Part 2

Desperation also played a part. The adventurers often found themselves hundreds of miles from any possibility of help. Stamina in the face of hunger and hardship, courage and energy in opposition to attack and fear were the basic elements of salvation. Of necessity the men adopted whatever methods promised to carry them to their goals. Religious fanaticism was another motive. To Cortés’s men, the Aztecs, who regularly offered human sacrifices to a heathen god, were an abomination and deserved to be annihilated, or at least enslaved, if they did not accept the Christian salvation held out to them. This attitude carried over, in somewhat lesser degree, to all Indians, even though Spain’s rulers constantly exhorted gentleness, and missionaries went with every major group to offer heaven to souls lost in darkness. That is, if Indians had souls, which many Europeans of the time sincerely doubted.

Finally, every _conquistador_ was stirred to action by his own credulity. The Church had brought him up to believe implicitly in miracles. A large part of his education consisted of peopling the unknown world with marvels and monsters. A favorite tale, though by no means the only one, dealt with seven Catholic bishops and their congregations who fled from the invading Moors to the island of Antilia. There they burned their ships and diligently built seven glorious cities, for naturally Christian settlements would be more dazzling than pagan ones. _Mas allá_: there is more beyond. A wondrous dream, Spanish-style. It carried, in succession, Pánfilo Narváez, Hernando de Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo into what became the United States. There reality at last took command.

Los Conquistadores

_Cavalryman in armor_ _Pikeman_ _Arquebusier, c. 1540_ _Crossbowman arming his weapon_ _Wardogs_ _Swordsman_

With a few thousand soldiers Spain conquered the Americas. Most of the soldiers were unemployed veterans of an army tempered by long campaigns against the Moors in Iberia and the French in North Italy. They came to America, wrote an eyewitness, “to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness, and to grow rich, as all men desire to do.”

_Los conquistadores_ were tough, disciplined, and as ruthless as circumstances required. Their weapons—evolved in the formal battle of Europe—were the matchlock musket (sometimes called an arquebus), the crossbow, pikes, lances (carried by cavalry), swords, cannon, and above all the horse, which Indians universally regarded as a supernatural being. This weaponry served well against organized armies in Central America and Peru that fought in formations mostly with clubs, spears, and slings. But in North America, the Spaniards faced skilled and elusive archers who could drive an arrow through armor. The crossbow and musket soon proved useless. Far more effective were sword-wielding cavalry and infantry and (for De Soto) wardogs. In the one battle Southeast Indians had a chance of winning (Mabila, 18 October 1540), De Soto against great odds slaughtered his antagonists. Thousands died against only 18 or so Spaniards. Foreshadowing things to come, this battle demonstrated that Indians fighting with Stone Age weapons were no match against European arms and tactics.

_Lever for arming the bow_ _Stock_ _Trigger_ _Bowstring_

The Wanderers

Redheaded Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca—Cabeza de Vaca translates as Cow’s Head—was a man of considerable pride and, apparently, some wry humor. In 1483, about three years after his birth, its exact date unknown, his paternal grandfather, Pedro de Vera, conquered the Grand Canary Island off the northwest coast of Africa for Spain, a feat that brought a glow, in court circles, to the name de Vera. And then there was his mother’s name, Teresa Cabeza de Vaca. Legend avers that back in 1212 her ancestor, a shepherd, had used the skull of a cow to mark a mountain pass that let a Christian army surprise and defeat its Mohammedan enemy. The shepherd’s sovereign thereupon bestowed the name Cabeza de Vaca on the family. Young Alvar Nuñez must have enjoyed the story, for he adopted his mother’s surname rather than his father’s, a not unusual custom in Spain.

He fought in several battles for Ferdinand and Isabella and for their grandson, Charles V, and was severely wounded at least once. In 1526, when he was about 46, Charles appointed him royal treasurer of a large expedition Pánfilo de Narváez proposed to lead into Florida, a name that then covered a huge region stretching from the peninsula around the dimly known north Gulf Coast to the Rio de las Palmas in northeastern Mexico.[1] If treasure was found—and treasure was Narváez’s goal—it would be up to Cabeza de Vaca to make sure the king received his 20 percent share. Other financial duties were involved, so that altogether it seemed a promising appointment for a middle-aged ex-soldier and able administrator. As events turned out, Vaca could hardly have suffered a greater misfortune.

The problem, which merits a digression, was Pánfilo de Narváez, the expedition’s leader. About the same age as Cabeza de Vaca, he was tall, courtly, and deep voiced, qualities that helped marvelously in advancing his career. He had prospered as a pioneer settler in Jamaica, and between 1511 and 1515 had aided Diego Velásquez in the conquest of Cuba, a feat which had elevated Velásquez to the governorship of the island. Both men added to their riches by using enforced Indian labor to exploit the island’s shallow placer mines and embryonic plantations. And although both could easily have retired to comfortable estates, each wanted more money, a common itch.

As chief administrator of Cuba, Velásquez was allowed by the government in Spain to authorize explorations of the Caribbean. In 1517 and 1518 he exercised this right by licensing seafarers to explore and trade along the coasts of Yucatan and Mexico, capture Indian slaves, and scout out the country for booty. In return for the licenses, Velásquez would share in whatever gains resulted.

Of his searchers for new wealth, the one whose name would ring down through history was Hernán Cortés. Cocky, crafty, reckless, and adept with the ladies, Cortés had come to Cuba as Velásquez’s private secretary at the same time Narváez had. He, too, had prospered, but unlike Narváez he had quarreled sharply with his former boss. Though a reconciliation had been effected, it was touchy. Still, Cortés had money and was willing to spend it on risky adventures, and so, in 1518, he was authorized to explore Mexico’s eastern coast. He assembled a fleet of 11 ships, 16 precious horses, and prodigious stores of armaments. People grew so excited about his prospects that he easily recruited 500 or so soldiers and 100 sailors—nearly half of Cuba’s male population.

While he was preparing his expedition, some of Velásquez’s other scouts returned with rumors of a fabulous empire of Aztec Indians and their capital city, Tenochtitlán, built on an island in a shallow lake that filled most of a high mountain valley in Mexico. Growing suddenly nervous about Cortés—how loyal would he be with treasure in front of him and an army at his back?—Velásquez in February 1519 revoked Cortés’s commission. Defying him, Cortés slipped away and disappeared.

One of the world’s most fabulous adventures followed. Landing on the Yucatan coast, Cortés rescued a survivor of one of Velásquez’s earlier expeditions—a man who in his captivity had learned the Mayan language. Employing the one-time prisoner as an interpreter, Cortés turned his fleet northward, probing the coast. Such resistance as developed among the Indians was quickly crushed by the terrifying aspect of the expedition’s few horses. During one of those aborted battles, Cortés rescued yet another captive, a woman named Malinche whom the priest with the expedition baptized and named Marina.

Marina was a Nahua, or Aztec. While in captivity she too had learned the Mayan tongue and could converse with the rescued Spaniard. Through this linguistic conduit, the _conquistadores_ received exciting information about Tenochtitlán, the glittering city of the Aztecs, predecessor of today’s Mexico City. A dazzling prize! And why, Cortés surely wondered, should he share any of it with Diego Velásquez, sitting safely at home in Cuba?

On April 21, 1519, the fleet dropped anchor at the sea end of a trail leading to the city. There Cortés laid the foundations of a port that he named Vera Cruz (today Veracruz). Calling his men together—they, too, were excited about prospects—he prevailed on the majority to elect him captain-general of the expedition, a move that in Cortés’s mind freed him of his obligations to Velásquez and made him answerable only to King Charles V. Simultaneously, he sent emissaries to Moctezuma, emperor of the Aztecs, asking for an audience.

The timing could hardly have been more propitious. The Aztec rule was harsh; subject nations seethed with discontent; Tenochtitlán itself was torn with dissensions. Fearful that the strangers might be able to capitalize on the undercurrents of the rebellion—and fearful, too, that the newcomers might somehow be descendants of the ancient serpent-god, Quetzalcoatl—Moctezuma tried to buy off the Spaniards. Down to Veracruz went five noble diplomats accompanied by 100 porters laden with treasure. All of it was breathtaking, but what really dumbfounded the Spaniards were two metal disks the size of cartwheels. One, representing the Sun God, was of solid gold. The other, dedicated to the Moon, was of silver.

Cortés declined to respond as expected. He loaded the treasure onto one of his ships and ordered the captain to sail directly to Spain, where he would use the booty to win the approval of Charles V. The rest of the ships he burned so that none of the men in the command who were still loyal to Velásquez could return to Cuba and stir up trouble there. As for his own men, they too would fight harder if they knew that no ships were waiting to evacuate them if they were defeated.

In November 1519, Tenochtitlán capitulated after a short, hard fight. Cortés took Moctezuma hostage and then paused to contemplate his enormous prize.

Unknown to the victors, the captain of the ship bound for Spain did pause in Cuba to check on some land he owned there. It was a short stay but long enough for the sailors to talk. Astounded couriers sped the word to Velásquez. The governor was outraged. He was already at work gathering a strong force of 900 men equipped with 80 horses and 13 ships to pursue Cortés and arrest him for defying orders. Doubly furious at what seemed to him Cortés’s latest treachery, he put Pánfilo de Narváez in charge of a punitive force to bring the disloyal _conquistador_ back to Cuba in chains!

Warnings from Veracruz reached Cortés at the Aztec capital. He reacted with characteristic boldness. Leaving two hundred men at Tenochtitlán, he marched the rest swiftly to the coast. No one there anticipated him so soon. Late at night, when most of his would-be captors were asleep, he waded his men across a swollen stream and attacked without warning. During the chaos that followed, a lance point put out one of Narváez’s eyes. By dawn the field was in Cortés’s hands. Most of Narváez’s men, hearing of the riches of Tenochtitlán, deserted their commander and swore fealty to the victor.

While Narváez remained under guard at Veracruz, nursing his wound, Cortés marched back to rejoin the rest of his men at Tenochtitlán. The Aztecs let the returning soldiers reach the palace compound and then attacked in waves of thousands. The hostage emperor, Moctezuma, was stoned to death by his own people while pleading for peace. Trying once again to use the night as cover, Cortés on June 30, 1520, led hundreds of Spaniards and several thousand Indian allies onto one of the stone-and-earth causeways that connected the island city to the mainland. Aztecs swarmed after them in canoes. On that famed _noche triste_—night of sorrows—850 Spaniards and upwards of 4,000 of their allies died.

Fortune shifted quickly, however. Wheeling around on the plains outside the city and making adroit use of his few horses and guns, Cortés defeated the army pursuing him. Doggedly then he put together a fresh army of Indians who hated the Aztecs and of whites who were dribbling into Mexico to see what was going on. The next year, on August 13, 1521, he recaptured Tenochtitlán, again at heavy cost. By twisting logic only a little, he could have blamed all these troubles on Narváez’s inept interference. He did not. He treated the man kindly and then sent him home to Spain with, so it is said, a bagful of golden artifacts.

“I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold, a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of the armour of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of [the Aztecs], harnesses and darts, very strange clothing, beds and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth of seeing than prodigies. These things are so precious that they are valued at a hundred thousand florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of people in foreign lands. Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.”—_Albrecht Dürer upon seeing the Aztec objects Cortés sent Charles V in 1519._

In Spain Narváez intrigued against the nation’s hero, as Cortés then was, as best he could. He also yearned for a conquest in which he could redeem himself. When the governorship of Florida fell open, he applied for the position and won. His plan was to establish his first colony at Río de las Palmas, north of Pánuco, on Mexico’s northeast coast, where Cortés had already placed a defensive outpost. From there he could put pressure on his enemy, who many of the king’s council thought was growing too big for his boots. He could also search for the treasure that he was sure lay somewhere in the north, in the land from which he supposed the Aztecs had originally come—land where the fabled Seven Cities might lie.

Six hundred soldiers, sailors, and would-be settlers, a few of whom had their wives with them, left Spain aboard five ships in June 1527. One of the adventurers was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, making his first trip to the New World. It was a hard journey—desertions, groundings, a deadly hurricane, and finally a series of adverse storms that drove the little fleet off its intended course for the Río de las Palmas to a landing on the west coast of the Florida peninsula, probably opposite the head of Tampa Bay.

In view of the peninsula’s nearness to Cuba, remarkably little was known about it. Beginning with Alonso Alvarez de Pineda in 1519, a few sea explorers had groped along its western coast on their way to Mexico. Occasional traders and slave hunters had poked into some of its lovely bays—and had often taken severe trouncings from the Indians for their pains. Juan Ponce de León, the only man to try to establish a colony there, was mortally wounded during the attempt.

Tenochtitlán, Capital of the Aztec Empire

Tenochtitlán, predecessor of today’s Mexico City, was one of the most magnificent cities in the world when Cortés and his small army arrived in 1519. The sight of the radiant city in the center of a large lake astonished the Spaniards. “We did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real,” wrote a soldier, “for there were great cities along the shore and many others in the lake, all filled with canoes, and at intervals along the causeways there were many bridges....”

About 250,000 persons lived here and in its sister city Tlatelolco (left). The market place was huge. “Some of the soldiers with us had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople and all over Italy and Rome, and they said they had never seen a public square so perfectly laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.”

At the center of the city—and the Aztec religion—was the _Templo Major_, a complex of temples and shrines to the gods of fertility and war—the sources of Aztec power. The surfaces of the temples were richly ornamented in symbols and myths that expressed their complete vision of life. It was this city, which governed a vast empire in central Mexico, that the intrepid Cortés and his band overthrew in 1521. Within a few years a splendid and original civilization lay in ruins.

Narváez must have known of the dangers, but when he saw a yellow object among some fish nets in a village from which the Indians had fled on his approach, he jumped to the conclusion that it was gold. Hopefully, he showed the object to some Indians he lured into camp, they pointed north and said vehemently, “Apalachee! Apalachee!” Straightway Narváez decided to march there overland with the main part of his force, 40 of them mounted on the skin-and-bone horses that had survived the sea journey. The rest of the group, including its women, were directed to sail along the coast to a harbor supposedly known to the expedition’s pilot. There the two groups would come together again.

Cabeza de Vaca protested. They couldn’t be sure they understood the Indians properly. Would the two parties be able to find each other again on the intricate coast? They did not have food enough for exploring. First they should locate their colony in an area suitable for farming and send the ships to Cuba for supplies. Time enough then to search for gold.

Narváez waved him aside. The ships sailed on and the land party headed north, each man carrying two pounds of biscuits and half a pound of bacon. After 15 days of hunger they luckily seized some Indians who led them to a field of maize ripe enough for harvesting. Strengthened somewhat but beset by clouds of insects, they waded on through bogs, built rafts for crossing rivers—a drowned horse fed some of them one night—and then entered a region of enormous trees where piles of fallen timber created an almost impassable maze.

Apalachee, located close to the site of modern Tallahassee, turned out to be a village of 40 small houses roofed with thatch. No gold. Disgruntled, Narváez imprisoned an Apalachee chief and appropriated some of the houses for shelter. The villagers retaliated by setting fire to the buildings, a tactic that became common during later years.

The invaders stayed 25 days, scouting the surrounding country and resting as best they could under constant sniping by displaced inhabitants. They then headed west toward another town of reputed richness, Aute, near present-day St. Marks, on Apalachee Bay. Indians shadowed them, killing or wounding several men with hard-pointed arrows capable of piercing armor. Cabeza de Vaca was one of those nicked.

On the Spaniards’ approach, the inhabitants of Aute burned their huts and fled. There was no gold in the ruins. No silver. No jewels. And no sign of Spanish ships in the bay. As a mysterious fever began felling the men one by one, Narváez said that Pánuco could not be far away. If they could build boats....

How? The men knew nothing about the art of shipbuilding. The only materials they had were what they and their horses wore. Total helplessness—until God’s will, Cabeza de Vaca wrote years later, prompted one anonymous fellow to say he thought he could make a bellows out of deerskin and wooden pipes. With the bellows they could produce heat enough to transform spurs, bridle-bits, crossbow darts, and iron stirrups into nails. Excited by that proposal, a Greek spoke up, saying he knew how to manufacture waterproofing pitch from the resin in the pine trees surrounding them.

Working with the energy of desperation, the men put together, between August 5 and September 20 five crude boats, each about 33 feet long. They made sails out of their clothing, rope out of horse hair and palmetto fibre, anchors out of stone. Those not involved in the construction used the surviving horses—a diminishing number since they killed one every third day for food—to bring in 640 bushels of corn from the fields at Aute. Several men died from fever or wounds received from the Indians—not altogether an ill wind, since the five boats could not have carried more than the 250 or so persons who overloaded them at sailing time. Narváez, exercising a leader’s prerogative, picked out the best boat and strongest crew for himself.

They crawled along close to the shore, sat out storms behind islands, lost more men to Indian attack, and suffered so terribly from thirst—the water bottles they had made from horsehide soon rotted—that four of them drank salt water in their misery and perished. A more historic moment than any of them would ever realize came toward the end of October 1528, when, as they were edging out past some marshy islands, a powerful current of fresh water swept them far out to sea. They had discovered the mouth of a great river—the Mississippi.