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
encyclopaedias 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 encyclopaedias, 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 Waldzeemueller, 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 Walzeemuellera. 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 Caesars 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 Caesars 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 Caesar, 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 Caesars 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 Caesar 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 Nunez 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 Espanola. 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 Tlacatecutle, 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-cah-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 Cuitlahuatzin 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.