Spanish Conquistadors III
Episode VD 5: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
To access my recorded lecture, click here.
Conquistadors: The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
We came here to serve God and his Majesty, to give light to those who were in the darkness, and to get rich, as all men desire to do.—Conquistador
Introduction
Spanish expeditions to the New World were driven, above all else, by a lust for gold. The Spanish Crown needed money to finance their ceaseless military campaigns in Europe and to support a lavish lifestyle at court. But the voyages of Columbus, Balboa, and Magellan produced only modest returns. Then in 1520, conquistador Hernan Cortés conquered the Aztecs in central Mexico, seized and melted down tons of gold and silver, and shipped it to Spain. More wealth than anyone had imagined, it altered the economic hierarchy in Europe.
Cortés’s conquest and rewards also deepened the Spanish sense of themselves as invincible, entitled Christian warriors and inspired more New World campaigns. Though lip service was paid to converting the Indians to Christianity, the overriding interest was the extraction of precious metals. King Charles referred to America as “the gold-bearing world.”
The Narváez Expedition
Pánfilo de Narváez was born in Spain in the 1470s. He sailed to Jamaica in 1510 as a soldier and later participated in the conquest of Cuba.
In 1520 he was part of a force sent to Mexico by the governor of Cuba with the objective of stopping the invasion by Hernán Cortés [see Lesson 101], which had not been authorized by the governor. Although the governor’s 900 men outnumbered Cortés’s force three to one, Cortés outmaneuvered them, winning a total victory. Narváez lost an eye and was taken prisoner.
After two years in captivity in Mexico, Narváez returned to Spain where the king named him adelantado (a title held by Spanish nobles in service of the king) with the mission of exploring, conquering, and colonizing La Florida (as Ponce de Leon had named it).
In 1527, Narváez left Spain with five ships and 600 men, among them Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who later published an account of his time in America. Most of the quotes in this chapter are from that publication.
In April, the fleet reached Tampa Bay, on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Narváez hoped to repeat Cortés’s success pillaging the natives of their wealth, but he faced two problems: The native people were poor farmers and hunter-gatherers, and Narváez lacked Cortés’s leadership and decision-making skills. He split up his force, sending all five ships and a quarter of his men north to search for a harbor while leading the rest of his army inland.
Overdressed, ill-provisioned, Narváez and his men spent a brutal summer slogging through swamps and dense woods. They endured heat, humidity, mosquitoes, storms, disease, malnutrition, and other calamities.
Near Tallahassee, the Spaniards’ high-handed manner provoked an attack by the Apalachee Indians whose skilled archers killed many soldiers. The desperate survivors were relegated to eating their horses and stealing parched corn from Indian villages.
In the survival mode now, Narváez abandoned any hope of exploration. He led his depleted army to the Gulf Coast in hopes of hooking up with his ships. But the ships, after weeks of waiting, had sailed away.
Narváez ordered his men to make boats from hollowed-out trees and sails from their shirts. It was arduous labor for a weakened crew. After completion, 242 men were crammed into five boats, “without anyone knowing the art of navigation,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote.
They floated along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. A month later many men had died, and the survivors were living on “half a fistful of dried corn a day.” When they ran out of water, some men drank from the sea, only to be poisoned by the salt.
Then they reached “a very large river that emptied into the sea in a torrent.” It was the Mississippi, and its current pushed the little flotilla farther out to sea, scattering the five boats.
In de Vaca’s boat, only he and the boatswain were strong enough to man the oars, and they struggled to keep up with Narváez’s lead boat. The captain had taken the healthiest, strongest men and de Vaca’s boat fell farther behind. He called to Narváez for a rope to tie the boats together. “He answered me that it was no longer time for one man to rule another. Each one should do whatever seemed best to him in order to save his own life.”
With that, Narváez “veered away with his raft” and was never seen again.
The three remaining boats, drifting near New Orleans (during hurricane season), were assaulted by a fierce storm. One boat overturned and 40 men drowned. The other two flimsy crafts were blown toward shore. “Near land, a great wave took us and cast the boats out of the water as far as a horseshoe can be tossed.”
In November 1528, two boats and about 80 survivors washed up on an island. Only 15 would live past that winter, prompting them to name the place “Isle of Doom.” Today it’s known as Galveston Island.
We looked the very image of death. The north wind began to blow, and we were closer to death than life.
The island was inhabited by the Coco Indians. Desperate Spaniards, those strong enough to walk, sneaked into a nearby village while the people were away gathering roots and working their fish traps. They stole an earthen cooking pot, some fish drying on a wooden rack, and a squirming puppy to slaughter. They were spotted . . . and followed.
Watching from the bushes, the Indians saw the men join others on the beach. Their desperation was obvious. Pale, hairy, half-naked strangers lay sprawled about the sand, many too weak to move. Others huddled about a driftwood fire, nursing it to life. Still others, unable to wait, tore at uncooked fish with their teeth. One man was apparently preparing the dog for cooking. When the strangers spoke, their language was incomprehensible.
The Indians went for reinforcements. Around dusk, about a hundred men descended on the beach. Tall, erect, with pierced ears, lips, and nipples, they had weapons but appeared to come in peace. One of the strangers gave the Indians some beads and bells, which delighted them; they especially loved the tinkling of the bells, a sound they’d never heard before.
They saw the disaster that had come upon us and the depths we were in. They sat down among us and, with the great grief and pity they felt for us, all of them began to cry.
As an act of friendship, the Indians gave the Spaniards some arrows. Through hand signs, they told them they’d be back tomorrow with food and water.
True to their word, the Indians returned next morning with water and enough food that after a few days de Vaca persuaded the men they could continue by sea. They pushed their boats back out, but soon the high waves and fierce winds tore the oars from their weakened hands. One boat overturned, three men drowned, and the survivors crawled back to the beach and collapsed.
Those of us who survived were as naked as the day we were born and had lost everything we had. [The Indians] sat down and lamented so loudly for half an hour that it could have been heard a long way off.
The Indians led them to their village. Though the Spaniards feared they were to become human sacrifices, they were fed and given huts to sleep in.
So emaciated were the men that “we could easily count every bone.” More men died that winter, some from “a stomach ailment.” When natives began to die, too, they blamed the Spanish and decided to kill them. Spared at the last minute, they were denied food unless they could heal the sick.
Knowing their lives were at stake, Cabeza de Vaca took on the role of lead physician, blending his Catholic beliefs with things he’d seen the natives do.
We did our healing by making a sign of the cross on the sick persons, breathing on them, saying the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary.
When most of the sick recovered, the grateful Indians fed and clothed them in hides. During the next few weeks that they stayed with the Indians, de Vaca’s respect for their hosts grew. He admired their generosity, their gentleness, their family relations.
These people love their children more and treat them kindly. If a son dies, the whole village joins the parents and kindred in weeping. The parents set off the wails each day before dawn, again at noon, and at sunset for one year.
Then cholera swept in, killing all but 15 of the Spaniards and half the village. Again, the natives blamed the Spaniards. Some of the men fled, but de Vaca and three others were taken prisoner and enslaved.
My life became unbearable. In addition to much other work, I had to grub roots in the water or from underground in the canebrakes. My fingers got so raw that if a straw touched them they would bleed. The broken canes slashed my flesh. I had to work without benefit of clothes.
In November 1528, De Vaca and the three other survivors—two Spaniards and an African slave named Estevanico—escaped captivity and made their way to the mainland (Texas), the first Europeans and African to enter the American West. They fell in with the Karankawa Indians, who at first treated them kindly. For the next four years, de Vaca worked as a trader, carrying flint, red ochre, and seashells between tribes.
But when the tribe fell on hard times, the Indians turned against the strangers, making them, once again, slaves. On the verge of starvation, they survived by eating spiders, worms, powered fish bones, dirt, and deer dung. The mosquitoes were so bad, “I looked like a leper. I can affirm that no other affliction suffered in the world can equal this.”
The men again escaped and headed west, living on the juice of the cactus fruit (prickly pear). They encountered a tribe that had heard about them, had heard these bearded men had the power to heal. Some of the villagers were complaining of headaches, and the strangers were asked to help. Offering his standard remedy, de Vaca prayed, made a sign of the cross, muttered some “Hail Marys,” and, as he reported, “they immediately said that all their pain was gone.”
De Vaca then treated a man with an arrowhead embedded in his chest, performing surgery with a hunting knife and sewing him back up using a bone needle and deer sinew. Next he restored life to a man with seemingly no pulse. The Indians were in awe. When it was time for the strangers to leave, they were rewarded with “more venison than we could carry.”
For months they traveled north, then west, moving from tribe to tribe as celebrated medicine men. Accompanied by a growing number of Indian escorts, they were hailed as “Children of the Sun” and showered with food and gifts.
The people hysterically crowded among us, everyone competing to touch us first; we were nearly killed in the crush. Without letting our feet touch ground, they carried us to the huts they had made for us.
Despite the adulation, life was miserable. Far from home, wandering in harsh conditions among alien cultures, they were covered in sores, their feet lacerated by rocks and thorns. De Vaca consoled himself with thoughts of Christ’s greater suffering.
The men did what they could to amplify an aura of mystery, for they needed the Indians awestruck. They ate little in the presence of the natives; accustomed to hardship, they made a point of not showing fatigue; they carried what they called “magic gourds”; and de Vaca never spoke directly to the natives.
After months of mostly desert travel, they reached the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Turning south, they soon came upon some fertile but abandoned farmland. The few remaining natives, destitute stragglers, said that “bearded men like us, with horses, lances, and swords, had terrorized the natives and carried them off in chains.”
De Vaca and the others were conflicted. Though gladdened by news of Christians in the area, they were deeply distressed by the desolation they observed: burned villages, deserted fields, natives living on tree bark.
It was spring 1536. De Vaca’s party had been wandering for eight years without seeing a European. Now, escorted by 600 Pima Indians, they came upon a party of Spanish slavers.
At dawn we came upon four Christians on horseback. Seeing my strange attire and that I was in the company of Indians, they were greatly startled. So great was their surprise that they could find no words. I spoke first and told me to take me to their leader.
Emaciated, dressed in rags, accompanied by Indians and an African, de Vaca presented a bizarre sight, which was augmented by the improbable tale he told—of being shipwrecked eight years earlier and 2,000 miles away, of enslavement, of wandering from tribe to tribe as a healer.
Though the slavers spoke his language, de Vaca felt a greater affinity for his Indian escorts—even more so when he learned that the Spanish had recently kidnapped all the women and boys and half the men in the region to work their gold and copper mines. And now they were scrutinizing his Indians “like coyotes eyeing chickens.”
De Vaca bargained for, and ostensibly won, the Indian’s freedom, arguing that “if the Indians are going to be converted to Christianity, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way.”
When he urged the Pimas to return to their villages, they hesitated, reluctant to leave de Vaca with these brutal men. How could he and these barbarians be the same people?
We had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset. We healed the sick, they killed the healthy. We came naked, barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced. We coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whoever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.
The slavers informed them that a Spanish town lay 100 miles to the south on the Pacific coast. When they arrived there, the mayor greeted them like returning war heroes and offered food and clothes. The refugees stayed three months, preparing for reentry to “civilization.” De Vaca slept on the ground the whole time.
Months later they reached Mexico City, where the viceroy—none other than Hernan Cortés, conqueror of the Aztecs —welcomed them. For de Vaca, civilization felt foreign, and for a long time he dressed in rags and shunned a bed.
Word reached de Vaca that the slavers, contrary to their agreement, had captured the Pima Indians and put them to work. “We wanted freedom for the Indians, and when we thought we had secured it, quite the opposite happened.”
De Vaca appealed to the authorities in Mexico City and got them released (though many had certainly died in the interim). Of greater interest was the mineral report. What about the gold?
Cities of Gold
Although Cabeza de Vaca reported that during his eight years of peregrinations he’d passed through lands “remote and devoid of resources,” he also retold stories he’d heard from the Indians. They had spoken of “populous towns farther north . . . very large houses with turquoise stepping stones . . .” And, of course, gold.
He carried with him some stones the Indians had given him. He called them emeralds but they were probably turquoise; he said they’d come from “villages of many people and very large houses,” probably from the high-walled pueblos of the American Southwest.
Mythical tales had long circulated in Europe of the Seven Cities of Gold, or Seven Cities of Cibola. Supposedly established in the 8th century by seven fugitive Portuguese monks, they were said to lie north of Mexico. Reaching it from Mexico City demanded a forced march across hundreds of miles of harsh desert and mountainous terrain.
Though Cabeza’s tales were nothing more than vague, second-hand rumors, they were enough to inflame the already-fevered imaginations of officials in Mexico City. Demonstrating the power of wishful thinking, they took his unconfirmed reports as proof that golden cities in fact existed. One such believer was the governor of a state in Mexico named Francisco Coronado.
Francisco Coronado
Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was born the second son into a noble family in Salamanca, Spain, in 1510. When his parents died, due to a system called primogeniture, his older brother inherited the family estate while Francisco received only a small settlement.
To the New World he went, to Mexico to seek his fortune. He soon gained a reputation as someone who could put down a rebellion, brutal but effective. The viceroy appointed him governor of a Mexican province known as New Galicia, located northwest of Mexico City. He married a wealthy heiress and moved into a large country estate. But he coveted a fortune of his own.
In 1539, Coronado assembled a scouting party that included some soldiers, some Indians, and a friar named Marcos. They were to head north and find those gold cities—or at least find hard evidence they existed.
Cabeza de Vaca and the other two surviving Spaniards declined to serve as guides. But the fourth survivor of that party, the “Negro-Moor Estevanico,” was still a slave and couldn’t refuse. Viceroy Mendoza purchased Estevanico and assigned him to Friar Marcos.
But Estevanico no longer had a slave mentality. For eight years he had traveled with Cabeza de Vaca, celebrated by the natives as a powerful medicine man, revered rather than reviled for the color of his skin. Though conditions were arduous, for most of that time he had lived as a free man.
Friar Marcos soon learned he could not control him. Estevanico was a sensation among the Indians, the first people who ever admired him for the color of his skin. They honored him and gave him women and, much to Marcos’s disapproval, he kept some and brought them along. The Indians also gave Estevanico turquoise, which he kept and wore rather than handing it over to his “betters.”
Conceding the slave’s prestige and power among the Indians, and himself road weary, Marcos sent Estevanico and a small party ahead to look for riches and report back. Since Estevanico probably couldn’t write, he was to send back crosses, the size of the cross indicating the magnitude of the find. If he found something “moderate,” he would send back “a white cross a span [9 inches] in size.” If the discovery was “important,” two spans. And if the discovery rivaled that of Mexico: “a large cross.”
Four days later Marcos received a cross from Estevanico that was “as high as a man.” After a few days, another cross arrived, equally as big. What Marcos didn’t realize was that Estevanico was sending large crosses not because he’d found gold, but because he was having the time of his life. The Indians were treating him like a king, and the transformation from slave to royalty was heady stuff.
Misinterpreting the meaning of Estevanico’s messages, Marcos thanked God and hurried forward. Estevanico had done nothing to alienate the natives, and Marcos, too, found them hospitable. He would describe receiving along the way “good lodging, excellent reception, and many turquoises, hides of the cattle [bison], and the same [promising] information regarding the country.”
In other words, gold was around—just not here.
Marcos passed through a valley “settled by attractive people and so bountiful in food that it could provision more than 300 men and horses. All is irrigated. It is like a garden.” And some of the inhabitants of that valley “were wearing turquoise necklaces, some with five and six loops.”
No gold yet, but surely this was rich country.
Zunis
Some months later and hundreds of miles to the north (New Mexico), the Zuni Indians were engaged in their annual planting ritual, honoring and placating the sacred spirits, just as they had done for centuries.
Lookouts suddenly reported a strange sight: a jostling crowd of 300 Indians leading a large, dark-skinned man, the likes of whom they had never seen before. He was black, muscular, dressed in pelts, wearing bits of turquoise, with “magic rattles” on his wrists and ankles, and walking two greyhounds on a leash.
The Indians tried to bar the strangers’ path by laying down a line of sacred cornmeal, but Estevanico just walked right over it. Upon meeting the chief, the erstwhile slave offered him a decorated gourd rattle as evidence of his otherworldly power. But the chief was not impressed. He recognized it as the work of another tribe to the south, an unfriendly tribe.
Estevanico announced that he was a Child of the Sun and demanded turquoise and women. He warned that more Children of the Sun were on the way. The Indians, deciding this stranger was either a madman or a spy, had him arrested, then killed.
When word of Estevanico’s death reached Friar Marcos, he decided he’s had enough. He gave away most of his possessions to the local Indians and headed for home.
In Mexico City, he was questioned about what he’d seen, especially about any gold. The friar was too honest to claim he’d actually seen gold, but, like Cabeza de Vaca, he willingly passed on stories he’d heard from the Indians, including fantastic tales of temple walls covered inside and out with precious stones. He himself had seen a promising valley.
I was told that there was much gold there and that the natives make it into vessels and jewels for their ears, and into little blades with which they wipe away their sweat.
Coronado Heads North
The lack of any eyewitness evidence of gold anywhere was not a deterrent to Francisco Coronado. In 1540, Coronado—wearing gilded armor and a helmet adorned with plumes—started north with an army of 300 Spanish soldiers, three priests, and food on the hoof: large herds of voracious horses, cows, and sheep. Enroute they pressed over a thousand Indians into service.
Following Indian trails through desert and over high mountains, the party took four grueling months to reach Hawikuh (western New Mexico), one of the largest of the Zuni pueblos.
Coronado wasted no time establishing control. He warned that the Indians must submit to the Spanish Crown and adopt Christianity. If they did not, he said, “with the help of God, we shall forcefully make war against you, take you and your wives and children, and make slaves of them, and shall do to you all the harm and damage that we can.”
Though the Indians didn’t understand Coronado’s words, there was no mistaking the threatening actions of his men. When the Spanish horsemen charged the Indians on animals they’d never seen before, they took refuge behind the elevated walls of their pueblos and threw stones and shot arrows at the invaders.
Coronado was twice knocked to the ground, but the Spanish soon overran the natives. They seized their stores of food, put up a cross, and demanded the Indians make offerings to the one true God.
Only after victory did it seem to dawn on Coronado how scant the fruits of victory. The Zuni and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest were a poor, agricultural people who had some turquoise but no gold.
While he considered his next move, Coronado sent small exploratory parties out into the surrounding countryside. One saw the Painted Desert, the first Europeans to do so. Another group, after a 20-day march, almost literally stumbled on the Grand Canyon. Nothing in their European experience had prepared them for its sheer size and grandeur. They set out to cross it, and the river below, aiming to climb to the other rim. But they soon realized the folly of this and gave it up. The rock formations that had appeared human size were actually taller than the highest towers in Spain.
As winter approached, Coronado and party headed south for the Rio Grande River, stopping at each pueblo to search for gold and take what they wanted. They demanded food and clothing, allowed their animals to destroy Indian crops, and molested Indian women. When a village dared to oppose him, he had it burned. In this way, he destroyed 12 villages, sending the survivors fleeing into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
In spring, Coronado led his party back north, desperate to find gold and salvage his reputation. A Pawnee captive of the Pueblos, a young man called Turk, approached Coronado with tales of a wondrous place to the north. He painted a compelling picture of a city he called Quivira. The lords of the land took siestas under trees decorated with gold bells and dined on dishes made of gold. Even the commoners had silver settings.
Coronado was hooked. Led by Turk, the party traveled through the Texas Panhandle and up into Kansas, the first Europeans to see the Great Plains. They were struck by the immensity of the grasslands and their own insignificant impact on them.
But Quivira turned out to be a clump of native huts on the Kansas River surrounded by corn and bean fields. Under threat of death, Turk confessed. There never was any gold. Turk had been pressured by his captors to lead the Spanish as far away as possible, ideally far enough so they’d starve to death.
Out of options, Coronado had Turk strangled to death and began the monthslong march back to Mexico City. There he was brought up on charges that he had mismanaged the expedition. In his defense, he wrote an obsequious letter to the king of Spain:
I have done all that I possibly can to have served your majesty and to discover a country where God our Lord might be served and the Royal Patrimony increased . . . Your majesty’s humble servant and vassal who would kiss the royal hands and feet.
A court of inquiry exonerated Coronado on all charges. He died in obscurity 12 years later, age 44. His failure to find gold spared the Indians of the Southwest for another 50 years. Conquest without riches was too expensive.
Cabeza de Vaca: After the Journey
After returning to Spain in 1537, de Vaca wrote to the king, defending the Indians the Crown was determined to conquer and convert to Christianity.
All these people, in order to be attracted to becoming Christians and subjects of your imperial majesty, need to be treated well. This is a very sure way of accomplishing this. Indeed there is no other way.
De Vaca was appointed governor of a Spanish colony in South America that comprised parts of what is now Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. He immediately enacted reforms to protect the Indians and the poor. This infuriated Spanish colonists, who were used to having their way with the natives. In 1545, they rose up in revolt. Governor de Vaca was arrested, charged with “poor administration,” and shipped to Spain in chains for trial.
Although eventually exonerated, Cabeza de Vaca never returned to South America. He died poor in Seville around the year 1560.
Aftermath & Analysis
1) Cabeza de Vaca wrote an account of his time in the Americas, first published in 1542 as La relación y comentarios (“The Account and Commentaries”). Some have labeled de Vaca a “proto-anthropologist” for his detailed accounts of the many tribes of Native Americans that he encountered. The book became a bestseller and helped some Europeans see the diversity and humanity of the native people, many for the first time.
2) Coronado’s ill-fated 1540 expedition in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola departed Mexico City with 5,000 sheep, 1,000 horses, and 500 cows. One can imagine the destruction those hungry animals wrought in agricultural native villages.
Ruminations
1) After eight years of wandering among the Indians, Cabeza de Vaca was able to humanize those people, the only conquistador I’m aware of who did. Could that transformation of attitude have happened any other way?
2) De Vaca’s success healing the Indians was almost certainly an example of the placebo effect. Your thoughts?