The search for El Dorado was the greatest of the dream quests of Spain.
It was not the first, it was not the last. Along with lesser ventures
without number Spain sought certain grand objects. These included the
Fountain of Youth, the Earthly Paradise, the Temple of the Sun, the
Cradle of Gold, the Country of Cinnamon, the Enchanted City of the
Cæsars, the Islands of Solomon, El Gran Moxo, El Gran Paititi, the
Sepulchres of Zenu, the Temple of Dobayba, the Seven Cities of Cibola,
Quivera the prairie capital. And Spain sought also buried cities and
phantom lakes and craters abrim with liquid gold.
Through most of these quests is the flow of delusive water. It sparkles
in the youth-conferring spring which De Leon failed to find. It moves
in the River Jordan, for which red man and white hunted in Florida.
It sweeps past the mythical Quivera, bearing huge canoes with prows
of gold. It shines on the far horizon of Cibola, and on it there are
barks of Cathay. It glimmers in the tarn of Guatavitá. In the legendary
sea of Manoa it reflects the fugitive gold of El Dorado. It laves the
enchanted City of the Cæsars hard by the lake of Nahuelhuapi. In the
Laguna de los Xarayes it ripples around the island home of El Gran
Moxo. It flashes on the beaches of fabled islands west of the southern
continent.
There were reasons for the illusory lakes of Spanish adventure. The
City of Mexico was seated in a lake with causeways crossing it and
canals reaching the heart of the city. The Empire of Peru held Lake
Titicaca as sacred. The scarcely less remarkable civilization of the
Chibchas of Colombia rendered homage to the lakes of the central
plateau. So the Spaniards thought that when they sought other golden
cities in the wilderness they would find them on the shores of inland
seas.
The periodic inundations of the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Paraguay,
and the tributaries of these streams deceived and disturbed men with
appearances which they could not understand. One explorer would come
upon a vast sheet of still water, and in due time it would get upon the
maps. Another would lead his column dry shod over the same place, and
men were slow to realize that each had made correct report of what he
saw. For example, the legendary lake of Xarayas, long supposed to be
the source of the Paraguay, is merely a seasonal inundation; but during
high water this transitory sea extends three hundred and fifty miles
north and south and one hundred and fifty miles east and west.
The things of the spirit--religion, romance, pure fantasy--animated
Spain in some of the quests it followed beside the still waters of the
lakes of dream. Its rude chivalry could serve the ideal with a whole
heart. But for the most part cavalier and muleteer sought gold alone.
Gems, spices, pepper, dyewoods, grain fields, raw materials, rubber,
bananas, coffee--these are objects of ancient or modern enterprise in
strange lands. They meant little to the Spaniard. Nor was his deepest
interest in metal that was still underground. He was looking for the
gold that for generation after generation Indian civilizations had
brought to the surface and stored in their capital cities. The rewards
of savage toil he would seize for himself who better knew their value,
or thought he did.
That is why the visionary expeditions of Spain are in the main a search
for cities, or, failing these, projects to loot temples and rifle
graves. Neither the digging nor the assembling of the golden treasure
was in the scheme. The purpose was to take the central treasure houses.
So Spain had already done in Peru. The captive Inca Atahuallpa had
himself suggested a kindred thing. For ransom he offered to fill his
prison chamber, a room seventeen feet wide and twenty-two feet long,
with gold to the depth of nine feet, or as high as the reach of the
tallest cavalier. When the bargain was made, gold began to pour in from
all corners of the empire--statues, vases, vessels, utensils, plaques,
disks, chains, temple ornaments, nuggets, and golden dust. Of course
his captors killed the Inca, and rushed on to seek the sources whence
flowed the maddening stream; and what they found did not satisfy. Much
of the treasure of the Incas had disappeared. Nor has it been uncovered
since.
Those vain enterprises of Spain, with which a great part of the New
World’s sixteenth century was filled, were attempts of adventurers to
lay hold of the gold which had escaped the conquistadors in Mexico and
Peru, or which it was imagined had escaped them. It was supposed that
the descendants of the Montezumas, taking rich treasures with them, had
retreated northward to Cibola or to Quivera, and there renewed their
state. It was reported, and with some basis of fact, that princes of
the Inca blood had gone north, south, or east from Cuzco and set up new
cities in the wilderness. The basis of fact was the flight of Manco
Capac, called the Last of the Incas. This prince raised the country
against its conquerors, flung an army of two hundred thousand warriors
against the Spanish garrison in Cuzco, and before night settled on the
empire of the Andes gave proof on the battlefield that there was valor
in the Quichua blood. At the mountain fortress of Choquequirau, the
Cradle of Gold, six thousand feet above the valley of the Apurimac,
Peruvian geographers believe the Last of the Incas made his seat.
_The Fountain of Youth_
It is best to begin the recital of the dream quests of Spain with the
dream of all ages--the search for lost youth. It was the first of those
adventures in the New World in which the sons of Spain were to show
they were different from other men, in that when they imagined a vain
thing their imagination rushed on to action.
In an unfinished poem Heine sketches the beginning of this quest. Ponce
de Leon, the veteran ex-governor of Porto Rico, lies in his hammock
and an old Indian servant sings to him of the Bahama island of Bimini
with its bird song and undying flowers, and of its interesting tenants.
These were old men restored by a magic spring to riotous youth and
beldames who had drunk of its waters and regained girlhood’s bloom;
they were afraid to return home because of the scandal their shamefully
youthful appearance would work among their friends. Poetic license
carries this sketch only a little beyond the credulity of the period,
for Peter Martyr had written at length to the bishop of Rome of an
island with a youth-restoring spring some three hundred leagues north
of Hispaniola.
[Illustration: _The Things of the Spirit Animated Spain in Some of the
Quests It Followed Beside the Still Waters of the Lakes of Dream_]
The Spanish cavalier set sail with three ships in 1512, in search of
Bimini. There were nearly seven hundred islands and islets in the
Bahamas and his journey was through a labyrinth. For a part of the
voyage he had the strangest, and perhaps the most fitting, of pilots.
To a clump of islands near the Lucayos he gave the name of La Vieja
or the Old Woman group because he found them without inhabitants save
one ancient woman. Her he took aboard to help guide him through the
sea passages. He found Florida, but he did not find Bimini, which was
discovered later by his captain, Juan Perez de Ortubia, the sagacious
old woman directing him to its shore. The water there was like any
other water. Ponce de Leon, however, escaped the disabilities of age. A
poisoned Indian arrow launched from a Florida bow did for him when he
was about sixty-one.
Before his death, the quest for a fountain from which one might quaff
the draught of youth had been broadened to include a River Jordan of
rejuvenating baths. This was somewhere on the peninsula of Florida,
where for half a century red men and white searched for it, bathing
in every stream, lagoon, and swamp they found, in the hope that the
magic water, in some sudden transformation scene, might betray its
whereabouts.
Though they did not know it, the Spaniards themselves brought to the
New World the legend of the fountain of youth and the name of Bimini,
as well as that of the River Jordan. Wiener has traced each step. In
1493, a year before the Pope made the line of demarcation between the
Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, he had given to Spain the newly
discovered lands on condition that the natives should be baptized
in the Catholic faith. Amerigo Vespucci falsely reported that, in
compliance therewith, a fountain of baptism had been placed on an
island in the Gulf of Mexico. Peter Martyr in his _Decade of 1511_
called this the _fonte perenni_, but the cartographer misread his
Latin, and on the map attached to his work a coast line north of Cuba
is called _isla de beimeni parte_. Thus the perennial fountain became
Bimini, and the fiction of a Christian baptismal font revived a pagan
myth.
_The Enchanted City of the Cæsars_
The quest of the Enchanted City of the Cæsars was the southernmost
adventure of the dreaming mind of Spain. It was prosecuted along the
slopes of the southern Andes and the Patagonian plains beyond--that
mysterious and desolate region which made so deep an impression upon
Darwin. Over the remote prairies, peopled only by huanacos and roving
bands of tall savages, Spanish commands hunted for a capital which the
natives called Trapalanda, and which, according to the oath of those
who said they had seen it, was as great as ancient Nineveh and as
populous as Peking.
Outbound to the Moluccas, the story ran, a vessel belonging to the
bishop of Palancia was shipwrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The
captain of the stranded craft, Sebastian de Arguello, found himself on
the Patagonian coast with three thousand miles of mountain and plain
between his little band and the outpost of Spanish power at Cuzco.
Followed by about two hundred soldiers and sailors, thirty adventurers,
twenty-three married women, and three priests, he struck boldly into
the heart of the pampas, moving northward. When the company reached
a region of lakes and meadows rimmed by snowy summits resolution was
taken to found there an independent state aloof from the perturbations
of the world. Other fugitives had reached this inviting spot before the
Spaniards--a numerous native people flying from the wreck of Peru.
It would seem from the rapid growth of the city which was said to
have arisen upon the shore of Lake Nahuelhuapi that red men and white
mingled their blood. The first report of the austral capital reached
Concepcion in Chile, in 1557.
The Spanish settlements were led to picture a great, rich city in the
south. A strong wall ran around it, and over it the roving Indians
of the prairies could see reddish roofs that gleamed as with gold.
The houses were of cut stone and those who had been within them
spoke of beds, chairs, and table service made of precious ores. The
central edifice in the capital was a noble church roofed with silver,
and from it were decreed and regulated the pompous festivals of the
ecclesiastical year.
Wishing to keep their isolation inviolate, its inhabitants had an
understanding with the Indians that the secret of the city should be
told to none. But when it received the name of _La Ciudad encantada
de los Cæsares_ (the enchanted City of the Cæsars), it was a presage
that from all the Spanish settlements of the south, expeditions should
go forth to seek it out, for the very words were a challenge to the
imagination.
It was called the city of the Cæsars because the men who founded it had
been subjects of Charles V of Spain, whom men had styled the Cæsar in
recognition of his world-wide dominion. It was called enchanted because
of the beauty of its lake setting and the splendors within its walls.
Soon its people became known as the Cæsars, and the men who conducted
expeditions to reach them as the Cæsaristas.
There were other motives for the quest beside the golden treasure
to be found there and the wish to visit a clime so fair that none
died save of old age. Here were a kindred people, cut off from their
fellows, and, it might be, lapsing decade after decade into a splendid
barbarism. The purity of their Christian faith was in danger of
corruption from every sort of heathen error. Civilization and religion
were both concerned in the rescue of this fascinating creole capital,
which had done so well by itself and yet needed to renew its contacts
with the world. So said the Spaniard wherever fortune had placed
him--in the homeland, in Mexico, in the Philippines, and most of all in
the colonies of the southern Cordilleras and the eastern plains.
There were a number of small expeditions to seek the legendary city,
and three of importance. Diego Flores de Leon reached Lake Nahuelhuapi
from the Pacific side, heard of savage armies massed on his front, and
went no further. Half a century later came the Jesuit father, Nicolas
Mascardi. Fearing that the southern capital might have forgotten the
mother tongue of Spain, he collaborated with another churchman in
a letter which was translated into seven languages--Greek, Latin,
Spanish, Italian, Chilean, Puelche, and Poya. The letter was sent
ahead by an Indian courier after he reached the shores of Nahuelhuapi.
Hearing a report that the site of the city was near the Atlantic, he
crossed the continent, and then turned southward toward the Straits of
Magellan, falling at last to an Indian arrow. This was in 1673. More
than a century afterward the Franciscan friar, Menendez, was sent out
by the viceroy of Peru, but found no city beside Nahuelhuapi.
Thereafter faith in the fable died, save among the imaginative and the
credulous. Of the former was Charles III of Spain, who died believing
it in 1788. Of the latter are the common people of Chile and Argentina,
who see in the streams of lava and volcanic sand at the foot of Osorno
the roads of a hidden people, and who still hear in the noise of the
avalanches upon Tronador the thunder of artillery along enchanted
battlements.
_The Seven Cities of Cibola_
In the quest of the Seven Cities of Cibola Spain dreamed northward,
and again deluded itself by the magic and sonority of a name. When
the fable was full blown it was of a city as great as the capital of
the Montezumas and ruled by a fugitive prince of that house. Lesser
cities surrounded it, as they surrounded Tenochtitlan on the plateau
of Anahuac. It stood beside a great inland sea out of which flowed the
Colorado, and on the coasts of this land were ships from China.
The inhabitants of the plains were cattle of deformed shape and
ferocious aspect, which the Spaniards called the kine of Cibola. The
inhabitants of the seven cities, says Friar Marcos, who saw them at a
distance, were a people “somewhat white,” clad in cotton garments and
dwelling in stone houses with flat roofs. The Franciscan continues:
“They have emeralds and other jewels, although they esteem none as much
as turquoises, wherewith they adorn the walls and porches of their
houses, and their apparel and vessels, and they use them instead of
money through all the country. They use vessels of gold and silver,
for they have no other metal, whereof there is greater avail and more
abundance than in Peru.”
This capital of the buffalo country was located within the limits of
the present United States. Somewhat shrunken from the dimensions of
legend, it is still in existence and the descendants of the men fabled
to traffic with Cathay go about its streets. Their skins are darker
than Marcos reported them, but they have the features and expression of
white men.
Here is another myth of a gilded land and a refugee king, but overlaid
with material of a strange texture brought from afar. Its scene is
inland where buffalo are feeding; yet one of its windows commands the
Pacific with slanting Chinese sails upon it, and into the other comes
an old tale of the open Atlantic. The Seven Cities of Cibola are the
legendary seven cities of Antilia, founded by seven Spanish bishops
who fled the Moor, and they are the seven caves out of which came the
Aztecs. But they are also seven towns, the remains of which, waste or
tenanted, are to be found in New Mexico near the Arizona line. The vice
of the legend is that they are small towns, and poor.
There are names of consequence in the quest of the Seven Cities of
Cibola, but a broad blotch of buffoonery is smeared across it. Alone of
all the visionary searches of Spain, it invites the treatment of ironic
burlesque. Yet there is heroism in the story and a great chapter of
geography.
The first of these names is that of the luckless but stout-hearted
Cabeza de Vaca who left a trail of wandering mishap clear across the
continent of North America, and who was yet to break new paths through
the forests and savannas of South America where he founded the capital
of the Silver Republic. In 1536 the outposts of Melchior Diaz, who
commanded in the northern Mexican district of Culiacan, came upon a
strange party--a white man, nearly naked, with matted hair and beard,
a negro, and eleven Indians. The white man spoke in Spanish and with
such joyful agitation as to arouse a momentary suspicion. It was Cabeza
de Vaca. His negro companion was named Estivanico. There were three
other Spaniards a day’s march behind. In what was to follow, singularly
enough, the negro is the central figure; in what had gone before the
story is the Spanish captain’s.
In 1527 he had sailed for Florida as treasurer of an expedition with
five vessels and six hundred men, in search of the Golden Apalache, one
of the minor dream quests of Spain. Quitting the fleet in a Florida
bay, three hundred men marched inland to their objective. What they
found was a collection of forty wigwams on the Suwanee River and a
rude people that engaged them in daily skirmishes at arms. So they
marched on, became entangled in the swamps and bayous along the coasts
of Alabama and Louisiana, made one fatal attempt to build rafts and
cross the Gulf to the Mexican coast, and then succumbed by degrees
to the wilderness. All but four of the Spaniards perished and these
were buffeted from tribe to tribe in an aimless drift westward. They
had almost reached the Gulf of California when they met the Spanish
outpost, and in eight years they had wandered from Atlantic to Pacific.
What they told launched the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola.
Farther north they had found tribes of sedentary Indians living in
stone houses, wearing cotton garments and turquoise ornaments, and
with indications of stores of gold to draw upon. Francisco Vasquez
Coronado, governor of Northwest Mexico, was commissioned by Mendoza,
Viceroy of New Spain, to explore in that direction. Distrusting
the reports of Cabeza de Vaca, his first step was a reconnaissance
under the Franciscan, Fray Marcos. As guide and attendant the negro
Estevanico went with him, and a party of Pima Indians accompanied them.
They started northward from Culiacan in 1539, following the coast. In
Sonora the friar committed the folly of sending the negro ahead with
instructions to report to him at intervals by messenger. If he found
a mean thing he was to send a cross a hand’s length long; if a larger
matter, a cross two hands’ long; if the negro found a country better
than New Spain he was to send back a great cross.
That was the last Fray Marcos saw of the negro, but he heard from him,
and from time to time he heard about him. Four days after his departure
an Indian came back bearing a wooden cross as high as a man and the
word of Estevanico that thirty days’ march ahead were seven cities
abounding in pearls and gold, and all subject to one lord. The houses
were of stone and mortar, one, two, and three stories high, and the
chief’s house was of four stories. One of the cities was named Cibola.
As the friar proceeded, the natives brought tales which seemed to
confirm the reports, and used place names that suggested grandeur. He
heard of a province called Totoneac, of the city of Ahacus, and of the
kingdoms of Hacus and Marata.
Meanwhile Africa was blazing a trail far ahead into Darkest America.
It was broad, dusty with the feet of an accumulating multitude, and
finger-posted by avarice and imposture. The negro had taken the
adventure out of the hands of the too-trusting monk. In his wanderings
with Cabeza de Vaca he had won assurance, some knowledge of the
Indian nature, and a gourd rattle. He moved with the state and tumult
of a medicine-man, this clapper his potent emblem of authority. The
superstitious natives met all his demands, and he demanded much--more
food than he could use, gold, green stones, women. The monk followed,
several journeys behind, in a sort of anti-climax.
The procession of the black Bacchus had its inevitable ending. Marcos
learned it while he was still some days from his goal. He met a number
of the Indians who had been with Estevanico, and they were flying
toward Mexico. They told of entering Cibola with the negro, where his
arrogance and folly mounted to new levels. Noting the lowering looks
of the sedentary Indians, several of these plains Indians went outside
and, hiding themselves, awaited the finish they foresaw. One day they
beheld their companions running from the town with men in pursuit. The
negro was not with them. His hosts had killed him.
With two of the Indians Marcos went on to a hill from which he looked
down upon a valley dotted with villages. The nearest of these and not
the largest was Cibola. To Marcos it seemed “as large as the City of
Mexico.” It is situate, he says, “on a plain at the foot of a round
hill, and maketh shew to be a fair city, and is better seated than any
that I have seen in these parts. The houses are builded in order, all
made of stone with divers storeys and flat roofs.” Then he adds from
hearsay details of golden vessels and turquoise-studded porches.
Setting up a wooden cross, Marcos hastened back, rejoicing, to make his
report to the viceroy. Out of what he told, and the far-sounding names
of provinces and kingdoms which he had heard, the Spanish mind made a
thing too rich for the haggard realities of the American southwest. It
seemed to call for a well-appointed expedition, and Coronado urged this
on the viceroy.
With Marcos as his guide he was dispatched with a land force of
three hundred and twenty Spaniards, three hundred native allies,
and a thousand Indian and negro camp followers. He left San Miguel
in February, 1540, and in May a fleet under Alarcon was sent from
Acapulco to act in concert with him along the coast of the Gulf of
California. Alarcon went to the head of the gulf with his ships, and up
the Colorado, but, learning from natives that white men had already
entered Cibola, he returned with his fleet to Acapulco.
What Coronado had entered was the Indian pueblo of Zuñi and its
attendant villages in northwestern New Mexico. As soon as his soldiers
beheld these little settlements, writes Castaneda, who went with the
expedition, they “broke out in curses against Fray Marcos.” They
accused him of deceiving them, and in fear of his life he was glad
to go back with the courier who bore to the viceroy the report of
Coronado. “I can assure your honour,” says the report, “the friar said
the truth in nothing that he reported, saving only the names of the
cities and great houses of stone; for although they be not wrought with
turquoises, nor with lime nor brick, yet are they very excellent houses
of three or four or five lofts high, wherein are good lodgings and fair
chambers. The seven cities are seven small towns, and they stand all
within four leagues together, and none of them is called Cibola, but
altogether they are called Cibola.”
In his scholarly account of this expedition Bandelier defends the
credulous monk, and urges that the Spaniards had tricked out his story
with their own imaginings. He argues that the comparison with the City
of Mexico was not with the old Aztec capital, but with the new Spanish
town which, as Fray Marcos knew it in 1539, may not have had as many
as a thousand inhabitants. As to the statement that the citizens of
Cibola embellished their houses with green stones or turquoises, it
has been learned that it was an old custom in Zuñi to decorate the
roof hatches by which the people descended to their chambers with
turquoise, malachite, phosphate of copper and other stones or ores
of green and blue. This was truthful detail, although lending itself
to exaggeration. But the golden vessels, which most concerned the
Spaniard, were fable, and the Coronado expedition had cost $250,000.
Despite the forthright words of Coronado, one conquistador who would
look facts in the face, his countrymen were unwilling to surrender the
vision all at once. The English merchant, Henry Hawks, spent five years
in Mexico and in 1572 made this report: “The Spanyards have notice of
seven cities which old men of the Indians shew them should lie towards
the northwest from Mexico. They have used and use dayly much diligence
in seeking of them, but they cannot find any one of them. They say that
the witchcraft of the Indians is such, that when they come by these
townes they cast a mist upon them, so that they cannot see them.”
Zuñi lies south of the great Navaho reservation, and is a pueblo
of the same type as Taos, Acoma, Laguna, and the Hopi towns. Its
identification with the Seven Cities of Cibola rests on the reports
of the explorers themselves, on an examination of their routes, and
especially on the researches of Frank H. Cushing, commissioner of the
American Bureau of Ethnology, who became a member of this Indian tribe
in 1880 and lived with it four years while he studied its traditions.
At that time Zuñi had sixteen hundred inhabitants.
These people called their home Shivano (Spanish, Civano). Cushing
found that the sonorous Marata and Tontoneac were not kingdoms or
provinces, but directions, and that one of the distant “cities” named
by the natives was Acoma, which lies near the Mesa Encantada. While the
Spaniards had denied that Marcos and Estevanico really made a journey
to the north, Cushing heard from the Zuñi story-tellers that a “black
Mexican” had come among them and had been killed for his rudeness to
their women. Soon afterwards the first “white Mexicans” they had seen
entered their land as conquerors.
_Quivera_
Coronado was not content to bring back his costly expedition,
empty-handed, from the fiasco of Cibola. Again he dreamed northward,
and the name of his dream is Quivera. Between this city of illusion in
the Mississippi Valley, and the city of enchantment which the Cæsars
had reared on the edge of the Patagonian plain, it is six thousand
miles in a straight line. These two capitals of the mirage are the
farthest north and farthest south of Spanish fantasy.
The conqueror of Cibola drifted into the Quivera adventure by degrees.
There must be richer pueblos east of the seven towns, he thought, and
went in search of them, discovering and occupying many. But he found
New Mexico a sterile land. He became interested in the great buffalo
herds that roamed the plains to the north and sent his lieutenant,
Alvarado, on a hunt to secure meat. Alvarado took with him as a guide
an Indian from somewhere far to the east whom he found living with
the Pecos tribe and who figures in Spanish writings as El Turco, “the
Turk,” which was what he looked like. The Spaniard did not stay long
among the buffalos, for the homesick Turk had an exciting tale to tell.
With it, Alvarado hastened back to his chief, and soon, with El Turco
as pathfinder, the columns started toward the northeast and Quivera.
This was another golden city in a prosperous land. Through the land ran
a river two leagues wide in which swam fish as large as horses. There
were great canoes upon the river, with as many as forty men to drive
them, and these had golden eagles for figureheads. The native sovereign
slumbered in the afternoons beneath a tree the branches of which were
hung with golden bells, where the wind made music. The houses of
Quivera were built of stone and were like those of the pueblos of New
Mexico, but larger and fairer. The meats and drinks of its citizens
were served in vessels of precious metals.
Of this land the Turk himself was a native. But there was another
Indian exile with the party. His name was Ysopete, and he, too, spoke
of Quivera. It seemed to be a different place farther north.
With one guide bent on leading him northward and the other eastward,
the expedition which Coronado conducted toward Quivera moved like a man
lost in the wilderness. It traveled to the right for thirty-seven days
and partly returned on its tracks. Soon the Spaniards became confused
and ill at ease. In the vast monotony of the staked plains they saw
no marks by which they could guide themselves forward or find the way
back. A sense of helplessness stole over them. The very bison that
grazed around them excited a sort of fear. Their horses went wild with
terror when for the first time they saw these huge, misshapen beasts,
whose glowing eyes and hollow bellowing were calculated to inspire awe
even in men.
The wanderers were in latitudes less kindly to illusion than those
where other men were seeking the Gilded King, and a glimmer of the
scientific and reasoning spirit which weighs motives and scrutinizes
facts was born in them. Was not this story of Quivera the Golden just
a tale told by the settled Indians in order to get rid of them? Had
not El Turco been instigated to lure them by confused trails into the
wilderness and leave them to perish there? Had not one of them detected
him talking to the devil in a pitcher of water?
While they harbored these distrustful forebodings the Spaniards fell
in with a party of plains Indians who knew Quivera. It was forty days’
march ahead, they said, and the columns would die for lack of food
and water upon the way. Stone buildings and plentiful provisions in
precious vessels at the end of the way? The prairie nomads knew of none
of these things. They spoke of an encampment where the houses were
made of straw and skins, and a little maize in them, naught else. The
shifty Turk changed his story. He had not told the truth, he admitted,
as to the houses of Quivera, but it had a numerous population and a
store of precious metals. In anger the Spaniards put shackles upon
him. They were ready to go back, but Coronado was determined, without
risking too many lives, at least to see for himself what lay at the end
of the trail. He took twenty-nine horsemen, the manacled El Turco, and
Ysopete, and rode northward with the plains Indians.
After thirty days of hard riding through a great treeless plain dotted
with buffalo herds and watered by a number of small streams, Coronado
reached Quivera, where he stayed twenty-five days. He describes the
region about it as a rich land in which grew plums like those of Spain,
mulberries, and well-flavored grapes. But the settlement itself was
merely the summer camp of an Indian horde that followed the buffalo and
supplemented a beef diet with corn cakes, made from maize grown in the
river bottoms.
The explorer tells the story with rough candor. “I had been told,” he
says, “that the houses were made of stone and were several stories;
they are only of straw, and the inhabitants are as savage as any that I
have seen. They have no clothes, nor cotton to make them out of; they
simply tan the hides of the cows which they hunt, and which pasture
around their village and in the neighborhood of a large river. They
eat their meat raw, and are enemies to one another and war among one
another. All these men look alike.”
As Estevanico had met his fate at Cibola, so the Turk met his at
Quivera. Its people did not know him, but they welcomed Ysopete, and
for his sake the Spaniards. El Turco sought to lay the blame on the New
Mexican Indians, who, he said, had engaged him to lead the Spaniards to
their fate on the prairies. This tale failing to help his credit, he
tried to raise Quivera against his masters, who incontinently hanged
him.
Before turning southward to rejoin his command and take it back
to Mexico, Coronado set up a wooden cross which bore a soldierly
inscription, “Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, leader of a campaign, came
to this place.”
Four states claim Quivera, and the blind wanderings of the Spaniards
give conjecture a broad field to work in. One thing certain is that
La Gran Quivera, the new Mexican mission, established after the
suppression of the Indian uprisings in 1580, does not stand on its
site. Bandelier thinks the site was in central Kansas about a hundred
miles north of the Arkansas River. It has severally been contended that
Quivera was a camp of the Wichita Indians; that it was in Nebraska not
far from the state capital; and that the place the Spaniards reached
was in the southwest corner of Missouri. Cyrus Thomas, who supports
the latter view, holds that El Turco came from some tribe near the
confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi, that the great stream of
which he spoke was the latter river and Quivera a town on its banks,
while the place seen by Coronado was simply the homeland of Ysopete.
Whatever the region, it would be as vain to seek the site as to look
for the camping ground in the desert where some forgotten Arab tribe
pitched its tents for a night, and struck them at sunrise.
_The Islands of Solomon_
There came a time when the New World was too small to hold the visions
of Spain. North and south the conquistadors had marched, seeking what
they did not find. So they dreamed westward over the sea. They had
plunged their hands in gold. They might yet bathe in it at the Baths of
Sunset.
As always, there were stories of islands in near-by waters where the
superstition or simplicity of the natives had heaped up treasure
that more deserving men might seize. The Spaniards went after it, at
first from Mexico. Then from the harbors of Peru ships began to sail
westward, and fantasies spread over the deep.
These voyages add two titles to the dream quests of Spain--the
Enchanted Islands and the Isles of Solomon--and the names may stand
for one reality. About six hundred miles west of the mainland of South
America, and on the line of the equator, lie the Galapagos, comprising
five large and ten smaller islands. From the Peruvians the Spaniards
learned of them, but for a while they could not find them. They were
vaguely called the Islas Encantadas because they seemed to elude the
search. The buccaneers used them later as sallyports from which to
attack the Peruvian plate fleet. Still later whalers resorted thither,
but not until 1832 did Ecuador occupy the group.
This archipelago of the west may have been the basis of the legend that
grew up among the seafaring folk of Peru. It was told that the Inca
Tupac Yupanqui had made a voyage and come upon two islands which were
called Nina-chumpi and Hahua-chumpi, or Fire Island and Outer Island.
He brought back gold and silver, a throne of copper, black slaves, and
the skin of an animal like a horse. Another account said the islands
were distant a journey of two months, and one was so large it might be
a continent. There were sheep, llamas and deer upon it and a bareheaded
people who wore cotton and woolen garments. Although their king dwelt
in a palace with mud walls, a frieze of gold ran around it.
A later legend, purporting to tell of a Spanish discovery, is very
definite: A long time before, a ship from Chile had been driven out
of its course to a large island, which it coasted for fifty days. One
of the seamen, Juan Montanes, went ashore and found a race of tall,
bearded Indians and women whose braided hair reached to their ankles.
They lived in communal houses four hundred feet long by one hundred
feet wide. Numerous rafts and sumptuously decorated canoes thronged
with people plied along the coasts. Because of his beard, the natives
treated the Spaniard kindly and pressed a gold plate and emeralds upon
him.
The account continues with the exactness of a seaman’s chart: “These
islands must be reached from Puerto de Arica, taking the volcano in the
bay as a landmark, such being the custom of the Indians who come and
go thither. As soon as the said volcano disappears, the desert islands
are reached. Going in among them, after two days the large island which
seems to be a continent is sighted, and what lies to the west is still
to be discovered.”
There are elements in this story, such as the communal houses and the
ornate canoes, borrowed from actual expeditions to the South Seas which
the earlier legend itself had launched. What these expeditions had
set out to find was a continent about two thousand miles to the west,
which stretched northward for three thousand miles from the latitude
of Tierra del Fuego to 15 degrees south, or almost on a line with
Callao; a domain about the size of that afterward discovered and named
Australia, but lying on the near side of the Pacific. Rumors of such a
continent passed from tavern gossip to palace conferences. Sarmiento
de Gamboa had gathered and analyzed Inca traditions of Pacific islands
and the learned men of the colony assumed that a continental mass lay
behind them. So in 1567 the governor of Peru dispatched two small ships
with one hundred and fifty men and put his youthful nephew, Alvarado de
Mendana, in command.
An incredible thing happened. These frail vessels, provisioned for a
voyage of two thousand miles, drove westward without sighting land
for seven thousand miles. In two months they crossed the width of the
Pacific, making their land-fall in the East Indies. For six months the
crews explored the capes, creeks, and jungles of a group of islands
flanking New Guinea on the east. Then the ships started back and were
off Callao twenty months after they had left it. They brought no
gold, but stories of “a naked, cheerful people of a bright reddish
colour”--in reality, head-hunting cannibals, to this day the most
savage of men.
Nearly thirty years went by before another expedition was undertaken,
and meanwhile legend was at work. It gave the distant group the name
it bears upon the map. These were called the Isles of Solomon, says
Lopez Vaz, “to the ende that the Spaniards, supposing them to bee
those Isles from whence Solomon fetched gold to adorne the temple at
Jerusalem, might bee the more desirous to goe and inhabit the same.”
But the Portuguese writer adds that because Drake and other raiders
had entered the South Seas, it was determined not to settle them, so
that interloping vessels Molucca-bound might have no succor on the way.
In 1595 Mendana, now middle aged, undertook to colonize the islands,
going out with four ships and 368 emigrants--men, women and children,
his own wife among them. Then another amazing thing happened. The
Spaniards could not find the Solomons. They discovered the Marquesas,
and in the island of Santa Cruz founded a short-lived colony where
Mendana died and whence the expedition went forth again to disaster.
Quiros, Mendana’s great lieutenant, returning to Peru, represented to
the viceroy that the islands come upon by his chief must screen an
unknown continent, as in fact they did. In 1605 he was sent out to find
them. He discovered the Society Islands, the Duff group and the New
Hebrides, but nowhere was there trace of the Isles of Solomon.
Dissolved into fable, for two centuries they were lost to geography. In
the waterside taverns of Peru, people still talked of them. But it had
become a maxim of the viceroys to treat the discovery as a romance, and
learned men concurred. The group was erased from the maps of the world.
Although it includes ten great islands stretching for six hundred
miles in an almost unbroken barrier across the track of navigators,
and although the first Spanish expedition brought back information
so detailed that every headland and harbor which Mendana passed has
since been identified, yet for two hundred years nobody could find the
archipelago. When it was rediscovered it was from the other direction.
Carteret and Bougainville, rounding Africa and entering the South Seas
in the latter part of the eighteenth century, came upon islands which
were found to be the lost lands of Spain.
_The Sepulchers of Zenu_
There are significant words in Raleigh’s _Discovery of Guiana_. Here,
he says, “commanders that shoot at honour and abundance shall find
more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with
treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.”
Moreover, it is virgin soil: “the graves have not bene opened for
golde, nor the Images puld downe out of their temples.” Spain’s hunger
for gold pursued the Indians into their sanctuaries, and even into
their graves.
The Bachelor Enciso and Balboa, each in turn commander of Darien,
sought golden treasures, which, as report ran, Indian piety had heaped
in the wilderness.
Enciso went forth to sack the Sepulchers of Zenu. This province lay
some twenty leagues west of Cartagena. From its steeps the rains washed
gold down in such profusion that the natives caught in nets nuggets
as big as eggs. Zenu was also the cemetery for all the tribes of the
country. For ages they had brought their dead thither for burial, and
deposited golden ornaments with the bodies in the tombs. The soil, the
Spanish lawyer thought, must have become incredibly rich from this long
accumulation. It was no sacrilege to plunder the dead, for were these
not pagans, buried according to the rites of an idolatrous faith?
Landing on the coast of Zenu, Enciso found an army under two caciques
drawn up to oppose him. The lawyer in him prompted him to put his
opponents in the wrong before appealing to arms. So he had a formal
statement read to the two chiefs. The colloquy which followed, and
which he reports himself, is one of the most interesting incidents in
all the contacts of white men with savages. The statement recited that
there was one God who ruled in heaven, that in the Pope He had a vicar
who ruled on earth, and that the latter had awarded Zenu to the King of
Spain. The Indians replied that they accepted the sovereignty of God in
heaven, but nothing further. The Pope, they said, must have been drunk,
to give away what did not belong to him, and the King somewhat mad, to
ask of him what was not his to give. If the King came to take it, they
would cut off his head and set it on a stake; and they pointed to other
stakes on which heads were set.
Whereupon there was fighting, in which, Enciso says, the Indians had
the worse of it. But two of his men, slightly wounded by poisoned
arrows, died raving; the country was hostile beyond what he had
anticipated, and his force small. He went away without rifling the
sepulchers.
_The Temple of Dobayba_
Balboa, succeeding Enciso at Darien, heard of a province called Dobayba
forty leagues away on the banks of the Atrato. It was named either
from a goddess or from an Indian princess to whom, after death, divine
honors were paid. Her worship was conducted in a great temple, whither
natives came with their offerings. At stated times the caciques of
remote provinces sent a golden tribute, together with slaves for
sacrifice.
Superstition and fear piled up treasure at this shrine. At one time its
worship had been neglected. Then a great drought fell upon the land,
the springs and rivers dried up, and a scourge of death was visited
upon the neglectful nations. The survivors renewed their zeal and
redoubled their offerings of slaves and gold. Thus from generation to
generation the wealth of many peoples drained into the blood-stained
temple. The prospect of spoiling a heathen shrine profaned by human
sacrifice and piled high with idolatrous gold presented itself not as a
desecration but as a duty.
On his first journey Balboa mistook a deserted frontier village for the
temple town. When he went again, it was at the behest of Pedrarias,
who had been made governor of the colony, and whose jealousy prompted
him to set Balboa a task that might bring disgrace. The quest of
Dobayba was now deemed an enterprise of romantic promise but of high
hazard. The way thither led through tribes of bold and crafty savages.
In the dreary fens lurked animals to be dreaded, including monstrous
importations from classic myth. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed above
the stagnant water, sinister lizards crawled on the banks, crocodiles
haunted the ooze. Dragons couched there, so said report, and huge bats
flitted by on vampire errands. Peter Martyr even mentions two harpies.
A later age was to discover the enigmatic White Indians. Rather than
enter this accursed region, the coast natives were wont to shun the
direct routes and travel the steep paths of the mountains.
Balboa was to win neither gold nor glory upon his forbidding mission.
Passing up the Gulf of Oraba and into the river Atrato with a fleet
of canoes, the expedition was ambushed by Indian canoes, losing half
its number. Its leader, wounded, made shore with the remainder and at
sunset began a crestfallen retreat to Darien.
The temple of Dobayba--if there was a temple--was left inviolate, to
receive the gold and shed the blood of heathen until the tropical
forest swept in and buried it in a green oblivion.
_Other Quests_
Of certain other Spanish quests less has been recorded, because they
were incidental to larger undertakings or were conducted by small
parties of adventurers, monks, or treasure-seekers, rather than by
columns of troops sent out by provincial governments. Pious men sought
the Terrestrial Paradise toward the headwaters of the Orinoco. From
all points of the compass explorers hunted for the Kingdom of Women.
Sometimes the conquistadors reiterated their own exploits, as when
Federmann looked for the House of the Sun in the Colombian Andes,
although under the name of the Temple of the Sun it had already fallen
to Pizarro. The adventure of the Golden Chain was attempted on several
occasions, parties of Spaniards undertaking to drain the crater lake of
Urcos, into which, tradition said, had been flung a massive chain of
gold long enough to encircle the great square at Cuzco.
The quest of the Cradle of Gold is of the last century, and here the
magic of a name again wrought its spell, two hundred years after the
feet of the conquistadors had passed. Bingham, who climbed to this
ruined mountain fortress a dozen years ago, believes that Choquequirau
is just a name of Indian poetry, misunderstood. Seen from a distance,
the ridge on which it lies resembles a hammock, and its only gold may
be that which the setting sun flings upon it. But the name itself, and
the vagueness of knowledge as to its last defenders, led to various
attempts to reach the ruin from the valley below. One party brought
back reports of rock-built “palaces, paved squares, temples, prisons
and baths.” The prefect of the Peruvian department of Apurimac, using
a company of soldiers and Indian carriers, built a way across the
rocky gorges and up the steep mountain side to Choquequirau. This, it
is thought, was the eyrie of the last Inca--neither temple town nor
treasure house, but a frontier fortress of the long ago.
The legendary Laguna de los Xarayes was indicated on the early maps
of South America as lying at the sources of the Paraguay. In it was
the splendid island home of El Gran Moxo. The imagery of the Hebrew
prophets was borrowed to describe his palace with its golden and
silvern vessels, its doors of bronze where living lions in chains of
gold kept guard, its cloud-like tower where a disk of silver, in shape
like the moon, shed light over the waters.
Explorers sought this island magnificence in vain. When they came in
the dry season, they could not find even the lake in which it swam, for
what seemed to be a vast lagoon was merely high water on the Paraguay.
One of the golden visions of Spain recoiled upon its head. The
Spaniards would not have it that with a single blow they had struck
down the power of the Incas and laid hold of all their riches. It
seemed to them they had merely precipitated a dispersal and an
exodus--the going out of Indian princes and property to found new seats
elsewhere. One of these was the great city of Paytiti, also called
the White House, which had risen near the confluence of the Huallaga
and Marañon in the forests of Peru. The legend which the conqueror
propagated of a fugitive dynasty grown strong in exile was cherished by
the humbled Quichuas, and twice it roused them to arms.
In 1740 Juan Santos assumed the name of Atahuallpa, raised an army from
the uncivilized members of various tribes, drove out the missionaries,
and for a space made the name and power of Paytiti a fact on the
borders of Peru. Again, in 1780, Tupac-Amaru, a descendant of the
Incas, appealed to the legend, aroused the country, abolished enforced
mine service and ecclesiastical dues, and became master of most of
the Peruvian plateau. The insurrection was put down and its leader
executed, but the injustices he had fought were never restored in full
vigor, and passed altogether when Peru rose against Spain in the War of
Independence. The dream of Paytiti had become a vision of liberation.