De Soto and the conquistadores

Front matter

a Magee

Miliaiae, eal

<r ay ity Hibs H its ate cae Filet i Kot! i <

Preface

AM aware that from the aspect of artistic effectiveness it would have been well if I could have omitted from this book the early chapters dealing with the compli-

cated affairs of Castilla del Oro and Nicaragua. In them De Soto * played a minor part, though one that steadily increased in importance. These matters, however, are essential to his story because it was under Pedrarias that he acquired as a young man his power of command and developed his soldiership. In the conquest of Peru he was subordinated to Pizarro, but without attempting to detract from the glory of that great man I have attempted to show that De Soto has never received the credit due to him for his share in that astonishing achievement._ It was precisely the prestige he enjoyed because of this among his contemporaries that brought so large a body of enthusiastic recruits to his banner when his intention to invade Florida became known. For the first - time a Spanish conqueror found himself with more volunteers than he needed, and was obliged to reject many

1 The name should be Soto, except when written out in full, but I lack the hardihood of a thorough precisian and so follow the accepted mode.

[ vii]

PREFACE of them. Throughout the disasters of the expedition he was much more than the central figure: his was the single will sustaining the whole army.

The range of his conquests was perhaps greater than that of any other commander. From Central America to Cuzco, from the Carolinas to beyond the Mississippi takes in a block of the world five thousand miles long by three thousand wide; and these far-flung territories were traversed by him within ten years. Yet he died overwhelmed with a sense of his own failure.

There have been only three biographies of De Soto covering the whole of his career, for Theodore Irving, Grace King, and Cunninghame Graham confine themselves to the last three years of their hero’s life. Lambert A. Wilmer published his book in 1858. In his preface he reproves Prescott and Irving for having made, as he says, so poor a use of the Spanish archives. Nevertheless, he does not, I think, cite a single authority with which these authors were unacquainted, or had failed to ‘quote. But he does make a number of statements, giving no reference whatever in their support, which are mainly mythical. He seems to have worked upon the principle that if Prescott and Irving said no worse things than they did of the Conquistadores it must have been because they were suppressing the truth, which he might therefore with impunity guess at. He also freely added for the glorification of De Soto thick slices of romance. A large

[ vii |

PREFACE part of his biography was apparently made up by Wilmer as he went along. Afterwards John Abbott rehashed Wilmer, and Frederick Ober rehashed Abbott.

I have to acknowledge the kindness of Professor Herbert I. Priestley, Mr. Irving B. Richman, and Dr. James A. Robertson for their reading of my manuscript. Each made valuable suggestions concerning details of this book. Most of these have been gratefully adopted; but I am not less grateful for those few which I could not use. Professor Josef Solterer, one of my colleagues, has been of great help in the correction of the proof. T. M.

Georgetown University Washington, D. C.

[ix]

CER DEANE POCA OCW HOC MOCO

Contents

CHAPTER INTRODUCTION I Darien 1s FounpDED II Cong ict AND INTRIGUE III Pizarro Persists IV Peru oF THE INcas V Tue Cup oF THE SUN VI Tue Doom oF THE INcas VII THe Nave. of THE WorLp VIII Tue Sour or a Conqueror IX FurtTHer PREPARATIONS X First ADVENTURES XI Bocs anp PITFALLs XII Tue WILperNEss XIII Tue Princess AND THE PEARLS XIV _ Disaster XV _ DEsPERATION XVI Tue FatHer oF WATERS XVII Fourtruer ExpitoraTIon XVIII THe DEATH oF THE CONQUEROR XIX TuHost Wuo SurviveD BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

[xi]

PAGE

II

Tue reign of Ferdinand and Isabella has been taken as the starting point of this book. The Inquisition offers the necessary clue.

In 1480 the Holy Office, which had existed since the thirteenth century, began to operate in Spain without qualification, with a ruthlessness it exhibited nowhere else. The Pope in fact considered its zeal excessive, and tried in vain to restrain it.

The Spaniards thought they knew what they were about. The Inquisition was not, in their case, directed primarily against Protestants—for there were none in their country then, and few later. Indeed it perhaps was unfortunate, as Hilaire Belloc suggests, that the nation during the Reformation, which was so near at hand, never had to bend its strength against and subdue the grim theology of Calvin. The Spanish Inquisition was faced with a different and a unique problem.

Upon the rugged peninsula only gradually and with infinite pain — “inch by inch, each step counting a century” — says Hubert Howe Bancroft — the Christian people had been able to push back the Moslem conquerors. It was a campaign lasting eight hundred years and including three thousand battles that was brought to its bed triumphant close under the generalship of Gonsalvo de Cérdoba, the Great Captain.

Upon the establishment of the Inquisition, though the end was already in sight, much remained to be done. The country was still full of Mohammedans and of Jews, the allies of Islam— many of them in very high places —who found it to their interest to pretend an acceptance of the Faith. Seville is said to have contained a hundred thousand of these “New Christians.” It was this class of .Moriscos and .Marrafios that constituted the greatest danger to the Christian state. The now united kingdoms had no intention of allowing what they had won by their heroic struggle to be undermined by the insidious burrowing of treachery. Accordingly, the “New Christians” were watched and, when detected in the clandestine practice of their religion, were apprehended and put to death. Those who openly professed the law of Israel or Islam were not at first molested — and never by the Inquisition — though they were under grave disabilities.

All European societies at that time accepted the principle that heresy — logically a crime worse than murder, since it destroys the soul—was a capital offence. Its extirpation was regarded as a surgical operation, to which pain, however grievous, was only incidental. Strange as it may seem, Torquemada was a notably compassionate man.

Protestants, a little later, concurred quite as fully as Catholics in the theory of the righteousness and necessity of religious persecution. But Spain, because of the special problems presented by the presence in the community of a large number of concealed Jews and Moslems, practised it with a thoroughness which has appalled the conscience of all other races.

Let us not fall into the common mistake of calling the chorus of horror hypocritical. England, under the half- Spanish Mary Tudor, was shocked at the burning of Protestants, though the people were at that time overwhelmingly Catholic in sentiment. The reason is that burning was a form of execution which violently twisted some nerve in the national character. Englishmen objected to the Spanish technique, not at all to the Spanish principle. They themselves used torture freely: it was the accepted judicial procedure of the time. And they had no objection to persons whom they considered heretics being killed. But burning affected their imagination in quite another way. During the reign of Elizabeth, huge crowds went out in holiday mood to see innocent priests dragged on hurdles to Tyburn, hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled, and quartered. And nobody seemed to mind it in the least, unless those who suffered felt a faint distaste. As for the “crop-headed Irish kerns” slaughtered by the thousand, who was ever so sentimental as to dream of raising any protest on their account

The fierce religious temper of Spain (where, it must be remembered, the Inquisition was immensely popular) carried the nation on to the decision of expelling all the Jews in the kingdom. So drastic an act was attended with inevitable cruelty. This we must deplore. We may regard it also as an error in statecraft. But we must not forget the idea that prompted it: that Spain could not be fully herself while secret Jews were within her borders. The Moslems also went; but as they were known to be a simple military race they were not regarded as so dangerous once they had been decisively crushed.

In the same year that this happened, and that the Great Captain reduced the last stronghold of Islam, Spain, swept and upborne by a wave of religious enthusiasm, sent Columbus westward to discover the Indies.

The famous explorer had the red hair and blue eyes that so often indicate the mystic or the twin-brother of the mystic, the practical mystic, the man of action. He was, it must be admitted, something of a charlatan, with his eloquence and braggadocio; but he was profoundly devout, and like all mystics he had patience. If he made extravagant demands upon his royal patrons it was in order to use the profits of his expedition for the redemption of the holy places from the infidels. He was buried, as were Michelangelo and Dante, in the habit of the third order of St. Francis.

Il

Wirx a fortitude developed in the long wars against the Arabs, and fired by the example of the Inquisition, the Spaniards went out to conquer the New World. They regarded themselves as crusaders, and were convinced of their divine mission to win to the cross the heathen in the Indies lately discovered. It was this conviction, not their suppositious greed, that enabled them to endure all that awaited them.

The Conquistadores were not always admirable or edifying men; but they were absolutely sincere, and, in their soldierly fashion, very devout. Among all the conquerors, there is only one recorded example of irreligion — that of the picturesque ruffian Francisco de Carbajal, who at the age of eighty-four was executed by the Pacificator Gasca. He jested all the way to the scaffold, as though he were a saint like Sir Thomas More and, when urged by the attendant priests to say at least the Our Father and the Hail Mary as a sign of penitence, snarled, silencing them by shocking them at his obduracy, “Our Father, Hail Mary —there!” With this solitary exception the Spanish adventurers were not only pious but apostolical in spirit.

The trouble is that, being so confident that they were conferring an inestimable benefit upon the aborigines by converting them, they had no patience with any failure to recognize that benefit. All resistance was considered to be wickedness prompted by the Devil, and was drastically dealt with. Spaniards had preserved the Faith at home by the use of arms; they could not be expected to have much compunction at extending it in their provinces by the same means. They did not look upon this as cruelty, but as the truest form of kindness.

All the same their severity has been grossly exaggerated. It must be granted that many terrible things were done by them; but these were not merely unauthorized, they were condemned by the Council of the Indies. Las Casas was by no means the only man who denounced the crimes of the administrators; and the Crown always appointed a priest as Protector of the Indians. Sefior Salvador de Madariaga has well summed up the matter:

[oJ

“Taken as a whole, the exploration and colonization of America by the Spaniards is perhaps the most inhuman, but also the most human, of its kind. Spaniards were, no doubt, the men who committed the abuses and illtreatments so often exposed since; but the Spaniards also, were those who laid down the standards of humanity by which the inhuman acts of their countrymen were condemned. And while the former, the brutal and unscrupulous colonizers, found imitators, and do to this day, the latter were far in advance of their time, and even of ours.”

It is a just claim. Exactly forty years after the momentous voyage of Columbus, Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican theologian, delivered a series of lectures in the University of Salamanca which has made that eminent authority, James Brown Scott, call him the father of international law. In this the Dominican amplified the teaching of Isidore of Seville and St. Thomas Aquinas; but, by going back to them for his principles, he ran counter to the conscienceless political theories of the Renaissance, and propounded a system superior in several respects to the colonial policy of the present day. It is Vitoria and not Grotius who is the first international lawyer. The Dutch writer confesses time and time again his indebtedness to his Spanish predecessor.

It is true that the Spanish government would have strongly dissented from Vitoria’s argument that the Pope, having no jurisdiction over the Barbarians, can give none; but it is significant that, although the Inquisition was operating in Spain, Vitoria was never called to account:

his theological position was recognized as being too sound.

Indeed, though the court of Spain was ready enough to avail itself of Alexander VI’s dubious partition of the Americas between the kingdoms of the peninsula, it also accepted, even before Vitoria propounded them, that friar’s main conclusions and exercised its powers in a humane temper. Machiavelli admiringly sneers at Ferdinand, saying that he never preached anything else but peace and good faith and to both was most hostile, therefore rising from being an insignificant prince to the position of the foremost king in Christendom. In this he is unfair. Ferdinand, like Isabella and their grandson Charles V, did all he could to see that the Indians were fairly treated.

To what extent the Conquistadores carried out the instructions of the King’s Requisition will appear in the pages of this book, where the worst that can be said of them is faithfully set down, as well as the best. It is notorious that the infamous Pedrarias often ignored his orders; but he was removed from office in consequence. Most of the colonial officials, however, tried to follow the general lines of Spanish policy, though it sometimes happened that in an altogether unforeseen emergency they had to act in contradiction to it.

We must never forget the difficulties of their position, ~ nor that if they inflicted severe punishment upon recalcitrant and treacherous savages, they were prepared to bear, and did bear, at least an equal amount of suffering themselves. It is a little smug for us, living our com-

[rr]

fortable sheltered lives, to reprove men in a desperate extremity for their harshness.

Let us also compare the Spanish eagerness to convert and educate the Indians, the readiness for assimilation on both sides, with the icy aloofness of the Puritan or Virginian colonist. The advantage is, at every point, with the Castilian. It was the Spaniards who built the first cities in the New World, who founded the first churches, hospitals and universities, who printed the first books, and who made in the seventeenth century the first rudimentary newspaper.

Let us not press the zw guoque argument to the point of making it embarrassing to our illustrious selves. A decent veil must be drawn over the nigger-snatching of Hawkins, of the slavery of the West Indies and the Southern States, of Lord Amherst’s ingenious method of clearing away inconvenient Indians by distributing among them blankets infected with small-pox, of the systematic extermination of the Irish — fellow Christians — under Elizabeth and Cromwell, of the perfidy of Drogheda, or (to come a little closer to our own time) of the British savagery at Badajoz, or of the cannon from whose mouths mutinous sepoys were blown to fragments, or of the Amritzar massacre, within the memory of our own school-children, or of a recent lynching when a pregnant woman was jeered at for her figure as she was being hanged. If there can be any ground for excusing such enormities, the Spanish conquerors, acting under greater provocation, have a still better defence. Their method of administering a few terrible blows was — judged as pol-

[ Asg aq wos, | SNVIGNI 3JHL JO NOLLDHONOO AYNLNAO-HLNAALXIS FHL icy — successful, and in its result, though possibly not in its intention, ultimately merciful.

It may be argued that, though they were few in numbers, the armor and firearms of the Spaniards gave them advantages so overpowering as to take from them most of the glory of their conquests. This is not the case. The moral effect of firearms was, doubtless, considerable; and without armor they would soon have been wiped out by arrows tipped with bone or by swords of obsidian. But the Spanish arquebuses were crude, laboriously loaded, and short-ranged; and they possessed exceedingly few of them. The sole signal advantage of the Conquistadores lay in their possession of horses. These gave them a decisive mobility.

What really made them unconquerable, however, was not their equipment but their unexampled military aptitude and valor. That valor reposed upon and was animated by their faith. The early history of America is the story of a crusade.

[ers

Chapter I

T THE beginning of the sixteenth century the aX centre of Spanish exploration was Darien, in

what is now known as the isthmus of Panama. Thither, to fabulous Asia as they supposed — for not until the return of Magellan’s expedition was America ascertained to be a distinct continent — sailed adventurers on fire for the discovery and conquest of the Golden Chersonese. “Upon the imagination of such,” says Washington Irving, “the very idea of an unknown sea and splendid empire broke with the vague wonders of an Arabian tale.”

To the colonies came, as usually happens in such cases, the best and the worst of men: dreaming youths, valiant gentlemen, and greedy old scoundrels who were sure that they could make their fortunes in these newly discovered lands where gold was in every river and where pearls abounded in the ocean. And many a cavalier who had sold or mortgaged the whole of his possessions to buy the fine horse and armor needed for following the Great Captain to Italy, and was in want of occupation since the campaign had been cancelled, thought to find in the Indies a profitable use for his rusting equipment. In

Darien the Aidalgo formed part of a very mixed crowd of knights-errant and cut-throats. There were, it is true, many of his own class there, young, ardent, brilliant— such men as Coronado, Bernal Diaz, the historian of Cortés, Oviedo, a still more famous historian afterwards, Almagro, and Pascual de Andagoya— but he and they came into close contact with others of a totally different stamp, rough, boorish, down on their luck, some of them just out of jail minus their ears, making a fresh and ruffianly start in the new world.

Many of these men became planters, for they had been given lands by a government at home that wished to get the colonies quickly settled and Spain freed from undesirables. But every planter had a sword within reach and sometimes found, as did Pizarro, who had been a ranchero, a quicker way to get rich than by digging the soil.

There was also a sprinkling of government officials — for the most part elderly men — and of priests, who were generally young enthusiasts eager for the conversion of the heathen, but with here and there among them a middle-aged cleric now in partibus infidelium because his bishop thought he would do less harm abroad.

Those who went to the new colony had had their imaginations fired by accounts of La Espajfiola, and expected to find a bright-blossomed, palm-shaded paradise, bask- _ing by a halcyon sea. Instead Darien was a patch of low-lying land in an isthmus that was an unbroken range of all but impassable mountains which concentrated the heat upon the settlement. It was situated upon a pestilential swamp, infested with cohorts of the most ferocious

[otis eI} species of mosquitos. For dragons there were alligators, and for vampires large bats, whose bite was frequently fatal.* In the waters were the jagged-toothed shark and, far more hideous, the octopus with its soft, quivering, monstrous arms. Miasma and a burning sky, desolation, hunger, drouth, death: all except the last were the universal portion: the ultimate evil came to many. The hardier ones got inured to the rigors of colonial life, but became, like the men who had preceded them, “all pale and yelowe, like unto them that have the yelowe jaundice.” Peter Martyr writes of them to Julius II: “These olde souldiers of Dariena were hardened to abide all sorrowes, and exceedingly tollerable of labour, heate, hunger and watching, in so much that merrily they make their boast that they have observed a longer and sharper Lent than ever your holiness enjoyed: for they say that for the space of foure whole yeere they eate none other than hearbes and fruits, except now and then perhappes fysshe, and very seldom fleshe; yea, and that sometime for the lack of all these, they have not abhorred from mangie dogs and filthie toads.” _ Pedrarias, who was seventy-four when he went out as Governor, felt this was altogether too much for a man of his years to endure. He had no single day free from the pain of his ailments; and shortly before leaving Spain had actually died, to all appearance. In the nick of time, while his body was lying in church awaiting burial, he

1 On the other hand, Peter Martyr tells an “amusing story” to the Pope of a servant to the friars who was sick and who appeared to be dying, the surgeon having tried vainly several times to draw blood from his veins. While abandoned to his death, he was saved by a bat settling upon him and gorging itself with blood, leaving the vein open.

THE DRAGONS OF DARIEN

[ From Montanus’ cA merica, Amsterdam 1671}

RASA 4»)

l of Y, il

SW = oe.

AMERICAN INDIANS

[ From a print in the British Museum, made at Augsberg circa 1500]

revived. Catalepsy, he surmised, would have less chance in Darien.

He was, therefore, all in favor of abandoning the colony and would have done so had his council permitted it. Reluctantly, under pressure, he stayed, but built a house upon a neighboring mountain where the air was better than in the town, and reserved for himself the best food available. His care of his health was rewarded by sixteen more years of life.

It was this man who was the patron of Hernando de Soto, having paid for his education at the University of Salamanca, provided his equipment and passage to the New World, and obtained for him the commission of a captain of dragoons; it was this man, too, who was the personal mentor of his protégé as well as the responsible director of the administrative policy of Darien.

Pedro Arias de Avila, Count of Pufio en Rostro, or Pedrarias, as he is generally called, was an interesting and detestable figure. He had been a good soldier in his time and a famous rider in the tilting-yard, but impaired health had soured his temper, and made him suspicious and irritable. With him had come to the colony his wife, a niece of Beatrice de Babadilla, the renowned Marchioness of Moya, the bosom friend of Isabella the Catholic. Their eight children had been left behind in Spain.

Bancroft has called the dark, grizzled governor “the -swarthy-souled.” The Spanish colonists had a still harder name for him: to them he was Furor Domini. Every historian damns him.

All the same we must very heavily discount many of fe17 J the charges that have been brought against him and others of the (Conquistadores. The good Las Casas, for example, brings all his accusations under suspicion because of what are obvious and fantastic exaggerations. He tells of pregnant women thrown into pits full of stakes upon which they were impaled; of a gallows just high enough to allow those who were hanged upon it — in batches of thirteen “in honour and reverence of our Redeemer and the twelve Apostles” — to have their feet burned as they died; of a victim who was being slowly roasted to death over a trestle being gagged so as not to disturb with his groanings the siesta of his executioner; - of Montejo in Yucatan feeding his dogs on Indian babies. And while all these things might be just possible, he snaps our straining credulity when he writes of Alvarado, the hero of the famous leap of the Noche Triste, acting in the following fashion in Guatemala: “It was his custom when he went to make war on some town or province, to take with him as many of the Indians as he could, to fight against the others; and as he had ten or twenty thousand and gave them nothing to eat, he allowed them to eat the Indians they captured. And so a solemn butchery of human flesh took place in his army where, in his presence, children were killed and roasted; and they would kill a man only to eat his hands and feet, which were esteemed the best bits.” ?

It is the same thing with his figures. He puts the

2See the print facing page 18. This is taken from the German translation of Las Casas published in 1599. The English edition of 1656 reproduces some of the German illustrations (badly) but improves upon them to the extent of changing, when possible, the sex of the sufferer, so as to make the point more effective by increasing the horror.

66$1 SVSVO SVI OL NOLLVYLSATI NVWYID V number of those exterminated by his countrymen at from twelve to fifteen millions, or, if we take his computations province by province, at twenty millions. The computations are self-evidently preposterous. There were nothing like that number of aboriginal inhabitants in Central and South America at the beginning of the sixteenth century and had there been it would have been physically impossible for a handful of Spaniards to have slaughtered so many people.

But it was an age when propaganda ® to be effective had to pass far beyond the bounds of reason. To be believed at all Las Casas had to allow a heavy margin for disbelief.

The accuser of the Conquerors wildly exaggerated, but had nevertheless, some grounds for his charges. The conditions of colonial life, its rigors, its precariousness, its remoteness from civilization, coupled with the insidious workings of the climate, told to some extent even upon men naturally kindly. They came too easily to justify to themselves the terrorism which had grown to be a system, on the ground that these Indians were children who had to be taught their lesson by whipping. Once docility had been achieved by these means a fatherly gentleness, that gentleness so strictly enjoined by the court should follow. In the meanwhile the only true form of kindness was severity.

- Then, too, there were spasms of panic. “When the Spanish looked out to the mountains and the plains,” as

3 The propaganda of the Brevissima Relacién could be, and very promptly

was, turned against Spain, who was hated because of her ascendency by all the other European nations. De Bry even tries to show that the Spaniards were cowards — which is going a little too far.

Herrera puts it, “the boughs and the very grass which grew high in the savannahs appeared to their excited imaginations to be armed with Indians, and when they turned their eyes towards the sea they fancied it was covered with the canoes of their exasperated foemen.” The rigidity of the Spanish mind made it incapable of understanding the savages, who could pass at a moment's notice from abject docility to insane fury. If the Indians were attacking, they could be killed in fair fight; if they were quiet, it was a sign that they were hatching mischief —so they were hanged to be on the safe side.

Gradually the conscience became calloused from habit. And there were convenient devices in Darien, as elsewhere, for stilling its inconvenient movement. Queen Isabella had been appalled, for example, that Columbus — her Columbus !—had brought slaves to Spain. The Crown accordingly forbade the enslavement of the Indians unless (here was the fatal loop-hole !) they were prisoners captured in just war. Very well, since that was how matters stood, ways should be devised — it was not _a difficult matter — of provoking war. The justice of it was a problematical question that monks could settle at their leisure.

There was another loop-hole in the humane instructions given to the officials. Cannibals might be seized and sent to distant provinces “in order that, being in the service of Christians, they might the more readily be converted and brought to our Holy Catholic Faith.” It was soon unhappily (or happily, according to the taste)

discovered that the Indies swarmed with cannibals. Again the policy was distorted by the administrator.

It was all very well for the learned members of the Council to lay down the law as to what should or should not be done. The man on the spot needed slaves and repartimientos. If they were going to throw themselves away tanned and tattered on this blighted soil, gold would have to sweeten their sacrifice. So if a cacique was coy about handing over the trinkets of his village, a little torture was applied. If he was still obdurate, the bloodhounds made an end of him.

With gold coming suddenly into the hands of men unaccustomed to it, an orgy of reckless gambling began. It was the only amusement available, and it led to murderous quarrels and a frenzied waste of time. The King, understanding this, had prohibited the sending of playing-cards to the colonies; but packs were bootlegged, and there were ways of gambling that did not necessitate the use of cards. The Council of the Indies then legislated on the matter. A twenty-four hours’ loss at play was to be limited to ten castellaios. Ten castellafios ! A man scorned to have a stake less than a gold piece; and a slave was a common wager. What hope was there of enforcing the law when Pedrarias himself, the members of his council and all his officers were forever at the table ? The first instance of prohibition in the New World has a history similar to that of a more recent noble experiment.