by Hugh Thomas
These Indians had their nipples pierced and reeds were driven two and a half inches through them. Their lower lips were also cut open. Their staple food was the swamp potato, but in the summer, they also ate fish.
Matters began to improve when Cabeza’s men discovered that another of Narváez’s five ships had docked nearby—that of Dorantes, whose crews, remarkably, were still clothed. The two groups pooled such resources as they had. Cabeza and Dorantes decided to try to spend the winter on this island. They despatched a boat under Álvaro Fernández with three other strong men to try to reach help in Havana. They set off, but must have been wrecked on the way. Very cold weather came upon the survivors. Five Christians who had had to camp on the beach ate one another’s bodies. By then, only fifteen from the two boat crews were alive. A stomach complaint then hit the Indians, who were tempted to kill the remaining Spaniards, but they abandoned the idea when they considered that if the Spaniards were so strong, they would surely have saved more of their own people.
The Indians tried to make the Spaniards into medicine men. Cabeza was unenthusiastic, but his fellow castaways felt that they had to accept. They established their authenticity by arranging to blow on the part of the body where there seemed to be pain and then make the sign of the cross. They recited a Paternoster and an Ave Maria. This sometimes worked.
Cabeza de Vaca soon went to the mainland, where he lived for a month eating blackberries. He became ill, and the other survivors of the expedition visited him. Then he returned to Malhado, where the Indian chiefs prescribed hard labor for him and the other survivors. His first work was to seek swamp potatoes under water. He eventually became a trader, procuring sea snails, shells, fruit, hides, flints for arrowheads, dried reeds, glue, and tassels of deer hair. But since these Indians were constantly at war with their neighbors, commerce was limited. In these circumstances, Cabeza became famous among the Indians of the Mississippi delta. He remained there almost six years.
14
Ordaz on the Orinoco;
Heredia at Cartagena
Those who do military service for the world pant, sweat, and endure the tumult of battle for many years. And for what perishable and worthless concerns, and with such uncertain hope!
ERASMUS, Enchiridion
Several of the captains who had accompanied Cortés in his years of struggle against the Mexica wished to have the opportunity of achieving something similar themselves. These were in particular Pedro de Alvarado, who, as has been seen, was carving out for himself a principality in Guatemala; Francisco de Montejo in Yucatán; Pánfilo de Narváez, the tragic Segoviano who as we have seen would die off the Mississippi; and Diego de Ordaz, who embarked on a great adventure on the river Orinoco.
Diego de Ordaz had been born in Castroverde de Campos, a small town in northwestern Castile near Medina de Rioseco, surrounded by flat, fertile land and fed by the river Valderaduey. Castroverde is a remote place, and it is at first sight astonishing that so determined a conquistador should have come from it. Ordaz was, however, a blood relation of other conquistadors who had accompanied Cortés, such as Cristóbal Flores from Valencia de Don Juan, a friend of Cortés who was punished by him for blaspheming. Ordaz was an uncle, too, of Francisco Verdugo, one of the many men of Cuéllar to take part in Diego Velázquez’s enterprises and who had left Spain with Ordaz in 1510. It seems likely that Ordaz had been present at the disastrous battle of Turbaco, in what is now Colombia, where the Spaniards were defeated and where the veteran explorer Juan de la Cosa had been killed.
Diego de Ordaz and his brother Pedro also took part in the conquest of Cuba: Diego became majordomo to the governor, Diego Velázquez. He became well known for leaving behind his brother Pedro in a swamp in the south of the island, but Pedro survived to be able to volunteer to join Pánfilo de Narváez in his expedition to New Spain in 1520.
Ordaz had joined Cortés’s expedition in 1519. Velázquez thought of him as one of “his” men on the journey He was asked to keep an eye on Cortés on Velázquez’s behalf. Ordaz was a captain of one of Cortés’s ten ships in 1519, and Cortés sent him to obtain supplies from Jamaica. Later, Ordaz tried to kidnap Cortés by asking him to dine on board his ship at Havana, but Cortés wisely refused the invitation. Ordaz’s brigantine in Yucatán went in search of the lost Andalusian Jerónimo de Aguilar. He seems to have plotted against Cortés in Veracruz, and he was arrested, condemned to death, and then pardoned. (As captain-general, Cortés had the right to make such condemnations.)1 Ordaz had no doubts about Cortés’s lack of morals: “The Marquess has no more conscience than a dog,” he wrote to his nephew Verdugo.2
Ordaz’s next exploit was to climb the volcano Popocatépetl, and he was able from that height to observe and, later, describe the beautiful site of Mexico-Tenochtitlan on its lake.3 It was the first European ascent of a mountain in the Americas. The Spaniards, therefore, knew which route to take to the Mexicas’ capital. Understandably, Ordaz took a volcano as his coat of arms. He lost a finger in the fighting “on the bridges” in 1520. That same year, Cortés, who now trusted him, sent him back to Spain to support his cause at court. Ordaz was not much missed in the last battles around Tenochtitlan, for he was no horseman and he stuttered in speech.4 But he was one of the conquistadors who interested himself in the achievements of the Indians, and later, in Spain, he requested his nephew Francisco Verdugo to send him some feather mosaics, which the Mexica arranged so artistically.5 He was also a good letter-writer, as his letters to Verdugo show.
In 1524, we find Ordaz branched out into new activities of his own. He was the owner of two-thirds of the ship Santa María de la Victoria, which sailed with merchandise for the Americas from Santo Domingo. But like all the successful captains in New Spain, he had his encomiendas: Teutla, Huejotzingo, Caplan, Chiautla. In 1529, the Crown also gave him the peninsula of Tepetlacingo, on the lake of Mexico.6 Then he went back to old Spain and was the only conquistador from New Spain present at Cortés’s second wedding, in 1529 in Béjar.
This was the background of the Castilian who, in May 1530, obtained a contract to “discover, conquer and populate” the towns that were to be found between the Río Marañón [that is, the Orinoco] and the Cape de la Vela (“of the Sail”) in what is now western Venezuela, on the west side of the peninsula of Guajira.7
Ordaz was able to organize a new expedition of five hundred men.8 He also had thirty horse. His captains were the famous and persistent Gil González Dávila, as alcalde mayor, Jerónimo Dortal as treasurer, and Juan Cortejo as captain-general, while Alonso Herrera was maestre de campo. Of these men, the first named had by then been active, as we have seen, in innumerable ways in the Indies over twenty years. Alonso Herrera, who came from Jerez de la Frontera, had been in Mexico in the last stages of the conquest. He had then been sent by Cortés to suppress a rebellion of the Zapotecs in Oaxaca in 1526: “He was a practical man experienced in military matters with a singular capacity to attract young soldiers.” Thus it was that he persuaded one hundred men to go with them. This included three brothers named Silva. They sold all they had in order to go with Ordaz, whom they joined late, in the Gulf of Paria, in the galleon of a Portuguese merchant, which they had stolen—or rather, persuaded the daughter of the merchant to make over to them without payment.
Most of the money for this expedition was found by two Italian bankers established in Seville, Cristóbal Franquesín and Alejandro Geraldini.
There was a clear ambiguity between Ordaz’s license and that already assigned to Welser’s men, the Germans Micer Enrique Eyniger and Jerónimo Seiler. It was also feared in Spain that Ordaz might touch the land of the most serene King of Portugal, “our brother”—that is, the territory that became Brazil. In the other direction, Ordaz would control the entire coast of Venezuela. How did that square with the existing concessions to the Germans? In this territory, Ordaz would become governor and captain-general for life and receive a salary of 725,000 maravedís a year. Out of this, he would, as the custom then wa
s, have to pay a chief magistrate, thirty infantrymen, 110 squires, a physician, and an apothecary. Ordaz would be able to grant such encomiendas as he thought fit and would receive twenty-five mares from the Crown, which he would pick up in Jamaica. He would also receive 300,000 maravedís for artillery and munitions. He would have the right to carry with him fifty black slaves, of whom a third would be women.
The obscurity in the license of Ordaz was mitigated by the fact that Ordaz himself had no intention of interfering with the Germans on the northern coast of South America. Instead, he wanted to explore the great Río Orinoco/Marañón, which he believed led to a land with extensive supplies of gold.9
Ordaz’s fleet sailed from Sanlúcar on October 20, 1531. He had two large naos and a smaller ship, which he called a carabelón. He had been maintaining his expedition at his own cost already for two months.
They stopped at Tenerife, where he picked up another hundred men, about forty horses, and some mares.10 Then, after a storm that dispersed the ships, they reached the Cape Verde Islands on December 26. They sailed easily across the Atlantic to make landfall in the Americas sixty miles east of the Río Orinoco. Perhaps that was just inside the territory now known as Guiana. No European before had seen this wild, green landscape. Ordaz sent out a chalupa, a small launch, with thirteen men on board. But three days later, it returned, having been unable to land because of the mud. They then found some islands, which they named San Sebastián, and from there sailed up the river for eight days, “but all the land which appeared was flooded.” They could find nothing to suggest that there was any settlement in the neighborhood. On one of these islands, they left a wooden cross to help to guide those who would follow them.
This is how Ordaz’s account appears in a later investigation in Santo Domingo. But some chroniclers talk of a wreck of the two caravels that formed part of the flotilla and how everyone aboard them took to small boats as best they could and left their colleagues to—in some cases—a terrible fate. It was sometimes said of those who disappeared at this stage that they had sailed on upriver and discovered a magical golden land, El Dorado, but the only certain thing is that nothing more was heard of them. A small group indeed set off in two little boats to look for Ordaz and his flagship, but they in turn found themselves swept northward into the Gulf of Paria. One of the boats was lost there with all hands.
Ordaz, meantime, had indeed gone north to where he knew there was water. He found himself in the Gulf of Paria and, after another forty days, on the island of Trinidad (so christened by Columbus on his third voyage). He had only one barrel (pipa) of water left. They waited four days there to gather more water and grass for the horses. Then they reached land in the gulf, presumably to the west of the channel already known to Spanish captains as the Dragon’s Mouth. There they were approached by Indians in two canoes. Ordaz gave them some good shirts of that staple Holland cloth, which had played such a part in relations between Spaniards and Indians.11 He also gave them some Venetian glass beads, which had played a similar part in those relations.
These people talked a great deal: Ordaz and his friends considered that a good sign. But here the expedition came into contact with Antonio Sedeño, an aggressive ex-notary like Cortés and a man who had made a fortune selling Carib—that is, allegedly man-eating yellow-skinned Indians of the Leeward Islands—slaves. In 1530, he had been named governor of Trinidad, though the island had not yet been conquered. He had gone to the mainland, where he had started to build a fortress. This caused him to seem as much a threat to Ordaz as Ordaz was to him. A lieutenant of Sedeño tried to seize Ordaz, but Jerónimo Dortal got the better of him, and on June 14, 1531, Ordaz established the pueblo of San Miguel de Paria.
Ordaz sought then to establish the different responsibilities in the zone of the Orinoco: Sedeño in Trinidad, the Germans in Venezuela, and even the pearl fisherman Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo in Cubagua. But his Spanish rivals were unyielding. It was hard to reach any agreement about land in a continent where the distances were enormous, knowledge modest, and hatreds intense.
Advised of the real route of the great Río Orinoco, Ordaz began to sail up the delta of that river on June 23 in his splendid galleon. What a sight it must have been! He had still over 350 men with him, though some of them derived from Sedeño and Ortiz de Matienzo.
He sent Alonso Herrera ahead. He found the Indians on the first large settlement on the bank, probably Uyapari, unfriendly (fuera de amistad y concordia). Most of the people in these pueblos were warlike bowmen and fighters (flecheros y guerreros y muy belicosos). Ordaz soon caught up with Herrera and proceeded to scrutinize (tantear) other pueblos. In one of these, which he and his friends named Tuy, after the pretty Portuguese–Spanish border town, they learned that on the other side of the mountains there was a large province called Guiana. Ordaz sent there one of Sedeño’s men, Juan González, who returned with the bad news that the way was difficult for horses, the land being sharp underfoot and sterile.
Ordaz now decided to continue up the Orinoco on land, leaving at Uyapari twenty-five sick men under the command of Gil González Dávila. But after several weeks’ march and having traveled about six hundred miles to what is now Puerto Ayacucho, an astonishing distance, it became impossible to go any farther. The jungle was too intense, the heat unbearable, the mosquitoes triumphant, the diseases merciless. Carib Indians attacked regularly. Ordaz withdrew to the confluence of the Orinoco and the Meta. Some Caribs persuaded the gullible Spaniards that there was gold high up the Meta. Ordaz and his men went some way up that great tributary by boat. But rapids and currents prevented them going very far. Ordaz decided to return to Paria, a rough spot which seemed to him by then a memory of tranquillity. His idea was to reenter the zone of the Meta with its golden promise later overland via Cumána. But there were further difficulties. Gil González Dávila, veteran of so many odd encounters in the Indies, was halted and imprisoned by Ortiz de Matienzo. Ordaz eventually found himself in Cubagua with a mere thirty men. Ortiz de Matienzo captured him, too, and dispatched him under guard to Santo Domingo. The judge there released him. Ordaz tried to recruit new men for his journey back to the Orinoco. He was refused permission to do so, thus he determined to return to Spain with the same intent. He set off but died on July 22, 1532, halfway across the Atlantic. According to Fray Pedro de Aguado, a historian of Venezuela, he had been poisoned by Ortiz de Matienzo.12 He was yet another of Cortés’s contemporaries to die in suspicious circumstances.
In 1532, another contract was made by the Crown for the conquest and settlement of a part of the territory that had been left with the German Welsers—namely, the land between Darien or the Gulf of Urabá and the mouth of the wonderful river Magdalena. The arrangement was made by the only Madrileño among any of the leading conquistadors, Pedro (Fernández) de Heredia.13
Heredia was a small-time businessman who left for the New World to escape his creditors. His first visit to the Indies was financed by his wife, Constanza Franco, who had inherited a fortune from her first husband. On that first voyage, Heredia went to Santo Domingo and founded a sugar mill and plantation at Azua de Compostela, where Cortés had served as a notary in his youth, on land that he inherited from a cousin.14 There he and his brother, Alonso, busied themselves in the Indian slave trade from the north of South America, indeed from the territory close to Cartagena, where he would receive his contract in 1532. Heredia went to Santa Marta, where he was for a time lieutenant-governor to Pedro de Valdillo, who himself took over from Álvarez Palomino in 1528. He must have seen then that no one was taking any notice of the zone between Darien and the Magdalena. Then he returned to Spain, where he pursued his plan of gaining his grant of Cartagena, which he obtained in August 1532.15
In September 1532, only a month afterwards, Heredia left Sanlúcar with a single galleon, a caravel, a small boat (fusta, or light rowing boat), and 115 men. Again, his wife, Constanza, seems to have been the principal backer. They sailed via the Canaries (La Gomera), then to Puer
to Rico (the island of Mona), then to Santo Domingo, where Heredia enrolled more men, including some left over from Ordaz’s unhappy expedition to the Orinoco. At Azua, where Heredia had had his plantation, they secured a new caravel. They went on to Santa Marta, where the commander looked for interpreters who spoke the language of the natives in Cartagena. Finally, early in 1533, probably on January 14, Heredia and his expedition disembarked on the Colombian coast in the bay of Cartagena.16
Soon after their landing, Heredia was joined by his brother, Alonso, who sailed in with reinforcements from Guatemala, where he had been with Pedro de Alvarado. Together, the brothers mounted expeditions from Cartagena southward into the territory of the Cenú people, and toward Urabá. Some further Spanish settlements were founded in unpromising circumstances: San Sebastián de Buenavista in the Gulf of Urabá, for example, Villa Rica de Madrid in Cenú territory, and Santa Cruz de Mompox, some way up the Magdalena. Their remarkable colonial architecture can still be appreciated by the adventurous traveler.
Cartagena was difficult to turn into a successful colony, largely because the supply of food was bad. The land nearby was marked by marsh and swamp. Sugar plantations and mills were founded, but for the time being, Heredia granted no encomiendas. This territory, which lay between two rivers, was soon to seem no more than a bridge to Peru. The governor of Santa Marta, at that time still García de Lerma, the businessman converted into proconsul, believed that Cartagena should be a dependency of his own city. Thwarted in that, he placed as many obstacles as possible in Heredia’s way, even seeking to avoid his training interpreters in his city to assist him.17 The Spanish settlers in Santa Marta were always raiding Cartagena for Indians, whom they could sell in “the islands,” that is, the West Indies. On the other hand, the people in Cartagena considered the charm of their city that it was close to the provinces of the Cenú, who could be used as a workforce. All the same, they were soon using black African slaves for all the hard, or dirty, work.18