The Gilded Man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America

CHAPTER IV.

THE EXPEDITION OF URSUA AND AGUIRRE.

The sedentary Indian tribe of Cundinamarca, the Muysca, had been completely subjugated, but numerous hordes of warlike, cannibal natives still roamed around their territory. These rovers by their constant attacks endangered the settlements of the Muysca and the Spanish colony itself. Their subjugation was therefore a necessity for the prosperity of the “new kingdom,” and seemed the more desirable because the gold which the Muysca possessed came from the regions inhabited by them. Already, under Lugo’s wretched administration, the captain Vanegas had chastised the Panches in the west and conquered their country, but northwest of Bogotá the Musos still roamed in the extensive forest flats and grassy prairies, and their predatory attacks threatened to depopulate the district of Tunja. Ursua had led an expedition to the northeast in 1548 and founded the settlement of Pampluna. On his return to Bogotá from this expedition (which is commonly spoken of as a “dorado journey”) the proposition was made to him, by the three royal judges who now ruled New Granada in place of his deposed uncle, to subjugate the Musos.

The knight, now twenty-three years old, advanced confidently into the enemy’s territory with one hundred and fifty men. So rapid were his movements that he assailed a fortified camp in the middle of the region before the Musos could collect their forces. A bitter war of extermination followed. Unable to repel the well-armed Spaniards by direct attacks, the savages swarmed daily around their camp, and tried to starve them out by burning their own crops. Ursua held his position and finally forced the Musos to negotiate; but when a large number of chiefs had come to him to conclude the treaty, he induced them to go inside of his tent, where they were murdered to the last man. He hoped by an act of such surpassing terror to paralyze the force of the tribe; but the war only broke out again all the more furiously, and as soon as Ursua returned to Bogotá the Spaniards were expelled and the settlement of Tudela was laid in ashes by the natives. Notwithstanding the crime he had committed, Ursua obtained the position of chief-justice in Santa Marta. He subdued the Tayronas Indians in 1551 and 1552, but he did not remain long in New Granada, for his mind had been turned toward Peru, and he went to Panamá. He waited there till Don Andreas Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañeta, viceroy of Peru, began his journey to Lima. The environs of Panamá and the Isthmus were then kept in a state of insecurity by bands of fugitive negroes (Cimarrones), and the perplexed municipality of the city were looking for a capable soldier who could deliver them from the plague. The story of Ursua’s deeds was known to the viceroy, and he recommended him to the officers. Ursua exterminated the blacks in a two years’ “bush war,” and then, in 1558, followed the Marquis of Cañeta to Peru.

Ten years previous to this the licentiate Pedro de la Gasca had suppressed the great Peruvian insurrection. Two later uprisings—those of Sebastian de Castilla in 1552 and of Francesco Hernandez Giron in 1554—had been likewise suppressed by the adherents of the Crown; but quiet was not yet fully established. A considerable number of men were living in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador who witnessed the return of order with a dissatisfaction that was well founded, because their past would not bear an examination in the light of the law. The number of this “disorderly rabble” was so large that the new viceroy did not rely upon the mere exercise of force against them, but was considering upon the ways and means of removing the dangerous element from Peru by means of a campaign into distant regions.

The unknown lands east of the Andes offered the only objective point for such a campaign. Chili, New Granada, and the banks of the La Plata were already occupied by the Spaniards, and it was desirable to send the expedition only to some point where it could disturb no already existing colony, and whence the danger of its returning to Peru would be small. Then, very opportunely, by a curious accident, the legend of the dorado again rose in Peru.

Pedro de Cieza of Leon says in the seventy-eighth chapter of his “Cronica del Peru”: “In the year of the Lord 1550 there came to the city of La Frontera ... more than two hundred Indians. They said that since leaving their home a few years before they had wandered through great distances, and had lost most of their men in wars with the inhabitants of the country. As I have heard, they also told of large and thickly populated countries toward the rising sun, and said that some of them were rich in gold and silver.” Cieza was in Peru from 1547 till 1550, and his statement is fully corroborated by a contemporary, Toribio de Ortiguera, who came to South America at the latest in 1561. It appears from the manuscript of the latter, entitled “Jornada del Marañon,” that these Indians originally lived on the Brazilian coast, near the mouth of the Amazon. They had started between 2000 and 4000 strong, under the lead of a chief named Viraratu, accompanied by two Portuguese, and sailed into the Amazon and up that river, amid hard-fought battles with the shore-dwellers, to the borders of Peru. Their appearance aroused great interest amongst the Spaniards. Fray Pedro Simon says of the event: “Those Indians brought accounts from the province of the Omaguas, which Captain Francisco de Orellana mentioned when he went down the Marañon River.... In that province, of which the Indians told when they came into Peru, lived the gilded man.”[60] Thus the idea of the dorado was awakened anew.

In the disordered condition of the country years passed before an expedition to the golden land of the Omaguas could be contemplated. The Marquis of Cañete readily perceived how favorable an occasion this story of the Brazilian visitors and the “dorado fever” it excited afforded him. After a personal interview with the Indians he proceeded energetically with preparations for an expedition to the shores of the Middle Amazon. Drafts were made upon the royal treasury for this object. The disorderly elements in the country seized the occasion with not less eagerness than the viceroy to secure for themselves an unmolested withdrawal; and thus the dorado, which had provoked the conquest of New Granada and had brought the colony of Venezuela to the verge of destruction, was this time the beneficent messenger of rest to Peru.

A campaign of this kind required a strong leader. The choice of the Marquis of Cañete fell upon Pedro de Ursua, who readily accepted the dangerous commission. Besides several other rewards he was to receive, in case of success, the title and all the rights of a governor of the countries expected to be conquered and settled.

A whole year passed before the preparations were completed, and it was not till the spring of 1560 that Ursua collected his men at Santa Cruz de Capacoba, on the Rio Llamas, a branch of the Huallaga, where he had had boats built for the voyage to the Amazon and upon it. It was really a “picked company” that met there. The scum of Peru formed the principal part of it; the majority, men accustomed to everything except order and morals; and with them were women.

To lead such a rabble with success in the face of uncertainties required an earnest and prudent, and at the same time a decided, character of moral worth. Ursua was frivolous and indolent, and often rashly bold. His preparations were incomplete. Much was still lacking when his money had all been spent, and his men were eager to embark. With the help of some officers—“all doughty champions with elastic consciences,” says Simon—Ursua forced the priest of Santa Cruz to “lend” him all his ready money, some four or five thousand pesos. By this act he set the example of violence.

He likewise furnished an example of immorality from the beginning. He kept up a close relation with Iñez de Atienza of Pinira (near the coast), the young and beautiful widow of Pedro de Arcos. Without heeding the counsels of his friends, he took his mistress with him on this campaign in search of the dorado, and lived with her so intimately that the chronicler feels impelled to make the remark, in excuse, that “they all said, indeed, that he intended at some later time to marry Iñez de Atienza.”

While the start was delayed, in consequence of the defects in Ursua’s preparations, trouble was brewing in the camp. It culminated in crime—the murder of Ursua’s lieutenant, Pedro Ramiro. Ursua’s behavior in this affair (he drew the perpetrators of the murder from their hiding-places by promising them immunity and then in the face of his pledge had them arrested and hung) made him personal enemies. With the other elements of discontent among the men were now associated hatred and vindictiveness against their leader.

On the first day of July, 1560, Juan de Vargas was able to go forward with an advance guard in a brigantine to the mouth of the Rio Ucayali. The main body, increased by the colonists of Moyobamba with their goods, should have followed at once, but of all the fleet only three flatboats and one brigantine were seaworthy; the other vessels were unavailable. It was necessary to build rafts and canoes. The embarkation could not be effected till September 26th, when it took place in great confusion. The available space in the boats was unevenly allotted; only forty out of three hundred horses were taken; and all the cattle were left, without masters, on the shore. The flotilla at last moved slowly down along the thickly wooded shores of the Rio Huallaga. It sailed three hundred leagues, according to Pedro Simon (vi.), without passing in sight of a single Indian hut. Harmony among the men was not promoted by their getting under way. Every one appeared dissatisfied and envious of the others, while most of them censured Pedro de Ursua. At the mouth of the Ucayali they came upon the advance expedition under Juan de Vargas; the men were nearly famished in the midst of the richest vegetation. Their vessel had rotted, and it was necessary to distribute them among those who crowded the other already overloaded boats. Fresh discontent arose over this measure, and the dissatisfaction was increased by the fact that Ursua always claimed a full share of room for himself and Iñez de Atienza. At last settlements were reached above the mouth of the Rio Napo, in which were found maize, sweet potatoes, beans, and other vegetables. At one of these places the flotilla landed, and the boats were repaired and rebuilt. Some of the Brazilian Indians who had given the original motive to the expedition and who accompanied it as guides pointed farther eastward as the direction of the rich country of which they were in search. The Ticunas, indeed, on the southern side of the Amazon (between the Ucayali and the Yavari) possessed some gold, but the dorado lived north of that river. The fleet therefore sailed on, despite the murmurs of the men, who had become tired of the constant promises and deceptions.

Before Christmas of 1560 Ursua reached Machiparo, where he was near the country of the Omaguas. Encouraged by the extent of the Indian settlements he found there, and by the friendly demeanor of the inhabitants, he determined to make a longer sojourn at that place, for his crews were worn out by their labor, especially by rowing. The men were glad to resign themselves to rest on the shore, but their idleness also gave them leisure to consider and mature criminal plans. Besides their dissatisfaction with Ursua’s leading, personal hatred, and many worse passions, thoughts of wider bearing lay at the bottom of their schemes.

Some of the members of the band had divined the secret thoughts of the viceroy of Peru, or had joined the expedition while realizing the improbability of the dorado legend, in order to use it for their own purposes. It is only certain that a conspiracy against Ursua was formed at Machiparo. He and his lieutenant were to be killed, and Fernando de Guzman, a young knight from Seville and the ensign of the campaign, was to be chosen commander in Ursua’s place. Under his direction they would return to Peru and with armed hand conquer the country, expel the royal officers, and establish a new kingdom there. The soul of this conspiracy was the Biscayan Lope de Aguirre.

Born at Oñate in Biscay, Aguirre was then about fifty years old. He had spent twenty years in Peru, chiefly in the occupation of a horse-trainer. Involved in all kinds of violent and seditious acts, he had been several times condemned to death and then pardoned, and having become at last a fugitive from province to province, was glad of the opportunity to join Ursua’s expedition. He is described as having been “small and spare in figure, ugly, ... with black beard and an eagle eye, which he turned straight upon others, particularly when he was angry.” Burning through and through with hatred against the Spanish Government, at home, at the same time, in all circles and ranks, endowed with remarkable shrewdness and great physical and mental force—a logical and impressive speaker, withal—with clearly defined purposes, he was in every respect a dangerous man. He was the most detestable character of the conquest.

Even before the beginning of the voyage earnest warnings against Aguirre had reached Ursua, but the indiscreet knight had disregarded them. The Biscayan had abundant leisure to intrigue with the men. Ursua was so blind as to allow the conspiracy to be organized under his eyes, without regarding the plainest evidences of it. On the 26th of December he embarked again and proceeded six or eight leagues farther to another village. Here a broad path led from the shore into the interior; a landing was effected, and a camp formed. “The path,” it was said, “led to a large city and province;” the Spaniards had, in fact, entered the territory of the Omaguas. A strong detachment started out “to explore the new country”—by which the most faithful soldiers were removed from the camp, and the conspirators were given the opportunity they had been waiting for.

On the first day of January, 1561, two hours after sunset, a well-armed party, with Alonzo de Montoya and Cristóval de Chavez at its head, came into Ursua’s quarters. He was lying in the hammock and speaking with a page. Surprised, he asked them, “What are you looking for here at so late an hour?” and was answered with a number of scattering shots. Before he could put himself on guard the whole band pressed in upon him, and with the cry, “Confessio, confessio, miserere mei Deus!” he fell to the ground and expired. The murderers hastened out, one of them crying aloud, “Liberty, liberty! Long live the king, the tyrant is dead!” The alarm brought Juan de Vargas, Ursua’s lieutenant, to the place. He was immediately prostrated, and the conspirators returned to the hut that served as the quarters of Fernando de Guzman.

Dismay and terror prevailed in the camp. Those not in the conspiracy stood surprised and helpless before the numerous and well-armed murderers. These took advantage of the confusion to remove on the next morning a few other of Ursua’s friends. A general meeting was then compulsorily assembled, in which Fernando de Guzman was without opposition proclaimed governor. New appointments of officers were made all around. Aguirre received the second highest place, with the rank of a maestro del campo.

The conspirators did not agree as to their further proceedings. The larger number, of whom Fernando de Guzman was the leader, would not give up the dorado. A second general meeting was called. Against the earnest opposition of Aguirre and Lorenzo de Salduendo, the view of the majority prevailed, and a continuance of the campaign was determined upon. A paper was drawn up in which Ursua’s death was excused as being a necessity, and was signed by those present. Aguirre joined in the signature, and wrote with a firm hand, “Lope de Aguirre, the traitor.” Murmurs were uttered audibly against this act, and Aguirre answered defiantly: “You have killed the representative of the king among us, the bearer of his power; do you think that this writing will exculpate you? Do you suppose that the king and his judges do not know what such papers are worth? We are all traitors and rebels, and even if the new country should be ten times as rich as Peru, more populous than New Spain, and more profitable to the king than the Indies, our heads are at the order of the first licentiate or pettifogger who comes among us with royal authority.”

This speech was shrewdly calculated, and was based on known facts which were extremely unpleasant to most of the men. The meeting broke up in disorder; even the conspirators were now divided into two parties. Aguirre had on his side the active and determined mutineers. His unexampled audacity dazzled many and also made him many enemies, but he carried his point, for he was the only one among the reckless, disorderly adventurers who was seeking to execute a clearly defined purpose.

The first thing to be done was to divert the band from the pursuit of the dorado. When his powers of persuasion failed to be of effect in this attempt, Aguirre built upon the knowledge of the men. The reconnoitring party which Ursua had sent out came back with the report that the path which they followed led to some abandoned huts, and that the thick woods prevented further advance. The company then reimbarked and went on. The shores of the Amazon were solitary and deserted; for weeks they saw no signs of men. Food became scarce; the horses were killed and eaten, and thus all possibility of an advance overland was taken away. The spirit of license grew more and more rife under these toils and privations. Aguirre secretly made use of the demoralization to remove the most influential men under various pretexts, and to put in their places persons in whom he could perceive willing tools. Fernando de Guzman permitted these crimes, for he was himself only a tool in the Biscayan’s hands, and was even so infatuated as to call the monster “father.” When at length the Brazilian Indians confessed that they knew nothing of this country, and that it was not like the one they had previously passed through, Guzman concurred in Aguirre’s plan to give up the dorado and invade Peru.

A halt of three months took place above the mouth of the Japura, and there it was determined at a general meeting to sail down the river to the sea. Margarita was to be secured by a sudden attack; thence Nombre de Dios and Panamá should be surprised; and once in possession of Panamá, the Europeans believed that the success of their scheme would be assured. This audacious plan was so attractively presented by Aguirre that a formal declaration of independence of Spain was drawn up, from which only three men ventured to withhold their signatures. Only one of these escaped death—the bachelor Francisco Vasquez, afterward historian of the campaign. Aguirre having thus succeeded in the first part of his design, it remained for him to acquire exclusive control of the expedition. A series of murders had relieved him of the officers most in his way, and the time had now come for Fernando de Guzman to fall. Knowing the ambitious character of the young Sevillan, he decided to exalt him to such a height that a fall should in any event be destructive. With absurd ceremonies Guzman was therefore proclaimed “Prince and King of the mainland and of Peru.” The puppet-play did not fail of its anticipated effect. Guzman, naturally courteous and therefore beloved, after this became proud and imperious, and surrounded himself with a silly ceremonial, which was unpleasant to the men. They soon ceased to love him; he was disliked, avoided, and finally hated; and his fall became a question only of time and opportunity.

The three months’ halt above the Japura was devoted to the building of two new brigantines of stronger construction for the contemplated sea voyage. When they were completed the company embarked upon them, and started, before Easter of 1561, down the river. Evidences of a numerous population were apparent on the right shore; and when the Indian guides said that wealthy tribes lived there, Aguirre, fearing that the thought of the dorado might be aroused again, contrived to change the course of the voyage. According to Simon,[61] he conducted the flotilla “through a bend into an arm of the river on the left side.” Simon’s account is based on the manuscript testimony of the eye-witness Vasquez, and he continues: “Therefore Aguirre determined to turn out of the direct way; and after they had gone three days and one night in a westerly direction, they came to some vacant huts.” This took place above the mouth of the Rio Negro, and it indicates, as Mr. Clements R. Markham likewise supposes, that the band left the continuous course of the Amazon and went through one of the numerous bayous that form a network of channels between the Japura and the Rio Negro, into the latter river. Von Humboldt and Southey are, on the other hand, of the opinion that Aguirre sailed down the Amazon to its mouth.

Yet that station of “some vacant huts” appears to have been situated, not on the main stream, but on a northern tributary.

The forsaken Indian town, surrounded by muddy water, in which the band found quarters while it consumed its scanty provisions, plagued day and night by clouds of mosquitoes, was a sorry stopping-place in which to spend the Easter season in idleness. Aguirre thought the place and the opportunity favorable for striking his last blow. Fernando de Guzman was ripe for his fall. Few of the men still adhered to him. But his death was to be preceded by those of two other persons whom Aguirre still feared. They were his former associate, Lorenzo de Salduendo, and Iñez de Atienza. This woman had soon forgotten her lover Ursua, and yielded herself without hesitation shortly after his death to the murderer Salduendo, with whom she afterward lived. Aguirre mortally hated her. A trifling contention about the division of the rooms gave the Biscayan a pretext for a quarrel with Salduendo. The result was that Aguirre killed his comrade in Guzman’s presence. Then two hired murderers rushed into the lodging of Iñez de Atienza and took the life of the young woman in the most revolting manner.

Dr. Markham, on the strength of a few verses of the licentiate Castellanos, calls Iñez de Atienza, after Madame Godin des Odonais, the heroine of the Amazon. The comparison is hardly admissible between Ursua’s mistress, who shortly after his death became so readily the mistress of his murderer, and the faithful wife who, to seek her husband toiling in the service of science at Cayenne, bravely made her way through the wilderness of the Amazon shores almost alone. It is also painful to read Dr. Markham, in his defence of this woman, a concubine in station, calling the eye-witness Vasquez, who maintained his fidelity to the Crown through constant danger to his life, a “gold-seeking adventurer,” and the noble Bishop Piedrahita, of Panamá, a “dirty friar.”

Salduendo’s death aroused Guzman from his dreams, but it was too late. Not able to accomplish anything openly against Aguirre, he determined to make an attack upon his life. Aguirre anticipated this, and speedily collected his adherents. The murderers pressed in the darkness of night into the quarters of the “prince of terra firma.” The priest Henao was the first victim, six captains fell next, and lastly the simple-minded youth himself was shot. On the next morning, Aguirre, accompanied by eighty armed men, came into the midst of the camp and was without opposition proclaimed “General of the Marañon.”

By this name, Marañon, Aguirre henceforth called the mutiny, of which he was now absolute commander, and it was so applied by the men themselves. Simon[62] says the word was derived from maraña (complication), and survived after Aguirre’s campaign as a by-name for the Amazon. This is, however, not correct. Peter Martyr had already, in his “De Orbe Novo,” applied the name to the Amazon, of which Pinzon had seen the mouths; Oviedo, who died in 1557, describes the Amazon River as the Marañon; and Gomara, whose “Historia general de las Indias” was printed in 1552, applied the name in an indefinite way to the great South American river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Amazon is, however, also known as the Rio de Orellano; and in view of the extremely vague geographical ideas that prevailed in the sixteenth century, no conclusion can be drawn from the application of the term “Marañones” to Aguirre’s men concerning the further course or route of the expedition. It is significant that Acosta[63] says, on the authority of a witness who was in the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre, and afterward went into the Order of Jesus, that the Amazon, Marañon, or Rio de Orellana, emptied into the sea opposite the islands of Margarita and Trinidad. In connection with this the statement of Cristoval de Acuña (1639), that Aguirre reached the sea through a side-mouth of the Amazon opposite Trinidad, is of considerable importance. Mr. Markham, therefore, does not seem to be wholly unjustified in supposing that the Marañones, having sailed up the Rio Negro, passed into the Orinoco through the Cassiquiare and thence through one of the mouths of the Orinoco, and not through the Amazon, into the Atlantic Ocean. In further confirmation of this view is the mention by Pedro Simon of Aguirre’s having met a cannibal tribe, the Arnaquinas. In fact, the Arekainas, thorough-going cannibals, now dwell on the Upper Rio Negro. On the other side are the facts that the Falls of the Orinoco are not mentioned in the few meagre accounts we have of the further course of the expedition, and that the torrent at Atures and Maypures, and even below, was hardly navigable for the brigantines although, according to Simon, they were “as strongly built as ships of three hundred tons.” But whether through the Orinoco or the Amazon, it seems to be certain that Aguirre with his two vessels reached the ocean on the first day of July, 1561.

With the murder of Guzman, Aguirre obtained supreme authority; and the compressed narrative of the voyage down the river to its mouth and into the ocean, which lasted not quite three months, gives us but little else than accounts of the Biscayan’s behavior in the exercise of unlimited power. His whole course was intended to establish this power, and since he was burdened with guilt and crime, and guilt and crime alone bound his men to him, doubt and suspicion of his own people were his predominant feelings. At least eight of the Marañones fell victims to these feelings in the course of three months; and every new crime attached the rest, by the sense of common guilt, more closely to their leader, who, like an evil spirit, led them, with an iron will, to further crimes. No one dared to speak or hardly to think of the dorado; the men were permitted to entertain but one thought—that of the conquest of Peru.

The island of Margarita was to afford the first base for this enterprise. Aguirre reached it in seventeen days, sailing around Trinidad. The appearance of the two brigantines excited general astonishment. Aguirre knew how to appeal to the emotions of the inhabitants. The governor of the island and some of the other officers went down to the landing to see the new-comers. Aguirre seized and imprisoned the governor; his men then captured the fort; and before the people of Margarita came to their senses the island had passed without drawing a sword into the hands of the Marañones. The royal treasury was immediately seized, independence of Spain was proclaimed, and provisions and ammunition for the further prosecution of the campaign were energetically collected, by gentle means or forcible. Aguirre now needed larger and swifter vessels for the execution of his audacious plan, for Nombre de Dios and Panamá were to be surprised in the same manner as Margarita had been, before the news of the event could spread. A large vessel, which had brought the Dominican-Provincial Montesinos with his military escort to Venezuela, was anchored before Maracapanna (the present Piritú), on the coast of the mainland, opposite Margarita. Some of the Marañones were sent to seize the vessel. Instead of doing that, they took the opportunity to desert the standard of rebellion and surrender to the Provincial, to whom they also made a circumstantial confession of all the atrocities which Aguirre and his band had committed. Fray Francisco de Montesinos was shocked by the story, and at once sent messengers to all the settlements in Venezuela. The report of the impending danger spread so rapidly over the mainland that in a short time fifteen hundred men were under arms in New Granada. Venezuela had been so exhausted by the dorado expeditions of the previous period that it was only with extreme effort that it could supply two hundred and sixty poorly armed men.

Aguirre, who had in the meantime sunk both brigantines, confidently awaited the arrival of the expected ships at Margarita. In the excited and tense condition of his mind, delay was hardly possible without violent outbreaks occurring. Not only were Aguirre’s own men exposed to his murderous caprices, but the defenceless people of the island stood in constant peril of death. Aguirre regarded their property as his legitimate spoil, and disposed of it arbitrarily for his own purposes. While the men of influence and means were robbed and murdered by him, the bad elements flocked to his party, and the reign of terror on the island increased as the Marañones gained accessions from the scum of the population. At last the Provincial’s vessel came in sight, but flying the royal standard. Aguirre fell into a furious passion. Having caused the governor of Margarita and the principal officers to be slain, he proceeded hastily down to the port to prevent the vessel’s landing. No battle ensued, however, for after an exchange of empty threats the Provincial set sail again in order to carry the alarm to the Antilles and the Isthmus.

Aguirre’s plan for surprising Panamá, having been thus defeated, he determined to invade Venezuela. Before doing so he instigated a number of murders at Margarita. At length he succeeded in getting a vessel, on which he sailed “on the last Sunday of August, 1561,” at the head of a well-armed band of criminals, for Burburata. The people of this place fled into the woods with their property as soon as they saw the vessel, which bore two blood-red swords, crossed, on its flag. Without halting at Burburata, Aguirre marched inland to Lake Tacarigua, on the shore of which the settlement of Valencia had existed since 1555. Some of his men deserted him in the tropical wilderness through which his road lay. Valencia had been abandoned, and the Marañones burned the vacant houses. Aguirre was ill, and therefore twice as irritable as usual, and gave himself up to the wildest cruelty, even toward his own men. In Valencia he composed a manifesto to the King of Spain, and sent it by a priest whom he had brought from Margarita as a hostage to the coast. The letter, which has been preserved by Vasquez and by Oviedo y Baños, begins, “To King Philip, a Spaniard, son of Charles the Invincible,” and ends with the words, “and on account of this ingratitude, I remain till death a rebel against thee.—Lope de Aguirre, the Wanderer.” The document is full of reasonable and unreasonable reproaches, contains the most glaring and absurd contradictions, and bears throughout the marks of insanity. From Valencia Aguirre went southwest toward Barquicimeto. The royal party was not prepared for resistance in the open field; but the number of the Marañones was perceptibly diminishing. Aguirre’s daily recurring frenzies were continually costing the lives of some of the men; the scanty population, instead of joining his party as he had anticipated, fled from before him, and his people deserted him at every opportunity.

The end was approaching. Barquicimeto was deserted, but the military force on the side of the king now appeared before the place, under the lead of the maestro del campo, Diego de Paredes. While not strong enough to attack him, it prevented Aguirre from proceeding farther. Well mounted, the royalists passed around his camp daily, cut off all access to it, and by the judicious circulation of amnesty proclamations which Governor Collado sagaciously issued, they encouraged his men to desert. The number of these diminished every day, and Aguirre’s mad spells of fury became steadily more impotent. At last Paredes decided to risk an attack on Barquicimeto. On the advance of the royal troops most of the Marañones threw away their arms and met their assailants with the cry, “Long live the king!” Aguirre found himself all at once entirely forsaken. Pale and trembling, he went into the chamber of his only child, a grown-up maiden, and with the words, “My child, God have mercy on your soul, for I am going to kill you, so that you shall not live in misery and shame the child of a traitor,” stabbed her in the heart, and then weakly tottered toward the door which the royal soldiers were approaching. He suffered himself to be taken without resistance. The royal maestro del campo desired to spare his life, but the Marañones insisted on the instant death of their former leader, and he fell under the discharge of musketry. His head was cut off and was exhibited at Tocuyo in an iron cage. His memory survives to the present time in Venezuela as that of an evil spirit; and when at night the jack-o’-lanterns dance over the marshy plains, the solitary wanderer crosses himself and whispers, “The soul of the tyrant Aguirre.”

With this closes the account of the series of expeditions which we undertook to describe in connection with the legend of the gilded man. The story justifies our comparison of the vision of the dorado after his real home had been conquered with a mirage, “enticing, deceiving, and leading men to destruction.”

Notwithstanding the tragical consequences which the search for this phantom invariably entailed, it remained long fixed like an evil spell upon the northeastern half of the South American continent. Martin de Proveda tried and failed, in 1556, to reach Omagua and the “provinces of the dorado.” Diego de Cerpa, in 1569, and Pedro Malaver de Silva, in 1574, met their deaths at the mouths of the Orinoco. There Antonio de Berreo, after he had fruitlessly marched through the whole interior of Venezuela, fell a prisoner into the hands of the English in 1582. The great expedition of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 only got as far as the Salto Caroni. In the meanwhile the locality of the legend, as Humboldt has remarked, kept shifting farther to the east, till it took final refuge in Guyana, “in the periodically overflowed plains between the rivers Rupununi, Essequibo, and Branco”—but shrunken at the same time to a purely geographical myth of Lake Parime. As in the first half of the sixteenth century German soldiers were the earliest to pursue the gilded chieftain, the fact also appears like a curious fate that in the first half of the nineteenth century the German travellers Alexander von Humboldt and Schomburgk laid that phantom of the great lake, and with it terminated the last survival of the legend of the gilded man.

CIBOLA.

INTRODUCTION.

The value of historical research on the American continent consists not only in the enrichment it affords to the fund of scientific knowledge, which has an indirect influence upon life, but also in the destruction it effects of deeply rooted errors, in which it acts immediately upon practical life. Accordingly as we represent to ourselves a people or a country when they first become known to us, so we shape our expectations of them when we go to establish our home among them. A correct notion of the past furnishes the basis for an intelligent forecasting of the future. I have tried to show in the history of the dorado what harm may result from incorrect views of history and misapprehensions of manners and customs.

The errors of this kind which arose in the southern half of the Western Continent were, fortunately, corrected at a comparatively early date. In North America similar errors have been reëchoed, with mischievous results, down to near the present time. Expectations awakened and cherished in the beginning of the sixteenth century, not fulfilled but never completely dispelled, have in past years prepared for the failure of many enterprises in the southwest of the United States. These expectations were built upon the basis of a misunderstood fact. The tradition of the “Seven Cities of Cibola” included a kernel of fact enveloped by a shell of exaggerated fancies and hopes. Much interest has been taken in recent times in inquiries respecting the “where” and the “how” of that kernel. While those questions were correctly answered by earnest and intelligent investigation thirty years ago, the practical seeker has been led by them into many unfortunate wanderings, and the settler looking for his future in the west has been lured into attempts that have forever buried his fortunes and those of his companions. The following pages have been prepared in the hope that, conveying the warnings of history, they may furnish the basis for the formation of more correct views.

CHAPTER I.

THE AMAZONS.

The legend of the Amazons was unquestionably domiciled upon the American continent by the Spaniards, and was suggested by imperfectly understood accounts of distant tribes given by the natives, to whose words the Spaniards were not inattentive. Keeping pace with the efforts of the Spaniards to penetrate to the north, it appears first in the fourth letter of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V. (October 15, 1524): “And among the reports which he brought from that province [Colima] was an account of a very good harbor which was found on that coast; ... and also he told me of the lords of the province of Ciguatan, that many of them asserted there was an island inhabited only by women without any men, and that from time to time men went out to them from the mainland; ... when they bore daughters they kept them, but the sons were put away. This island is ten days distant from the province, and many persons have gone there from the province and seen them. I was also told that they were rich in pearls and in gold.”

It was Gonzalo Sandoval, Cortés’s most faithful lieutenant and friend, who brought this account. It was not allotted to Cortés himself to pursue the search for the Amazons’ island, for the insurrection which another associate in his conquest of the Mexican tribes, Cristóbal de Olid, excited against him in Honduras forced him into the arduous campaign in that part of Central America, in which he only with great difficulty escaped death. Until that remarkable expedition, which penetrated southward from Mexico to the now hardly accessible interior regions of Chiapas and Yucatan, the Spaniards held the northern coast of the Mexican gulf to the present state of Tamaulipas, but on the western coast they had advanced but little beyond the twentieth degree of north latitude in the state of Jalisco. The subjugation of the tribes of the Rio Pánuco on the eastern coast brought about a conflict in the year 1523 between Cortés and the contemporary discoverer, Francisco de Garay, which ended in Garay’s going to Mexico, where he espoused the natural daughter of Cortés, and then suddenly died. The behavior of Cortés had already aroused the distrust of the Spanish Government. There is no longer much doubt that, feeling his separation from the mother-country, and counting on the support of the natives, which he was beginning to cultivate systematically, he was working for the establishment of an independent kingdom in Mexico. He was therefore dangerous to all who stood near him in importance, and used every means to remove them. To this end he sent the most capable and most popular of his lieutenants, Pedro de Alvarado, to Guatemala, and Cristóbal de Olid to Honduras, while Sandoval, in whose frank and innocent character alone he could trust, was allowed to remain in Mexico. He had managed to get the first commissioner whom the Government sent to Mexico, Cristóbal de Tápia, out of the country; but Garay he permitted to come to Mexico—to die.

Cortés considered himself secure, and wrote a letter to the Spanish Crown, the language of which is little known, in which, while he insisted in the plainest manner upon his services and personal devotion, he in the most courtly terms denied allegiance, and declined any interference of the royal officers in the administration of the new colony. This letter, which bears the same date as the famous paper called the Carta Cuarta (October 15, 1524), was written when four officers of the Spanish Crown—the treasurer, Alonso de Estrada; the accountant and paymaster, Rodrigo de Albornoz; the factor, Gonzalo de Salazar; and the inspector, Peral Mendez Chirinos—had come to Mexico to take care of the financial interests of the monarch. The insurrection of Olid called away the conqueror of Mexico and took him to Honduras, else he would have carried out his ambitious plans at that time, when, it is hardly to be doubted, they would have been more successful than was afterward the struggle for independence of Gonzalo Pizarro in Peru.

After the departure of Cortés from Mexico, October 12, 1524, the administration of the province fell into the hands of the officers of the Crown. They soon quarrelled, and disastrous complications arose. Mexico itself was the scene of great disorder, while the Indians in the country rebelled. This interregnum lasted till the year 1525, and ended with the arrest of Salazar and Chirinos by the partisans of Cortés. Cortés, after restoring order in Honduras, returned to Mexico on June 20, 1526.

A brilliant reception was prepared for him there, but it had only a transient importance. The Spanish Government had perceived the magnitude of the danger with which it was threatened from the extraordinary but reckless conqueror, and had made the best of his absence. Cortés had indeed been honored with the title of “Adelantado” of New Spain, and with many personal privileges, but the most northern part of Mexico that had been discovered, from the mouth of the Pánuco River, was withdrawn from his dominion and placed under the administration of Nuño de Guzman. By this change he lost all the fruits of his agreement with Francisco de Garay and of Garay’s premature death. A young jurist, Luis Ponce de Léon, was immediately sent to Mexico to make an impartial investigation on the spot of the complaints that were brought against Cortés. For this purpose he was privately given full power to arrest Cortés if necessary and send him to Spain, or in the other event to confirm him in his office.

Ponce de Léon arrived at the City of Mexico on July 2, 1526, and was received with pomp by Cortés, who placed himself wholly at his disposition; but the climate agreed no better with the new functionary than it had before agreed with Garay. He died in the same month after a short illness; and eight weeks afterward his successor in office, the Bachelor Márcos de Aguilar, also died. The process against Cortés dragged slowly along with many interruptions amid great disquiet in the country; for Alonso de Estrada had taken the reins of government, and had abridged the conqueror’s prerogatives to the domain of military command and Indian administration. Shorn of all power, Cortés had to submit to the inevitable, and to suffer patiently a banishment from the City of Mexico, which Estrada imposed upon him in order to secure tranquillity.

Although further explorations in the north were temporarily interrupted by the disorders that prevailed in the country, Cortés found time to organize an expedition to the Molukkes on the western coast, and at least to open communication with them. The royal officers, on the contrary, could accomplish nothing, and in order to circumscribe their power, as well as that of the governor of Panamá, Pedro Arias Dávila, independent jurisdictions were created out of Honduras, Guatemala, and Yucatan. At the same time the Church assumed the control of Indian affairs, and finally, in order to terminate the arbitrary provisional system of government, the royal court of law, Audiencia real, was set up in the year 1527 as the chief authority in Mexico.

Nuño Beltrán de Guzman entered into possession of his government in Pánuco in the year 1528. He was young, vigorous, and energetic, but imperious, and his inconsiderate ambition was not capable of the wise patience that Cortés manifested. His first step was to stir up boundary disputes with the adjacent jurisdiction of New Spain or Mexico, and when no results accrued from them, he sent Sancho de Caniego to Madrid with a series of complaints against Hernando Cortés, which could not fail to excite earnest attention. Besides the charge of treason against the Crown already raised, Guzman accused the conqueror with having murdered Francisco de Garay and Luis Ponce de Léon. Cortés presented himself in Spain almost simultaneously with the charges, to defend himself personally against them. But an accusation of another more heinous offence had been more recently filed in secret against him at the court. His wife, Doña Catalina Xuarez, with whom he had not long shared the happiness of wedded life, having been separated from her a few years after their marriage by absence on his campaigns, had joined him again after the conquest of Mexico, and suddenly died three months later. He was therefore, although not openly, accused of murdering her. The Acts of the Process against Cortés included a “secret inquiry” (pesquisa secreta) into this terrible accusation. The Process resulted in an official acquittal; but the Acts themselves presented the death of Francisco de Garay in the most suspicious light, left the manner in which the death of Ponce de Léon occurred an open question, and made it certain that Cortés had with his own hands strangled in bed his first faithful wife, who had followed him to Mexico at his request. The Process did not detain Cortés later than till the year 1530. In the meantime the Spanish Crown, as soon as it was informed of the new accusations that had been brought against Cortés, appointed Nuño Beltrán de Guzman president of the court of law in Mexico, and thus elevated him to the highest official position in New Spain. The selection was an unwise one. Guzman proceeded to Mexico, where he arrived in 1529. His demeanor was very arrogant. The complaints against him soon became as loud, even on the side of the Audiencia, as they had been against Cortés. At last the King of Spain (the Emperor Charles V.) named a new Audiencia, and appointed as its president Sebastian Ramirez de Fuenléal, bishop of Santo Domingo. The president did not go directly to the mainland, but spent some time in his episcopal see, partly in order to observe quietly the course of affairs in Mexico, and partly to perfect his plans for the reorganization of the country.

Guzman’s conduct was in the meantime intolerable. Directly in the face of the Spanish laws he pursued the natives in order to extort gold and slaves from them, and abused the former associates of Cortés. Even the Audiencia was glad when he left Mexico, on the 20th of December, 1529, at the head of a large Spanish squadron and more than eight thousand Indians, for the purpose of continuing the discoveries begun by Sandoval for Cortes in the northwest. The drafting of Indians to engage in this campaign was a transgression of the law, but he was personally supported in it by some of the members of the court. His march was directed first toward Michoacan, but its ultimate goal was the gold-rich and pearl-bearing island of the fabulous Amazons.

The Tarasca lived and still live in Michoacan. Although they spoke a different language from the Mexicans, their traditions pointed to an original connection with them, and they were in the same stage of civilization. The Tarasca were split up into a number of groups, which, like the other linguistic stocks or their subdivisions, of which Tlaxcala, Cholula, and the three large settlements of the Mexican Valley—Mexico, Tezcuco, and Tlacopan—were conspicuous examples, had a common leadership in war. The tribes of Michoacan had two such head war-chiefs, of whom commonly only one—like Montezuma in his day in Mexico—who is called Cazonci, is named. The Tarasca had voluntarily submitted to Cortés, and stood in friendly relations toward the Spaniards as long as the famous conqueror commanded in Mexico. Guzman, having arrived at Michoacan, in his rude way imposed considerable requisitions on the chiefs. As these could not be granted quickly enough, the principal leader, “Zinzicha,” was tortured to death. Guzman then went northward, and this campaign constitutes the saddest page for the natives in the history of Mexico. The Indians there suffered generally only during two periods: first under the confusion which prevailed during the absence of Cortés, from 1524 to 1526; and, second, under the administration of Nuño de Guzman, from 1529 to 1531. The rule of Cortés was wisely just and mild; and the later policy of the Spaniards was a paternal one, marked by a correct knowledge of the Indian character, its weaknesses and its capabilities.

Guzman has been often accused, by his contemporaries as well as by later writers, of having exercised deliberate cruelties on his march through the present states of Jalisco and Sinaloa, and his campaign has been described as one of devastation. Numerous acts of violence certainly occurred. The Indian tribes, divided, scattered, and living in constant war with one another, suffered much, but a careful examination of the authorities shows that it was more from fear than anything else; while no reliance can be placed upon the numerical statements concerning the so-called Spanish blood-baths, particularly none upon those of the bishop of Chiapas, Bartholomé de las Casas. The whole literature of that period should be read with the same reserves with which we receive the political “campaign literature” of the present; and the numerous official hearings of the Spanish civil officers furnish the most contradictory statements. Guzman was ambitious and avaricious; his outbreaks of cruelty were provoked by those passions. Where his interests demanded patience he could be gentle enough, but when excited by contradiction or negligence, he raged against his own Spaniards as well as against hostile Indians. Contrary to the orders of the Spanish Crown, he made slaves of a number of Indians in order that he might at least compensate himself for the disappointments he suffered in other respects; for the chief object of his search was gold in quantities, but he could only obtain it scantily. The civilization of the natives appeared to decline as he went toward the northwest; the houses of stone and plaster gave way to lighter structures of cane and wood, and shelters made of branches and foliage.

A bitter disappointment was awaiting him in Cihuatlan in the present state of Sinaloa. Sandoval had brought the story of the Amazons from there; but instead of the island on which he had placed the soldierly women, Guzman was shown only a few insignificant villages. He found them, however, exclusively inhabited by women and children, for the men had fled to the mountains. The legend of the Amazons was thus resolved into one of those mistakes which were sure to arise at that time on the first contact of Europeans with natives whose language they did not understand. No trace was found of gold, pearls, or treasures of any kind. The story of the Amazons ceases from this time to be of any significance in the history of discovery in the northern half of America. It plainly appears from the accounts of contemporaries that it was not a native legend in America, but was an importation from Europe, a survival from classical antiquity, which emigrated along with cultivated and uncultivated Europeans into what was called the New World.

Guzman, although unsuccessful as to his principal object, did not abandon the effort to press farther north. He reached Culiacan, and founded there a settlement under the name of San Miguel de Culiacan. His force, however, was exhausted and partially destroyed. His Indian guides especially had suffered much. He therefore despatched the Captain Chirinos toward the north, and the latter in turn sent his captains, Cebreros and Diego de Alcáraz, still farther in that direction. Guzman in the meantime started on his return. His direct work in this region ended with the foundation of the Spanish settlement in Culiacan. In the beginning of May, 1531, he left the young town and began a continuous march to the south. His kingdom had come to an end; Cortés had returned to Mexico and arrived at an understanding with the new Audiencia. Grave accusations were raised against Nuño de Guzman. All his orders concerning the Indians were revoked, and when at last the new president of the royal court of justice, Bishop Don Sebastian Ramirez de Fuenléal, came into Mexico, he took control of affairs with a firm hand, and banished his violent predecessor to the scene of his march on the western coast. In 1537 he was arrested by order of the Spanish Government and carried a prisoner to Spain, where, having been deprived of his property by confiscation, he died in poverty in 1544. When Guzman, even after he had become satisfied at Cihuatlan that he had been pursuing a phantom in the shape of the river of the Amazons, still endeavored to go farther north, he was moved by another story which excited his avarice and his imagination. Unable himself to follow this second phantom, he charged Captain Chirinos with the object. The latter went as far as the Rio de Petatlan, and thence sent out his subordinates, Cebreros and Alcáraz, to the Rio Mayo. The numerous though small towns which were found on the banks of this river were inhabited by the Mayo Indians, who now form a branch of the linguistic stock of the Yaqui, or Hyaquin. Cebreros crossed the Mayo, proceeded in 1532 into the present Sonora, and although he had hardly twenty men reached the Rio Yaqui. He did not venture to go farther than to the north bank of that river, but returned to Sinaloa. The Indians there were in active revolt, and the Spaniards had great difficulty in maintaining themselves in the weak settlement of San Miguel Culiacan. They had found on their northern excursions fertile intervales inhabited by warlike tribes. Beyond these tribes lived a people who built their houses of clay. Still farther north another wonder-story invited them, which promised more than the most fertile intervale, more than the most civilized Indian settlements. The account of Indians in Sonora who lived in large houses of clay was true, for it referred to the southern Pimas. But the story that attracted the Spaniards to the north was the legend of the “Seven Cities.”

CHAPTER II.

THE SEVEN CITIES.

The planisphere which Martin Dehaim constructed in the year 1492 for the Portuguese service contained, among other features, an island of Antilia west of the Cape de Verde group, with a note relating that at the time of the conquest of Spain by the Arabs a Portuguese archbishop and a number of Christians had fled to that island and founded seven cities upon it. The story is still more plainly marked on the map of Johannes Ruysch—Universalior Cogniti Orbis Tabula, A.D. 1508. The legend of the seven cities thus appears, like the myth of the Amazons, to have been known in Europe previous to the landing of Columbus. After the successive discoveries of the islands of the West Indian group in the last years of the fifteenth century “Antilia” (ante insula) ceased to designate a proper and special part of the land. The name of Antilles remained, and was applied to the whole chain of islands that separate the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. The seven cities also passed into complete oblivion till they were brought again into a kind of indefinite recollection about the year 1530 by the expedition of Nuño de Guzman. It is uncertain when, how, or where Guzman heard of the “siete cibdadis.” The anonymous author of the “Primua Relacion” speaks of them in connection with that campaign as if he had already heard the story in Mexico; while other contemporary writers say nothing of them, but mention a large river that emptied into the Southern Sea, which the inhabitants had barred with an iron chain. Neither the seven cities nor the broad river with its barrier chain were found by Cebreros and Alcáraz.

It is proper, therefore, to inquire whether, or to what extent, a story concerning the seven cities existed among the natives of Mexico before the arrival of the Europeans. But such an inquiry should be prefaced by this statement of general fact: Wherever it is possible to follow the development of popular legends in groups of men not acquainted with writing, but who have been taught to transmit these stories by verbal tradition from generation to generation, we are surprised at finding that the legend has been preserved with careful fidelity through centuries, and that any novelty or change which has been introduced into it must always be ascribed to foreign influence. Such influence is not necessarily to be attributed to an extra-continental contact; but where such a contact takes place—and where, as everywhere in America, one group of the human race is suddenly caused to live with another of whom it is so far in advance in established historical foundations and knowledge, and in the means of perpetuating the remembrance of them, as the Europeans of the sixteenth century were then in advance of the American aborigines all over the continent without exception; and where this living in contact is at the same time combined with the exercise of a religious influence by the superior race on the other—then a reconstruction of the legends is inevitable. It is expressed first in efforts to adapt the mythology of the inferior people to that of the higher; and as mythology and history are closely interwoven, a partial insinuation of the sagas, stories, and legends of the superior people into those of the others can hardly be avoided.

Great care is therefore necessary to extract the real kernel of the Indian traditions, in Mexico for instance, from the investing shell of the legends of the sixteenth century. The subject has been treated till now not only with little critical care as to this point, but for the most part without any critical sense. Everything has been accepted as pure coin which, since the subjection of the Mexican tribes by Cortés, has been called Indian historical tradition. Only superficial consideration has been given to the time, place, and manner of the origin of the Indian paintings and other documents. It has not been considered, in using them as historical authorities, that the Codex Mendocino, the Codex Vaticanus, and the Codex Telleriano Ramensis were painted by Indians in the middle and second half of the sixteenth century, by order of the Spanish viceroy and Don Martin Enriquez, as illustrations of the local traditions which were collected at the time by a commission in the name of the Crown. No inquiry has been made into the extent to which those paintings agree with the earliest declarations of the natives, which were made and recorded not more than ten years after the institution of Spanish rule. The Church also, as well as the Spanish Government, made earnest efforts a short time after the conquest to collect the historical legends and stories of the Indians. About the middle of the sixteenth century a statement was introduced into the publications concerning these traditions, that the Nahuatl tribes of Mexico believed that they had originated out of seven caves. The Codex Mendocino had nothing about this, and it was not composed much before 1549. Later writers made seven tribes out of the seven caves, and finally seven towns or cities. We have already seen that Nuño de Guzman had heard or knew of the story of the seven cities about 1530; and the supposition therefore seems not unauthorized that the seven caves of the Mexican tradition, as they were conceived and represented after the discovery of New Mexico, were an interpolation of the European legend into the Indian recollections of their history.

In 1531 the bishop of San Domingo assumed control of the government in Mexico as president of the Royal Law Court. No further advance of importance was made in the discoveries in the northwest, and the settlement of San Miguel de Culiacan in Sinaloa was held as the extreme post in that direction whence occasional excursions to the north were attempted. In the meantime Nuño de Guzman was removed from the scene and called to answer for his misdemeanors before the Spanish courts. Melchior Diaz commanded in Culiacan as capitan and alcalde mayor, and Diego de Alcáraz was at the head of an advanced post which was pushed out between Culiacan and the borders of the present Sonora. Some of the men of this reconnoitring party, when about eighty miles north of Culiacan, met in the last days of March, 1536, a strange spectacle. A man, nearly naked, with long tangled hair and beard, accompanied by eleven Indians and a negro, came to them, and spoke to them in Spanish, with warm emotion, expressing great joy that after eight years of wandering he had at last been permitted to meet white men, and Spanish countrymen. He bore the outer traces of great physical suffering, and spoke in so excited a manner that the other Spaniards at first regarded him and listened to him with suspicion. He gave his name as Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, and that of the negro who was with him was Estévanico. Two other Spaniards, Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado and Andrés Dorantes, were a day’s journey back, in company with a number of Indians who had followed them from the north.

When the Spaniards had recovered from their surprise, they took the new-comers to Diego de Alcáraz, who immediately sent three of his men with fifty Indians to search for the other Spaniards. His purpose, however, was not so much to deliver his countrymen as to find provisions and gold. For this object he kept back the Indians who had come with Maldonado and Dorantes, removed the latter from them, and finally put the four, including Cabeza de Vaca and the negro, under arrest. The Indians escaped by flight; and the prisoners, after having been abused in various ways, were delivered on May 1st to the commander, Melchior Diaz, at Culiacan, who gave them an honorable reception, and to whom they were permitted to relate the wonderful history of their adventures.

This story of the wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions is indeed a wonder-tale, and is hardly matched in thrilling incident by anything of the kind of the sixteenth century. De Vaca has himself written it out in the book “Naufragios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca y Relacion de la Jornada que hizo á la Florida con el Adelantado Pámfilo de Narvaez,” which was printed at Valladolid in 1555. Having been composed from recollection and not on the basis of notes of any kind, the book is obscure in its geographical data. Many of the details are erroneously set forth, and the glowing fancies excited by the contemplation of the author’s terrible sufferings and privations are in many cases obviously detrimental to historical truth. The substance of the story is true, and gives a vivid picture of the fortunes of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions.

An expedition was organized in 1527 under the command of Pámfilo de Narvaez, the former rival of Cortés, whom he had attacked and captured in 1520 at Cempohual, to explore the peninsula of Florida, concerning the wealth of which extremely vague and therefore exaggerated accounts were in circulation. Five vessels, with six hundred men, left San Lúcar de Barrameda in Spain on June 17th. Cabeza de Vaca was treasurer of the enterprise. Rarely has any campaign of conquest met with such a series of consecutive disasters as befell this unhappy expedition of the “Armada of Pámfilo de Narvaez.” One of the vessels went down in a squall during the stay of the fleet at the island of Cuba. The flotilla could not leave Havana till February, 1528, and it was so hindered by storms and head-winds that it did not reach the coast of Florida till Maundy-Thursday of that year. It anchored in a bay on the shore of which was an Indian village. The men were landed, and it was decided, against the advice of Cabeza de Vaca, to leave the ships and march inland. The unfortunate march began on May 1, 1528, with three hundred men and forty horses.[64] Amidst great difficulties, without provisions, they went northward through marshy woods and morasses, and across broad rivers, at no very great distance from the seashore. Till the 17th of June they found only a single Indian village (on May 16th). Then some Indians met them from whom they learned that they were near the settlement of Apalache, of which they were in search, concerning the wealth of which fabulous reports had found their way to the Spanish Antilles. They suffered a bitter disappointment when, on June 24th, they came in sight of the desired place. Forty Indian huts constituted the whole village. They were now in northern Florida, on the Suwanee River. At Apalache serious hostilities began with the natives, who daily harassed the weary and famishing Spaniards and killed some of their men. After a halt there of twenty-five days, Narvaez decided to go westward.

It is not necessary to go further into the melancholy details of the march of this expedition. Once in the swamps and bayous that extended along the coast of Alabama, and perhaps Louisiana, no escape was to be hoped for. An attempt to build rafts and sail upon them across the gulf to the Mexican coast resulted in the drowning of a part of the men. The rest, cast back upon the shore without food and without water, fell victims to the hostility of the natives, to hunger, and to the winter, which came upon them. Only four survived, viz., Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo Maldonado, Dorantes, and the negro Estévanico. The vessels which had been left in the Bay of Santa Cruz, Florida, went to pieces in the storm, and their crews perished.

The subsequent adventures of the four survivors may be described very briefly. Buffeted from one Indian tribe to another, often cruelly treated, participating in the privations to which their savage masters were exposed by their miserable way of living, they arrived in northwestern Mexico, as we have already seen, in the year 1536.

Two facts are officially and indubitably established: that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were members of the expedition of Pámfilo de Narvaez, which went from Spain in 1527 to Cuba, and in the following year from Cuba to Florida and there vanished; and that they appeared again in the year 1536, in a naked and almost savage condition, in the company of Indians, in the present state of Sinaloa. It is therefore evident that they had wandered during an interval of eight years across the North American continent from east to west, from the peninsula of Florida to the Gulf of California.

It is almost impossible to determine the course they took, or probably took. They remained for a long time with the tribes which periodically inhabited the marshy regions of the Mississippi Delta, and were then conducted westward. The fact is of importance that the tuna, or fruit of the great leaf-cactus (opuntia), constituted a principal food resource during the whole time. This indicates that the first year was mostly spent in the southern parts of the present United States; and the description of the country, as well as the fact that the mesquite tree is mentioned, are evidence that they passed through the present State of Texas. Their course was generally westward, and it may be very clearly inferred from that that they at all events crossed the Rio Grande.

At a considerable distance beyond that river they found permanent dwellings, the inhabitants of which planted beans, melons, and maize. In this part of their wanderings they heard of an animal which Cabeza de Vaca called a cow. It has been concluded from this that the wanderers entered New Mexico and saw there the American bison or buffalo. I cannot agree with this opinion. The casas de asiento were much too far west to be identified with the pueblos. The Pimas of southern Sonora, their northern neighbors the Opatas, and several tribes of the Sierra Madre, lived in permanent houses of clay and stone; and if Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had seen the large, many-storied houses of New Mexico they would not have omitted to describe their remarkable stairlike structure. The dress of the inhabitants of these “permanent dwellings” also agrees rather with the costume of Sonora and Chihuahua than with the recognized dress of the Pueblo Indians. By the word “cow” Cabeza de Vaca probably meant to speak of the hides he saw rather than to describe the animal itself. The untanned hide of the large brown deer (cervus canadensis) is but little smaller than that of a cow; and a description of the striking figure of the bison would not have been wanting in the “Naufragios” if Cabeza de Vaca had actually seen the “hump-backed cow,” as the older Spanish writers called it. It is possible that he heard of the buffalo and perhaps saw some of the robes, but it is not certain; for, in the verbal explanations which he gave at Madrid in 1547 to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, he spoke only of “three kinds of deer, one of which was as large as an ox,” but said nothing of “cows.”