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Rather than journey to India by going around the southern tip Africa, as had the Portugal's Bartolomew Diaz, Queen Isabella of Spain sent Christopher Columbus with three ships westward, Columbus believing that the Far East was only a couple thousand miles in that direction. Columbus and his crew were at sea for seventy days, the crew saying their vespers and singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary every night before sleeping. They spotted a small island in the Caribbean Sea called Guanahani - perhaps the island that today is called San Salvador. For three months Columbus and his crew explored the islands between Guanahani and the island they called Hispaniola, believing they were in the Far East. They found people on these islands friendly, while Columbus was concluding that they could be easily dominated and had the makings of what he described as "fine servants." Although deeply religious, like many others of his time, Columbus combined his faith with a lust for wealth and a belief in authoritarianism, including slavery. Columbus was impressed by the beauty of the islands, especially Hispaniola, with its forested mountains and river valleys.
Columbus was impressed too by the gold being worn by people on Hispaniola, especially the island's chiefs - gold that lay in the island's rivers. For a European like Columbus gold represented a greater wealth than it did for Americans, who were using it for decoration and jewelry rather than for money.
On December 24, Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, wrecked on the coast of Hispaniola. The goods on board were taken ashore and a settlement created, called La Navidad (Christmas). Columbus left thirty-nine men at La Navidad and, on January 4, with his two remaining ships, he began his return journey to Spain. He assumed that the islands he found were his to declare for Spain's royalty: Isabella and Ferdinand. Isabella and Ferdinand petitioned Pope Alexander VI for sovereignty over the islands. Alexander granted them exclusive title in the papal bull of 1493 - the island people having no say in the matter.
Columbus made his second voyage to the Caribbean, with seventeen ships and 1,500 men, horses and dogs, arriving at his base on the island of Hispaniola in 1494, and he found the crewmen he had left behind had been slaughtered. Some on the island had decided against being pushed around and to defend themselves against the Spanish. Columbus established another settlement, on the north shore of Hispaniola, called Isabella.
Columbus had been instructed to convert the islanders to Christianity, but he had promised to export wealth to Spain - gold and spices - and to pay the costs of his enterprise, in addition to having been promised ten percent of the wealth that he could gather. In the place of other wealth, Columbus transported islanders back to Spain to be sold as slaves. Unhappy about the kidnappings, the islanders rebelled again.
In 1496 a permanent base for Spain in the "New World" was established at Santo Domingo. Columbus began his fourth and last journey to the Caribbean in 1502. He had found all of the Caribbean's major islands, and he believed that these islands lay off the coast of India.
Columbus believed that he might come across half-human, half-monsters, in keeping with the view in Europe that such people existed in remote places outside of Christendom. No clear-cut differentiation between the human species and non-humans had been established, and a popular travel book by Sir John Mandeville, written in the fourteenth century, had reported the existence of half-monsters - a book written in several languages and published in numerous editions. Columbus found no monsters, but suspicion remained among the Spaniards that half-beasts existed nearby, especially cannibals, and people who ate insects - the doings of the devil.
Columbus returned to Spain in 1504 and, in poor health, he died there in 1506. Carribean islanders working as slaves were also dying. Hispaniola's indigenous population, approximately 100,000 in 1493, would be down to around 300 by 1570. Meanwhile, in place of the islanders, slaves were shipped from Africa to labor there for Europeans.
Some among the Spanish found the islanders with what they called "a beastly lack of shame of nakedness." They saw the islanders as primitive, but human enough, and in 1511, a Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesino, returned to Spain concerned about those called Indians. He persuaded King Ferdinand to summon a group of theologians and learned men to suggest a remedy for what was called the "Indian problem." From these discussions the Laws of Burgos were produced, which declared that the Indians were by nature idle and given to vice. Spaniards were instructed to congregate the Indians into villages near where Europeans had received grants of land. The Spaniards were to build churches and to support and maintain priests, who were to give Indians instruction in the rudiments of Catholicism. The Indians were to be forbidden from engaging in commerce. They were to be allowed only one wife, and they were to work in the fields and mines, but not overworked, and they were to be fed and not beaten.
The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon had been bestowed with the task of finding and taking for the Spanish monarchy the island of Bimini and a legendary spring that gave eternal life and health. In March 1513 he set sail from Puerto Rico with three ships and about 200 men. In April they came upon a land that Ponce de Leon called "Pascua de Florida." in English: feast of flowers. He claimed Florida for Spain and fighting broke out between his men and local people.
Continuing his search for Bimini, Ponce de Leon found instead Andros Island. He returned to Spain and in September the King of Spain named him a Captain General. He returned to Puerto Rico and began again his search of the island of Bimini. In 1921 he landed again in Florida, on its western coast. He was met by hostile warriors who struck with a poisoned arrow. Ponce de Leon returned to Havana Cuba where he died of his wound.
And soldiers and colonists, including more than seventy married couples and twelve friars, had journeyed from Spain to Hispaniola, and there a successful colony was established. By 1515, the gold that could be mined in Hispaniola had dwindled. A search for gold elsewhere in the New World had begun. In 1519, Spain's authority in the Americas sent a 34-year-old adventurer, a former dropout from law school who had been in the Caribbean since 1504, Hernán Cortés (Cortes), on a mission to Mexico. Cortés landed on the gulf coast of Mexico with 600 men, 17 horses and 12 cannon, and there he spent several months. He took sides in conflicts between local societies. He won presents from local people, including twenty women, one of whom became his mistress and interpreter. He founded the town of Villa Rica de las Vera Cruz (Veracruz), and he was selected by its town council as its chief military and judicial officer, establishing his independence from Spanish authority at Santo Domingo. From Vera Cruz, Cortés moved inland, toward the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan (Tenochtitlán). He was mindful that success against the Aztecs depended on making allies with the enemies of the Aztecs. He had to fight his potential allies, and he benefited from guns, light cannon, steel swords and horses. With his new allies he fought the independent republic of Tlaxcala, who were also enemies of the Aztecs, and, after initial skirmishes, Tlaxcala became his ally.
In Tenochtitlan the king of the Aztecs, Moctezuma II (known also as Montezuma II) had heard that Cortés was on his way, but rather than organize armed resistance against him, Moctezuma planned to welcome him and placate him with gifts. Responding to a myth, Moctezuma believed that Cortés was an incarnation of the god Quetzalcoatl returning to claim his people.
Cortés arrived with his small force and around 1,000 Tlaxcatecs. He and his fellow Spaniards were astounded by the size and beauty of Tenochtitlan, a city surrounded by water. Crowds of Aztecs came in their canoes to see the white gods and their supernatural animals. Moctezuma arrived in a sedan chair and treated the Spaniards as his guests. He gave them use of one of his castles and entertained them for a week. Cortés in turn took Moctezuma hostage. He received from Moctezuma gold and other presents, men and women slaves and the passivity of the Aztec nation. Cortés had become the master of Mexico City, passing himself off to the Aztecs as representing God and claiming that godly authority resided in Spain. And, offended by Aztec human sacrifices and paganism in general, Cortés encouraged moves against Aztec worship. The Spanish began driving Aztec priests from their temples and replacing stone images with a cross and the image of the Virgin Mary.
After the Spaniards had been in Tenochtitlan a few months, with Moctezuma still prisoner, one of Cortés' underlings led an attack against a crowd in Tenochtitlan central square, in an effort to break up a religious festival. Many Aztec nobles were killed. People were outraged, and to calm the anger the Spanish displayed Moctezuma on the palace roof. Apparently by now the crowd saw Moctezuma as a traitor, and they through stones, Moctezuma soon dying of his wounds. To escape from the angry Aztecs, Cortés and his 1300 men fought their way out of the city at night. About half of his force died, some of the Spaniards losing their life because they had overloaded themselves with precious metal.
Cortés and his force returned to Tlaxcala where they were well received. Aztec power having been challenged, various peoples whom the Aztecs had been ruling still saw opportunity in riding themselves of Aztec domination and continued to side with Cortés and Tlaxcala. Spanish reinforcements and supplies arrived to strengthen Cortés' force. From Tlaxcala, Cortés won domination over neighboring territory, and in August, 1521, Cortés with an enlarged army of Spaniards and Indians returned to Tenochtitlan. They surrounded the city, cut its outside supply of fresh water and food. They attacked the city on rafts with cannon, and in the city they fought block by block.
The people of Tenochtitlan fought without guns, and they were suffering from small pox, against which they had no immunity - unlike the Spaniards who brought the disease to the Americas. Five-sixths of Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Moctezuma's nephew and heir, Cuautemoc (Cuauhtémoc), surrendered. Surviving Aztecs abandoned the corpse-ridden and disease-infested city, and what was left of the city was burned.
Cortés changed the name of Tenochtitlan to Mexico (Mexico City). In 1524, Cuauhtemoc was executed, ending the line of Aztec kings. Spanish men from the Caribbean flocked to Mexico, and they took Indian mistresses, who begat children, beginning the mix of Spaniard and Indian.
The lands that Columbus and Cortés had set foot upon they had claimed for the Spanish crown. And where lands had been claimed for them, Spain's monarchs claimed absolute authority. After Cortés, Spaniards roamed over northern Mexico and southern parts of what is now the United States, looking for another civilization as rich in what they saw as precious metal as had been the Aztecs. By the mid-1500s Spanish authority was firmly established in Mexico, which had become known as New Spain. In New Spain the native populations had become a third what they were prior to the arrival of Columbus.
Spain's monarchy took seriously its power in the Americas, and they were concerned about competition from the monarchies of England and France. In 1526 another Spaniard, Lucas Vásques de Ayllón, tried to establish a colony in what today is South Carolina, a colony that failed.
Another expansion took place in 1529 when Spanish soldiers, looking for fame and wealth, pushed from Mexico City northwest to what they called Nueva Galacia. They pillaged, burned villages and enslaved people who got in their way. Wanting slaves and needing an excuse for slave taking, they goaded friendly Indians into rebellion. And in 1531 they established the town of Guadalajara, named after their leader's birthplace in Spain.
Conquest in Mexico encouraged the Spaniards to move into South America. In some villages in the great Inca Empire in South America, small pox was wiping out from fifty to ninety percent of the population. The Inca Empire became more vulnerable following the death of the Inca, Huayna Capac (Cápac), in 1527. The empire was divided between his two sons, and a quarrel between the two erupted and led to civil war. Then a measles epidemic began in both Mexico and Inca territory.
The brother who won the civil war was Atahuallpa. Atahuallpa held his brother prisoner and was consolidating his victory by warring against members of the royal family and some nobles who had sided with his brother, when, in 1532, a Spaniard in his mid-fifties, Francisco Pizarro, arrived in Inca territory with 102 men, 62 horses and some interpreters.
Atahuallpa had been warned of Pizarro's arrival. He knew of the Spanish and their horses and was unafraid of a force of 102 men. Atahuallpa agreed to meet Pizarro at the central plaza of Cajamarca, a town in the northern half of the empire. Atahuallpa was accompanied by five to six thousand armed men, and his army of around 35,000 was nearby. He arrived carried aloft in a chair on the shoulders of his servants. Pizarro's chaplain greeted the king with the announcement that King Charles V of Spain was the only true king and that the Christian god the only true god. Atahuallpa was handed a copy of the Christian Bible. The Inca king was not about to take instruction, believing as the Inca did that their gods had put them on the world to teach others and that their great God of the Sky, Virechocha, controlled all things. Atahuallpa looked at the Bible and threw it to the ground. A prearranged signal by the Spanish was given and Spaniards who had been hiding from the view of the Incas fired their harquebusiers (predecessor of the musket) and two light cannon into the Inca crowd, with the all important advantage of range, and in this instance, noise and shock. Then Pizarro's cavalry charged. The Inca around Atahuallpa ran, and their panic frightened others farther back. The sight of men running and afraid frightened Atahuallpa's main force, and they too ran.
A few Spaniards had been superficially wounded, while at least 1,500 Inca had been killed. Pizarro had taken Atahuallpa prisoner, and for months he used him as a hostage and pawn with which to govern, while Atahuallpa's generals feared that attacking the Spaniards would leave their king dead.
Atahuallpa offered Pizarro gold and silver in exchange for his freedom, believing that with this Pizarro and his men would go away. Pizarro agreed, and Atahuallpa ordered agents to collect the treasure, mainly from areas that had supported his brother. Pizarro and his men received their treasure: 13,420 pounds of 22 carat-gold and 26,000 pounds of pure silver. Spaniard reinforcements arrived - 150 in number. Atahuallpa was accused of organizing an attack against the Spanish. He was charged with treason, plotting the murder of his brother, worshipping false gods and polygamy. Condemned to be burned at the stake, he was told that if he accepted Christianity he would only be strangled to death. Atahuallpa converted, submitted stoically, was strangled in the Plaza of Cajamarca and given a Christian burial.
Pizarro accepted another son of Huayna Capac as his puppet king of the Inca, and obedience to the god-king helped Pizarro continue his rule, while people in some outlying areas of the empire remained hostile. Meanwhile, Spanish soldiers and colonists were flocking to South America in great number.
Pizarro's puppet king died within the year, and he was replaced by another brother, Manco Inca. Pizarro fought rebellions against his rule, and he had as allies some who been dominated by the Inca, and some who had been dominated by the Inca were at least passive toward the Spanish. Helping in this passivity was the continuing belief among local peoples that the Spaniards were agents of the gods, fulfilling a prophecy about times of trouble.
Pizarro conquered the Inca capital, Cuzco. Remnants of Atahuallpa's once proud army fled north to Quito. Then in 1536 Manco Inca betrayed Pizarro and led a rebellion. He and his followers were driven into the mountains, where an Inca rule-in-exile would remain hidden for generations. Pizarro took revenge on Manco Inca. He had Manco Inca's wife stripped, beaten, shot with arrows and her body floated down the Yucay River for Manco Inca's forces to find.
Pizarro defeated a Spaniard's attempt to grab power away from him. But Pizarro had not had much time to enjoy his power and share of the new wealth. In 1551, while in his mid-sixties, followers of his defeated enemy took revenge and assassinated him. Inca meanwhile were being wiped out by the arrival of more disease, an epidemic of what might have been typhus had arrived in 1545. Then from Europe came a virulent form of influenza. Diseases had been moving faster than did the Spaniards, carried by the Indians themselves into areas ahead of the Spanish.
It was the policy of Spain's king to reward soldiers with land, and the soldiers were taking Indian slaves to work their land. Behind the disease, the soldiers and the wealth seekers came representatives of the Catholic Church, with the approval of Spain's monarchy, which was interested in spreading Christianity as well as its authority. The monarchy granted the Church to go to the Americas to designate where Christian mission were to be established and to be responsible for education, establish hospitals and orphanages to take care of the aged and the mentally disturbed and to convert.
In the wake of these disasters for the American Indians, Pope Paul III, in 1537, issued a series of encyclicals declaring it heresy to describe Indians as other than human. Pope Paul was eager to label the Indians as worthy of conversion, and he urged clergy and laymen to work at converting the Indians by preaching to them and by acting in an exemplary fashion. The pope forbade the enslavement of the Indians or seizure of their property, but the Indians remained endangered as an unregulated drive for fame and fortune proved more powerful than Pope Paul's declarations. And in 1538 the pope's declarations were nullified by Spain's monarchy, which declared the pope's declaration in violation of the agreement between the monarchy and the Vatican concerning the powers of the monarchy in the Americas.
Meanwhile Spaniards were tearing down Indian temples and destroying Indian idols, with the stones from destroyed temples often used to build Christian churches. In trying to destroy paganism the Spaniards wiped out the historical records and ancient almanacs of the Indians. The Spaniards intentionally humiliated the priests of native religions to discredit them. Those who took on the appearance of conversion put a Roman Catholic face onto their religious tradition, hanging onto their god by amalgamating him with Jesus Christ.
The gold that Pizarro found in Peru inspired Spaniards to look for it elsewhere in the Americas. A tale of the Seven Cities of Antilia had entered the imaginations of various Spaniards in the Americas - cities believed to have been created by a group of European migrants many centuries earlier. Spain's viceroy in Mexico City, Antonio de Mendoza, sent a Franciscan monk, Marcos de Niza, and his Moorish slave-interpreter north to investigate. In what today is New Mexico the friar exercised his imagination, believing he was seeing a great city gleaming in the sun miles away, and he planted a cross and claimed the area in the name of God and the King of Spain and then returned to Mexico City.
Mendoza was impressed by the monk's report, and he organized and financed with his own money an expedition to New Mexico, to be led by the thirty-year-old governor of Nueva Galacia, Francisco de Coronado. The expedition included 225 cavalrymen, 62 foot soldiers, 1000 Indians and black slaves driving many head of cattle.
In 1540 the expedition journeyed north through what is today called Arizona. Coronado sent a scouting party that found the Grand Canyon and then returned to the group. Coronado found Hopi Indians and towns of adobe and rock belonging to the Pueblo Indians, who lived in multi-story houses, wore cotton clothing and grew corn. He wanted to be friendly with them and to win their acceptance of the divine rule of the king of Spain and of Christianity. The Pueblo Indians had already heard about Christians and feared Coronado's coming. They had put their magic out to prevent the approach of the Christians, but their magic failed. Rather than the friendship he wanted, Coronado fought to defend himself to acquire the provisions he needed to survive, and he fought to subjugate. For months war raged between the Pueblo Indians and Coronado's expedition, the Pueblo Indians defending their positions with copper head bolts shot from crossbows and arrows shot from longbows. The expedition ravaged crops. With superior weaponry the Spaniards managed to subdued those Pueblo who had not fled safely to the mountains, and in an effort to assert and advertised their authority, the expedition burned 200 Pueblo at the stake.
The Pueblo Indians rid themselves of Coronado by telling him of golden cities on the Great Plains to the east. Coronado and his men crossed Texas and found Comanche Indians and Apache hunting buffalo. An advance party journeyed into what is now Kansas, and they left some horses behind - horses that were to multiply on the plains and become the source of horses for plains Indians.
In 1542, Coronado returned to Mexico, with Mendoza having nothing in return for his investment - chasing rumors always a bad gamble. The myth of a city of gold was discredited, and Coronado was accused of mismanaging the expedition. He was ruined psychologically and considered unfit for prosecution. His chief lieutenant, García Cárdenas, was tried in Spain for crimes against Indians, and he died in prison.
Meanwhile, with soldiers having been away chasing after riches, Indians in Nueva Galacia had decided it was a good time to rebel against brutal Spanish impositions. The leader of the rebellion had urged his followers to kill all Spaniards and burn their churches so that they could return to their old ways and their old gods. The rebellion had been crushed by an army of 400 Spaniards and 30,000 Aztec and Tlaxcalan warrior allies to whom the Spaniards had given firearms.
In 1539, Hernando de Soto, who had been second in command to Pizarro in South America, began his exploration of the Gulf of Mexico area. He had nine ships and 1,000 fighting men aside from his sailors - the best equipped expedition yet in the Americas. From Cuba de Soto explored Florida, then he journeyed through Alabama and north into what is now Tennessee, a wetter region than New Mexico and supporting a denser population of Indian farmers. The Indians were friendly to his expedition, but de Soto was often hostile. His expedition pillaged and stole what wealth it could - such as pearls. And he told local people that Christians were immortal.
In 1542, evidence to the contrary appeared. Near the Mississippi River, de Soto became ill and died. His men buried him in a large hole. Local people disinterred the body, found de Soto dead. They attacked what remained of the expedition, and the expedition escaped down the Mississippi and returned to Mexico.
In 1542, Viceroy Mendosa sent a couple of ships north, captained by Juan Cabrillo, to search the coast of California. The Spanish, meanwhile, were fighting a bitter guerrilla war of resistance by the remnants of Maya civilization in the Yucatan peninsula, where the terrain made warfare on horseback difficult. But on the peninsula, in 1542, the Spanish managed to found the city of Merida.
Expansion had been taking place in South America, the Spanish in 1537 having founded the town of Asuncion in a wooded area on the eastern bank of the Paraguay River. At an undeveloped port (at what is now Buenos Aires) in the southeast of South America, a few cattle, horses, sheep and goats that the Spaniards were shipping from Spain escaped and were to thrive and multiply on surrounding prairie. Buenos Aires (pronounced Buenos EYE-ray-es) did not thrive. Om 1541 it was abandoned because of the hostility of local Indians, who were to benefit from the horses and cattle, changing their economy and turning themselves into more formidable warriors.
In 1545 rich veins of silver ore were found in the Bolivian highlands. A rush for silver was on, and that same year Spaniards began looking for silver in Mexico. In 1546 they found it in rugged mountains in Zacatecas, around 300 miles northwest of Mexico City. In 1548 the town of La Paz was founded on the route between the mining town of Potosi, also high in the Andes, and Lima, Spain's leading port city in South America. In 1553, Spaniards, moving southward along the Pacific Ocean, founded Santiago, at the foot of the Andes Mountains. For years the hunt for silver ore continued. Silver was found in Guerrero, south of Mexico City, and it was found in Sonora in the northwest and in Chihuahua, where numerous boom towns arose in the 1560s.
On the rainy north coast of the South American continent, men exploring for gold founded in 1563 a settlement to be called Caracas. In 1565, Spanish colonists looking for farmland journeyed to the southeast and found Tucuman (Tucumán). By the 1570s, on territory between the Paraguay and Parana (Paraná) Rivers, Spaniards had seized Indian lands for farmland and broken the resistance of local Indians. In 1573, colonists expanded farther southward and founed Santa Fe (Holy Faith), and Cordoba. And men interested in farming established a colony there at Buenos Aires in 1580.
Mexico became the greatest silver producing region of the world, and silver mining dominated the minds of Spain's authorities in Mexico. They built forts to protect the transport of the silver. Indians were forced to labor in the silver mines. Catholic clergy protested but to no avail. The agricultural economy suffered from neglect, as did other commerce not connected with silver. Often goods piled up and rotted. In some years hundreds of thousands of Indians starved to death, sometimes where successful harvests were no more than one hundred miles away.
In Mexico in 1579, Spaniards created the province of Nuevo Leon and founded the town of Monterrey. The man in change, who became the governor of this region, Luis Carvajal, was then accused of being a Jew, and he was denounced and hanged.
Forty years after Coronado's disappointing expedition, some Franciscans, with soldiers for protection, journeyed from Chihuahua into New Mexico to save souls. All were killed by hostile Indians except for a few soldiers who returned and brought back with them reports of turquoise and silver ore, of land good for grazing and suitable for farming. A wealthy mine owner from Zacatecas, Don Juan de Oñate, decided to finance a colony in what was now called Neuva (New) Mexico. The government approved, believing it was a good idea to establish an outpost in Nuevo Mexico as protection against England's expansion. They recalled that in 1578 Sir Francis Drake, who had sailed through the Megellan Straits, raided ports from Peru to Panama and had landed on the coast of northern California.
In April 1598, Don Juan de Oñate and 400 soldiers - 130 of them with wives and children - 10 Franciscan friars, 83 carts and 7,000 head of stock, arrived in Nuevo Mexico, Oñate proclaiming Spanish dominion over the area and its inhabitants. Oñate met with curious Pueblo leaders and explained through an interpreter that their submission to Spain's rule would bring them peace, justice, protection from their enemies, new crops and trade, and that conversion to Christianity would bring them an "eternal life of great bliss." In the eyes of the Spanish present, the Indians accepted vassalage to the king of Spain, and the Spanish looked forward to living in peace with the Indians.
The colonists moved up the Rio Grande to a Pueblo Indian town that they renamed San Juan (Saint John). The soldiers were motivated by the promise that they would be rewarded with land and the crown's offer of the title of gentleman, which went with land ownership, and the settlement's name took on an extension: St. John of the Gentlemen.
The settlers lived crowded together in building with Pueblo Indians. Then they convinced Pueblo Indians from across the river to move into San Juan, and they moved across river to buildings that the Pueblo had vacated and renamed that village San Gabriel. The first irrigation ditch dug by the Spaniards in Nuevo Mexico began on August 11, 1589, and construction of the first church began on August 23.
Among the Pueblo societies was one that revolted against Spanish authority. Oñate and his men killed from 600 to 800 of the rebel Indians and managed to hold until reinforcements arrived on December 24, 1599. Oñate brought his scattered settlers together again at San Gabriel.
Recommended Books
The Aztecs, by Michael E Smith, Blackwell, 1996
Indians of North America, by Harold E Driver, University of Chicago Press, 1961
Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture, by Gustav Jahoda, Routlege, 1998
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