The Spanish Pioneers Part 3

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.

Ferno 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 circ.u.mnavigated 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 circ.u.mdedisti 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 t.i.tle 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.sist 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 Was.h.i.ta; 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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 circ.u.mnavigated 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 cla.s.s 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 Nunez 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 Estevanico, 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 appet.i.te 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 Zuni, 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 Zuni, the negro Estevanico 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 p.r.i.c.king-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 Zuni, 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 Zuni 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 canon 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sa.s.sins,"--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 Zuni, 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated 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, Zuni, 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 Castano 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 Onate, 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," Onate desired to be an explorer. The Crown refused to provide for further expeditions into the disappointing north; and about 1595 Onate 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 Fe), and there founded, in September of that year, San Gabriel de los Espanoles (St. Gabriel of the Spaniards), the second town in the United States.

Onate 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 Onate founded Santa Fe, 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 Onate 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.

Onate 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.