USA > California > The Spanish Pioneers And The California Missions > Part 3
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These voyages rest only on Vespucci's own state- ments, 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 Waldzeemüller, who had got hold of Amerigo
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UNIQUE ROSICRUCIAN FOUNTAIN AT MISSION SAN FERNANDO
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Vespucci's documents. History is full of injustices, but never a greater among them all than the chris- tening of America. It would have been as appro- priate to call it Walzeemüllera. 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 se- ries 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,
4
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began with the decade from 1510 to 1520, -the beginning of a century of such exploration and con- quest as the world never saw before nor since. Spain had it all to herself, save for the heroic but compara- tively petty achievements of Portugal in South Amer- ica, between the Spanish points of conquest. The sixteenth century in the New World was unparalleled in military history; and it produced, or rather de- veloped, 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 wilder- nesses 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 ob- scurity 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 cata- logued 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 Cæsars of the New World ; and no other conquests in the history of
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America are at all comparable to theirs. As among the four, it is almost difficult to say which was great- est ; 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 Cæsar, 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) auto- graph 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 Cæsars of America.
Certain it is that the bald-headed little great man of old Rome, who crowds the page of ancient his- tory, did nothing greater than each of those four Spanish heroes, who with a few tattered Spaniards
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in place of the iron legions of Rome conquered each an inconceivable wilderness as savage as Cæsar 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 supe- riority of weapons over the savages, and taxing them with a cruel and relentless extermination of the ab- origines. 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 incom- parably less cruelty suffered by the Indians who op- posed 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
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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, how- ever, we must outline the eventful career and tragic end of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Nuñez 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 Española. 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 ar- rival in Spain, laid all the blame upon Balboa, and got him condemned by the king for high treason.
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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 adelan- tado; and soon after he married the daughter of Pedro Arias. Still full of great plans, Balboa car- ried 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
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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 treach- erous 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 ex- plorer 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.
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V.
THE CHAPTER OF CONQUEST.
W HILE the discoverer of the greatest ocean was still striving to probe its farther mys- teries, a handsome, athletic, brilliant young Span- iard, 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 sol-
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dier. 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 Her- nandez 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.1 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.
1 This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.
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The landing of the Spaniards caused as great a sensation as would the arrival in New York to-day of an army from Mars.1 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 dis- criminate 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 Mex- ico, 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 his- torians have fallen into the sad blunder of accept- ing 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
1 Tezozomoc, the Indian historian, graphically describes the wonder of the natives.
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Pueblo Indians of New Mexico at the present day, - a military democracy, with a mighty and com- plicated religious organization as its "power behind the throne." Moctezuma was merely Tlacatecutle, or head war-chief of the Nahuatl (the ancient Mexi- cans), and neither the supreme nor the only execu- tive. Of just how little importance he really was may be gathered from his fate.
Having founded Vera Cruz, Cortez caused him- self to be elected governor and captain-general (the highest military rank) 1 of the new country; and having burned his ships, like the famous Greek com- mander, that there might be no retreat, he began his march into the grim wilderness before him.
It was now that Cortez began to show particu- larly 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
1 Another specific act of treason.
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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 treach- erous 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 Esca- lante 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 quar- tered ; and now, going by night with his officers to the house of the head war-captain, he seized Mocte- zuma 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
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vivid impression on the savages or be at once and nihilated 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 impos- sible fables which lured so many of the early Span- iards 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.
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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 sim- ply 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 - swarm- ing with savage foes by the countless thousands.
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THE CHAPTER OF CONQUEST.
The Indian makes very few excuses for failure ; and the Nahuatl had already elected a new head war-captain named Cuitlahuátzin in place of the unsuccessful Moctezuma. The latter was still a prisoner ; and when the Spaniards brought him out upon the house-top 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 crim- son 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 impor- tant running fight in the plains of Otumba, where the Spaniards were entirely surrounded, but cut their way out after a desperate hand-to-hand strug- gle which really decided the fate of Mexico. Cor- tez marched to Tlacala, raised an army of Indians
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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 remark- able 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 vic- torious 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 insubordina- tion 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
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THE CHAPTER OF CONQUEST.
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 treach- erously 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.
No, Cortez was not cruel to the Indians ; but as soon as his rule was 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 ambi- tion ; and she was in his way. At last she was found in her bed one morning, strangled to death.
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