established he became a cruel tyrant to his own countrymen, a traitor to
his friends and even to his king,--and, worst of all, a cool assassin.
There is strong evidence that he had "removed" several persons who were
in the way of his unholy ambitions; and the crowning infamy was in the
fate of his own wife. Cortez had long for a mistress the handsome Indian
girl Malinche; but after he had conquered Mexico, his lawful wife came
to the country to share his fortunes. He did not love her, however, as
much as he did his ambition; and she was in his way. At last she was
found in her bed one morning, strangled to death.
Carried away by his ambition, he actually plotted open rebellion against
Spain and to make himself emperor of Mexico. The Crown got wind of this
precious plan, and sent out emissaries who seized his goods, imprisoned
his men, and prepared to thwart his secret schemes. Cortez boldly
hastened to Spain, where he met his sovereign with great splendor.
Charles received him well, and decorated him with the illustrious Order
of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. But his star was already
declining; and though he was allowed to return to Mexico with
undiminished outward power, he was thenceforth watched, and did nothing
more that was comparable with his wonderful earlier achievements. He had
become too unscrupulous, too vindictive, and too unsafe to be left in
authority; and after a few years the Crown was forced to appoint a
viceroy to wield the civil power of Mexico, leaving to Cortez only the
military command, and permission for further conquests. In 1536 Cortez
discovered Lower California, and explored part of its gulf. At last,
disgusted with his inferior position where he had once been supreme, he
returned to Spain, where the emperor received him coldly. In 1541 he
accompanied his sovereign to Algiers as an attache, and in the wars
there acquitted himself well. Soon after their return to Spain, however,
he found himself neglected. It is said that one day when Charles was
riding in state, Cortez forced his way to the royal carriage and mounted
upon the step determined to force recognition.
"Who are you?" demanded the angry emperor.
"A man, your Highness," retorted the haughty conqueror of Mexico, "who
has given you more _provinces_ than your forefathers left you
_cities_!"
Whether the story is true or not, it graphically illustrates the
arrogance as well as the services of Cortez. He lacked the modest
balance of the greatest greatness, just as Columbus had lacked it. The
self-assertion of either would have been impossible to the greater man
than either,--the self-possessed Pizarro.
At last, in disgust, Cortez retired from court; and on the 2d of
December, 1554, the man who had first opened the interior of America to
the world died near Seville.
There were some in South America whose achievements were as wondrous as
those of Cortez in Mexico. The conquest of the two continents was
practically contemporaneous, and equally marked by the highest military
genius, the most dauntless courage, the overcoming of dangers which were
appalling, and hardships which were wellnigh superhuman.
Francisco Pizarro, the unlettered but invincible conqueror of Peru, was
fifteen years older than his brilliant cousin Cortez, and was born in
the same province of Spain. He began to be heard of in America in 1510.
From 1524 to 1532 he was making superhuman efforts to get to the unknown
and golden land of Peru, overcoming such obstacles as not even Columbus
had encountered, and enduring greater dangers and hardships than
Napoleon or Caesar ever met. From 1532 to his death in 1541, he was busy
in conquering and exploring that enormous area, and founding a new
nation amid its fierce tribes,--fighting off not only the vast hordes
of Indians, but also the desperate men of his own forces, by whose
treachery he at last perished. Pizarro found and tamed the richest
country in the New World; and with all his unparalleled sufferings still
realized, more than any other of the conquerors, the golden dreams which
all pursued. Probably no other conquest in the world's history yielded
such rapid and bewildering wealth, as certainly none was bought more
dearly in hardship and heroism. Pizarro's conquest has been most
unjustly dealt with by some historians ignorant of the real facts in the
case, and blinded by prejudice; but that marvellous story, told in
detail farther on, is coming to its proper rank as one of the most
stupendous and gallant feats in all history. It is the story of a hero
to whom every true American, young or old, will be glad to do justice.
Pizarro has been long misrepresented as a blood-stained and cruel
conqueror, a selfish, unprincipled, unreliable man; but in the clear,
true light of real history he stands forth now as one of the greatest of
self-made men, and one who, considering his chances, deserves the utmost
respect and admiration for the man he made of himself. The conquest of
Peru did not by far cause as much bloodshed as the final reduction of
the Indian tribes of Virginia. It counted scarcely as many Indian
victims as King Philip's War, and was much less bloody, because more
straightforward and honorable, than any of the British conquests in East
India. The most bloody events in Peru came after the conquest was over,
when the Spaniards fell to fighting one another; and in this Pizarro
was not the aggressor but the victim. It was the treachery of his own
allies,--the men whose fames and fortunes he had made. His conquest
covered a land as big as California, Oregon, and most of Washington,--or
as our whole seaboard from Nova Scotia to Port Royal and two hundred
miles inland,--swarming with the best organized and most advanced
Indians in the Western Hemisphere; and he did it all with less than
three hundred gaunt and tattered men. He was one of the great captains
of all time, and almost as remarkable as organizer and executive of a
new empire, the first on the Pacific shore of the southern continent. To
this greatness rose the friendless, penniless, ignorant swineherd of
Truxillo!
Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, subdued that vast area of the
deadly Araucanians with an "army" of two hundred men. He established the
first colony in Chile in 1540, and in the following February founded the
present city of Santiago de Chile. Of his long and deadly wars with the
Araucanians there is not space to speak here. He was killed by the
savages Dec. 3, 1553, with nearly all his men, after an indescribably
desperate struggle.
There is not space to tell here of the wondrous doings in the southern
continent or the lower point of this,--the conquest of Nicaragua by Gil
Gonzales Davila in 1523; the conquest of Guatemala, by Pedro de
Alvarado, in 1524; that of Yucatan by Francisco de Montijo, beginning in
1526; that of New Granada by Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, in 1536; the
conquests and exploration of Bolivia, the Amazon, and the Orinoco (to
whose falls the Spaniards had penetrated by 1530, by almost superhuman
efforts); the unparalleled Indian wars with the Araucanians in Chile
(for two centuries), with the Tarrahumares in Chihuahua, the Tepehuanes
in Durango, the still untamed Yaquis in northwestern Mexico; the
exploits of Captain Martin de Hurdaide (the Daniel Boone of Sinaloa and
Sonora); and of hundreds of other unrecorded Spanish heroes, who would
have been world-renowned had they been more accessible to the
fame-maker.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous
man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.
[5] Tezozomoc, the Indian historian, graphically describes the wonder of
the natives.
[6] Another specific act of treason.
VI.
A GIRDLE ROUND THE WORLD.
Before Cortez had yet conquered Mexico, or Pizarro or Valdivia seen the
lands with which their names were to be linked for all time, other
Spaniards--less conquerors, but as great explorers--were rapidly shaping
the geography of the New World. France, too, had aroused somewhat; and
in 1500 her brave son Captain de Gonneville sailed to Brazil. But
between him and the next pioneer, who was a Florentine in French pay,
was a gap of twenty-four years; and in that time Spain had accomplished
four most important feats.
Fernao Magalhaes, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan, was born in
Portugal in 1470; and on reaching manhood adopted the seafaring life, to
which his adventurous disposition prompted. The Old World was then
ringing with the New; and Magellan longed to explore the Americas. Being
very shabbily treated by the King of Portugal, he enlisted under the
banner of Spain, where his talents found recognition. He sailed from
Spain in command of a Spanish expedition, August 10, 1519; and steering
farther south than ever man had sailed before, he discovered Cape Horn,
and the Straits which bear his name. Fate did not spare him to carry his
discoveries farther, nor to reap the reward of those he had made; for
during this voyage (in 1521) he was butchered by the natives of one of
the islands of the Moluccas. His heroic lieutenant, Juan Sebastian de
Elcano, then took command, and continued the voyage until he had
circumnavigated the globe for the first time in its history. Upon his
return to Spain, the Crown rewarded his brilliant achievements, and gave
him, among other honors, a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a globe and the
motto, _Tu primum circumdedisti me_,--"Thou first didst go around me."
Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida,--the first State of our
Union that was seen by Europeans,--was as ill-fated an explorer as
Magellan; for he came to "the Flowery Land" (to which he had been lured
by the wild myth of a fountain of perennial youth) only to be slain by
its savages. De Leon was born in San Servas, Spain, in the latter part
of the fifteenth century. He was the conqueror of the island of Puerto
Rico, and sailing in 1512 to find Florida,--of which he had heard
through the Indians,--discovered the new land in the same year, and took
possession of it for Spain. He was given the title of adelantado of
Florida, and in 1521 returned with three ships to conquer his new
country, but was at once wounded mortally in a fight with the Indians,
and died on his return to Cuba. He, by the way, was one of the bold
Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to America, in
1493.
[Illustration: Autograph of Hernando de Soto.]
More of the credit of Florida belongs to Hernando de Soto. That gallant
_conquistador_ was born in Estremadura, Spain, about 1496. Pedro Arias
de Avila took a liking to his bright young kinsman, helped him to obtain
a university education, and in 1519 took him along on his expedition to
Darien. De Soto won golden opinions in the New World, and came to be
trusted as a prudent yet fearless officer. In 1528 he commanded an
expedition to explore the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan, and in 1532
led a reinforcement of three hundred men to assist Pizarro in the
conquest of Peru. In that golden land De Soto captured great wealth; and
the young soldier of fortune, who had landed in America with no more
than his sword and shield, returned to Spain with what was in those days
an enormous fortune. There he married a daughter of his benefactor De
Avila, and thus became brother-in-law of the discoverer of the
Pacific,--Balboa. De Soto lent part of his soon-earned fortune to
Charles V., whose constant wars had drained the royal coffers, and
Charles sent him out as governor of Cuba and adelantado of the new
province of Florida. He sailed in 1538 with an army of six hundred men,
richly equipped,--a company of adventurous Spaniards attracted to the
banner of their famous countryman by the desire for discovery and gold.
The expedition landed in Florida, at Espiritu Santo Bay, in May, 1539,
and re-took possession of the unguessed wilderness for Spain.
But the brilliant success which had attended De Soto in the highlands of
Peru seemed to desert him altogether in the swamps of Florida. It is
note-worthy that nearly all the explorers who did wonders in South
America failed when their operations were transferred to the northern
continent. The physical geography of the two was so absolutely unlike,
that, after becoming accustomed to the necessities of the one, the
explorer seemed unable to adapt himself to the contrary conditions of
the other.
De Soto and his men wandered through the southern part of what is now
the United States for four ghastly years. It is probable that their
travels took them through the present States of Florida, Georgia,
Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the northeastern corner
of Texas. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River; and theirs were
the first European eyes to look upon the Father of Waters, anywhere save
at its mouth,--a century and a quarter before the heroic Frenchmen
Marquette and La Salle saw it. They spent that winter along the Washita;
and in the early summer of 1542, as they were returning down the
Mississippi, brave De Soto died, and his body was laid to rest in the
bosom of the mighty river he had discovered,--two centuries before any
"American" saw it. His suffering and disheartened men passed a frightful
winter there; and in 1543, under command of the Lieutenant Moscoso, they
built rude vessels, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in
nineteen days,--the first navigation in our part of America. From the
Delta they made their way westward along the coast, and at last reached
Panuco, Mexico, after such a five years of hardship and suffering as no
Saxon explorer of America ever experienced. It was nearly a century and
a half after De Soto's gaunt army of starving men had taken Louisiana
for Spain that it became a French possession,--which the United States
bought from France over a century later yet.
[Illustration: THE ROCK OF ACOMA.
_See page 125._]
So when Verazzano--the Florentine sent out by France--reached America in
1524, coasted the Atlantic seaboard from somewhere about South Carolina
to Newfoundland, and gave the world a short description of what he saw,
Spain had circumnavigated the globe, reached the southern tip of the New
World, conquered a vast territory, and discovered at least half-a-dozen
of our present States, since the last visit of a Frenchman to America.
As for England, she was almost as unheard of still on this side of the
earth as though she had never existed.
Between De Leon and De Soto, Florida was visited in 1518 by Francisco de
Garay, the conqueror of Tampico. He came to subdue the Flowery Land, but
failed, and died soon after in Mexico,--the probability being that he
was poisoned by order of Cortez. He left even less mark on Florida than
did De Leon, and belongs to the class of Spanish explorers who, though
real heroes, achieved unimportant results, and are too numerous to be
even catalogued here.
In 1527 there sailed from Spain the most disastrous expedition which was
ever sent to the New World,--an expedition notable but for two things,
that it was perhaps the saddest in history, and that it brought the man
who first of all men crossed the American continent, and indeed made one
of the most wonderful walks since the world began. Panfilo de
Narvaez--who had so ignominiously failed in his attempt to arrest
Cortez--was commander, with authority to conquer Florida; and his
treasurer was Alvar 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 appetite of the Spaniard; and Fray
Marcos kept his footsore way, until early in June, 1539, he actually
came to the Seven Cities of Cibola. These were in the extreme west of
New Mexico, around the present strange Indian pueblo of 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
pricking-up of ears throughout New Spain (the general Spanish name then
for Mexico); and as soon as ever an armed expedition could be fitted
out, it started for the Seven Cities of Cibola, with Fray Marcos himself
as guide. Of that expedition you shall hear in a moment. Fray Marcos
accompanied it as far as 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 canyon of the Colorado,
and to the pueblo of Jemez in northern New Mexico. That winter he moved
his whole command to Tiguex, where is now the pretty New Mexican village
of Bernalillo, on the Rio Grande, and there had a serious and
discreditable war with the Tigua Pueblos.
It was here that he heard that golden myth which lured him to frightful
hardships, and hundreds since to death,--the fable of the Quivira. This,
so Indians from the vast plains assured him, was an Indian city where
all was pure gold. In the spring of 1541 Coronado and his men started in
quest of the Quivira, and marched as far across those awful plains as
the centre of our present Indian territory. Here, seeing that he had
been deceived, Coronado sent back his army to Tiguex, and himself with
thirty men pushed on across the Arkansas River, and as far as
northeastern Kansas,--that is, three-fourths of the way from the Gulf of
California to New York, and by his circuitous route much farther.
There he found the tribe of the Quiviras,--roaming savages who chased
the buffalo,--but they neither had gold nor knew where it was. Coronado
got back at last to Bernalillo, after an absence of three months of
incessant marching and awful hardships. Soon after his return, he was so
seriously injured by a fall from his horse that his life was in great
danger. He passed the crisis, but his health was wrecked; and
disheartened by his broken body and by the unredeemed disappointments of
the forbidding land he had hoped to settle, he gave up all hope of
colonizing New Mexico, and in the summer of 1542 returned to Mexico with
his men. His disobedience to the viceroy in coming back cast him into
disgrace, and he passed the remainder of his life in comparative
obscurity.