[Illustration: Tenochtitlán]
Tenochtitlán, predecessor of today’s Mexico City, was one of the most
magnificent cities in the world when Cortés and his small army arrived
in 1519. The sight of the radiant city in the center of a large lake
astonished the Spaniards. “We did not know what to say, or whether
what appeared before us was real,” wrote a soldier, “for there were
great cities along the shore and many others in the lake, all filled
with canoes, and at intervals along the causeways there were many
bridges....”
About 250,000 persons lived here and in its sister city Tlatelolco
(left). The market place was huge. “Some of the soldiers with us had
been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople and all over Italy
and Rome, and they said they had never seen a public square so
perfectly laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.”
At the center of the city—and the Aztec religion—was the _Templo
Major_, a complex of temples and shrines to the gods of fertility and
war—the sources of Aztec power. The surfaces of the temples were
richly ornamented in symbols and myths that expressed their complete
vision of life. It was this city, which governed a vast empire in
central Mexico, that the intrepid Cortés and his band overthrew in
1521. Within a few years a splendid and original civilization lay in
ruins.
Narváez must have known of the dangers, but when he saw a yellow object
among some fish nets in a village from which the Indians had fled on his
approach, he jumped to the conclusion that it was gold. Hopefully, he
showed the object to some Indians he lured into camp, they pointed north
and said vehemently, “Apalachee! Apalachee!” Straightway Narváez decided
to march there overland with the main part of his force, 40 of them
mounted on the skin-and-bone horses that had survived the sea journey.
The rest of the group, including its women, were directed to sail along
the coast to a harbor supposedly known to the expedition’s pilot. There
the two groups would come together again.
[Illustration: The Aztecs and kindred people were wonderful artists
in gold. The lifesize breastplate is Mixtecan, perhaps the
representation of the god of death.]
[Illustration: The gold plug is an Aztecan facial ornament. Nobles
and military leaders routinely wore plugs as a sign of rank. The
plugs were inserted through a hole below the lip or in the cheek.]
Cabeza de Vaca protested. They couldn’t be sure they understood the
Indians properly. Would the two parties be able to find each other again
on the intricate coast? They did not have food enough for exploring.
First they should locate their colony in an area suitable for farming
and send the ships to Cuba for supplies. Time enough then to search for
gold.
Narváez waved him aside. The ships sailed on and the land party headed
north, each man carrying two pounds of biscuits and half a pound of
bacon. After 15 days of hunger they luckily seized some Indians who led
them to a field of maize ripe enough for harvesting. Strengthened
somewhat but beset by clouds of insects, they waded on through bogs,
built rafts for crossing rivers—a drowned horse fed some of them one
night—and then entered a region of enormous trees where piles of fallen
timber created an almost impassable maze.
Apalachee, located close to the site of modern Tallahassee, turned out
to be a village of 40 small houses roofed with thatch. No gold.
Disgruntled, Narváez imprisoned an Apalachee chief and appropriated some
of the houses for shelter. The villagers retaliated by setting fire to
the buildings, a tactic that became common during later years.
The invaders stayed 25 days, scouting the surrounding country and
resting as best they could under constant sniping by displaced
inhabitants. They then headed west toward another town of reputed
richness, Aute, near present-day St. Marks, on Apalachee Bay. Indians
shadowed them, killing or wounding several men with hard-pointed arrows
capable of piercing armor. Cabeza de Vaca was one of those nicked.
On the Spaniards’ approach, the inhabitants of Aute burned their huts
and fled. There was no gold in the ruins. No silver. No jewels. And no
sign of Spanish ships in the bay. As a mysterious fever began felling
the men one by one, Narváez said that Pánuco could not be far away. If
they could build boats....
How? The men knew nothing about the art of shipbuilding. The only
materials they had were what they and their horses wore. Total
helplessness—until God’s will, Cabeza de Vaca wrote years later,
prompted one anonymous fellow to say he thought he could make a bellows
out of deerskin and wooden pipes. With the bellows they could produce
heat enough to transform spurs, bridle-bits, crossbow darts, and iron
stirrups into nails. Excited by that proposal, a Greek spoke up, saying
he knew how to manufacture waterproofing pitch from the resin in the
pine trees surrounding them.
Working with the energy of desperation, the men put together, between
August 5 and September 20 five crude boats, each about 33 feet long.
They made sails out of their clothing, rope out of horse hair and
palmetto fibre, anchors out of stone. Those not involved in the
construction used the surviving horses—a diminishing number since they
killed one every third day for food—to bring in 640 bushels of corn from
the fields at Aute. Several men died from fever or wounds received from
the Indians—not altogether an ill wind, since the five boats could not
have carried more than the 250 or so persons who overloaded them at
sailing time. Narváez, exercising a leader’s prerogative, picked out the
best boat and strongest crew for himself.
They crawled along close to the shore, sat out storms behind islands,
lost more men to Indian attack, and suffered so terribly from thirst—the
water bottles they had made from horsehide soon rotted—that four of them
drank salt water in their misery and perished. A more historic moment
than any of them would ever realize came toward the end of October 1528,
when, as they were edging out past some marshy islands, a powerful
current of fresh water swept them far out to sea. They had discovered
the mouth of a great river—the Mississippi.
As they worked back toward the coast on the far side of the river mouth,
winds and sea currents quickened their pace. Despite strenuous efforts
the crews could not keep the boats together. The men with Cabeza de Vaca
grew so exhausted that they shouted to Narváez to toss them a rope and
help pull them along. Narváez refused. “When the sun sank,” the
treasurer recalled later, “all who were in my boat were fallen one on
another, so near to death that there were few of them in a state of
sensibility.” They lay inert throughout the night. At dawn—it was
November 6, 1528—Cabeza de Vaca heard the tumult of breakers but could
take no measures to meet the threat. A giant wave lifted the boat out of
the water and dropped it with a crash on what was either Galveston
Island off the coast of Texas or a nearby stub of a peninsula.
[Illustration: The “hunch-backed cows” that Vaca and his companions
saw were the wide-ranging American bison. “They have small horns
like the cows of Morocco,” he wrote. “The hair is very long and
wooly like a rug. Some are tawny, others are black. In my judgment
the flesh is finer and fatter than cows from [Spain].”]
Karankawa Indians who had gathered at the spot to dig roots succored
them. A little later they joined the crew of another capsized boat that
had been commanded by captains Alonso de Castillo and Andrés Dorantes,
whose black slave Estéban was with him. The combined group numbered
about 80, most of them infirm and next to naked. Numbly, they tried to
repair Cabeza de Vaca’s boat so the strongest could sail to Pánuco for
help. It sank. Four volunteers then agreed to try to reach Mexico by
land. They never returned.
A winter of intense cold, starvation, and fever left only 15 alive,
Cabeza de Vaca barely so. In the spring, 13 of the survivors moved off
with the greater part of the Indians in search of food, leaving Cabeza
de Vaca and a second invalid, Lope de Oviedo, behind with a small band.
As soon as Cabeza de Vaca was able to work, the Indians set him to
digging roots and carrying firewood. To escape the drudgery he became a
trader, traveling far inland with a pack of shells, flints, cane for
arrow shafts, sinews and so on for barter. During the wanderings he
became the first European known to have seen bison.
His great desire was to walk southwest along the coast until he reached
other men of his own kind, and he urged Oviedo to join him. The fellow
kept promising he would as soon as he was better. Not wishing to desert
a fellow Spaniard, Cabeza de Vaca wasted four years through one
postponement after another. At last they started, but then Oviedo caved
in with fear and turned back, preferring familiar miseries to the
unknown.
Shortly thereafter, in 1532, in the bottomlands of the Colorado River of
Texas, where several bands were harvesting walnuts, Cabeza de Vaca
stumbled joyously across Castillo, Dorantes, and the vigorous black
Estéban. The trio were also ready to strike for Mexico if they could
escape from their masters, but they warned against fierce tribes to the
southwest. They should try a route farther north.
After two years of interruption and frustrations they made the break.
The incredible journey, broken by long stays at various Indian camps,
lasted two years. At times they traveled alone. More often they were
accompanied by Indians. After they had chanced to pray over an ailing
man, who thereupon leaped up and declared himself cured, they became
revered as supernatural medicinemen, children of the sun. Their marches,
often scouted out for them by Estéban, who also served as interpreter—he
learned six languages during those arduous years—became triumphal
processions. Sometimes, says Cabeza de Vaca, as many as 4,000 Indians
would accompany them from one village to the next, a figure that, as
Bernard DeVoto has pointed out, should be taken as a way of saying
“quite a few.” Those who escorted them would often loot the first
village they reached, whereupon its inhabitants, moving on with the
quartet to another village, would recoup their losses by plundering it.
What route did they follow? No one knows. Cabeza de Vaca’s descriptions
of Indian customs, rivers, mountains, vegetation, and so on have led
some students to suggest that the wanderers may have gone as far north
as southern New Mexico and Arizona. Others think they traveled out of
west Texas into Chihuahua. But whatever the way, it eventually merged
with one of the trade trails that ran between the Pueblo Indian towns of
the Southwest and those in the heavily populated, southward trending
valleys of Sonora. They reached the Sonora area in the spring of 1536.
What had they seen along the way? Not much, according to a report that
the survivors sent to the _audiencia_ in Hispaniola in 1537. Just
buffalo robes that had originated in the country of the plains Indians
and beautifully woven cotton mantas that their native hosts had obtained
by trade with Indians somewhere in the north (probably the Pueblos of
the Rio Grande). Bits of coral and turquoise. And miles and miles of
desolation, thinly populated by primitive tribes. Writing a memoir of
the trip six years later, Cabeza de Vaca improved only slightly on the
tales. In Sonora, he related, he was given five emeralds shaped like
arrowheads; the donors said the “jewels” had been purchased in the north
with parrot feathers and plumes. Sadly, he lost the five artifacts
before anyone else saw them. He also told of handling a small bell made
of copper and of hearing stories about large cities filled with big
houses and surrounded by boundless fields of maize.
Such reports were too vague and understated to create much popular
excitement—at first. But as Antonio de Mendoza, New Spain’s first and
recently arrived Viceroy, realized, the calm might not last. For a
similar story told a few years earlier to the infamous Nuño de Guzmán by
an Indian slave named Tejo had stirred up a violent reaction.
At the time Guzmán had been governor of Pánuco on Mexico’s northeast
coast and was making a fortune selling slaves to plantations throughout
the West Indies. But that wasn’t enough, and his ears pricked up when he
listened to Tejo telling about a trip with his father to seven marvelous
cities far to the northwest—cities whose streets were lined with the
shops of goldsmiths and silversmiths.
The story may well have had an element of truth in it. If a trader kept
traveling northwest from Pánuco—and some of Mexico’s early Indian
traders were far-ranging—he would eventually reach the impressive pueblo
towns of today’s New Mexico. Where the notion of goldsmiths came from is
something else, but Guzman believed it because he wanted to.
Instead of taking a direct line to his goal, he put together a strong
force, fought his way across the mountains to the west coast, and hewed
out, as a base of operations for a thrust along the trade trails leading
north, the all-but-independent province of Nueva Galicia. (It embraced
the better part of the present-day Mexican states of Nayarit and
Sinaloa.) Illness and then his arrest for his slave-dealings put a stop
to the northern plans, but the appearance of the Vaca party out of the
wilderness might, Mendoza feared, lead the great Cortés to appropriate
the idea for himself.
Cortés was ripe for trouble. Because of his insubordination to Diego
Velásquez of Cuba, the king had refused to name him Viceroy of New
Spain, but then had tried to compensate for the injustice, as Cortés
considered it, by naming him the Marquís of the Valley of Oaxaca and
giving him the right to explore the South Seas (south of Asia) for new
principalities. On their quests some of his ship captains stirred
Guzmán’s jealousy by sailing north along the coast of Nueva Galicia.
When Guzmán seized one of those ships in the port of Chiametla, the
Marquís rushed up with a small army and took it back. He then used that
ship to cross what he called the Sea of Cortés (today’s Gulf of
California) and claim possession, in the name of the king, of pearl
fisheries his mariners had discovered at La Paz in what we call Baja
California. The fisheries were not proving lucrative, however, and the
least sign that something better existed farther north might tempt him
to push on.
It behooved Mendoza, as the king’s representative, to move first, before
New Spain’s legitimate northward expansion was halted by one of these
semi-autonomous _conquistadores_. Dutifully reporting each of his moves
to Charles V—caution was part of his nature—he asked, in turn, Castillo,
Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca to lead a small exploring party into the
north and learn what was really there. Not surprisingly, in view of
their experiences, each refused.
In 1537, Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain. Skeptics say he wanted to
persuade the king to appoint him _adelantado_ of Florida so that he
could move independently into the north from that direction. On reaching
Madrid, however, he found that Charles had already given the post to
Hernando de Soto.
Years later one of De Soto’s Portuguese officers from the town of
Elvas—he identified himself only as a _hidalgo_ (gentleman) of
Spain—wrote that De Soto offered to take Cabeza de Vaca along as second
in command for the sake of his guidance. Again the wanderer declined.
But, said the _hidalgo_, whose accuracy cannot be checked, Vaca did drop
hints to his friends and relatives that led them to sell everything they
had in order to buy enough equipment to join the expedition. Possibly.
But all we really know is that Cabeza de Vaca, the only man to brush
against both of the _entradas_ that gave the world its first views of
what became the United States, never returned there himself. He was sent
to South America instead.
Mendoza of course learned by ship of De Soto’s appointment and of
necessity had to assume that one of the new _adelantado_’s goals would
be the Seven Cities. So now he had twin worries, Cortés in the west, De
Soto in the east. But before considering the steps he took to checkmate
them, it is well to look at De Soto’s adventure, for he is the one who,
through sheer luck, had the head start.