the deadliest savages that Europeans ever encountered. For a century of Indian wars in the east there were three centuries and a half in the southwest. In one Spanish colony (in Bolivia) as many were slain by the savages in one massacre as there were people in New York city when the war of the Revolution began! If the Indians in the east had wiped out twenty-two thousand settlers in one red slaughter, as did those at Sorata, it would have been well up in the eighteen-hundreds before the depleted colonies could have untied the uncomfortable apron-strings of the mother country, and begun national housekeeping on their own account.

When you know that the greatest of English text-books has not even the name of the man who first sailed around the world (a Spaniard), nor of the man who discovered Brazil (a Spaniard), nor of him who discovered California (a Spaniard), nor of those Spaniards who first found and colonized in what is now the United States, and that it has a hundred other omissions as glaring, and a hundred histories as untrue as the omissions are inexcusable, you will understand that it is high time we should do better justice than did our fathers to a subject which should be of the first interest to all real Americans.

The Spanish were not only the first conquerors of the New World, and its first colonizers, but also its first civilizers. They built the first cities, opened the first churches, schools, and universities; brought the first printing-presses, made the first books; wrote the first dictionaries, histories, and geographies, and brought the first missionaries; and before New England had a real newspaper, Mexico had a seventeenth-century attempt at one!

One of the wonderful things about this Spanish pioneering—almost as remarkable as the pioneering itself—was the humane and progressive spirit which marked it from first to last. Histories of the sort long current speak of that hero-nation as cruel to the Indians; but, in truth, the record of Spain in that respect puts us to the blush. The legislation of Spain in behalf of the Indians everywhere was incomparably more extensive, more comprehensive, more systematic, and more humane than that of Great Britain, the Colonies, and the present United States all combined. Those first teachers gave the Spanish language and Christian faith to a thousand aborigines, where we gave a new language and religion to one. There have been Spanish schools for Indians in America since 1524. By 1575—nearly a century before there was a printing-press in English America—many books in twelve different Indian languages had been printed in the city of Mexico, whereas in our history John Eliot's Indian Bible stands alone; and three Spanish universities in America were nearly rounding out their century when Harvard was founded. A surprisingly large proportion of the pioneers of America were college men; and intelligence went hand in hand with heroism in the early settlement of the New World.

II.

A MUDDLED GEOGRAPHY.

The least of the difficulties which beset the finders of the New World was the then tremendous voyage to reach it. Had that three thousand miles of unknown sea been the chief obstacle, civilization would have overstepped it centuries before it did. It was human ignorance deeper than the Atlantic, and bigotry stormier than its waves, which walled the western horizon of Europe for so long. But for that, Columbus himself would have found America ten years sooner than he did; and for that matter, America would not have waited for Columbus's five-times-great-grandfather to be born. It was really a strange thing how the richest half of the world played so long at hide-and-seek with civilization; and how at last it was found, through the merest chance, by those who sought something entirely different. Had America waited to be discovered by some one seeking a new continent, it might be waiting yet.

Despite the fact that long before Columbus vagrant crews of half a dozen different races had already reached the New World, they had left neither mark on America nor result in civilization; and Europe, at the very brink of the greatest discovery and the greatest events in history, never dreamed of it. Columbus himself had no imaginings of America. Do you know what he started westward to find? Asia.

The investigations of recent years have greatly changed our estimates of Columbus. The tendency of a generation ago was to transform him to a demigod,—an historical figure, faultless, rounded, all noble. That was absurd; for Columbus was only a man, and all men, however great, fall short of perfection. The tendency of the present generation is to go to the other extreme,—to rob him of every heroic quality, and make him out an unhanged pirate and a contemptible accident of fortune; so that we are in a fair way to have very little Columbus left. But this is equally unjust and unscientific. Columbus in his own field was a great man despite his failings, and far from a contemptible one.

To understand him, we must first have some general understanding of the age in which he lived. To measure how much of an inventor of the great idea he was, we must find out what the world's ideas then were, and how much they helped or hindered him.

In those far days geography was a very curious affair indeed. A map of the world then was something which very few of us would be able to identify at all; for all the wise men of all the earth knew less of the world's topography than an eight-year old schoolboy knows to-day. It had been decided at last that the world was not flat, but round,—though even that fundamental knowledge was not yet old; but as to what composed half the globe, no man alive knew. Westward from Europe stretched the "Sea of Darkness," and beyond a little way none knew what it was or contained. The variation of the compass was not yet understood. Everything was largely guess-work, and groping in the dark. The unsafe little "ships" of the day dared not venture out of sight of land, for there was nothing reliable to guide them back; and you will laugh at one reason why they were afraid to sail out into the broad western sea,—they feared that they might unknowingly get over the edge, and that ship and crew might fall off into space! Though they knew the world was roundish, the attraction of gravitation was not yet dreamed of; and it was supposed that if one got too far over the upper side of the ball one would drop off!

Still, it was a matter of general belief that there was land in that unknown sea. That idea had been growing for more than a thousand years,—for by the second century it began to be felt that there were islands beyond Europe. By Columbus's time the map-makers generally put on their rude charts a great many guess-work islands in the Sea of Darkness. Beyond this swarm of islands was supposed to lie the east coast of Asia,—and at no enormous distance, for the real size of the world was underestimated by one third. Geography was in its mere infancy; but it was engaging the attention and study of very many scholars who were learned for their day. Each of them put his studious guessing into maps, which varied astonishingly from one another.

But one thing was accepted: there was land somewhere to the west,—some said a few islands, some said thousands of islands, but all said land of some sort. So Columbus did not invent the idea; it had been agreed upon long before he was born. The question was not if there was a New World, but if it was possible or practicable to reach it without sailing over the jumping-off place or encountering other as sad dangers. The world said No; Columbus said Yes,—and that was his claim to greatness. He was not an inventor, but an accomplisher; and even what he accomplished physically was less remarkable than his faith. He did not have to teach Europe that there was a new country, but to believe that he could get to that country; and his faith in himself and his stubborn courage in making others believe in him was the greatness of his character. It took less of a man to make the final proof than to convince the public that it was not utter foolhardiness to attempt the proof at all.

Christopher Columbus, as we call him (as Colon[1] he was better known in his own day), was born in Genoa, Italy, the son of Dominico Colombo, a wool-comber, and Suzanna Fontanarossa. The year of his birth is not certain; but it was probably about 1446. Of his boyhood we know nothing, and little enough of all his early life,—though it is certain that he was active, adventurous, and yet very studious. It is said that his father sent him for awhile to the University of Pavia; but his college course could not have lasted very long. Columbus himself tells us that he went to sea at fourteen years of age. But as a sailor he was able to continue the studies which interested him most,—geography and kindred topics. The details of his early seafaring are very meagre; but it seems certain that he sailed to England, Iceland, Guinea, and Greece,—which made a man then far more of a traveller than does a voyage round the world nowadays; and with this broadening knowledge of men and lands he was gaining such grasp of navigation, astronomy, and geography as was then to be had.

Autograph of Christopher Columbus.

It is interesting to speculate how and when Columbus first conceived an idea of such stupendous importance. It was doubtless not until he was a mature and experienced man, who had become not only a skilled sailor, but one familiar with what other sailors had done. The Madeiras and the Azores had been discovered more than a century. Prince Henry, the Navigator (that great patron of early exploration), was sending his crews down the west coast of Africa,—for at that time it was not even known what the lower half of Africa was. These expeditions were a great help to Columbus as well as to the world's knowledge. It is almost certain, too, that when he was in Iceland he must have heard something of the legends of the Norse rovers who had been to America. Everywhere he went his alert mind caught some new encouragement, direct or indirect, to the great resolve which was half unconsciously forming in his mind.

About 1473 Columbus wandered to Portugal; and there formed associations which had an influence on his future. In time he found a wife, Felipa Moñiz, the mother of his son and chronicler Diego. As to his married life there is much uncertainty, and whether it was creditable to him or the reverse. It is known from his own letters that he had other children than Diego, but they are left in obscurity. His wife is understood to have been a daughter of the sea-captain known as "The Navigator," whose services were rewarded by making him the first governor of the newly discovered island of Porto Santo, off Madeira. It was the most natural thing in the world that Columbus should presently pay a visit to his adventurous father-in-law; and it was, perhaps, while in Porto Santo on this visit that he began to put his great thoughts in more tangible shape.

With men like "the world-seeking Genoese," a resolve like that, once formed, is as a barbed arrow,—difficult to be plucked out. From that day on he knew no rest. The central idea of his life was "Westward! Asia!" and he began to work for its realization. It is asserted that with a patriotic intention he hastened home to make first offer of his services to his native land. But Genoa was not looking for new worlds, and declined his proffer. Then he laid his plans before John II. of Portugal. King John was charmed with the idea; but a council of his wisest men assured him that the plan was ridiculously foolhardy. At last he sent out a secret expedition, which after sailing out of sight of shore soon lost heart and returned without result. When Columbus learned of this treachery, he was so indignant that he left for Spain at once, and there interested several noblemen and finally the Crown itself in his audacious hopes. But after three years of profound deliberation, a junta[2] of astronomers and geographers decided that his plan was absurd and impossible,—the islands could not be reached. Disheartened, Columbus started for France; but by a lucky chance tarried at an Andalusian monastery, where he won the guardian, Juan Perez de Marchena, to his views. This monk had been confessor to the queen; and through his urgent intercession the Crown at last sent for Columbus, who returned to court. His plans had grown within him till they almost overbalanced him, and he seems to have forgotten that his discoveries were only a hope and not yet a fact. Courage and persistence he certainly had; but we could wish that now he had been a trifle more modest. When the king asked on what terms he would make the voyage, he replied: "That you make me an admiral before I start; that I be viceroy of all the lands that I shall find; and that I receive one tenth of all the gain." Strong demands, truly, for the poor wool-comber's son of Genoa to speak to the dazzling king of Spain!

Ferdinand promptly rejected this bold demand; and in January, 1492, Columbus was actually on his way to France to try to make an impression there, when he was overtaken by a messenger who brought him back to court. It is a very large debt that we owe to good Queen Isabella, for it was due to her strong personal interest that Columbus had a chance to find the New World. When all science frowned, and wealth withheld its aid, it was a woman's persistent faith—aided by the Church—that saved history.

There has been a great deal of equally unscientific writing done for and against that great queen. Some have tried to make her out a spotless saint,—a rather hopeless task to attempt in behalf of any human being,—and others picture her as sordid, mercenary, and in no wise admirable. Both extremes are equally illogical and untrue, but the latter is the more unjust. The truth is that all characters have more than one side; and there are in history as in everyday life comparatively few figures we can either deify or wholly condemn. Isabella was not an angel,—she was a woman, and with failings, as every woman has. But she was a remarkable woman and a great one, and worthy our respect as well as our gratitude. She has no need to fear comparison of character with "Good Queen Bess," and she made a much greater mark on history. It was not sordid ambition nor avarice which made her give ear to the world-finder. It was the woman's faith and sympathy and intuition which have so many times changed history, and given room for the exploits of so many heroes who would have died unheard of if they had depended upon the slower and colder and more selfish sympathy of men.

Isabella took the lead and the responsibility herself. She had a kingdom of her own; and if her royal husband Ferdinand did not deem it wise to embark the fortunes of Arragon in such a wild enterprise, she could meet the expenses from her realm of Castile. Ferdinand seems to have cared little either way; but his fair-haired, blue-eyed queen, whose gentle face hid great courage and determination, was enthusiastic.

The Genoan's conditions were granted; and on the 17th of April, 1492, one of the most important papers that ever held ink was signed by their Majesties, and by Columbus. If you could see that precious contract, you would probably have very little idea whose autograph was the lower one,—for Columbus's rigmarole of a signature would cause consternation at a teller's window nowadays. The gist of this famous agreement was as follows:—

1. That Columbus and his heirs forever should have the office of admiral in all the lands he might discover.

2. That he should be viceroy and governor-general of these lands, with a voice in the appointment of his subordinate governors.

3. That he should reserve for himself one tenth part of the gold, silver, pearls, and all other treasures acquired.

4. That he and his lieutenant should be sole judges, concurrent with the High Admiral of Castile, in matters of commerce in the New World.

5. That he should have the privilege of contributing one eighth to the expenses of any other expedition to these new lands, and should then be entitled to one eighth of the profits.

It is a pity that the conduct of Columbus in Spain was not free from a duplicity which did him little credit. He entered the service of Spain, Jan. 20, 1486. As early as May 5, 1487, the Spanish Crown gave him three thousand maravedis (about $18) "for some secret service for their Majesties;" and during the same year, eight thousand maravedis more. Yet after this he was secretly proffering his services again to the King of Portugal, who in 1488 wrote Columbus a letter giving him the freedom of the kingdom in return for the explorations he was to make for Portugal. But this fell through.

Of the voyage itself you are more likely to have heard,—the voyage which lasted a few months, but to earn which the strong-hearted Genoese had borne nearly twenty years of disheartenment and opposition. It was the years of undaunted struggling to convert the world to his own unfathomed wisdom that showed the character of Columbus more fully than all he ever did after the world believed him.

The difficulties of securing official consent and permission being thus at last overcome, there was only the obstacle left of getting an expedition together. This was a very serious matter; there were few who cared to join in such a foolhardy undertaking as it was felt to be. Finally, volunteers failing, a crew had to be gathered forcibly by order of the Crown; and with his não the "Santa Maria," and his two caravels the "Niña" and the "Pinta," filled with unwilling men, the world-finder was at last ready.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Pronounced Cō-lōn,—the Spanish form.

[2] Pronounced Hoon-tah.

III.

COLUMBUS, THE FINDER.

Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, on Friday, August 3, 1492, at 8 a. m., with one hundred and twenty Spaniards under his command. You know how he and his brave comrade Pinzon held up the spirits of his weakening crew; and how, on the morning of October 12, they sighted land at last. It was not the mainland of America,—which Columbus never saw until nearly eight years later,—but Watling's Island. The voyage had been the longest west which man had yet made; and it was very characteristically illustrative of the state of the world's knowledge then. When the variations of the magnetic needle were noticed by the voyagers, they decided that it was not the needle but the north star that varied. Columbus was perhaps as well informed as any other geographer of his day; but he came to the sober conclusion that the cause of certain phenomena must be that he was sailing over a bump on the globe! This was more strongly brought out in his subsequent voyage to the Orinoco, when he detected even a worse earth-bump, and concluded that the world must be pear-shaped! It is interesting to remember that but for an accidental change of course, the voyagers would have struck the Gulf Stream and been carried north,—in which case what is now the United States would have become the first field of Spain's conquest.

The first white man who saw land in the New World was a common sailor named Rodrigo de Triana, though Columbus himself had seen a light the night before. Although it is probable—as you will see later on—that Cabot saw the actual continent of America before Columbus (in 1497), it was Columbus who found the New World, who took possession of it as its ruler under Spain, and who even founded the first European colonies in it,—building, and settling with forty-three men, a town which he named La Navidad (the Nativity), on the island of San Domingo (Española, as he called it), in December, 1492. Moreover, had it not been that Columbus had already found the New World, Cabot never would have sailed.

The explorers cruised from island to island, finding many remarkable things. In Cuba, which they reached October 26, they discovered tobacco, which had never been known to civilization before, and the equally unknown sweet potato. These two products, of the value of which no early explorer dreamed, were to be far more important factors in the money-markets and in the comforts of the world than all the more dazzling treasures. Even the hammock and its name were given to civilization by this first voyage.

In March, 1493, after a fearful return voyage, Columbus was again in Spain, telling his wondrous news to Ferdinand and Isabella, and showing them his trophies of gold, cotton, brilliant-feathered birds, strange plants and animals, and still stranger men,—for he had also brought back with him nine Indians, the first Americans to take a European trip. Every honor was heaped upon Columbus by the appreciative country of his adoption. It must have been a gallant sight to see this tall, athletic, ruddy-faced though gray-haired new grandee of Spain riding in almost royal splendor at the king's bridle, before an admiring court.

The grave and graceful queen was greatly interested in the discoveries made, and enthusiastic in preparing for more. Both intellectually and as a woman, the New World appealed to her very strongly; and as to the aborigines, she became absorbed in earnest plans for their welfare. Now that Columbus had proved that one could sail up and down the globe without falling over that "jumping-off place," there was no trouble about finding plenty of imitators.[3] He had done his work of genius,—he was the pathfinder,—and had finished his great mission. Had he stopped there, he would have left a much greater name; for in all that came after he was less fitted for his task.

A second expedition was hastened; and Sept. 25, 1493, Columbus sailed again,—this time taking fifteen hundred Spaniards in seventeen vessels, with animals and supplies to colonize his New World. And now, too, with strict commands from the Crown to Christianize the Indians, and always to treat them well, Columbus brought the first missionaries to America,—twelve of them. The wonderful mother-care of Spain for the souls and bodies of the savages who so long disputed her entrance to the New World began early, and it never flagged. No other nation ever evolved or carried out so noble an "Indian policy" as Spain has maintained over her western possessions for four centuries.

The second voyage was a very hard one. Some of the vessels were worthless and leaky, and the crews had to keep bailing them out.

Columbus made his second landing in the New World Nov. 3, 1493, on the island of Dominica. His colony of La Navidad had been destroyed; and in December he founded the new city of Isabella. In January, 1494, he founded there the first church in the New World. During the same voyage he also built the first road.

As has been said, the first voyages to America were little in comparison with the difficulty in getting a chance to make a voyage at all; and the hardships of the sea were nothing to those that came after the safe landing. It was now that Columbus entered upon the troubles which darkened the remainder of a life of glory. Great as was his genius as an explorer, he was an unsuccessful colonizer; and though he founded the first four towns in all the New World, they brought him only ill. His colonists at Isabella soon grew mutinous; and San Tonias, which he founded in Hayti, brought him no better fortune. The hardships of continued exploration among the West Indies presently overcame his health, and for nearly half a year he lay sick in Isabella. Had it not been for his bold and skilful brother Bartholomew, of whom we hear so little, we might not have heard so much of Columbus.

By 1495, the just displeasure of the Crown with the unfitness of the first viceroy of the New World caused Juan Aguado to be sent out with an open commission to inspect matters. This was more than Columbus could bear; and leaving Bartholomew as adelantado (a rank for which we now have no equivalent; it means the officer in chief command of an expedition of discoverers), Columbus hastened to Spain and set himself right with his sovereigns. Returning to the New World as soon as possible, he discovered at last the mainland (that of South America), Aug. 1, 1498, but at first thought it an island, and named it Zeta. Presently, however, he came to the mouth of the Orinoco, whose mighty current proved to him that it poured from a continent.

Stricken down by sickness, he returned to Isabella, only to find that his colonists had revolted against Bartholomew. Columbus satisfied the mutineers by sending them back to Spain with a number of slaves,—a disgraceful act, for which the times are his only apology. Good Queen Isabella was so indignant at this barbarity that she ordered the poor Indians to be liberated, and sent out Francisco de Bobadilla, who in 1500 arrested Columbus and his two brothers, in Española, and sent them in irons to Spain. Columbus speedily regained the sympathy of the Crown, and Bobadilla was superseded; but that was the end of Columbus as viceroy of the New World. In 1502 he made his fourth voyage, discovered Martinique and other islands, and founded his fourth colony,—Bethlehem, 1503. But misfortune was closing in upon him. After more than a year of great hardship and distress, he returned to Spain; and there he died May 20, 1506.

The body of the world-finder was buried in Valladolid, Spain, but was several times transferred to new resting-places. It is claimed that his dust now lies, with that of his son Diego, in a chapel of the cathedral of Havana; but this is doubtful. We are not at all sure that the precious relics were not retained and interred on the island of Santo Domingo, whither they certainly were brought from Spain. At all events, they are in the New World,—at peace at last in the lap of the America he gave us.

Columbus was neither a perfect man nor a scoundrel,—though as each he has been alternately pictured. He was a remarkable man, and for his day and calling a good one. He had with the faith of genius a marvellous energy and tenacity, and through a great stubbornness carried out an idea which seems to us very natural, but to the world then seemed ridiculous. As long as he remained in the profession to which he had been reared, and in which he was probably unequalled at the time, he made a wonderful record. But when, after half a century as a sailor, he suddenly turned viceroy, he became the proverbial "sailor on land,"—absolutely "lost." In his new duties he was unpractical, headstrong, and even injurious to the colonization of the New World. It has been a fashion to accuse the Spanish Crown of base ingratitude toward Columbus; but this is unjust. The fault was with his own acts, which made harsh measures by the Crown necessary and right. He was not a good manager, nor had he the high moral principle without which no ruler can earn honor. His failures were not from rascality but from some weaknesses, and from a general unfitness for the new duties to which he was too old to adapt himself.

We have many pictures of Columbus, but probably none that look like him. There was no photography in his day, and we cannot learn that his portrait was ever drawn from life. The pictures that have come down to us were made, with one exception, after his death, and all from memory or from descriptions of him. He is represented to have been tall and imposing, with a rather stern face, gray eyes, aquiline nose, ruddy but freckled cheeks, and gray hair, and he liked to wear the gray habit of a Franciscan missionary. Several of his original letters remain to us, with his remarkable autograph, and a sketch that is attributed to him.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] As he himself complains: "The very tailors turned explorers."

IV.

MAKING GEOGRAPHY.

While Columbus was sailing back and forth between the Old World and the new one which he had found, was building towns and naming what were to be nations, England seemed almost ready to take a hand. All Europe was interested in the strange news which came from Spain. England moved through the instrumentality of a Venetian, whom we know as Sebastian Cabot. On the 5th of March, 1496,—four years after Columbus's discovery,—Henry VII. of England granted a patent to "John Gabote, a citizen of Venice," and his three sons, allowing them to sail westward on a voyage of discovery. John, and Sebastian his son, sailed from Bristol in 1497, and saw the mainland of America at daybreak, June 24, of the same year,—probably the coast of Nova Scotia,—but did nothing. After their return to England, the elder Cabot died. In May, 1498, Sebastian sailed on his second voyage, which probably took him into Hudson's Bay and a few hundred miles down the coast. There is little probability in the theory that he ever saw any part of what is now the United States. He was a northern rover,—so thoroughly so, that the three hundred colonists whom he brought out perished with cold in July.

England did not treat her one early explorer well; and in 1512 Cabot entered the more grateful service of Spain. In 1517 he sailed to the Spanish possessions in the West Indies, on which voyage he was accompanied by an Englishman named Thomas Pert. In August, 1526, Cabot sailed with another Spanish expedition bound for the Pacific, which had already been discovered by a heroic Spaniard; but his officers mutinied, and he was obliged to abandon his purpose. He explored the Rio de la Plata (the "Silver River") for a thousand miles, built a fort at one of the mouths of the Paraña, and explored part of that river and of the Paraguay,—for South America had been for nearly a generation a Spanish possession. Thence he returned to Spain, and later to England, where he died about 1557.

Of the rude maps which Cabot made of the New World, all are lost save one which is preserved in France; and there are no documents left of him. Cabot was a genuine explorer, and must be included in the list of the pioneers of America, but as one whose work was fruitless of consequences, and who saw, but did not take a hand in, the New World. He was a man of high courage and stubborn perseverance, and will be remembered as the discoverer of Newfoundland and the extreme northern mainland.

After Cabot, England took a nap of more than half a century. When she woke again, it was to find that Spain's sleepless sons had scattered over half the New World; and that even France and Portugal had left her far behind. Cabot, who was not an Englishman, was the first English explorer; and the next were Drake and Hawkins, and then Captains Amadas and Barlow, after a lapse of seventy-five and eighty-seven years, respectively,—during which a large part of the two continents had been discovered, explored, and settled by other nations, of which Spain was undeniably in the lead. Columbus, the first Spanish explorer, was not a Spaniard; but with his first discovery began such an impetuous and unceasing rush of Spanish-born explorers as achieved more in a hundred years than all the other nations of Europe put together achieved here in America's first three hundred. Cabot saw and did nothing; and three quarters of a century later Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake—whom old histories laud greatly, but who got rich by selling poor Africans into slavery, and by actual piracy against unprotected ships and towns of the colonies of Spain, with which their mother England was then at peace—saw the West Indies and the Pacific, more than half a century after these had become possessions of Spain. Drake was the first Englishman to go through the Straits of Magellan,—and he did it sixty years after that heroic Portuguese had found them and christened them with his life-blood. Drake was probably first to see what is now Oregon,—his only important discovery. He "took possession" of Oregon for England, under the name of "New Albion;" but old Albion never had a settlement there.

Sir John Hawkins, Drake's kinsman, was, like him, a distinguished sailor, but not a real discoverer or explorer at all. Neither of them explored or colonized the New World; and neither left much more impress on its history than if he had never been born. Drake brought the first potatoes to England; but the importance even of that discovery was not dreamed of till long after, and by other men.

Captains Amadas and Barlow, in 1584, saw our coast at Cape Hatteras and the island of Roanoke, and went away without any permanent result. The following year Sir Richard Grenville discovered Cape Fear, and there was an end of it. Then came Sir Walter Raleigh's famous but petty expeditions to Virginia, the Orinoco, and New Guinea, and the less important voyages of John Davis (in 1585-87) to the Northwest. Nor must we forget brave Martin Frobisher's fruitless voyages to Greenland in 1576-81. This was the end of England in America until the seventeenth century. In 1602 Captain Gosnold coasted nearly our whole Atlantic seaboard, particularly about Cape Cod; and five years later yet was the beginning of English occupancy in the New World. The first English settlement which made a serious mark on history—as Jamestown did not—was that of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1602; and they came not for the sake of opening a new world, but to escape the intolerance of the old. In fact, as Mr. Winsor has pointed out, the Saxon never took any particular interest in America until it began to be understood as a commercial opportunity.

ONE OF THE MOQUI TOWNS.
See page 87.

But when we turn to Spain, what a record is that of the hundred years after Columbus and before Plymouth Rock! In 1499 Vincente Yañez de Pinzon, a companion of Columbus, discovered the coast of Brazil, and claimed the new country for Spain, but made no settlement. His discoveries were at the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco; and he was the first European to see the greatest river in the world. In the following year Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese, was driven to the coast of Brazil by a storm, "took possession" for Portugal, and founded a colony there.

As to Amerigo Vespucci, the inconsiderable adventurer whose name so overshadows his exploits, his American claims are extremely dubious. Vespucci was born in Florence in 1451, and was an educated man,—his father being a notary and his uncle a Dominican who gave him a good schooling. He became a clerk in the great house of the Medicis, and in their service was sent to Spain about 1490. There he presently got into the employ of the merchant who fitted out Columbus's second expedition,—a Florentine named Juanoto Berardi. When Berardi died, in 1495, he left an unfinished contract to fit out twelve ships for the Crown; and Vespucci was intrusted with the completion of the contract. There is no reason whatever to believe that he accompanied Columbus either on the first or the second voyage. According to his own story, he sailed from Cadiz May 10, 1497 (in a Spanish expedition), and reached the mainland eighteen days before Cabot saw it. The statement of encyclopædias that Vespucci "probably got as far north as Cape Hatteras" is ridiculous. The proof is absolute that he never saw an inch of the New World north of the equator. Returning to Spain in the latter part of 1498, he sailed again, May 16, 1499, with Ojeda, to San Domingo, a voyage on which he was absent about eighteen months. He left Lisbon on his third voyage, May 10, 1501, going to Brazil. It is not true, despite the encyclopædias, that he discovered and named the Bay of Rio Janeiro; both those honors belong to Cabral, the real discoverer and pioneer of Brazil, and a man of vastly greater historical importance than Vespucci. Vespucci's fourth voyage took him from Lisbon (June 10, 1503) to Bahia, and thence to Cape Frio, where he built a little fort. In 1504 he returned to Portugal, and in the following year to Spain, where he died in 1512.

These voyages rest only on Vespucci's own statements, which are not to be implicitly believed. It is probable that he did not sail at all in 1497, and quite certain that he had no share whatever in the real discoveries in the New World.

The name "America" was first invented and applied in 1507 by an ill-informed German printer, named Waldzeemüller, who had got hold of Amerigo Vespucci's documents. History is full of injustices, but never a greater among them all than the christening of America. It would have been as appropriate to call it Walzeemüllera. The first map of America was made in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, a Spaniard,—and a very funny map it would seem to the schoolboy of to-day. The first geography of America was by Enciso, a Spaniard, in 1517.

It is pleasant to turn from an overrated and very dubious man to those genuine but almost unheard-of Portuguese heroes, the brothers Gaspard and Miguel Corte-Real. Gaspard sailed from Lisbon in the year 1500, and discovered and named Labrador,—"the laborer." In 1501 he sailed again from Portugal to the Arctic, and never returned. After waiting a year, his brother Miguel led an expedition to find and rescue him; but he too perished, with all his men, among the ice-floes of the Arctic. A third brother wished to go in quest of the lost explorers, but was forbidden by the king, who himself sent out a relief expedition of two ships; but no trace of the gallant Corte-Reals, nor of any of their men, was ever found.

Such was the pioneering of America up to the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century,—a series of gallant and dangerous voyages (of which only the most notable ones of the great Spanish inrush have been mentioned), resulting in a few ephemeral colonies, but important only as a peep into the doors of the New World. The real hardships and dangers, the real exploration and conquest of the Americas, began with the decade from 1510 to 1520,—the beginning of a century of such exploration and conquest as the world never saw before nor since. Spain had it all to herself, save for the heroic but comparatively petty achievements of Portugal in South America, between the Spanish points of conquest. The sixteenth century in the New World was unparalleled in military history; and it produced, or rather developed, such men as tower far above the later conquerors in their achievement. Our part of the hemisphere has never made such startling chapters of conquest as were carved in the grimmer wildernesses to our south by Cortez, Pizarro, Valdivia, and Quesada, the greatest subduers of wild America.

There were at least a hundred other early Spanish heroes, unknown to public fame and buried in obscurity until real history shall give them their well-earned praise. There is no reason to believe that these unremembered heroes were more capable of great things than our Israel Putnams and Ethan Allens and Francis Marions and Daniel Boones; but they did much greater things under the spur of greater necessity and opportunity. A hundred such, I say; but really the list is too long to be even catalogued here; and to pay attention to their greater brethren will fill this book. No other mother-nation ever bore a hundred Stanleys and four Julius Cæsars in one century; but that is part of what Spain did for the New World. Pizarro, Cortez, Valdivia, and Quesada are entitled to be called the Cæsars of the New World; and no other conquests in the history of America are at all comparable to theirs. As among the four, it is almost difficult to say which was greatest; though there is really but one answer possible to the historian. The choice lies of course between Cortez and Pizarro, and for years was wrongly made. Cortez was first in time, and his operations seem to us nearer home. He was a highly educated man for his time, and, like Cæsar, had the advantage of being able to write his own biography; while his distant cousin Pizarro could neither read nor write, but had to "make his mark,"—a striking contrast with the bold and handsome (for those days) autograph of Cortez. But Pizarro—who had this lack of education as a handicap from the first, who went through infinitely greater hardships and difficulties than Cortez, and managed the conquest of an area as great with a third as many men as Cortez had, and very much more desperate and rebellious men—was beyond question the greatest Spanish American, and the greatest tamer of the New World. It is for that reason, and because such gross injustice has been done him, that I have chosen his marvellous career, to be detailed later in this book, as a picture of the supreme heroism of the Spanish pioneers.

But while Pizarro was greatest, all four were worthy the rank they have been assigned as the Cæsars of America.

Certain it is that the bald-headed little great man of old Rome, who crowds the page of ancient history, did nothing greater than each of those four Spanish heroes, who with a few tattered Spaniards in place of the iron legions of Rome conquered each an inconceivable wilderness as savage as Cæsar found, and five times as big. Popular opinion long did a vast injustice to these and all other of the Spanish conquistadores, belittling their military achievements on account of their alleged great superiority of weapons over the savages, and taxing them with a cruel and relentless extermination of the aborigines. The clear, cold light of true history tells a different tale. In the first place, the advantage of weapons was hardly more than a moral advantage in inspiring awe among the savages at first, for the sadly clumsy and ineffective firearms of the day were scarcely more dangerous than the aboriginal bows which opposed them. They were effective at not much greater range than arrows, and were tenfold slower of delivery. As to the cumbrous and usually dilapidated armor of the Spaniard and his horse, it by no means fully protected either from the agate-tipped arrows of the savages; and it rendered both man and beast ill-fitted to cope with their agile foes in any extremity, besides being a frightful burden in those tropic heats. The "artillery" of the times was almost as worthless as the ridiculous arquebuses. As to their treatment of the natives, there was incomparably less cruelty suffered by the Indians who opposed the Spaniards than by those who lay in the path of any other European colonizers. The Spanish did not obliterate any aboriginal nation,—as our ancestors obliterated scores,—but followed the first necessarily bloody lesson with humane education and care. Indeed, the actual Indian population of the Spanish possessions in America is larger to-day than it was at the time of the conquest; and in that astounding contrast of conditions, and its lesson as to contrast of methods, is sufficient answer to the distorters of history.

Before we come to the great conquerors, however, we must outline the eventful career and tragic end of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. In one of the noblest poems in the English language we read,—

"Like stout Cortes, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent upon a peak in Darien."

But Keats was mistaken. It was not Cortez who first saw the Pacific, but Balboa,—five years before Cortez came to the mainland of America at all.

Balboa was born in the province of Estremadura, Spain, in 1475. In 1501 he sailed with Bastidas for the New World, and then saw Darien, but settled on the island of Española. Nine years later he sailed to Darien with Enciso, and there remained. Life in the New World then was a troublous affair, and the first years of Balboa's life there were eventful enough, though we must pass them over. Quarrels presently arose in the colony of Darien. Enciso was deposed and shipped back to Spain a prisoner, and Balboa took command. Enciso, upon his arrival in Spain, laid all the blame upon Balboa, and got him condemned by the king for high treason. Learning of this, Balboa determined upon a master-stroke whose brilliancy should restore him to the royal favor. From the natives he had heard of the other ocean and of Peru,—neither yet seen by European eyes,—and made up his mind to find them. In September, 1513, he sailed to Coyba with one hundred and ninety men, and from that point, with only ninety followers, tramped across the Isthmus to the Pacific,—for its length one of the most frightful journeys imaginable. It was on the 26th of September, 1513, that from the summit of the divide the tattered, bleeding heroes looked down upon the blue infinity of the South Sea,—for it was not called the Pacific until long after. They descended to the coast; and Balboa, wading out knee-deep into the new ocean, holding aloft in his right hand his slender sword, and in his left the proud flag of Spain, took solemn possession of the South Sea in the name of the King of Spain.

The explorers got back to Darien Jan. 18, 1514, and Balboa sent to Spain an account of his great discovery. But Pedro Arias de Avila had already sailed from the mother country to supplant him. At last, however, Balboa's brilliant news reached the king, who forgave him, and made him adelantado; and soon after he married the daughter of Pedro Arias. Still full of great plans, Balboa carried the necessary material across the Isthmus with infinite toil, and on the shores of the blue Pacific put together the first ships in the Americas,—two brigantines. With these he took possession of the Pearl Islands, and then started out to find Peru, but was driven back by storms to an ignoble fate. His father-in-law, becoming jealous of Balboa's brilliant prospects, enticed him back to Darien by a treacherous message, seized him, and had him publicly executed, on the trumped-up charge of high treason, in 1517. Balboa had in him the making of an explorer of the first rank, and but for De Avila's shameless deed might probably have won even higher honors. His courage was sheer audacity, and his energy tireless; but he was unwisely careless in his attitude toward the Crown.

V.

THE CHAPTER OF CONQUEST.

While the discoverer of the greatest ocean was still striving to probe its farther mysteries, a handsome, athletic, brilliant young Spaniard, who was destined to make much more noise in history, was just beginning to be heard of on the threshold of America, of whose central kingdoms he was soon to be conqueror.

Hernando Cortez came of a noble but impoverished Spanish family, and was born in Estremadura ten years later than Balboa. At the age of fourteen he was sent to the University of Salamanca to study for the law; but the adventurous spirit of the man was already strong in the slender lad, and in a couple of years he left college, and went home determined upon a life of roving. The air was full of Columbus and his New World; and what spirited youth could stay to pore in musty law-books then? Not the irrepressible Hernando, surely.

Accidents prevented him from accompanying two expeditions for which he had made ready; but at last, in 1504, he sailed to San Domingo, in which new colony of Spain he made such a record that Ovando, the commander, several times promoted him, and he earned the reputation of a model soldier. In 1511 he accompanied Velasquez to Cuba, and was made alcalde (judge) of Santiago, where he won further praise by his courage and firmness in several important crises. Meantime Francisco Hernandez de Cordova, the discoverer of Yucatan,—a hero with this mere mention of whom we must content ourselves,—had reported his important discovery. A year later, Grijalva, the lieutenant of Velasquez, had followed Cordova's course, and gone farther north, until at last he discovered Mexico. He made no attempt, however, to conquer or to colonize the new land; whereat Velasquez was so indignant that he threw Grijalva in disgrace, and intrusted the conquest to Cortez. The ambitious young Spaniard sailed from Santiago (Cuba) Nov. 18, 1518, with less than seven hundred men and twelve little cannon of the class called falconets. No sooner was he fairly off than Velasquez repented having given him such a chance for distinction, and directly sent out a force to arrest and bring him back. But Cortez was the idol of his little army, and secure in its fondness for him he bade defiance to the emissaries of Velasquez, and held on his way.[4] He landed on the coast of Mexico March 4, 1519, near where is now the city of Vera Cruz (the True Cross), which he founded,—the first European town on the mainland of America as far north as Mexico.

The landing of the Spaniards caused as great a sensation as would the arrival in New York to-day of an army from Mars.[5] The awe-struck natives had never before seen a horse (for it was the Spanish who brought the first horses, cattle, sheep, and other domestic animals to the New World), and decided that these strange, pale new-comers who sat on four-legged beasts, and had shirts of iron and sticks that made thunder, must indeed be gods.

Here the adventurers were inflamed by golden stories of Montezuma,—a myth which befooled Cortez no more egregiously than it has befooled some modern historians, who seem unable to discriminate between what Cortez heard and what he found. He was told that Montezuma—whose name is properly Moctezuma, or Motecuzoma, meaning "Our Angry Chief"—was "emperor" of Mexico, and that thirty "kings," called caciques, were his vassals; that he had incalculable wealth and absolute power, and dwelt in a blaze of gold and precious stones! Even some most charming historians have fallen into the sad blunder of accepting these impossible myths. Mexico never had but two emperors,—Augustin de Iturbide and the hapless Maximilian,—both in this present century; and Moctezuma was neither its emperor nor even its king. The social and political organization of the ancient Mexicans was exactly like that of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico at the present day,—a military democracy, with a mighty and complicated religious organization as its "power behind the throne." Moctezuma was merely Tlacatécutle, or head war-chief of the Nahuatl (the ancient Mexicans), and neither the supreme nor the only executive. Of just how little importance he really was may be gathered from his fate.

Having founded Vera Cruz, Cortez caused himself to be elected governor and captain-general (the highest military rank)[6] of the new country; and having burned his ships, like the famous Greek commander, that there might be no retreat, he began his march into the grim wilderness before him.

It was now that Cortez began to show particularly that military genius which lifted him so far above all other pioneers of America except Pizarro. With only a handful of men,—for he had left part of his forces at Vera Cruz, under his lieutenant Escalante,—in an unknown land swarming with powerful and savage foes, mere courage and brute force would have stood him in little stead. But with a diplomacy as rare as it was brilliant, he found the weak spots in the Indian organization, widened the jealous breaches between tribes, made allies of those who were secretly or openly opposed to Moctezuma's federation of tribes,—a league which somewhat resembled the Six Nations of our own history,—and thus vastly reduced the forces to be directly conquered. Having routed the tribes of Tlacala (pronounced Tlash-cáh-lah) and Cholula, Cortez came at last to the strange lake-city of Mexico, with his little Spanish troop swelled by six thousand Indian allies. Moctezuma received him with great ceremony, but undoubtedly with treacherous intent. While he was entertaining his visitors in one of the huge adobe houses,—not a "palace," as the histories tell us, for there were no palaces whatever in Mexico,—one of the sub-chiefs of his league attacked Escalante's little garrison at Vera Cruz and killed several Spaniards, including Escalante himself. The head of the Spanish lieutenant was sent to the City of Mexico,—for the Indians south of what is now the United States took not merely the scalp but the whole head of an enemy. This was a direful disaster, not so much for the loss of the few men as because it proved to the Indians (as the senders intended it to prove) that the Spaniards were not immortal gods after all, but could be killed the same as other men.

As soon as Cortez heard the ill news he saw this danger at once, and made a bold stroke to save himself. He had already strongly fortified the adobe building in which the Spaniards were quartered; and now, going by night with his officers to the house of the head war-captain, he seized Moctezuma and threatened to kill him unless he at once gave up the Indians who had attacked Vera Cruz. Moctezuma delivered them up, and Cortez at once had them burned in public. This was a cruel thing, though it was undoubtedly necessary to make some vivid impression on the savages or be at once annihilated by them. There is no apology for this barbarity, yet it is only just that we measure Cortez by the standard of his time,—and it was a very cruel world everywhere then.

It is amusing here to read in pretentious text-books that "Cortez now ironed Montezuma and made him pay a ransom of six hundred thousand marks of pure gold and an immense quantity of precious stones." That is on a par with the impossible fables which lured so many of the early Spaniards to disappointment and death, and is a fair sample of the gilded glamour with which equally credulous historians still surround early America. Moctezuma did not buy himself free,—he never was free again,—and he paid no ransom of gold; while as for precious stones, he may have had a few native garnets and worthless green turquoises, and perhaps even an emerald pebble, but nothing more.

Just at this crisis in the affairs of Cortez he was threatened from another quarter. News came that Pamfilo de Narvaez, of whom we shall see more presently, had landed with eight hundred men to arrest Cortez and carry him back prisoner for his disobedience of Velasquez. But here again the genius of the conqueror of Mexico saved him. Marching against Narvaez with one hundred and forty men, he arrested Narvaez, enlisted under his own banner the welcome eight hundred who had come to arrest him, and hastened back to the City of Mexico.

Here he found matters growing daily to more deadly menace. Alvarado, whom he had left in command, had apparently precipitated trouble by attacking an Indian dance. Wanton as that may seem and has been charged with being, it was only a military necessity, recognized by all who really know the aborigines even to this day. The closet-explorers have pictured the Spaniards as wickedly falling upon an aboriginal festival; but that is simply because of ignorance of the subject. An Indian dance is not a festival; it is generally, and was in this case, a grim rehearsal for murder. An Indian never dances "for fun," and his dances too often mean anything but fun for other people. In a word, Alvarado, seeing in progress a dance which was plainly only the superstitious prelude to a massacre, had tried to arrest the medicine-men and other ringleaders. Had he succeeded, the trouble would have been over for a time at least. But the Indians were too numerous for his little force, and the chief instigators of war escaped.

When Cortez came back with his eight hundred strangely-acquired recruits, he found the whole city with its mask thrown off, and his men penned up in their barracks. The savages quietly let Cortez enter the trap, and then closed it so that there was no more getting out. There were the few hundred Spaniards cooped up in their prison, and the four dykes which were the only approaches to it—for the City of Mexico was an American Venice—swarming with savage foes by the countless thousands.

The Indian makes very few excuses for failure; and the Nahuatl had already elected a new head war-captain named Cuitlahuátzin in place of the unsuccessful Moctezuma. The latter was still a prisoner; and when the Spaniards brought him out upon the housetop to speak to his people in their behalf, the infuriated multitude of Indians pelted him to death with stones. Then, under their new war-captain, they attacked the Spaniards so furiously that neither the strong walls nor the clumsy falconets, and clumsier flintlocks, could withstand them; and there was nothing for the Spaniards but to cut their way out along one of the dykes in a last desperate struggle for life. The beginning of that six days' retreat was one of the bitterest pages in American history. Then was the Noche Triste (the Sad Night), still celebrated in Spanish song and story. For that dark night many a proud home in mother Spain was never bright again, and many a fond heart broke with the crimson bubbles on the Lake of Tezcuco. In those few ghastly hours two thirds of the conquerors were slain; and across more than eight hundred Spanish corpses the frenzied savages pursued the bleeding survivors.

After a fearful retreat of six days, came the important running fight in the plains of Otumba, where the Spaniards were entirely surrounded, but cut their way out after a desperate hand-to-hand struggle which really decided the fate of Mexico. Cortez marched to Tlacala, raised an army of Indians who were hostile to the federation, and with their help laid siege to the City of Mexico. This siege lasted seventy-three days, and was the most remarkable in the history of all America. There was hard fighting every day. The Indians made a superb defence; but at last the genius of Cortez triumphed, and on the 13th of August, 1521, he marched victorious into the second greatest aboriginal city in the New World.

These wonderful exploits of Cortez, so briefly outlined here, awoke boundless admiration in Spain, and caused the Crown to overlook his insubordination to Velasquez. The complaints of Velasquez were disregarded, and Charles V. appointed Cortez governor and captain-general of Mexico, besides making him Marquis de Oaxaca with a handsome revenue.

Safely established in this high authority, Cortez crushed a plot against him, and executed the new war-captain, with many of the caciques (who were not potentates at all, but religious-military officers, whose hold on the superstitions of the Indians made them dangerous).

But Cortez, whose genius shone only the brighter when the difficulties and dangers before him seemed insurmountable, tripped up on that which has thrown so many,—success. Unlike his unlearned but nobler and greater cousin Pizarro, prosperity spoiled him, and turned his head and his heart. Despite the unstudious criticisms of some historians, Cortez was not a cruel conqueror. He was not only a great military genius, but was very merciful to the Indians, and was much beloved by them. The so-called massacre at Cholula was not a blot on his career as has been alleged. The truth, as vindicated at last by real history, is this: The Indians had treacherously drawn him into a trap under pretext of friendship. Not until too late to retreat did he learn that the savages meant to massacre him. When he did see his danger, there was but one chance,—namely, to surprise the surprisers, to strike them before they were ready to strike him; and this is only what he did. Cholula was simply a case of the biter bitten.

No, Cortez was not cruel to the Indians; but as soon as his rule was established he became a cruel tyrant to his own countrymen, a traitor to his friends and even to his king,—and, worst of all, a cool assassin. There is strong evidence that he had "removed" several persons who were in the way of his unholy ambitions; and the crowning infamy was in the fate of his own wife. Cortez had long for a mistress the handsome Indian girl Malinche; but after he had conquered Mexico, his lawful wife came to the country to share his fortunes. He did not love her, however, as much as he did his ambition; and she was in his way. At last she was found in her bed one morning, strangled to death.

Carried away by his ambition, he actually plotted open rebellion against Spain and to make himself emperor of Mexico. The Crown got wind of this precious plan, and sent out emissaries who seized his goods, imprisoned his men, and prepared to thwart his secret schemes. Cortez boldly hastened to Spain, where he met his sovereign with great splendor. Charles received him well, and decorated him with the illustrious Order of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. But his star was already declining; and though he was allowed to return to Mexico with undiminished outward power, he was thenceforth watched, and did nothing more that was comparable with his wonderful earlier achievements. He had become too unscrupulous, too vindictive, and too unsafe to be left in authority; and after a few years the Crown was forced to appoint a viceroy to wield the civil power of Mexico, leaving to Cortez only the military command, and permission for further conquests. In 1536 Cortez discovered Lower California, and explored part of its gulf. At last, disgusted with his inferior position where he had once been supreme, he returned to Spain, where the emperor received him coldly. In 1541 he accompanied his sovereign to Algiers as an attaché, and in the wars there acquitted himself well. Soon after their return to Spain, however, he found himself neglected. It is said that one day when Charles was riding in state, Cortez forced his way to the royal carriage and mounted upon the step determined to force recognition.

"Who are you?" demanded the angry emperor.

"A man, your Highness," retorted the haughty conqueror of Mexico, "who has given you more provinces than your forefathers left you cities!"

Whether the story is true or not, it graphically illustrates the arrogance as well as the services of Cortez. He lacked the modest balance of the greatest greatness, just as Columbus had lacked it. The self-assertion of either would have been impossible to the greater man than either,—the self-possessed Pizarro.

At last, in disgust, Cortez retired from court; and on the 2d of December, 1554, the man who had first opened the interior of America to the world died near Seville.

There were some in South America whose achievements were as wondrous as those of Cortez in Mexico. The conquest of the two continents was practically contemporaneous, and equally marked by the highest military genius, the most dauntless courage, the overcoming of dangers which were appalling, and hardships which were wellnigh superhuman.

Francisco Pizarro, the unlettered but invincible conqueror of Peru, was fifteen years older than his brilliant cousin Cortez, and was born in the same province of Spain. He began to be heard of in America in 1510. From 1524 to 1532 he was making superhuman efforts to get to the unknown and golden land of Peru, overcoming such obstacles as not even Columbus had encountered, and enduring greater dangers and hardships than Napoleon or Cæsar ever met. From 1532 to his death in 1541, he was busy in conquering and exploring that enormous area, and founding a new nation amid its fierce tribes,—fighting off not only the vast hordes of Indians, but also the desperate men of his own forces, by whose treachery he at last perished. Pizarro found and tamed the richest country in the New World; and with all his unparalleled sufferings still realized, more than any other of the conquerors, the golden dreams which all pursued. Probably no other conquest in the world's history yielded such rapid and bewildering wealth, as certainly none was bought more dearly in hardship and heroism. Pizarro's conquest has been most unjustly dealt with by some historians ignorant of the real facts in the case, and blinded by prejudice; but that marvellous story, told in detail farther on, is coming to its proper rank as one of the most stupendous and gallant feats in all history. It is the story of a hero to whom every true American, young or old, will be glad to do justice. Pizarro has been long misrepresented as a blood-stained and cruel conqueror, a selfish, unprincipled, unreliable man; but in the clear, true light of real history he stands forth now as one of the greatest of self-made men, and one who, considering his chances, deserves the utmost respect and admiration for the man he made of himself. The conquest of Peru did not by far cause as much bloodshed as the final reduction of the Indian tribes of Virginia. It counted scarcely as many Indian victims as King Philip's War, and was much less bloody, because more straightforward and honorable, than any of the British conquests in East India. The most bloody events in Peru came after the conquest was over, when the Spaniards fell to fighting one another; and in this Pizarro was not the aggressor but the victim. It was the treachery of his own allies,—the men whose fames and fortunes he had made. His conquest covered a land as big as California, Oregon, and most of Washington,—or as our whole seaboard from Nova Scotia to Port Royal and two hundred miles inland,—swarming with the best organized and most advanced Indians in the Western Hemisphere; and he did it all with less than three hundred gaunt and tattered men. He was one of the great captains of all time, and almost as remarkable as organizer and executive of a new empire, the first on the Pacific shore of the southern continent. To this greatness rose the friendless, penniless, ignorant swineherd of Truxillo!

Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, subdued that vast area of the deadly Araucanians with an "army" of two hundred men. He established the first colony in Chile in 1540, and in the following February founded the present city of Santiago de Chile. Of his long and deadly wars with the Araucanians there is not space to speak here. He was killed by the savages Dec. 3, 1553, with nearly all his men, after an indescribably desperate struggle.

There is not space to tell here of the wondrous doings in the southern continent or the lower point of this,—the conquest of Nicaragua by Gil Gonzales Davila in 1523; the conquest of Guatemala, by Pedro de Alvarado, in 1524; that of Yucatan by Francisco de Montijo, beginning in 1526; that of New Granada by Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, in 1536; the conquests and exploration of Bolivia, the Amazon, and the Orinoco (to whose falls the Spaniards had penetrated by 1530, by almost superhuman efforts); the unparalleled Indian wars with the Araucanians in Chile (for two centuries), with the Tarrahumares in Chihuahua, the Tepehuanes in Durango, the still untamed Yaquis in northwestern Mexico; the exploits of Captain Martin de Hurdaide (the Daniel Boone of Sinaloa and Sonora); and of hundreds of other unrecorded Spanish heroes, who would have been world-renowned had they been more accessible to the fame-maker.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.

[5] Tezozomoc, the Indian historian, graphically describes the wonder of the natives.

[6] Another specific act of treason.

VI.

A GIRDLE ROUND THE WORLD.

Before Cortez had yet conquered Mexico, or Pizarro or Valdivia seen the lands with which their names were to be linked for all time, other Spaniards—less conquerors, but as great explorers—were rapidly shaping the geography of the New World. France, too, had aroused somewhat; and in 1500 her brave son Captain de Gonneville sailed to Brazil. But between him and the next pioneer, who was a Florentine in French pay, was a gap of twenty-four years; and in that time Spain had accomplished four most important feats.

Fernão Magalhaes, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan, was born in Portugal in 1470; and on reaching manhood adopted the seafaring life, to which his adventurous disposition prompted. The Old World was then ringing with the New; and Magellan longed to explore the Americas. Being very shabbily treated by the King of Portugal, he enlisted under the banner of Spain, where his talents found recognition. He sailed from Spain in command of a Spanish expedition, August 10, 1519; and steering farther south than ever man had sailed before, he discovered Cape Horn, and the Straits which bear his name. Fate did not spare him to carry his discoveries farther, nor to reap the reward of those he had made; for during this voyage (in 1521) he was butchered by the natives of one of the islands of the Moluccas. His heroic lieutenant, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, then took command, and continued the voyage until he had circumnavigated the globe for the first time in its history. Upon his return to Spain, the Crown rewarded his brilliant achievements, and gave him, among other honors, a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a globe and the motto, Tu primum circumdedisti me,—"Thou first didst go around me."

Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida,—the first State of our Union that was seen by Europeans,—was as ill-fated an explorer as Magellan; for he came to "the Flowery Land" (to which he had been lured by the wild myth of a fountain of perennial youth) only to be slain by its savages. De Leon was born in San Servas, Spain, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. He was the conqueror of the island of Puerto Rico, and sailing in 1512 to find Florida,—of which he had heard through the Indians,—discovered the new land in the same year, and took possession of it for Spain. He was given the title of adelantado of Florida, and in 1521 returned with three ships to conquer his new country, but was at once wounded mortally in a fight with the Indians, and died on his return to Cuba. He, by the way, was one of the bold Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to America, in 1493.

Autograph of Hernando de Soto.

More of the credit of Florida belongs to Hernando de Soto. That gallant conquistador was born in Estremadura, Spain, about 1496. Pedro Arias de Avila took a liking to his bright young kinsman, helped him to obtain a university education, and in 1519 took him along on his expedition to Darien. De Soto won golden opinions in the New World, and came to be trusted as a prudent yet fearless officer. In 1528 he commanded an expedition to explore the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan, and in 1532 led a reinforcement of three hundred men to assist Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. In that golden land De Soto captured great wealth; and the young soldier of fortune, who had landed in America with no more than his sword and shield, returned to Spain with what was in those days an enormous fortune. There he married a daughter of his benefactor De Avila, and thus became brother-in-law of the discoverer of the Pacific,—Balboa. De Soto lent part of his soon-earned fortune to Charles V., whose constant wars had drained the royal coffers, and Charles sent him out as governor of Cuba and adelantado of the new province of Florida. He sailed in 1538 with an army of six hundred men, richly equipped,—a company of adventurous Spaniards attracted to the banner of their famous countryman by the desire for discovery and gold. The expedition landed in Florida, at Espiritu Santo Bay, in May, 1539, and re-took possession of the unguessed wilderness for Spain.

But the brilliant success which had attended De Soto in the highlands of Peru seemed to desert him altogether in the swamps of Florida. It is note-worthy that nearly all the explorers who did wonders in South America failed when their operations were transferred to the northern continent. The physical geography of the two was so absolutely unlike, that, after becoming accustomed to the necessities of the one, the explorer seemed unable to adapt himself to the contrary conditions of the other.

De Soto and his men wandered through the southern part of what is now the United States for four ghastly years. It is probable that their travels took them through the present States of Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the northeastern corner of Texas. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River; and theirs were the first European eyes to look upon the Father of Waters, anywhere save at its mouth,—a century and a quarter before the heroic Frenchmen Marquette and La Salle saw it. They spent that winter along the Washita; and in the early summer of 1542, as they were returning down the Mississippi, brave De Soto died, and his body was laid to rest in the bosom of the mighty river he had discovered,—two centuries before any "American" saw it. His suffering and disheartened men passed a frightful winter there; and in 1543, under command of the Lieutenant Moscoso, they built rude vessels, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in nineteen days,—the first navigation in our part of America. From the Delta they made their way westward along the coast, and at last reached Panuco, Mexico, after such a five years of hardship and suffering as no Saxon explorer of America ever experienced. It was nearly a century and a half after De Soto's gaunt army of starving men had taken Louisiana for Spain that it became a French possession,—which the United States bought from France over a century later yet.

THE ROCK OF ACOMA.
See page 125.

So when Verazzano—the Florentine sent out by France—reached America in 1524, coasted the Atlantic seaboard from somewhere about South Carolina to Newfoundland, and gave the world a short description of what he saw, Spain had circumnavigated the globe, reached the southern tip of the New World, conquered a vast territory, and discovered at least half-a-dozen of our present States, since the last visit of a Frenchman to America. As for England, she was almost as unheard of still on this side of the earth as though she had never existed.

Between De Leon and De Soto, Florida was visited in 1518 by Francisco de Garay, the conqueror of Tampico. He came to subdue the Flowery Land, but failed, and died soon after in Mexico,—the probability being that he was poisoned by order of Cortez. He left even less mark on Florida than did De Leon, and belongs to the class of Spanish explorers who, though real heroes, achieved unimportant results, and are too numerous to be even catalogued here.

In 1527 there sailed from Spain the most disastrous expedition which was ever sent to the New World,—an expedition notable but for two things, that it was perhaps the saddest in history, and that it brought the man who first of all men crossed the American continent, and indeed made one of the most wonderful walks since the world began. Panfilo de Narvaez—who had so ignominiously failed in his attempt to arrest Cortez—was commander, with authority to conquer Florida; and his treasurer was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. In 1528 the company landed in Florida, and forthwith began a record of horror that makes the blood run cold. Shipwreck, savages, and starvation made such havoc with the doomed band that when in 1529 Vaca and three companions found themselves slaves to the Indians they were the sole survivors of the expedition.

Vaca and his companions wandered from Florida to the Gulf of California, suffering incredible dangers and tortures, reaching there after a wandering which lasted over eight years. Vaca's heroism was rewarded. The king made him governor of Paraguay in 1540; but he was as unfit for such a post as Columbus had been for a viceroy, and soon came back in irons to Spain, where he died.

But it was through his accounts of what he saw in that astounding journey (for Vaca was an educated man, and has left us two very interesting and valuable books) that his countrymen were roused to begin in earnest the exploration and colonization of what is now the United States,—to build the first cities and till the first farms of the greatest nation on earth.

The thirty years following the conquest of Mexico by Cortez saw an astounding change in the New World. They were brimful of wonders. Brilliant discovery, unparalleled exploration, gallant conquest, and heroic colonization followed one another in a bewildering rush,—and but for the brave yet limited exploits of the Portuguese in South America, Spain was all alone in it. From Kansas to Cape Horn was one vast Spanish possession, save parts of Brazil where the Portuguese hero Cabral had taken a joint foothold for his country. Hundreds of Spanish towns had been built; Spanish schools, universities, printing-presses, books, and churches were beginning their work of enlightenment in the dark continents of America, and the tireless followers of Santiago were still pressing on. America, particularly Mexico, was being rapidly settled by Spaniards. The growth of the colonies was very remarkable for those times,—that is, where there were any resources to support a growing population. The city of Puebla, for instance, in the Mexican State of the same name, was founded in 1532 and began with thirty-three settlers. In 1678 it had eighty thousand people, which is twenty thousand more than New York city had one hundred and twenty-two years later.

VII.

SPAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.

Cortez was still captain-general when Cabeza de Vaca came into the Spanish settlements from his eight years' wandering, with news of strange countries to the north; but Antonio de Mendoza was viceroy of Mexico, and Cortez' superior, and between him and the traitorous conqueror was endless dissension. Cortez was working for himself, Mendoza for Spain.

As Mexico became more and more thickly dotted with Spanish settlements, the attention of the restless world-finders began to wander toward the mysteries of the vast and unknown country to the north. The strange things Vaca had seen, and the stranger ones he had heard, could not fail to excite the dauntless rovers to whom he told them. Indeed, within a year after the arrival in Mexico of the first transcontinental traveller, two more of our present States were found by his countrymen as the direct result of his narratives. And now we come to one of the best-slandered men of them all,—Fray Marcos de Nizza, the discoverer of Arizona and New Mexico.

Fray (brother) Marcos was a native of the province of Nizza, then a part of Savoy, and must have come to America in 1531. He accompanied Pizarro to Peru, and thence finally returned to Mexico. He was the first to explore the unknown lands of which Vaca had heard such wonderful reports from the Indians, though he had never seen them himself,—"the Seven Cities of Cibola, full of gold," and countless other marvels. Fray Marcos started on foot from Culiacan (in Sinaloa, on the western edge of Mexico) in the spring of 1539, with the negro Estévanico, who had been one of Vaca's companions, and a few Indians. A lay brother, Onorato, who started with him, fell sick at once and went no farther. Now, here was a genuine Spanish exploration, a fair sample of hundreds,—this fearless priest, unarmed, with a score of unreliable men, starting on a year's walk through a desert where even in this day of railroads and highways and trails and developed water men yearly lose their lives by thirst, to say nothing of the thousands who have been killed there by Indians. But trifles like these only whetted the appetite of the Spaniard; and Fray Marcos kept his footsore way, until early in June, 1539, he actually came to the Seven Cities of Cibola. These were in the extreme west of New Mexico, around the present strange Indian pueblo of Zuñi, which is all that is left of those famous cities, and is itself to-day very much as the hero-priest saw it three hundred and fifty years ago. At the foot of the wonderful cliff of Toyallahnah, the sacred thunder mountain of Zuñi, the negro Estévanico was killed by the Indians, and Fray Marcos escaped a similar fate only by a hasty retreat. He learned what he could of the strange terraced towns of which he got a glimpse, and returned to Mexico with great news. He has been accused of misrepresentation and exaggeration in his reports; but if his critics had not been so ignorant of the locality, of the Indians and of their traditions, they never would have spoken. Fray Marcos's statements were absolutely truthful.

When the good priest told his story, we may be sure that there was a pricking-up of ears throughout New Spain (the general Spanish name then for Mexico); and as soon as ever an armed expedition could be fitted out, it started for the Seven Cities of Cibola, with Fray Marcos himself as guide. Of that expedition you shall hear in a moment. Fray Marcos accompanied it as far as Zuñi, and then returned to Mexico, being sadly crippled by rheumatism, from which he never fully recovered. He died in the convent in the City of Mexico, March 25, 1558.

The man whom Fray Marcos led to the Seven Cities of Cibola was the greatest explorer that ever trod the northern continent, though his explorations brought to himself only disaster and bitterness,—Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. A native of Salamanca, Spain, Coronado was young, ambitious, and already renowned. He was governor of the Mexican province of New Galicia when the news of the Seven Cities came. Mendoza, against the strong opposition of Cortez, decided upon a move which would rid the country of a few hundred daring young Spanish blades with whom peace did not at all agree, and at the same time conquer new countries for the Crown. So he gave Coronado command of an expedition of about two hundred and fifty Spaniards to colonize the lands which Fray Marcos had discovered, with strict orders never to come back!

Coronado and his little army left Culiacan early in 1540. Guided by the tireless priest they reached Zuñi in July, and took the pueblo after a sharp fight, which was the end of hostilities there. Thence Coronado sent small expeditions to the strange cliff-built pueblos of Moqui (in the northeastern part of Arizona), to the grand cañon of the Colorado, and to the pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mexico. That winter he moved his whole command to Tiguex, where is now the pretty New Mexican village of Bernalillo, on the Rio Grande, and there had a serious and discreditable war with the Tigua Pueblos.

It was here that he heard that golden myth which lured him to frightful hardships, and hundreds since to death,—the fable of the Quivira. This, so Indians from the vast plains assured him, was an Indian city where all was pure gold. In the spring of 1541 Coronado and his men started in quest of the Quivira, and marched as far across those awful plains as the centre of our present Indian territory. Here, seeing that he had been deceived, Coronado sent back his army to Tiguex, and himself with thirty men pushed on across the Arkansas River, and as far as northeastern Kansas,—that is, three-fourths of the way from the Gulf of California to New York, and by his circuitous route much farther.

There he found the tribe of the Quiviras,—roaming savages who chased the buffalo,—but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of incessant marching and awful hardships. Soon after his return, he was so seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked; and disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative obscurity.

This was a sad end for the remarkable man who had found out so many thousands of miles of the thirsty Southwest nearly three centuries before any of our blood saw any of it,—a well-born, college-bred, ambitious, and dashing soldier, and the idol of his troops. As an explorer he stands unequalled, but as a colonizer he utterly failed. He was a city-bred man, and no frontiersman; and being accustomed only to Jalisco and the parts of Mexico which lie along the Gulf of California, he knew nothing of, and could not adapt himself to, the fearful deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. It was not until half a century later, when there came a Spaniard who was a born frontiersman of the arid lands, that New Mexico was successfully colonized.

While the discoverer of the Indian Territory and Kansas was chasing a golden fable across their desolate plains, his countrymen had found and were exploring another of our States,—our golden garden of California. Hernando de Alarcon, in 1540, sailed up the Colorado River to a great distance from the gulf, probably as far as Great Bend; and in 1543 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the Pacific coast of California to a hundred miles north of where San Francisco was to be founded more than three centuries later.

After the discouraging discoveries of Coronado, the Spaniards for many years paid little attention to New Mexico. There was enough doing in Mexico itself to keep even that indomitable Spanish energy busy for awhile in the civilizing of their new empire. Fray Pedro de Gante had founded in Mexico, in 1524, the first schools in the New World; and thereafter every church and convent in Spanish America had always a school for the Indians attached. In 1524 there was not a single Indian in Mexico's countless thousands who knew what letters were; but twenty years later such large numbers of them had learned to read and write that Bishop Zumarraga had a book made for them in their own language. By 1543 there were even industrial schools for the Indians in Mexico. It was this same good Bishop Zumarraga who brought the first printing-press to the New World, in 1536. It was set up in the City of Mexico, and was soon very actively at work. The oldest book printed in America that remains to us came from that press in 1539. A majority of the first books printed there were to make the Indian languages intelligible,—a policy of humane scholarship which no other nation colonizing in the New World ever copied. The first music printed in America came from this press in 1584.

The most striking thing of all, as showing the scholarly attitude of the Spaniards toward the new continents, was a result entirely unique. Not only did their intellectual activity breed among themselves a galaxy of eminent writers, but in a very few years there was a school of important Indian authors. It would be an irreparable loss to knowledge of the true history of America if we were to lose the chronicles of such Indian writers as Tezozomoc, Camargo, and Pomar, in Mexico; Juan de Santa Cruz, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, in Peru; and many others. And what a gain to science if we had taken pains to raise up our own aborigines to such helpfulness to themselves and to human knowledge!

In all other enlightened pursuits which the world then knew, Spain's sons were making remarkable progress here. In geography, natural history, natural philosophy, and other sciences they were as truly the pioneers of America as they had been in discovery. It is a startling fact that so early as 1579 a public autopsy on the body of an Indian was held at the University of Mexico, to determine the nature of an epidemic which was then devastating New Spain. It is doubtful if by that time they had got so far in London itself. And in still extant books of the same period we find plans for repeating firearms, and a plain hint of the telephone! The first printing-press did not reach the English colonies of America until 1638,—nearly one hundred years behind Mexico. The whole world came very slowly to newspapers; and the first authentic newspaper in its history was published in Germany in 1615. The first one in England began in 1622; and the American colonies never had one until 1704. The "Mercurio Volante" (Flying Mercury), a pamphlet which printed news, was running in the City of Mexico before 1693.

When the ill reports of Coronado had largely been forgotten, there began another Spanish movement into New Mexico and Arizona. In the mean time there had been very important doings in Florida. The many failures in that unlucky land had not deterred the Spaniards from further attempts to colonize it. At last, in 1560, the first permanent foothold was effected there by Aviles de Menendez, a brutal Spaniard, who nevertheless had the honor of founding and naming the oldest city in the United States,—St. Augustine, 1560. Menendez found there a little colony of French-Huguenots, who had wandered thither the year before under Ribault; and those whom he captured he hanged, with a placard saying that they were executed "not as Frenchmen, but as heretics." Two years later, the French expedition of Dominique de Gourges captured the three Spanish forts which had been built there, and hanged the colonists "not as Spaniards, but as assassins,"—which was a very neat revenge in rhetoric, if an unpraiseworthy one in deed. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake, whose piratical proclivities have already been alluded to, destroyed the friendly colony of St. Augustine; but it was at once rebuilt. In 1763 Florida was ceded to Great Britain by Spain, in exchange for Havana, which Albemarle had captured the year before.

It is also interesting to note that the Spaniards had been to Virginia nearly thirty years before Sir Walter Raleigh's attempt to establish a colony there, and full half a century before Capt. John Smith's visit. As early as 1556 Chesapeake Bay was known to the Spaniards as the Bay of Santa Maria; and an unsuccessful expedition had been sent to colonize the country.

In 1581 three Spanish missionaries—Fray Agostin Rodriguez, Fray Francisco Lopez, and Fray Juan de Santa Maria—started from Santa Barbara, Chihuahua (Mexico), with an escort of nine Spanish soldiers under command of Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado. They trudged up along the Rio Grande to where Bernalillo now is,—a walk of a thousand miles. There the missionaries remained to teach the gospel, while the soldiers explored the country as far as Zuñi, and then returned to Santa Barbara. Chamuscado died on the way. As for the brave missionaries who had been left behind in the wilderness, they soon became martyrs. Fray Santa Maria was slain by the Indians near San Pedro, while trudging back to Mexico alone that fall. Fray Rodriguez and Fray Lopez were assassinated by their treacherous flock at Puaray, in December, 1581.

In the following year Antonio de Espejo, a wealthy native of Cordova, started from Santa Barbara in Chihuahua, with fourteen men to face the deserts and the savages of New Mexico. He marched up the Rio Grande to some distance above where Albuquerque now stands, meeting no opposition from the Pueblo Indians. He visited their cities of Zia, Jemez, lofty Acoma, Zuñi, and far-off Moqui, and travelled a long way out into northern Arizona. Returning to the Rio Grande, he visited the pueblo of Pecos, went down the Pecos River into Texas, and thence crossed back to Santa Barbara. He intended to return and colonize New Mexico, but his death (probably in 1585) ended these plans; and the only important result of his gigantic journey was an addition to the geographical and ethnological knowledge of the day.

In 1590 Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, lieutenant-governor of New Leon, was so anxious to explore New Mexico that he made an expedition without leave from the viceroy. He came up the Pecos River and crossed to the Rio Grande; and at the pueblo of Santo Domingo was arrested by Captain Morlette, who had come all the way from Mexico on that sole errand, and carried home in irons.

Juan de Oñate, the colonizer of New Mexico, and founder of the second town within the limits of the United States, as well as of the city which is now our next oldest, was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. His family (which came from Biscay) had discovered (in 1548) and now owned some of the richest mines in the world,—those of Zacatecas. But despite the "golden spoon in his mouth," Oñate desired to be an explorer. The Crown refused to provide for further expeditions into the disappointing north; and about 1595 Oñate made a contract with the viceroy of New Spain to colonize New Mexico at his own expense. He made all preparations, and fitted out his costly expedition. Just then a new viceroy was appointed, who kept him waiting in Mexico with all his men for over two years, ere the necessary permission was given him to start. At last, early in 1597, he set out with his expedition,—which had cost him the equivalent of a million dollars, before it stirred a step. He took with him four hundred colonists, including two hundred soldiers, with women and children, and herds of sheep and cattle. Taking formal possession of New Mexico May 30, 1598, he moved up the Rio Grande to where the hamlet of Chamita now is (north of Santa Fé), and there founded, in September of that year, San Gabriel de los Españoles (St. Gabriel of the Spaniards), the second town in the United States.

Oñate was remarkable not only for his success in colonizing a country so forbidding as this then was, but also as an explorer. He ransacked all the country round about, travelled to Acoma and put down a revolt of its Indians, and in 1600 made an expedition clear up into Nebraska. In 1604, with thirty men, he marched from San Gabriel across that grim desert to the Gulf of California, and returned to San Gabriel in April, 1605. By that time the English had penetrated no farther into the interior of America than forty or fifty miles from the Atlantic coast.

In 1605 Oñate founded Santa Fé, the City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis, about whose age a great many foolish fables have been written. The city actually celebrated the three hundred and thirty-third anniversary of its founding twenty years before it was three centuries old.

In 1606 Oñate made another expedition to the far Northeast, about which expedition we know almost nothing; and in 1608 he was superseded by Pedro de Peralta, the second governor of New Mexico.

Oñate was of middle age when he made this very striking record. Born on the frontier, used to the deserts, endowed with great tenacity, coolness, and knowledge of frontier warfare, he was the very man to succeed in planting the first considerable colonies in the United States at their most dangerous and difficult points.

VIII.

TWO CONTINENTS MASTERED.

This, then, was the situation in the New World at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Spain, having found the Americas, had, in a little over a hundred years of ceaseless exploration and conquest, settled and was civilizing them. She had in the New World hundreds of towns, whose extremes were over five thousand miles apart, with all the then advantages of civilization, and two towns in what is now the United States, a score of whose States her sons had penetrated. France had made a few gingerly expeditions, which bore no substantial fruit; and Portugal had founded a few comparatively unimportant towns in South America. England had passed the century in masterly inactivity,—and there was not so much as an English hut or an English man between Cape Horn and the North Pole.

That later times have reversed the situation; that Spain (largely because she was drained of her best blood by a conquest so enormous that no nation even now could give the men or the money to keep the enterprise abreast with the world's progress) has never regained her old strength, and is now a drone beside the young giant of nations that has grown, since her day, in the empire she opened,—has nothing to do with the obligation of American history to give her justice for the past. Had there been no Spain four hundred years ago, there would be no United States to-day. It is a most fascinating story to every genuine American,—for every one worthy of the name admires heroism and loves fairplay everywhere, and is first of all interested in the truth about his own country.

By 1680 the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico was beaded with Spanish settlements from Santa Cruz to below Socorro, two hundred miles; and there were also colonies in the Taos valley, the extreme north of the Territory. From 1600 to 1680 there had been countless expeditions throughout the Southwest, penetrating even the deadly Llano Estacado (Staked Plain). The heroism which held the Southwest so long was no less wonderful than the exploration that found it. The life of the colonists was a daily battle with niggard Nature—for New Mexico was never fertile—and with deadliest danger. For three centuries they were ceaselessly harried by the fiendish Apaches; and up to 1680 there was no rest from the attempts of the Pueblos (who were actually with and all about the settlers) at insurrection. The statements of closet historians that the Spaniards enslaved the Pueblos, or any other Indians of New Mexico; that they forced them to choose between Christianity and death; that they made them work in the mines, and the like,—are all entirely untrue. The whole policy of Spain toward the Indians of the New World was one of humanity, justice, education, and moral suasion; and though there were of course individual Spaniards who broke the strict laws of their country as to the treatment of the Indians, they were duly punished therefor.

Yet the mere presence of the strangers in their country was enough to stir the jealous nature of the Indians; and in 1680 a murderous and causeless plot broke out in the red Pueblo Rebellion. There were then fifteen hundred Spaniards in the Territory,—all living in Santa Fé or in scattered farm settlements; for Chamita had long been abandoned.

Thirty-four Pueblo towns were in the revolt, under the lead of a dangerous Tehua Indian named Popé. Secret runners had gone from pueblo to pueblo, and the murderous blow fell upon the whole Territory simultaneously. On that bitter 10th of August, 1680, over four hundred Spaniards were assassinated,—including twenty-one of the gentle missionaries who, unarmed and alone, had scattered over the wilderness that they might save the souls and teach the minds of the savages.

Antonio de Otermin was then governor and captain-general of New Mexico, and was attacked in his capital of Santa Fé by a greatly-outnumbering army of Indians. The one hundred and twenty Spanish soldiers, cooped up in their little adobe city, soon found themselves unable to hold it longer against their swarming besiegers; and after a week's desperate defence, they made a sortie, and hewed their way through to liberty, taking their women and children with them. They retreated down the Rio Grande, avoiding an ambush set for them at Sandia by the Indians, and reached the pueblo of Isleta, twelve miles below the present city of Albuquerque, in safety; but the village was deserted, and the Spaniards were obliged to continue their flight to El Paso, Texas, which was then only a Spanish mission for the Indians.

In 1681 Governor Otermin made an invasion as far north as the pueblo of Cochiti, twenty-five miles west of Santa Fé, on the Rio Grande; but the hostile Pueblos forced him to retreat again to El Paso. In 1687 Pedro Reneros Posada made another dash into New Mexico, and took the rock-built pueblo of Santa Ana by a most brilliant and bloody assault. But he also had to retire. In 1688 Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzate—the greatest soldier on New Mexican soil—made an expedition, in which he took the pueblo of Zia by storm (a still more remarkable achievement than Posada's), and in turn retreated to El Paso.

At last the final conqueror of New Mexico, Diego de Vargas, came in 1692. Marching to Santa Fé, and thence as far as ultimate Moqui, with only eighty-nine men, he visited every pueblo in the Province, meeting no opposition from the Indians, who had been thoroughly cowed by Cruzate. Returning to El Paso, he came again to New Mexico in 1693, this time with about one hundred and fifty soldiers and a number of colonists. Now the Indians were prepared for him, and gave him the bloodiest reception ever accorded in New Mexico. They broke out first at Santa Fé, and he had to storm that town, which he took after two days' fighting. Then began the siege of the Black Mesa of San Ildefonso, which lasted off and on for nine months. The Indians had removed their village to the top of that New Mexican Gibraltar, and there resisted four daring assaults, but were finally worn into surrender.

Meantime De Vargas had stormed the impregnable citadel of the Potrero Viejo, and the beetling cliff of San Diego de Jemez,—two exploits which rank with the storming of the Peñol of Mixton[7] in Jalisco (Mexico) and of the vast rock of Acoma, as the most marvellous assaults in all American history. The capture of Quebec bears no comparison to them.

These costly lessons kept the Indians quiet until 1696, when they broke out again. This rebellion was not so formidable as the first, but it gave New Mexico another watering with blood, and was suppressed only after three months' fighting. The Spaniards were already masters of the situation; and the quelling of that revolt put an end to all trouble with the Pueblos,—who remain with us to this day practically undiminished in numbers, though they have fewer towns, a quiet, peaceful, Christianized race of industrious farmers, living monuments to the humanity and the moral teaching of their conquerors.

Then came the last century, a dismal hundred years of ceaseless harassment by the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, and occasionally by the Utes,—a harassment which had hardly ceased a decade ago. The Indian wars were so constant, the explorations (like that wonderful attempt to open a road from San Antonio de Bejar, Texas, to Monterey, California) so innumerable, that their individual heroism is lost in their own bewildering multitude.

More than two centuries ago the Spaniards explored Texas, and settlement soon followed. There were several minor expeditions; but the first of magnitude was that of Alonzo de Leon, governor of the Mexican State of Coahuila, who made extensive explorations of Texas in 1689. By the beginning of the last century there were several Spanish settlements and presidios (garrisons) in what was to become, more than a hundred years later, the largest of the United States.

The Spanish colonization of Colorado was not extensive, and they had no towns north of the Arkansas River; but even in settling our Centennial State they were half a century ahead of us, as they were some centuries ahead in finding it.

In California the Spaniards were very active. For a long time there were minor expeditions which were unsuccessful. Then the Franciscans came in 1769 to San Diego Bay, landed on the bare sands where a million-dollar American hotel stands to-day, and at once began to teach the Indians, to plant olive-orchards and vineyards, and to rear the noble stone churches so beautifully described by the author of "Ramona," which shall remain as monuments of a sublime faith long after the race that built them has gone from off the face of the earth.

California had a long line of Spanish governors—the last of whom, brave, courtly, lovable old Pio Pico, has just died—before our acquisition of that garden-State of States. The Spaniards discovered gold there centuries, and were mining it a decade, before an "American" dreamed of the precious deposit which was to make such a mark on civilization, and had found the rich placer-fields of New Mexico a decade earlier yet.

In Arizona, Father Franciscus Eusebius Kuehne,[8] a Jesuit of Austrian birth but under Spanish auspices, was first to establish the missions on the Gila River,—from 1689 to 1717 (the date of his death). He made at least four appalling journeys on foot from Sonora to the Gila, and descended that stream to its junction with the Colorado. It would be extremely interesting, did space permit, to follow fully the wanderings and achievements of that class of pioneers of America who have left such a wonderful impress on the whole Southwest,—the Spanish missionaries. Their zeal and their heroism were infinite. No desert was too frightful for them, no danger too appalling. Alone, unarmed, they traversed the most forbidding lands and braved the most deadly savages, and left in the lives of the Indians such a proud monument as mailed explorers and conquering armies never made.

The foregoing is a running summary of the early pioneering of America,—the only pioneering for more than a century, and the greatest pioneering for still another century. As for the great and wonderful work at last done by our own blood, not only in conquering part of a continent, but in making a mighty nation, the reader needs no help from me to enable him to comprehend it,—it has already found its due place in history. To record all the heroisms of the Spanish pioneers would fill, not this book, but a library. I have deemed it best, in such an enormous field, to draw the condensed outline, as has now been done; and then to illustrate it by giving in detail a few specimens out of the host of heroisms. I have already given a hint of how many conquests and explorations and dangers there were; and now I wish to show by fair "sample pages" what Spanish conquest and exploration and endurance really were.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Pronounced Mish-tón.

[8] Often misspelled Kino.

II.

SPECIMEN PIONEERS.

I.

THE FIRST AMERICAN TRAVELLER.

The achievements of the explorer are among the most important, as they are among the most fascinating, of human heroisms. The qualities of mind and body necessary to his task are rare and admirable. He should have many sides and be strong in each,—the rounded man that Nature meant man to be. His body need not be as strong as Samson's, nor his mind as Napoleon's, nor his heart the most fully developed heart on earth; but mind, heart, and body he needs, and each in the measure of a strong man. There is hardly another calling in which every muscle, so to speak, of his threefold nature will be more constantly or more evenly called into play.

It is a curious fact that some of the very greatest of human achievements have come about by chance. Many among the most important discoveries in the history of mankind have been made by men who were not seeking the great truth they found. Science is the result not only of study, but of precious accidents; and this is as true of history. It is an interesting study in itself,—the influence which happy blunders and unintended happenings have had upon civilization.

In exploration, as in invention, accident has played its important part. Some of the most valuable explorations have been made by men who had no more idea of being explorers than they had of inventing a railroad to the moon; and it is a striking fact that the first inland exploration of America, and the two most wonderful journeys in it, were not only accidents, but the crowning misfortunes and disappointments of the men who had hoped for very different things.

Exploration, intended or involuntary, has not only achieved great results for civilization, but in the doing has scored some of the highest feats of human heroism. America in particular, perhaps, has been the field of great and remarkable journeys; but the two men who made the most astounding journeys in America are still almost unheard of among us. They are heroes whose names are as Greek to the vast majority of Americans, albeit they are men in whom Americans particularly should take deep and admiring interest. They were Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveller; and Andrés Docampo, the man who walked farther on this continent than any other.

WHERE ZALDIVAR STORMED THE CITY.
See page 135.

In a world so big and old and full of great deeds as this, it is extremely difficult to say of any one man, "He was the greatest" this or that; and even in the matter of journeys there have been bewilderingly many great ones, of the most wonderful of which we have heard least. As explorers we cannot give Vaca and Docampo great rank; though the latter's explorations were not contemptible, and Vaca's were of great importance. But as physical achievements the journeys of these neglected heroes can safely be said to be without parallel. They were the most wonderful walks ever made by man. Both men made their records in America, and each made most of his journey in what is now the United States.

Cabeza de Vaca was the first European really to penetrate the then "Dark Continent" of North America, as he was by centuries the first to cross the continent. His nine years of wandering on foot, unarmed, naked, starving, among wild beasts and wilder men, with no other attendants than three as ill-fated comrades, gave the world its first glimpse of the United States inland, and led to some of the most stirring and important achievements connected with its early history. Nearly a century before the Pilgrim Fathers planted their noble commonwealth on the edge of Massachusetts, seventy-five years before the first English settlement was made in the New World, and more than a generation before there was a single Caucasian settler of any blood within the area of the present United States, Vaca and his gaunt followers had trudged across this unknown land.

It is a long way back to those days. Henry VIII. was then king of England, and sixteen rulers have since occupied that throne. Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, was not born when Vaca started on his appalling journey, and did not begin to reign until twenty years after he had ended it. It was fifty years before the birth of Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia; a generation before the birth of Shakspere, and two and a half generations before Milton. Henry Hudson, the famous explorer for whom one of our chief rivers is named, was not yet born. Columbus himself had been dead less than twenty-five years, and the conqueror of Mexico had seventeen yet to live. It was sixty years before the world had heard of such a thing as a newspaper, and the best geographers still thought it possible to sail through America to Asia. There was not a white man in North America above the middle of Mexico; nor had one gone two hundred miles inland in this continental wilderness, of which the world knew almost less than we know now of the moon.

The name of Cabeza de Vaca may seem to us a curious one. It means "Head of a Cow." But this quaint family name was an honorable one in Spain, and had a brave winning: it was earned at the battle of Naves de Tolosa in the thirteenth century, one of the decisive engagements of all those centuries of war with the Moors. Alvar's grandfather was also a man of some note, being the conqueror of the Canary Islands.

Alvar was born in Xeres[9] de la Frontera, Spain, toward the last of the fifteenth century. Of his early life we know little, except that he had already won some consideration when in 1527, a mature man, he came to the New World. In that year we find him sailing from Spain as treasurer and sheriff of the expedition of six hundred men with which Panfilo de Narvaez intended to conquer and colonize the Flowery Land, discovered a decade before by Ponce de Leon.

They reached Santo Domingo, and thence sailed to Cuba. On Good Friday, 1528, ten months after leaving Spain, they reached Florida, and landed at what is now named Tampa Bay. Taking formal possession of the country for Spain, they set out to explore and conquer the wilderness. At Santo Domingo shipwreck and desertion had already cost them heavily, and of the original six hundred men there were but three hundred and forty-five left. No sooner had they reached Florida than the most fearful misfortunes began, and with every day grew worse. Food there was almost none; hostile Indians beset them on every hand; and the countless rivers, lakes, and swamps made progress difficult and dangerous. The little army was fast thinning out under war and starvation, and plots were rife among the survivors. They were so enfeebled that they could not even get back to their vessels. Struggling through at last to the nearest point on the coast, far west of Tampa Bay, they decided that their only hope was to build boats and try to coast to the Spanish settlements in Mexico. Five rude boats were made with great toil; and the poor wretches turned westward along the coast of the Gulf. Storms scattered the boats, and wrecked one after the other. Scores of the haggard adventurers were drowned, Narvaez among them; and scores dashed upon an inhospitable shore perished by exposure and starvation. The living were forced to subsist upon the dead. Of the five boats, three had gone down with all on board; of the eighty men who escaped the wreck but fifteen were still alive. All their arms and clothing were at the bottom of the Gulf.

The survivors were now on Mal Hado, "the Isle of Misfortune." We know no more of its location than that it was west of the mouth of the Mississippi. Their boats had crossed that mighty current where it plunges out into the Gulf, and theirs were the first European eyes to see even this much of the Father of Waters. The Indians of the island, who had no better larder than roots, berries, and fish, treated their unfortunate guests as generously as was in their power; and Vaca has written gratefully of them.

In the spring his thirteen surviving companions determined to escape. Vaca was too sick to walk, and they abandoned him to his fate. Two other sick men, Oviedo and Alaniz, were also left behind; and the latter soon perished. It was a pitiable plight in which Vaca now found himself. A naked skeleton, scarce able to move, deserted by his friends and at the mercy of savages, it is small wonder that, as he tells us, his heart sank within him. But he was one of the men who never "let go." A constant soul held up the poor, worn body; and as the weather grew less rigorous, Vaca slowly recovered from his sickness.

For nearly six years he lived an incomparably lonely life, bandied about from tribe to tribe of Indians, sometimes as a slave, and sometimes only a despised outcast. Oviedo fled from some danger, and he was never heard of afterward; Vaca faced it, and lived. That his sufferings were almost beyond endurance cannot be doubted. Even when he was not the victim of brutal treatment, he was the worthless encumbrance, the useless interloper, among poor savages who lived the most miserable and precarious lives. That they did not kill him speaks well for their humane kindness.

The thirteen who escaped had fared even worse. They had fallen into cruel hands, and all had been slain except three, who were reserved for the harder fate of slaves. These three were Andrés Dorantes, a native of Bejar; Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado, a native of Salamanca; and the negro Estévanico, who was born in Azamor, Africa. These three and Vaca were all that were now left of the gallant four hundred and fifty men (among whom we do not count the deserters at Santo Domingo) who had sailed with such high hopes from Spain, in 1527, to conquer a corner of the New World,—four naked, tortured, shivering shadows; and even they were separated, though they occasionally heard vaguely of one another, and made vain attempts to come together. It was not until September, 1534 (nearly seven years later), that Dorantes, Castillo, Estévanico, and Vaca were reunited; and the spot where they found this happiness was somewhere in eastern Texas, west of the Sabine River.

But Vaca's six years of loneliness and suffering unspeakable had not been in vain,—for he had acquired, unknowingly, the key to safety; and amid all those horrors, and without dreaming of its significance, he had stumbled upon the very strange and interesting clew which was to save them all. Without it, all four would have perished in the wilderness, and the world would never have known their end.

While they were still on the Isle of Misfortune, a proposition had been made which seemed the height of the ridiculous. "In that isle," says Vaca, "they wished to make us doctors, without examining us or asking our titles; for they themselves cure sickness by blowing upon the sick one. With that blowing, and with their hands, they remove from him the disease; and they bade us do the same, so as to be of some use to them. We laughed at this, saying that they were making fun, and that we knew not how to heal; and for that they took away our food, till we should do that which they said. And seeing our stubbornness, an Indian said to me that I did not understand; for that it did no good for one to know how, because the very stones and other things of the field have power to heal,... and that we, who were men, must certainly have greater power."

This was a characteristic thing which the old Indian said, and a key to the remarkable superstitions of his race. But the Spaniards, of course, could not yet understand.

Presently the savages removed to the mainland. They were always in abject poverty, and many of them perished from starvation and from the exposures incident to their wretched existence. For three months in the year they had "nothing but shell-fish and very bad water;" and at other times only poor berries and the like; and their year was a series of wanderings hither and thither in quest of these scant and unsatisfactory foods.

It was an important fact that Vaca was utterly useless to the Indians. He could not serve them as a warrior; for in his wasted condition the bow was more than he could master. As a hunter he was equally unavailable; for, as he himself says, "it was impossible for him to trail animals." Assistance in carrying water or fuel or anything of the sort was impossible; for he was a man, and his Indian masters could not let a man do woman's work. So, among these starveling nomads, this man who could not help but must be fed was a real burden; and the only wonder is that they did not kill him.

Under these circumstances, Vaca began to wander about. His indifferent captors paid little attention to his movements, and by degrees he got to making long trips north, and up and down the coast. In time he began to see a chance for trading, in which the Indians encouraged him, glad to find their "white elephant" of some use at last. From the northern tribes he brought down skins and almagre (the red clay so indispensable to the savages for face-paint), flakes of flint to make arrow-heads, hard reeds for the shafts, and tassels of deer-hair dyed red. These things he readily exchanged among the coast tribes for shells and shell-beads, and the like,—which, in turn, were in demand among his northern customers.

On account of their constant wars, the Indians could net venture outside their own range; so this safe go-between trader was a convenience which they encouraged. So far as he was concerned, though the life was still one of great suffering, he was constantly gaining knowledge which would be useful to him in his never-forgotten plan of getting back to the world. These lonely trading expeditions of his covered thousands of miles on foot through the trackless wildernesses; and through them his aggregate wanderings were much greater than those of either of his fellow-prisoners.

It was during these long and awful tramps that Cabeza de Vaca had one particularly interesting experience. He was the first European who saw the great American bison, the buffalo, which has become practically extinct in the last decade, but once roamed the plains in vast hordes,—and first by many years. He saw them and ate their meat in the Red River country of Texas, and has left us a description of the "hunchback cows." None of his companions ever saw one, for in their subsequent journey together the four Spaniards passed south of the buffalo-country.

Meanwhile, as I have noted, the forlorn and naked trader had had the duties of a doctor forced upon him. He did not understand what this involuntary profession might do for him,—he was simply pushed into it at first, and followed it not from choice, but to keep from having trouble. He was "good for nothing but to be a medicine-man." He had learned the peculiar treatment of the aboriginal wizards, though not their fundamental ideas. The Indians still look upon sickness as a "being possessed;" and their idea of doctoring is not so much to cure disease, as to exorcise the bad spirits which cause it.

This is done by a sleight-of-hand rigmarole, even to this day. The medicine-man would suck the sore spot, and pretend thus to extract a stone or thorn which was supposed to have been the cause of trouble; and the patient was "cured." Cabeza de Vaca began to "practise medicine" after the Indian fashion. He says himself, "I have tried these things, and they were very successful."

When the four wanderers at last came together after their long separation,—in which all had suffered untold horrors,—Vaca had then, though still indefinitely, the key of hope. Their first plan was to escape from their present captors. It took ten months to effect it, and meantime their distress was great, as it had been constantly for so many years. At times they lived on a daily ration of two handfuls of wild peas and a little water. Vaca relates what a godsend it seemed when he was allowed to scrape hides for the Indians; he carefully saved the scrapings, which served him as food for days. They had no clothing, and there was no shelter; and constant exposure to heat and cold and the myriad thorns of that country caused them to "shed their skin like snakes."

At last, in August, 1535, the four sufferers escaped to a tribe called the Avavares. But now a new career began to open to them. That his companions might not be as useless as he had been, Cabeza de Vaca had instructed them in the "arts" of Indian medicine-men; and all four began to put their new and strange profession into practice. To the ordinary Indian charms and incantations these humble Christians added fervent prayers to the true God. It was a sort of sixteenth-century "faith-cure;" and naturally enough, among such superstitious patients it was very effective. Their multitudinous cures the amateur but sincere doctors, with touching humility, attributed entirely to God; but what great results these might have upon their own fortunes now began to dawn upon them. From wandering, naked, starving, despised beggars, and slaves to brutal savages, they suddenly became personages of note,—still paupers and sufferers, as were all their patients, but paupers of mighty power. There is no fairy tale more romantic than the career thenceforth of these poor, brave men walking painfully across a continent as masters and benefactors of all that host of wild people.

Trudging on from tribe to tribe, painfully and slowly the white medicine-men crossed Texas and came close to our present New Mexico. It has long been reiterated by the closet historians that they entered New Mexico, and got even as far north as where Santa Fé now is. But modern scientific research has absolutely proved that they went on from Texas through Chihuahua and Sonora, and never saw an inch of New Mexico.

With each new tribe the Spaniards paused awhile to heal the sick. Everywhere they were treated with the greatest kindness their poor hosts could give, and with religious awe. Their progress is a very valuable object-lesson, showing just how some Indian myths are formed: first, the successful medicine-man, who at his death or departure is remembered as a hero, then as a demigod, then as divinity.

In the Mexican States they first found agricultural Indians, who dwelt in houses of sod and boughs, and had beans and pumpkins. These were the Jovas, a branch of the Pimas. Of the scores of tribes they had passed through in our present Southern States not one has been fully identified. They were poor, wandering creatures, and long ago disappeared from the earth. But in the Sierra Madre of Mexico they found superior Indians, whom we can recognize still. Here they found the men unclad, but the women "very honest in their dress,"—with cotton tunics of their own weaving, with half-sleeves, and a skirt to the knee; and over it a skirt of dressed deerskin reaching to the ground, and fastened in front with straps. They washed their clothing with a soapy root,—the amole, now similarly used by Indians and Mexicans throughout the Southwest. These people gave Cabeza de Vaca some turquoise, and five arrow-heads each chipped from a single emerald.

In this village in southwestern Sonora the Spaniards stayed three days, living on split deer-hearts; whence they named it the "Town of Hearts."

A day's march beyond they met an Indian wearing upon his necklace the buckle of a sword-belt and a horseshoe nail; and their hearts beat high at this first sign, in all their eight years' wandering, of the nearness of Europeans. The Indian told them that men with beards like their own had come from the sky and made war upon his people.

The Spaniards were now entering Sinaloa, and found themselves in a fertile land of flowing streams. The Indians were in mortal fear; for two brutes of a class who were very rare among the Spanish conquerors (they were, I am glad to say, punished for their violation of the strict laws of Spain) were then trying to catch slaves. The soldiers had just left; but Cabeza de Vaca and Estévanico, with eleven Indians, hurried forward on their trail, and next day overtook four Spaniards, who led them to their rascally captain, Diego de Alcaráz. It was long before that officer could believe the wondrous story told by the naked, torn, shaggy, wild man; but at last his coldness was thawed, and he gave a certificate of the date and of the condition in which Vaca had come to him, and then sent back for Dorantes and Castillo. Five days later these arrived, accompanied by several hundred Indians.

Alcaráz and his partner in crime, Cebreros, wished to enslave these aborigines; but Cabeza de Vaca, regardless of his own danger in taking such a stand, indignantly opposed the infamous plan, and finally forced the villains to abandon it. The Indians were saved; and in all their joy at getting back to the world, the Spanish wanderers parted with sincere regret from these simple-hearted friends. After a few days' hard travel they reached the post of Culiacan about the first of May, 1536, where they were warmly welcomed by the ill-fated hero Melchior Diaz. He led one of the earliest expeditions (in 1539) to the unknown north; and in 1540, on a second expedition across part of Arizona and into California, was accidentally killed.

After a short rest the wanderers left for Compostela, then the chief town of the province of New Galicia,—itself a small journey of three hundred miles through a land swarming with hostile savages. At last they reached the City of Mexico in safety, and were received with great honor. But it was long before they could accustom themselves to eating the food and wearing the clothing of civilized people.

The negro remained in Mexico. On the 10th of April, 1537, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes sailed for Spain, arriving in August. The chief hero never came back to North America, but we hear of Dorantes as being there in the following year. Their report of what they saw, and of the stranger countries to the north of which they had heard, had already set on foot the remarkable expeditions which resulted in the discovery of Arizona, New Mexico, our Indian Territory, Kansas, and Colorado, and brought about the building of the first European towns in the inland area of the United States. Estévanico was engaged with Fray Marcos in the discovery of New Mexico, and was slain by the Indians.

Cabeza de Vaca, as a reward for his then unparalleled walk of much more than ten thousand miles in the unknown land, was made governor of Paraguay in 1540. He was not qualified for the place, and returned to Spain in disgrace. That he was not to blame, however, but was rather the victim of circumstances, is indicated by the fact that he was restored to favor and received a pension of two thousand ducats. He died in Seville at a good old age.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Pronounced Hay-ress.

II.

THE GREATEST AMERICAN TRAVELLER.

The student most familiar with history finds himself constantly astounded by the journeys of the Spanish Pioneers. If they had done nothing else in the New World, their walks alone were enough to earn them fame. Such a number of similar trips over such a wilderness were never heard of elsewhere. To comprehend those rides or tramps of thousands of miles, by tiny bands or single heroes, one must be familiar with the country traversed, and know something of the times when these exploits were performed. The Spanish chroniclers of the day do not dilate upon the difficulties and dangers: it is almost a pity that they had not been vain enough to "make more" of their obstacles. But however curt the narrative may be on these points, the obstacles were there and had to be overcome; and to this very day, after three centuries and a half have mitigated that wilderness which covered half a world, have tamed its savages, filled it with convenient stations, crossed it with plain roads, and otherwise removed ninety per cent of its terrors, such journeys as were looked upon as everyday matters by those hardy heroes would find few bold enough to undertake them. The only record at all comparable to that Spanish overrunning of the New World was the story of the California Argonauts of '49, who flocked across the great plains in the most remarkable shifting of population of which history knows; but even that was petty, so far as area, hardship, danger, and endurance went, beside the travels of the Pioneers. Thousand-mile marches through the deserts, or the still more fatal tropic forests, were too many to be even catalogued. It is one thing to follow a trail, and quite another to penetrate an absolutely trackless wilderness. A big, well-armed wagon-train is one thing, and a little squad on foot or on jaded horses quite another. A journey from a known point to a known point—both in civilization, though the wilderness lies between—is very different from a journey from somewhere, through the unknown, to nowhere; whose starting, course, and end are all untrodden and unguessed wilds. I have no desire to disparage the heroism of our Argonauts,—they made a record of which any nation should be proud; but they never had a chance to match the deeds of their brother-heroes of another tongue and another age.

The walk of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the first American traveller, was surpassed by the achievement of the poor and forgotten soldier Andrés Docampo. Cabeza de Vaca tramped much more than ten thousand miles, but Docampo much over twenty thousand, and under as fearful hardships. The explorations of Vaca were far more valuable to the world; yet neither of them set out with the intention of exploring. But Docampo did make a fearful walk voluntarily, and for a heroic purpose, which resulted in his later enormous achievement; while Vaca's was merely the heroism of a very uncommon man in escaping misfortune. Docampo's tramp lasted nine years; and though he left behind no book to relate his experiences, as did Vaca, the skeleton of his story as it remains to us is extremely characteristic and suggestive of the times, and recounts other heroism than that of the brave soldier.

When Coronado first came to New Mexico in 1540, he brought four missionaries with his little army. Fray Marcos returned soon from Zuñi to Mexico, on account of his physical infirmities. Fray Juan de la Cruz entered earnestly into mission-work among the Pueblos; and when Coronado and his whole force abandoned the Territory, he insisted upon remaining behind among his dusky wards at Tiguex (Bernalillo). He was a very old man, and fully expected to give up his life as soon as his countrymen should be gone; and so it was. He was murdered by the Indians about the 25th of November, 1542.

The lay-brother, Fray Luis Descalona, also a very old man, chose for his parish the pueblo of Tshiquite (Pecos), and remained there after the Spaniards had left the country. He built himself a little hut outside the great fortified town of the savages, and there taught those who would listen to him, and tended his little flock of sheep,—the remnants of those Coronado had brought, which were the first that ever entered the present United States. The people came to love him sincerely,—all save the wizards, who hated him for his influence; and these finally murdered him, and ate the sheep.

Fray Juan de Padilla, the youngest of the four missionaries, and the first martyr on the soil of Kansas, was a native of Andalusia, Spain, and a man of great energy both mentally and physically. He himself made no mean record as a foot-traveller, and our professional pedestrians would stand aghast if confronted with the thousands of desert miles this tireless apostle to the Indians plodded in the wild Southwest. He had already held very important positions in Mexico, but gladly gave up his honors to become a poor missionary among the savages of the unknown north. Having walked with Coronado's force from Mexico across the deserts to the Seven Cities of Cibola, Fray Padilla trudged to Moqui with Pedro de Tobar and his squad of twenty men. Then plodding back to Zuñi, he soon set forth again with Hernando de Alvarado and twenty men, on a tramp of about a thousand miles more. He was in this expedition with the first Europeans that ever saw the lofty town of Acoma, the Rio Grande within what is now New Mexico, and the great pueblo of Pecos.

In the spring of 1541, when the handful of an army was all gathered at Bernalillo, and Coronado set out to chase the fatal golden myth of the Quivira, Fray Padilla accompanied him. In that march of one hundred and four days across the barren plains before they reached the Quiviras in northeastern Kansas, the explorers suffered tortures for water and sometimes for food. The treacherous guide misled them, and they wandered long in a circle, covering a fearful distance,—probably over fifteen hundred miles. The expedition was mounted, but in those days the humble padres went afoot. Finding only disappointment, the explorers marched all the way back to Bernalillo,—though by a less circuitous route,—and Fray Padilla came with them.

But he had already decided that among these hostile, roving, buffalo-living Sioux and other Indians of the plains should be his field of labor; and when the Spanish evacuated New Mexico, he remained. With him were the soldier Andrés Docampo, two young men of Michuacan, Mexico, named Lucas and Sebastian, called the Donados, and a few Mexican Indian boys. In the fall of 1542 the little party left Bernalillo on its thousand-mile march. Andrés alone was mounted; the missionary and the Indian boys trudged along the sandy way afoot. They went by way of the pueblo of Pecos, thence into and across a corner of what is now Colorado, and nearly the whole length of the great State of Kansas. At last, after a long and weary tramp, they reached the temporary lodge-villages of the Quivira Indians. Coronado had planted a large cross at one of these villages, and here Fray Padilla established his mission. In time the hostile savages lost their distrust, and "loved him as a father." At last he decided to move on to another nomad tribe, where there seemed greater need of his presence. It was a dangerous step; for not only might the strangers receive him murderously, but there was equal risk in leaving his present flock. The superstitious Indians were loath to lose the presence of such a great medicine-man as they believed the Fray to be, and still more loath to have such a benefit transferred to their enemies,—for all these roving tribes were at war with one another. Nevertheless, Fray Padilla determined to go, and set out with his little retinue. One day's journey from the villages of the Quiviras, they met a band of Indians out on the war-path. Seeing the approach of the savages, the good Father thought first for his companions. Andrés still had his horse, and the boys were fleet runners.

"Flee, my children!" cried Fray Padilla. "Save yourselves, for me ye cannot help, and why should all die together? Run!"

They at first refused, but the missionary insisted; and as they were helpless against the savages, they finally obeyed and fled. This may not seem, at first thought, the most heroic thing to do, but an understanding of their time exonerates them. Not only were they humble men used to give the good priests implicit obedience, but there was another and a more potent motive. In those days of earnest faith, martyrdom was looked upon as not only a heroism but a prophecy; it was believed to indicate new triumphs for Christianity, and it was a duty to carry back to the world the news. If they stayed and were slain with him,—as I am sure these faithful followers were not physically afraid to do,—the lesson and glory of his martyrdom would be lost to the world.

Fray Juan knelt on the broad prairie and commended his soul to God; and even as he prayed, the Indians riddled him with arrows. They dug a pit and cast therein the body of the first Kansas martyr, and piled upon it a great pile of stones. This was in the year 1542.