Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The most astonishing of the early military expeditions was that led by Panfilo de Narváez, who had been sent by Governor Velázquez from Cuba to arrest Cortés and lost an eye in the encounter. He now took on the Florida assignment left vacant by Ponce de León. He left Cuba and landed in Florida, near Tampa Bay, in 1528, with four hundred men and eighty horses. The party, which had a licence to ‘explore, conquer and settle’, and therefore included women as well, had as its second-in-command Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The Spaniards penetrated fruitlessly into the north of Florida, plundering as they went, then retreated back in confusion to the Gulf of Mexico, where Narváez and many others died, while possibly a hundred survivors, among them Cabeza de Vaca, escaped out across the Gulf then inland through Texas. Eventually only four survivors were left: they moved from tribe to tribe, working as slaves for the Indians and surviving by their wits. After some ten years living among the coastal tribes, Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions worked their way westward to the Rio Grande.

  In the same year, 1528, that the Narváez expedition took place, Hernando Cortés left New Spain to go home and the council of the Indies set up as government in his place an Audiencia of officials, presided over by Beltrán Nuño de Guzmán. Guzmán was a lawyer who had arrived in the New World after the fall of Tenochtitlan, and had succeeded in securing (from Spain) the governorship of the province of Pánuco. There he made a name for himself by his brutal suppression of Indian rebellions; thousands were rounded up and sold off as slaves to Spaniards in the Caribbean. As president of the Audiencia he continued with his slaving and profiteering activities, provoking violent opposition from many colonists and fierce denunciations from the clergy, among them Motolinia and the newly appointed bishops of Tlaxcala (Garcés) and Mexico (Zumárraga).

  Not content with the profits he was making out of his regime in New Spain, Guzmán led a force to the northern limits of the territory, which came to be known as New Galicia, in search of the fabled riches of the Isle of the Amazons and the Seven Cities of Cibola. He was supported by a strong force of soldiers and fifteen thousand Indian attendants. On his way north through Michoacan he continued his brutal practices in the territory of the Purépecha or Tarascan people, where he seized, tortured and killed the king of the Tarascans, in one of the most savage acts to occur in the entire history of the conquest.

  One day in March 1536, while Guzmán's raiders were exploring new territory by the River Sinaloa, they came across a bearded and sunburnt white man, accompanied by a burly black man, in the company of eleven Indians. The newcomers were Cabeza de Vaca and an escaped companion; two more Spaniards arrived a couple of days later. They had a long and fascinating story to tell; Cabeza de Vaca's narrative of having lived ‘alone among the Indians and naked like them’ became a classic of travel lore. Guzman gave the new arrivals clothes to wear but, commented Cabeza de Vaca, ‘for some time I could not wear any nor could we sleep anywhere but on the ground’. With the linking of the two groups of Spaniards, the Spanish empire suddenly gained a whole new perspective, of a northern continent that stretched ocean to ocean and could conceivably be penetrated and occupied. This was the classic ‘frontier’ that now challenged the daring of the Spanish explorers.

  Among the best known of the early soldiers who came north from Mexico was Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who succeeded Guzmán as governor of New Galicia. In February 1540 with the official blessing of the viceroy he led a large group of 260 settlers and 60 soldiers in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, a mythical settlement that formed part of the corpus of legends that persistently inspired the early explorers. They were encouraged by a reconnaissance made the previous year by two friars, who reported having seen ‘from afar’ a wonderful city even larger than Mexico. In their pursuit of wealth the Spaniards had the advantage of being able to learn from Cortés's famous expedition nearly twenty years before. The Coronado expedition therefore came well equipped with hundreds of horses, as well as arms, dogs, guides and a force of one thousand native allies.

  The impressive army represented the first known contact of the horse with North Americans (who, however, had to wait over a generation before they could acquire them). The journey was fruitless, for Coronado quickly found that the small native tribes living in an area of adobe villages had none of the gold or silver he had been led to expect. After attacking and occupying settlements of the Zuni and later of the Hopi peoples, Coronado sent some members of his expedition towards the west, where they reached the edge of the Grand Canyon and sighted the great River Colorado. With his main force he moved to the territory of the Pueblo Indians by the Rio Grande, but provoked hostile reactions when he made constant and aggressive demands for food and clothing. The main contact made was with the Tiwa people, who suffered the brunt of the unending Spanish search for supplies. In one village the Indians refused to co-operate, so thirty of the inhabitants were killed and the village torched. In the space of two years, Coronado's men attacked and destroyed thirteen of the fifteen Tiwa villages in the region.17 Finally, in 1542, after many frustrations, the group returned to Mexico City, where Coronado died twelve years later. His pioneering journey into the interior of the Great Plains, where they found (in the words of their chronicler) ‘nothing but buffalo and sky’,18 and no substance whatever to the fables of golden cities, left the colonists in New Spain with little wish to venture again into the inhospitable and empty north.

  The Coronado expedition was paralleled towards the east by the journey of Hernando de Soto, a conqueror who had participated with Pizarro in the ransom of the Inca and still sought adventure. In 1537 he was named governor of Cuba and granted a commission as adelantado of Florida. The next two years were spent preparing a further attempt on the lands where Ponce de León and Narváez had failed to achieve anything of substance. Soto landed on the west coast of Florida at Tampa Bay in 1539, with a company of over six hundred men and good supplies and horses. By 1540 they had penetrated Georgia and reached as far as Carolina, but found little to justify the effort. In May 1541 they came to the immense River Mississippi, which they named Espiritu Santo, crossed it and penetrated deep into the interior of the continent into Arkansas and Texas, attacking and pillaging when necessary, attracted always by stories of great wealth. Soto died of fever during the journey in May 1542, and his body was consigned to the great river he had discovered. His men, now reduced to barely three hundred and harassed by Indian attacks, began to construct boats in the winter of 1542 and in the summer of 1543 made their way down the Mississippi to the Gulf, the first Europeans known to have done so.

  The unsettled nature of the Spanish presence on the northern fringe of New Spain was complicated further by the Indian reaction, of which the most resolute was the so-called Mixton war in the area of New Galicia in the years 1541 and 1542. The Caxcan tribes on this frontier were inspired by a millenarian movement that looked to the return of the god ‘Tlatol’ who would drive the Spaniards out, destroy the Christian religion and restore an age of riches for the indigenous peoples. Where they could, they burnt churches and killed the clergy. The limited troops available to Viceroy Mendoza were unable to deal with the scale of the uprising. One of the forces sent to deal with the Indians was led by the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who was routed, forced to withdraw and died of the wounds he received. Finally, the viceroy himself had to take the field, and he did so wisely with the aid of his Nahua allies. His army consisted of a small core of a hundred and eighty mounted Spaniards, together with artillery; its main body was made up of well over ten thousand Indian auxiliaries with their caciques.19 The rising was put down, but the Spaniards recognized that there were practical limits to the area in which they could effectively operate.

  The year 1543, it has been said, ‘closed the age of the conquistadors in North America’.20 The administrators in Cuba and Mexico were keen to extend the territory under their control, but the men they sent out had their vision fixed exclusively on precious metals and had little int
erest in farming the rich land or taking their religion and culture to the natives. The policy of violent intrusion worked to an extent because of the collaboration of some Indian tribes against others, but could not in the long run succeed. An empire required different methods if it was to succeed at all.

  The meagre results of Spanish ventures into North America up to the 1540s were compensated in the same decade by the discovery of dazzling wealth much closer home. Silver was found at Zacatecas in northern New Spain in 1546, and at other nearby sites soon afterwards: Guanajuato, Aguas Calientes, San Luis Potosí. New Galicia's sudden wealth resulted in a rash of mining settlements and an influx of immigrants in search of a quick kill. This time the explorers came to settle, not merely to maraud. As the population of the area rose, the frontier pushed further north and a new province, New Biscay, was formed in the 1560s, drawing its name from the Basque entrepreneurs who pioneered the mines. Its capital town, Durango, was founded in 1563. The new wealth could only be protected by an active policy of settlement, which in turn implied building houses and defences, finding food, and maintaining Christian clergy. The Spanish presence began to take on a more concrete form. When much later silver was also found in 1631 at Parral, further north, the frontier pushed well beyond New Biscay.

  However, there were inevitable obstacles, the most important being the native tribes, which had never been dominated by the Nahua and now refused to be drawn into the Spanish scheme of labour service. After years of fighting off attacks by the hostile Indians, whom the Spaniards labelled Chichimecs no matter what tribe they came from, the authorities arrived at a solution that had functioned half a century before in the Caribbean: they imported labour. Indians from the peaceful areas of Mexico, such as from Tlaxcala, were brought in and settled in the new territory. At the end of the sixteenth century, free Indians made up nearly two-thirds of the total mining force of seven thousand five hundred Indians at Zacatecas. It was another important stage in the native conquest of the New World.

  The success of the policy of settlement in the 1560s coincided with an active intervention in imperial policy by the crown. Philip II's new policy of crown control over developments in the overseas empire had been initiated by sponsoring Legazpi's expedition to the Pacific. The king did not neglect the Atlantic. In 1565 he made a historic contract with Menéndez de Avilés. The venture was one of the most important ever sponsored by the Crown in the New World and laid the foundation for Spanish aspirations to power in the Atlantic and North America.

  The Asturian soldier and sea-captain Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, born in 1519, had had direct experience of the Caribbean, served at the king's side in the campaign of St Quentin in 1557, and spent a while in prison in Seville in 1563 because of a dispute with the House of Trade. He was commander of three of the fleets that sailed to America, in 1555, 1560 and 1562. On 20 March 1565 he made a contract21 with the government by which he was appointed adelantado of Florida, with the right to be civil and military governor of the territory for two lifetimes. He was granted the title of marquis, conceded twenty-five square leagues of land for himself, and given certain trade monopolies. In return he was to mount an expedition at his own risk and expense, and supply five hundred armed men; with these he was to settle Florida, build two towns and advance the Catholic faith. Shortly after the contract was settled, the king received news of a French Huguenot expedition that had settled in Florida. Philip II arranged for three hundred royal soldiers to augment Menéndez's force, and made haste to get the adelantado on his way. It was the first time that the Spanish crown had ever sent troops to the New World, sign of the seriousness of the situation.

  The Calvinist leadership in France had for some time encouraged exploration in the Atlantic in search of possible New World settlements. France had never recognized Spain's claim to America based on the papal donation, and its government had regularly encouraged all efforts to trade and settle there. In 1564 an expedition of Calvinists, led by Jean Ribault, founded a settlement on the Atlantic coast of Florida, at the mouth of the St John's river, naming it Fort Caroline. Philip II's government considered the occupation, which was backed by its principal enemy - France – and carried out by heretics, an act of war. In early September 1565 the adelantado and his men came ashore further south, at a spot where they founded a town they named St Augustine. They then immediately set out for Fort Caroline.22

  Ribault and most of the adult men had gone out in order to head off the newcomers. The Spaniards surprised the colonists in the fort, killed all the males they found (‘we cut the throats of a hundred and thirty-two’, the adelantado later reported), and took captive the women and children, fifty in number. Menéndez then caught up with Ribault's group, who realized that resistance was hopeless. He refused to promise mercy when the French offered to surrender. The lives of a select few were spared. Most of the rest, possibly 340 in all, had their hands bound behind their backs, were taken apart in groups and systematically had their throats cut in cold blood. Of the total number of prisoners spared in this action, between a hundred and fifty and two hundred, some were ransomed, some freed, and others sent to the galleys. It was the first important clash in the New World between Spaniards and colonists from another European country, and also the most bloody. It was bitterly denounced in France, and in Madrid the French ambassador, a Catholic, presented an angry protest to Philip II. However, the ferocity served its purpose; for at least a generation no other Europeans attempted settling the areas claimed by Spain. But it could not stop the efficient and firm settlement of French and English in North America and along the Atlantic coast.

  The establishment by Menéndez of the town and fortress of St Augustine was one of the most significant decisions of the century. The first Spaniards in the area – from Ponce de León, who had given it the name ‘Florida’, to explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca and Hernando de Soto – had been in search of quick wealth and saw little reason to remain where there was none. By mid-century, considerations of security, not only against foreign incursions but more cogently to protect the valuable treasure fleets as they made their way across the Atlantic from Cuba, gained the upper hand. Earlier attempts to found a suitable base had failed. By contrast, Menéndez, who had ambitious plans to create a solid Spanish presence in the area, succeeded in setting up several other bases on the coast, notably at Santa Elena. He also hoped to facilitate direct overland links with the Spanish silver mines in New Spain. His dream was to open up a transcontinental route from the Atlantic all the way to Mexico, and give reality to the programme of imperial expansion.23 After the Fort Caroline operation he went to Cuba, then returned the following year and resumed exploration further up the Atlantic coast. Philip II backed him fully, and in 1566 sent an additional detachment of royal soldiers to Florida to garrison the posts settled by Menéndez. The king also repaid him for the high costs incurred in Florida and gave him the title of governor of Cuba. Colonists were encouraged to come directly from the peninsula, and in 1570 the crown began to pay the salaries of the garrisons directly. The Spanish presence was now an accepted fact.

  The obstacles to a successful programme remained formidable. Menéndez, like all the pioneers, had no inkling of the immense distances in America. The Spaniards, moreover, were pitifully few in number and in order to survive they logically had to seek allies among the native Indians. The attempt to find a modus vivendi between the two cultures did not succeed here any more than it did elsewhere. The adelantado had good intentions, and repeatedly affirmed his interest in saving Indian souls. In practice, repeated incidents such as the destruction of a fort in 11568 by Indians who had allied with French marauders, and the murder in 1571 of a group of Jesuits further north up the Atlantic coast, made Menéndez adopt the view that only extermination of the natives (‘a war of fire and blood’) would bring security to the Spanish settlements. In 1573, back once again in Madrid, he petitioned the king to permit enslavement of the Indians, but Philip refused. The adelantado's last great service to
his king was to accept command of the armada being prepared for service in Flanders in 1574. Before the fleet could sail he died during an epidemic in Santander, in September that year. In Florida the situation deteriorated rapidly. His family there took over control, but mismanaged affairs. The Indians attacked relentlessly. Very soon only two Spanish settlements remained in Florida: St Augustine and Santa Elena. The latter was abandoned temporarily in 1576, and then permanently ten years later.

  The mid-sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions into North America produced some useful, if confused, information about the continent, and advanced the science of cartography, particularly in respect of the location of the great rivers. From the European point of view, something had been achieved. In terms of imperial expansion, however, little was gained apart from acquainting the scattered Indian tribes with the strange ferocity of the white man. The peoples on the northern frontier of New Spain defended their lands tenaciously. A weary Spaniard in 1587 reported that ‘from the moment I left Mexico until I reached Zacatecas my horse and I have not let go of our arms one second, and we were armed from head to foot because the countryside is swarming with these devils of Chichimecs;… in all the route there was not a single village, and water only every eight leagues, little of it and bad at that; we slept on the ground even though there was a lot of snow, and every night we spent on guard’.24 In this troubled country, Spaniards were obliged to seek help from some of the local tribes. It was a period when peoples such as the Mexicas, the Tarascans and the Otomíes were interested in expanding their territories. In northern New Spain they were willing to make alliances with Spaniards against their enemies. They provided the bulk of the fighting men available to the newcomers, and fulfilled crucial roles as scouts and interpreters.25 The Indians conquered other Indians, and in consequence facilitated the task of the white man. If the frontier continued to survive, it was almost exclusively because of the support given by indigenous peoples to the Spaniards.