Part 3

“With no lesse manlye courage than Hannibal of Carthage shewed his souldiers Italye and the promontories of the Alps, he exhorted his men to lyft up theyre hartes and to behoulde the land even now under theyre feete and the sea before theyre eyes, which shoulde bee unto them a full and juste reward of theyre great laboures and trauayles now ouerpassed. When he had sayde these woordes, he commanded them to raise certeine heapes of stones in the steede of altars for a token of possession. Then, descendynge from the toppes of the mountaynes, lest such as might come after hym shoulde argu hym of lyinge and falshod, he wrote the Kyng of Castelles his name here and there on the barkes of the trees, both on the ryght hande and on the lefte, and raysed heapes of stones all the way that he went untyll he came to the region of the nexte Kynge towarde the south, whose name was Chiapes.”

“The act of taking possession was so typical of similar formalities of the Conquistadores,” continues Mozans, “that I transcribe from Oviedo his account of the manner in which Balboa and his companions claimed for his sovereign the Sea of the South, all islands in it and all lands bordering on it, in what part of the world soever. Armed with his sword and bearing aloft a banner on which were painted an image of the Blessed Virgin and the Divine Child and the arms of Castile and Leon, Balboa, followed by his associates, entered the water until it rose above his knees, when in a loud voice he said:

“‘Long live the high and mighty monarchs, Don Ferdinand and Doña Juana, Sovereigns of Castile, of Leon and of Aragon, in whose name and for the royal crown of Castile, I take real and corporal and actual possession of these seas and lands and coasts and ports and islands of the south, and all thereunto annexed, and of the kingdoms and provinces which do or may appertain to them, in whatever manner or by whatever right or title, ancient or modern, in times past, present or to come, without any contradiction; and if other prince or captain, Christian or infidel, or of any law, sect or condition whatsoever, shall pretend any right to these islands and seas, I am ready and prepared to maintain and defend them in the name of the Castilian Sovereigns, present and future, whose is the empire and dominion over these Indias, islands and _terra firma_, northern and southern, with all their seas, both at the arctic and antarctic poles, on either side of the equinoctial line, whether within or without the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, both now and at all times so long as the world shall endure and until the final judgment of all mankind.’ And then the Notary, who always accompanied such expeditions, was ordered to make on the spot an exact record of what had been said and done, which was duly signed and authenticated by all present.”

It was to the Portuguese navigator Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan in the English rendering of the name) that the honor finally fell of being the first, not alone to find the passage through the new continent that was being so eagerly sought, but to cross by the western route to the East Indies and thereby blaze the way to making geography an exact science. He had already been to the Moluccas by the African route, and, disgusted by the failure of his King suitably to reward his services, had transferred his allegiance to Spain and managed to secure from the Emperor Charles V a commission and five ships, the largest of but 120 tons’ burden. On the 20th of September, 1419, he sailed from the Guadalquivir, with a crew numbering 280, all told, and, having entered the Plata River and satisfied himself that it was not a strait, ran down the Patagonian coast through many storms until he found shelter in the harbor of St. Julian, where, on Easter Sunday, a mutiny broke out that only a man of such remarkable courage and resourcefulness as Magellan possessed could have suppressed. It had been a hard voyage, the chances of finding the strait seemed slim, there was only the prospect that there they must remain throughout the antarctic winter in idleness and discomfort; it is small wonder that they wanted to desert.

However, during the last week in August spring began (the seasons are reversed south of the equator, it must be remembered) and the fleet, without the _Santiago_, which had been wrecked, proceeded to the south. After experiencing much more bad weather, they made Cape Virgins on the 21st of October and entered a large bay, which was flanked by lofty mountains, crowned with glaciers and snow. This at last was the entrance to the passage, but at that very point one of the vessels, the _San Antonio_, seized an opportunity to make its escape and return to Spain. “For five weeks,” as Hawthorne relates, “the remaining three ships wound along through the tortuous channel. Provisions were running short, yet Magellan would not turn back ‘even if he had to eat the leather off the ships’ yards.’ At length his persistence was rewarded by a sight of the open sea. ‘When,’ to quote Richard Eden, ‘the Capitayne was past the strayght and saw the way open to the mayne sea, he was so gladde thereof that for joy the teares fell from his eyes and he named the poynte of the lande from whense he first saw that sea Cape Desiderato.’ And the broad ocean which lay before him was so calm, after his many stormful days, that he called it the Pacific.”

“But months of a voyage as trying as any they had encountered still lay before them,” Hawthorne goes on. “Could the planet be so vast? Until December they kept a northerly course, then struck out boldly across the unknown waste. They ran across one or two islands, but erelong were swallowed up in the seemingly endless immensity of ocean. They were reduced to the utmost extremities for food and water; scurvy broke out; nineteen men died and thirty were too ill to work. Finally, on the 6th of March, they reached the Ladrone Islands, so named because of the thievishness of the natives. Here they got fruit and other food, and the worst was over. Ten days later the Philippines were sighted and Magellan knew the extent of his achievement. He had sailed round the world. Happier than Columbus, he did not survive this mightiest exploit of his time; in a fight with the natives the great sailor was killed.”

Only one of the little vessels ever got back to Spain. Returning by way of Africa, she arrived at the Guadalquivir in September, a year after she had set out, and with but eighteen survivors of the expedition. “What a picture!” the historian exclaims—“those eighteen seaworn mariners in their battered craft, survivors of the greatest feat of navigation that has ever been performed. What a poem is their story, what an event in the history of mankind! What reward did Magellan have? None that mortal could bestow. He was dead and his wife and son had also died. Del Cano, the captain of the ship, was given a crest, with the legend, on a terrestrial globe, ‘_Primus circumdedisti me_,’ together with a pension of five hundred ducats, and Espinosa was likewise pensioned and ennobled. But every mariner who sails the seas knows Magellan and the story of his exploit, and mankind accords him the honor that Spain could not bestow. Of all the great explorers, he is perhaps the one whose character and deeds we can contemplate with the most unalloyed satisfaction.”

IV

Until the great Dutch navigator, Willim Cornelis Schouten, found the way around Cape Horn nearly a hundred years later, however, no practical advantage over her rival resulted to Spain from Magellan’s discoveries—so far as trade with the East Indies was concerned, that is. The passage through the Strait was too perilous for sailing vessels, the distance across the Pacific too great. Yet only a year before Magellan set out on his famous voyage an era began in her new possessions that was to pour into her coffers a stream of gold in comparison with which the profits Portugal was deriving from her trade with the Orient seemed trivial. For in that year Hernando Cortés, the greatest soldier and statesman Spain ever sent to the new world, began his conquest of Mexico.

Except for the spirit of emulation it inspired, except for the knowledge it brought of the existence in the newly discovered countries of a people less barbarous than the aborigines of the Antilles, of mines that were worth while and of enormous hoards of treasure, the story of that conquest has no place in the history of South America, and, therefore, will not be gone into here. It is related somewhere as an interesting commentary that in an obscure little house in the City of Mexico still lives a modest, well-educated gentleman who is directly descended from the Emperor of the Aztecs. Señor Montezuma entertains no hope of a restoration, it is said, but quietly accepts the meager pension allowed him by the present government, while the heirs of Cortés receive immense revenues from their Mexican estates and the Marquis del Valle, as the present-day Cortés is called, lives in luxury and is a man of influence and power in the land.

In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was commissioned by the King of Spain to locate the Papal meridian in America and then to follow in Magellan’s track and determine the corresponding longitude on the Asiatic side; but, when he put in at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, he heard rumors of a great and wealthy people who dwelt near the headwaters of the river—rumors like those Grijalva had heard respecting the Aztecs and which had led to the Mexican conquest by Cortés; only these wonderful accounts were of a South American empire. In proof of what they said, the Indians of the Plata exhibited silver ornaments that had passed from hand to hand from the highlands of Bolivia and Peru, along the river to the Atlantic; and, too strongly tempted to resist, and trusting that the discovery of the rich mines from which this silver came would excuse their disobedience, Cabot and his company abandoned their survey and spent three years exploring and prospecting along the Uruguay and Paraná as far north as the present site of the city of Asunción. As their forces and provisions were inadequate to enable them to penetrate farther, the search was in vain; and so, having found, on their return to a fort they had established, that it had been taken by the Indians and the garrison massacred, Cabot abandoned the effort and went back to Spain to make what explanation he could.

The news of this supposed encroachment, added to the ever increasing poaching of the French, proved what was needed to stimulate the Portuguese at last to make a serious attempt at colonization in Brazil. One Christovão Jaques and a few settlers had already established a small sugar factory in the neighborhood of the present site of Pernambuco, and it had been found that much of the land in the northern part of the country was admirably adapted to the cultivation of that staple, the demand for which in Europe was constantly increasing. Five vessels were sent out, therefore, under the command of Martim Affonso da Souza. Early in 1531 he drew near Cape St. Roque, captured three French ships laden with brazil wood, sent part of his own fleet north to explore the coast beyond, and with the other ships sailed south and dropped anchor near the site of what is now the great coffee port of Santos. There he established São Vicente, the first permanent colony in Brazil.

There also they came across one João Ramalho, a former sailor who had been put ashore for mutiny years before by a ship on its way to India and was living among the natives of the neighborhood with his half-breed children. Glad enough to welcome his countrymen, he disposed the Indians to peace and showed the Portuguese the way up the mountains to the vast plateau that begins only a few miles from the sea. There, near the present site of São Paulo, was founded another settlement, from whence they could stretch out in all directions over what was destined to become the greatest coffee-producing country in the world.

A year or two afterward, encouraged by Da Souza’s success, Duarte Coelho set out with a carefully selected and more numerous company and founded the colony of Pernambuco. Here, as in the south, the country back of the coast was fertile and easily accessible and there was little trouble with the Indians. Sugar planting proved wonderfully profitable, Coelho turned out to be a good manager, and so politic was he in the relations with the mother country that within a few years the colony had become self-supporting and, like the other, possessed of all the elements of permanence and prosperity. Soon afterward São Salvador da Bahia was established. With such a beginning, it was not long before the Portuguese began flocking to Brazil as the Spaniards had to the Caribbean.

V

In the meanwhile in this region of the Caribbean much progress had been made. Towns had been built, not only in Española, but in Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico and in Darien and other places on the Isthmus, landed estates (_repartimientos_) had been apportioned, as rewards for services, among such as desired to cultivate them, mining rights had been allotted. These plantations and the mines were being worked by natives impressed into slavery, some of the communities had become large and thriving, in Spain a Council of the Indies and in the islands local governmental tribunals (_Real Audiencias_) had been created.

Whole fleets of ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic, those setting out from Spain laden with implements of agriculture and war, clothes, and fresh companies of adventurers, coming over as colonists, or to continue the work of conquest and the search for treasure; those returning, laden with the products of the tropics and with gold and precious stones. Emeralds had been found near the coast of Colombia, and Balboa had discovered in the Gulf of San Miguel—that famous group of islands where, as Mozans tells us, “pearls were so common that the natives used them for adorning the paddles of their canoes”—pearls “as large as filberts and of exceeding beauty of form and luster,” many of which, “found in the same fisheries a short time subsequently, at once took place among the largest and most perfect of the world’s gems.”

Nevertheless, neither there nor anywhere else in the Caribbean region, had any vast wealth and civilization comparable to that of the Mexicans been discovered. Balboa, however, had married, according to the Indian custom, the daughter of a _cacique_ (native chief), and, being in the confidence of the Indians of his province, had heard rumors, even before the conquest of Mexico, of a rich and powerful empire to the south (the same that were afterward heard by Cabot); and, after he had been succeeded as Governor by his jealous rival, the notorious Pedrarias Davila, was commissioned to take charge of an expedition to go in search of it. Already he had accomplished the unheard-of task of taking four ships to pieces on the Caribbean shore, transporting them across the Isthmus and reconstructing them on the shore of San Miguel, and, when about to sail, had been arrested by order of Pedrarias, tried on a charge of treason, and executed before he could appeal to Spain. Some years later, having forestalled his great rival in that summary way, Pedrarias entrusted the venture to one Francisco Pizarro, an opportunist, without money, rank, or credit, and then nearly fifty years old, yet one who startled the world by an achievement equaled only by Cortés’ own.

Francisco Pizarro had been but a swineherd in his boyhood, but later had served under Gonzolo de Cordova (_El Gran Capitan_) in that splendid body of infantrymen which fought its way to the foremost rank in Europe, and was a son, too, though an illegitimate one, of a Spanish officer of noble blood. For such a man, as Dawson says, “an admirable soldier, conscious that he possessed powers of the highest order yet hopelessly handicapped in old Europe by his base birth and illiteracy, the discovery of the new world opened up a field for his talents” that led him “eagerly to embrace the opportunity to embark with Alonso de Ojeda in 1509 for the Darien gold mines.” His first appearance in history is as a member of the party that went with Balboa to search for the Pacific; afterward he was among the first of “the adventurers that flocked to the new city of Panama, looking over the mysterious sea, like a pack of wolves eager for a share in the spoils of its unknown shores;” later he happened to be the officer chosen by Pedrarias for Balboa’s arrest.

As he had no funds of his own, and since it was the custom of the times for the Conquistadores who undertook such expeditions to do so at their own expense, he associated with him a priest named Hernando de Luque, who had some capital, and Diego de Almagro, a soldier of still more advanced age but of ability and good reputation. It was agreed that the Padre de Luque should contribute the funds, that Almagro should attend to the collecting and forwarding of troops and supplies, and that Pizarro himself should have the active command. Whereupon they bought one of the ships that had been carried across the Isthmus by Balboa and set out on their first expedition in 1524. As so frequently occurred in such cases, however, inadequacy of provisions caused the venture to fail.

Eighteen months later they sailed again, with a much larger stock of supplies and this time with 160 men. For hundreds of miles they found nothing but the same swampy, forest-clad wastes along the Colombian shore, inhabited only by naked tribes of savages. Pizarro’s disheartened companions, too ready to believe that the country they were seeking was but a myth, would have had him return; but one day the pilot, who had been sent on ahead, suddenly reappeared with the news that he had penetrated south of the equator and had there met a large trading raft on its way north, bearing cloth, silver work, vases, and other things pertaining to civilization and manned by a crew that wore clothes. These men, the pilot reported, had told him that they came from a town called Tumbez, which lay in a fertile valley behind a penetrable coast—that the whole interior of the country was inhabited by a civilized people, subjects of an emperor whose capital was a great city, high up in the mountains still farther south. On this confirmation of their hopes, the commander succeeded in inducing his men to push on until they had reached nearly as far as the northern boundary of Ecuador, where he landed most of the company on an island called Gallo and sent Almagro back to Panama for more provisions and supplies.

At Gallo the climate proved unhealthful; fevers soon decimated the party; even their clothes were rotted by the almost incessant rains and steamy heat, and, as though that were not enough, when the Governor learned from members of the crew who had returned that the men were being held there against their will, he flew into a rage, instead of sending supplies and reinforcements, and despatched a ship to bring back all who wished to desert. Only emboldened by these misfortunes, Pizarro “drew his sword and traced a line with it on the sand from east to west,” says Montesino in his _Anales del Perú_. “Then, turning toward the south, ‘Friends and comrades,’ he said, ‘on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south,’ and, so saying, he stepped across the line.” He was followed by the pilot Ruiz, a Greek cavalier named de Candia, and only eleven others. There is, indeed, as Prescott comments—

“Something striking to the imagination in the spectacle of those few brave spirits consecrating themselves to a daring enterprise that seemed as far above their strength as any recorded in the fabulous annals of knight-errantry. A handful of men, without food, without clothing, almost without arms, without knowledge of the land to which they were bound, without even a vessel to transport them, were left there on a rock in the ocean with the avowed purpose of carrying on a crusade against a powerful empire, staking their lives on its success. What is there in the legends of chivalry that surpasses it?”

For weary months they awaited the return of Almagro with the provisions, and the moment they arrived set sail for the Gulf of Guayaquil. Landing at Tumbez, says Dawson, “with their own eyes they saw confirmation of what the Indians of the raft had told them. Irrigated fields, green with beautiful crops, lined the river bank; eighty thousand people, all comfortably housed, lived in the valley; commerce was flourishing; large temples, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, testified to their wealth and culture; the government was well ordered and stable, and the people received the visitors with open-handed hospitality.” It is easy enough to imagine with what longing eyes these forlorn adventurers who had risked and endured so much must have gazed on such a scene as this!

Yet, concluding that his force was too small even for a raid, and thinking it wiser, anyway, after what had happened, to be invested with independent powers before making any attempt at a conquest, Pizarro made his way back to Spain and related his experiences to the King, who was so greatly impressed both with the story and the petitioner’s noble and commanding presence that he did more than merely commission him to undertake a new expedition: he legitimized him and created him marquis, appointed him _Adelantado_ (governor) of such countries as he might conquer, created Almagro marshal, and made the thirteen who had so gallantly stood by them gentlemen of coat armor.

On Pizarro’s return to Panama, he brought with him a few kindred spirits selected from among the very flower of the fighting men of the Peninsula, including his brothers Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo and his half-brother, Francisco Alcantara, his equals in valor if not in audacity and intellect. And then, as he believed from what he had seen of the fighting on the Isthmus, that a few scores of good men, mail-clad and well provided with artillery and horses—for these, unknown in the new world before the advent of the Spaniards, had never failed to strike terror to the natives—would be as effective as thousands in overcoming undisciplined masses of Indians, armed in their inferior fashion, instead of attempting to assemble an army he got together only a small company composed of men of whose courage and experience he was well assured. Having arranged with Almagro to follow with what reinforcements he could recruit from among the unemployed adventurers in Nicaragua, he set out once more.

This time he happened to land first among the less civilized tribes in Ecuador, where he had the good fortune to find a rich store of emeralds and gold, which he sent back to Almagro to encourage him in his work. Then, marching down the coast to Guayaquil, he crossed to the island of Puna to await the reinforcements, conquered the fierce inhabitants of the place, and was afterward joined by a detachment sent out by his associate under the command of Hernando de Soto, an adventurer who had served with Cortés in Mexico and was later to attain still greater fame as the discoverer of the Mississippi. Even with those De Soto brought, the whole force numbered less than two hundred and fifty.