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THE SPANISH PIONEERS
[Illustration: FRANCISCO PIZARRO.]
THE
SPANISH PIONEERS
BY
CHARLES F. LUMMIS
AUTHOR OF "A NEW MEXICO DAVID," "STRANGE CORNERS OF OUR COUNTRY," ETC.
Illustrated
SIXTH EDITION
[Illustration]
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--
_a_ the sound of ah
_e_ " " ay
_i_ " " ee
_j_ " " h
_o_ " " oh
_u_ " " oo
_h_ is silent
_ll_ is sounded like lli in million
_n_ " " ny in lanyard
_hua_ " " wa in water
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 Nunez 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 Canyon 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.
[Illustration: 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
Moniz, 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 nao the "Santa Maria," and his two caravels
the "Nina" and the "Pinta," filled with unwilling men, the world-finder
was at last ready.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Pronounced C[=o]-l[=o]n,--the Spanish form. (Transcriber's note: the
= signifies a macron over the o)
[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 (Espanola, 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 Espanola, 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 Parana, 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.
[Illustration: 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 Yanez 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.