Part 7
The Indians of the hot countries of America were not so savage as those who lived in the northern parts of the continent. But they had a terrible religious rite which they had learned from the Aztecs. They offered human lives to appease the sun god. Though the Aztecs were a peaceable people otherwise, they often went to war to take prisoners for these horrible sacrifices.
Cortes broke into a temple at one place on the way and murdered the priests who were killing and offering human beings to the sun god. He set up a cross and invited the people to become Christians or be killed. In that way he gained many converts from among the frightened Indians.
But with Hernando Cortes this kind of conversion was but a step toward gaining gold and power for himself and for the king of Spain. After many terrible battles, in which he massacred the helpless natives by thousands, he and his few hundred white men, with thousands of Indian allies, reached the capital of Montezuma. Built of stone on an island in the midst of a beautiful lake, this civilized city was connected with the mainland by six long stone bridges or causeways. The splendid capital, with its palaces and temples of hewn stone, had much of the beauty of Venice. The city measured twelve miles around. It was then hundreds of years old, and proved that the ancient Aztecs knew how to build great stone houses and bridges.
Montezuma came out to meet Cortes, borne on a golden throne on the shoulders of Aztec nobles and officials. He wore priceless feathers and his garments were embroidered with many-colored gems. Even his shoes were gold. His courtiers carried carpets to lay down before him, so that his sacred feet should not touch the ground. How the eyes of those greedy Spaniards glittered when they beheld such signs of the great wealth of Montezuma and his people!
The white men were received with great honor. They were served in golden goblets with a strange, rich drink which the Aztecs named chocolatl. This delicious drink is now called chocolate or cocoa. Montezuma told the Spaniards that their coming had been foretold by the priests for hundreds of years, ever since the visit of a pure white man, a son of the Sun who had come down from the skies. This sun-god had told the Aztecs that he would come again with other sun-gods and reign over the empire forever.
Cortes pretended to be the long-expected “fair god” of the Aztecs, and persuaded Montezuma to visit him in the palace assigned to the Spanish leader and his officers during their stay in the city. The people, who had no reason to believe in the Spanish soldiers, crowded around the sedan chair of their king, crying out against him because he was placing himself in the wicked hands of the strangers. Montezuma told them not to fear, for their guests were honorable men and he was sure that all would be well with him. But he soon found that he was not a guest but a prisoner, betrayed by a pretense of friendship. The Mexicans came again and attacked the palace which Cortes and his men had now turned into a fortress. During the months when the Spaniards held Montezuma as a prisoner a fierce war was waged with the Mexicans.
While Cortes and his army were in such desperate straits, word came that the governor of Cuba had sent ships and nearly a thousand men to bring the general and his followers back, to be punished as deserters. Cortes and a picked band crept out of the capital one dark night, marched hundreds of miles to the coast, and surprised and defeated the army the governor had sent. Then he returned, with all those armed men and many more cannon and horses, to relieve the small garrison he had left to hold the many thousands of Aztecs at bay, and capture the city of Mexico.
The Aztecs were frightened when they saw the thousand soldiers Cortes now brought up against them, for it looked as if the new troops had come down from the skies to the help of the Spaniards. When the battle was fiercest, the broken-spirited emperor went out to plead with the natives to stop their fighting. This made them so angry that they hurled stones at him and he died of a broken heart. The hatred of his own people was even harder to bear than Spanish cruelty.
After more fierce fighting, Cortes completed the conquest of Mexico. Years afterward he returned to his old home in Spain, where he was, for a time, treated as a great conqueror. But he suffered in later years from remorse for his treachery and cruelty. When he grew old he was imprisoned through the influence of Spanish enemies.
One day an old, broken man with shaggy gray locks pushed through the crowd around King Charles of Spain, now known as Emperor Charles the Fifth and the most powerful monarch in the world. When the emperor asked the old man who he was, he replied with indignant pride,
“I am Cortes, the man who has given you more provinces than your ancestors left you cities.”
DE SOTO, A GOLD HUNTER IN SOUTHERN SWAMPS
Hernando de Soto was the Spanish grandee, or noble, appointed governor of Cuba and “the Floridas” about twenty-five years after Florida was discovered. It was Ponce de Leon who landed near the southern point of North America, on Easter Day, 1513, and named that lovely country Florida--Land of Flowers. De Leon had heard a beautiful story that far inland in the heart of the wilderness there was a magic spring that would make young forever all who drank of its sparkling waters. Though he searched long and eagerly, Ponce de Leon discovered no Fountain of Eternal Youth, but he did find endless swamps full of snakes and alligators.
De Soto, the new governor of Florida, made up his mind that Ponce de Leon was a very foolish old man. He ought to have known that there are no such things nowadays as springs of eternal youth. He, Hernando de Soto, was going to show his practical good sense by finding solid, yellow gold--for what good is youth without money to enjoy it with? De Soto was already a very rich man, for he had served under Pizarro, the cruel conqueror of Peru, and he had gone home to Spain one of the wealthiest of its grandees, in those days of wonderful discoveries and marvelous fortunes. Still Hernando de Soto was not satisfied. He wanted to be like Pizarro or Cortes--to conquer a great country and capture from its dusky people gold mines and vast wealth.
Therefore on a bright July day he left Cuba in charge of a high official and sailed away. He and his knights in armor stood on the decks of their nine ships, large and small, and waved farewells to the fair ladies who stood on the castle tower at Havana weeping bitterly, fearing that they would never see their brave lords and knights again.
Governor de Soto and his fleet came to anchor in the harbor now known as Tampa Bay. During the night they were aroused by horrible yells and showers of arrows from the shore. In the morning the Spaniards made a landing, though the natives fought hard to keep them back. Before night they met a man who could be of great use to them. He was a member of a party that, after De Leon’s discovery, had gone to Florida to find gold, but had been driven back. This young man, Juan Ortiz, had been captured and kept by the Indians as a slave. A member of De Soto’s scouting party tells how they met this poor fellow:
“Towards sunset it pleased God that the soldiers descried at a distance some twenty Indians painted with a kind of red ointment that they put on when they go to war. They wore many feathers and had their bows and arrows. And when the Christians ran at them, the Indians fled to a hill, and one of them came forth into the path, lifting up his voice and saying in Spanish,
“‘Sirs, for the love of God, slay not me! For I am a Christian like yourselves. I was born in Seville, and my name is Juan Ortiz.’”
The Spanish governor received Ortiz as if he were his own long-lost son. He made himself very useful because he knew both the Spanish and the Indian language, and thus could help the Spaniards to talk to the natives.
De Soto now started inland leading a brilliant company of knights and private soldiers, all in bright armor. Over the shining helmets were waving plumes, and many a mailed fist held aloft a rich and beautiful banner. There were hundreds of horsemen and many more men marching on foot. No more richly dressed men and horses ever started out on a Crusade to regain possession of the Holy City. But the object of this Spanish quest was gold. Spanish serving men drove along with this rich and gay procession four hundred fat hogs. De Soto had decided not to risk being starved to death as so many explorers had been. And gamekeepers held in leash, not falcons to catch and kill birds or beasts, but bloodhounds for hunting Indians.
Instead of mountains of rocks from which gold could be mined, De Soto’s men found swamps. The weather was sultry and moist. Insects got inside their knightly armor and stung them to madness, and venomous serpents coiled around their armored legs. Indians shot poisoned arrows at them from the bushes. Their coats of mail were so heavy that stout knights sank deep in the bogs. They advanced very slowly; they wallowed rather than marched, and their days and nights were spent in weariness and torture.
The fame of the white men went on ahead of them. As De Soto advanced he found the savages on the warpath ready to drive back the invaders. All along their line of march they could hear savage threats in the distance. Juan Ortiz told the Spaniards that the Indians were shouting:
“Keep on, robbers and murderers! In Apalachee you will get what you deserve. No mercy will be shown to captives, who will be hung on the highest trees along the trail.”
After the Spaniards had marched through the lands of five different chiefs, they found a great chieftain who seemed to wish to make friends with the white men. De Soto gladly accepted, but Juan Ortiz warned him to look out for treachery. So the white men were secretly prepared; and when the traitor chief gave the signal to his men to attack, the Spaniards raised their battle cry, “_Santiago!_” and thousands of the savages were killed by a few hundred Spaniards. Hundreds of Indians took refuge in a lake. There five good swimmers would lie side by side, on the surface like logs, forming a human raft on which the best archer would stand and shoot back at the white men. The fight lasted all day and nearly all night. Before morning all the Indians were killed or captured, put in chains, and divided among the Spaniards as slaves.
The Indians, who at first thought the white men were gods, were now sure they were devils. The boasted village of Apalachee was only a few straw huts on a knoll in the center of a great swamp. And the savages who defended it with bows and arrows were no match for armed Spaniards; the white men killed nearly all of them.
Cold weather came on, and the Spaniards went into winter quarters. A beautiful Indian girl-chief in that region came bringing pearls and gems to the Spanish chieftain. But he demanded gold. When she understood this she sent men to a far country for the yellow metal he desired so eagerly. De Soto and his men now rejoiced, for they thought they had found the object of their long and painful search. When the red messengers returned the stuff proved not to be gold. It must have been copper ore or “fool’s gold.”
During the second year of their long march, the Spaniards were led southward to Mabila, which is believed to have stood on the shore of Mobile Bay. This was a huge fortress, the greatest native town the white men had yet seen. Within an immense stockade or wall of tree trunks on end stood a number of houses each of which would hold hundreds of Indians.
Tuscaloosa, the Mabile chief, set a trap for the Spaniards. The battle which took place here was the worst of all. The
Spaniards lost seventy men and forty horses. Then they set fire to the Indians’ houses, and the savages perished in the flames.
De Soto’s men were heartily sick of fighting. They also despaired of finding gold in southern swamps. The governor heard here that they were plotting to desert him at Mabila and return by boat to Havana. So, instead of waiting for a ship to come from Cuba, he ordered them to march farther into the wilderness. As the prospect of finding gold became more desperate, De Soto seemed to grow more cruel. Indians were beheaded for small offenses; friendly scouts were tortured and sent back with insulting messages to their chiefs.
The farther west the Spaniards went the more bitterly the natives fought and the more successful they were in battle. In one place the Indians burned nearly all the Spaniards’ hogs, and feasted on roast pork for many days. After terrible wanderings, the few remaining Spaniards came to a wide stream at Chickasaw Bluff, a few miles above the present city of Vicksburg.
Though it is often stated that De Soto discovered the Mississippi, he was not the first Spaniard to see that wide and muddy stream. The Great River meant nothing to him. As he wandered up and down its banks he contracted malarial fever and died miserably. Faithful friends placed the body in his heavy armor and wrapped that in blankets weighted with sand. Then, on a dark night, they paddled out into the middle of the stream and sank it in a hundred feet of water, where the Indians could not find it and wreak their revenge upon De Soto’s remains. His followers attempted to go farther west but became discouraged and descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE, ENGLAND’S FIRST GREAT SAILOR
Among little Francis Drake’s earliest memories was his home in the hulk of an old ship near a navy yard in the south of England. His father was a sort of chaplain to the fleets which kept coming and going there. Francis heard the wild tales of seafaring men about pirates and Spaniards, and seafights, and the wonderful wealth in distant lands.
Young Drake’s soul was fired with a fervent longing for life and adventure on the high seas or the Spanish Main, as the region along the northern coast of South America was called, where wedges of gold and silver from Peru and pearls and precious stones were stored in treasure towns, waiting to be shipped to Spain. But Francis was the eldest of twelve children and his father was poor. So the lad was bound out till he was twenty-one to work for a skipper, or owner of a small trading vessel called a barque. In his work there was plenty of lifting and lugging to do--moving baskets and bales on and off his master’s boat. He had to work long hours--often at night. His food was scarce and coarse and his pay was very small indeed, for his work was thought not worth much more than his learning the sailor trade.
Sometimes they sailed the barque across the Channel to France or Holland and brought back a cargo to England; but that was as far as such a small craft could be trusted to go. Francis often saw great ships riding high on their majestic way to foreign lands, and he felt sure that those lucky sailors would have thrilling times with pirates and Spaniards, and come home loaded down with gold and silver, spices, precious gems, and thrilling stories. Much as he yearned to go on a long voyage, the faithful fellow stayed by his master, worked hard, and learned all the ins and outs of sailing a ship, whether large or small.
Just before Francis was old enough to be his own man the good skipper died. As he had never married and had no near relatives, he left his barque to his faithful apprentice. Young Drake continued the business, running from port to port and market to market for about a year, when he saw a chance to sail on a longer voyage and engage in a larger enterprise. He had a cousin, John Hawkins, who was captain of a vessel. This cousin now had a little fleet of five ships and was about to engage in the slave trade. As Francis had learned to manage a ship, Captain Hawkins offered to put the smallest vessel in his fleet under his young cousin’s command. So Francis sold his barque and became captain of his cousin’s ship _Judith_.
Now, at the age of twenty-two, Francis Drake was embarking on the voyage of life with the prospect of great adventures, as he had always dreamed of doing. Slave trading was not considered wrong four hundred years ago. The ships would go to Africa and buy or carry off negroes and take them to some foreign country to work in fields and mines. There the blacks would be sold for gold, silver, pearls and other things of great value. Sometimes the owner of a fleet would make a fortune in a single adventure. Of course, there was a great risk to run. Although England and Spain were not then at war, the English and Spanish treated each other as enemies when they met on the high seas.
For this voyage, Captain Hawkins got leave of Queen Elizabeth “to load negroes in Guinea and sell them in the West Indies.” As a sign that the hundred and seventy men on Hawkins’s fleet saw nothing wrong in stealing black men from their homes and selling them to be slaves, here is a motto which that captain had written to govern his soldiers and sailors: “Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company.”
Hawkins and Drake seem to have had no trouble in seizing negroes on the coast of Africa, or in selling their human cargo in the Spanish ports of America. But as these slavers were starting back to England they were caught in a storm and had to go into a harbor in Mexico for safety and to repair damages. While they were there a Spanish fleet five times as large as theirs, loaded with gold and pearls, came in also for repairs. The English agreed to leave the Spaniards without touching their ships if the Spaniards would let them alone. But the Spanish captain did not keep his word and there was a fierce battle. Hawkins and Drake did great damage to the Spanish fleet. They reached England safely with two of their ships, though they had lost nearly all the treasure they had received as pay for the slaves.
Captain Drake complained to the queen of the way in which the Spaniards had deceived them, but she was afraid to go to war with a country which had such a powerful navy as Spain’s was then. So the bold English captain took matters into his own hands. He made one voyage after another, attacking Spanish settlements where gold and silver were stored, boarding Spanish vessels, killing the men or taking them prisoners, and bringing their rich cargoes to England. Within a few years the Spaniards lived in terror of their lives when they heard that Francis Drake was near, and the king of Spain appealed to Queen Elizabeth to stop those attacks, calling Drake “the master thief of the western world.”
On one of these expeditions, Drake landed on the Isthmus of Panama, or Darien, as it was then called. Some of the natives showed him the way across to the South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean, as Magellan had named it, and when they had ascended a mountain about half-way across, Drake climbed a tall tree from which he gazed upon the broad, unexplored ocean.
“May God give me leave and life to sail that sea but once!” murmured Captain Drake to his companions.
But Queen Elizabeth had heard of the terror of the Spaniards and ordered him to stop, lest he plunge her kingdom into a Spanish war before England was ready. So for a while Francis Drake stayed at home and suffered because he was not allowed to fight with the Spaniards.
About five years after his first sight of the Pacific, Captain Drake sailed away from England in command of a fleet of five vessels of which the flagship was the _Golden Hind_. The object of the voyage was a secret. This was about sixty years after Magellan, the Portuguese master-sailor, had discovered and passed through the straits named for him.
It took five months for the fleet to reach the eastern coast of South America. In due time they found and passed through the Straits of Magellan; but the ocean beyond was more terrific than Pacific, for a fierce storm drove the _Golden Hind_ even farther south than Tierra del Fuego, so that Drake was first to land at Cape Horn, the southern-most point of South America. At the place where the waters of the Atlantic meet those of the Pacific, Drake lay down and embraced the sharp point of rock and exclaimed: “I am the only man in the world who has ever been so far south!”
All the ships in Drake’s fleet but the _Golden Hind_ had either been sunk, broken, or scattered. Now at last he had “leave and life to sail that sea but once”--with one ship alone. The undaunted hero sailed up the western coast of South America to capture treasure from the gold mines of Peru. When he came near Valparaiso, some Spaniards in a ship saw the _Golden Hind_ approach. Never dreaming that an English ship could be in that ocean, they were astonished to see a gun presented through a porthole and to hear an English voice calling on them roughly to surrender. So they stared and cursed under their breath while “the master thief of the western world” took charge of their ship with sixty thousand gold pesos, jewels, merchandise, and a stock of wine.
When the people of Valparaiso heard that the dreadful Drake was in their harbor, they fled from the city. The little English crew entered the town, and stocked up with bread, bacon, and wine, which they enjoyed to the full after many months of famishing. In a day or two the _Golden Hind_ sailed away northward toward Peru.
At another port they waylaid three unguarded barques and captured fifty-seven bricks of silver, each weighing about twenty pounds. When they came to the port of Lima, there were seventeen vessels anchored in the harbor. Not daunted by numbers, Drake sailed right into the harbor, captured them all with his one ship, and made their men prisoners while he plundered the whole Spanish fleet. By this time the alarm had been spread along the coast that Drake was capturing everything in sight, and the
governor of Peru with two thousand men was waiting for him at Callao.
Drake’s good luck seemed now to desert him. In the presence of that waiting army the wind died down and the _Golden Hind_ was becalmed, helpless, and unable to move a yard. The Spanish governor grinned as he went out in boats from the shore with four hundred soldiers, to take back all the precious cargo Drake had lately captured. But before the armed men reached the English ship a gale blew up and Drake sailed away, laughing and waving farewells to his pursuers.
The cargo from the last ship they captured overloaded the _Golden Hind_ with tons of gold, silver and precious gems. It was useless to overhaul any more galleons, for they now had all their ship could carry. Their only thought was to get their treasure home safe and sound. Sailing across the Pacific, they were sixty-eight days without sighting land.
The _Golden Hind_ began to show the strain of her long voyage; so they set up a forge on an island in the South Pacific and spent weeks in making repairs, so that the ship might complete her voyage around the world. After they had sailed more than a month longer, the ship ran on a ledge of rocks. Seeing that they could not get her off, they threw six cannon overboard, then the sugar and spices, then great fortunes in silver. At last they managed to work her off the ledge into deep water. Still it was nearly a year before they reached the harbor of Plymouth, England.