The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  Carvajal asked Hutten to place himself at his, Carvajal’s, orders. Hutten replied: “Señor governor, already you know that I and these gentlemen and brothers have been marching for five years in order to carry out the full discovery of this territory, where we have lost many friends, horses and clothes. And we come here ruined and poor, sick, tired and indebted; and as my followers have been friends, I would like them to go with me to the port whence we set off [Coro] and there we can recover, for there is the judge of the Residencia. I wish to give my testimony and give an account to His Majesty and to the Welsers who have this government. I beg your excellency not to disturb us.”

  Carvajal said to the soldiers: “I hope you will be a witness of the fact that this is the government of the Emperor. Here the Welsers are nothing, it is His Majesty who rules.”

  Hutten replied: “Already I have said that these [the Welsers] hold the land on behalf of His Majesty.”

  Carvajal responded with: “Stop talking.” He said to the notary: “Take heed that I order that he goes a prisoner to his tent and does not leave it.”

  Hutten answered: “Take heed that I stand by what I have said, which is that I do not recognise Señor Carvajal as the judge, for I am the captain-general of His Majesty.” He insisted again that he had to go to Coro in order to make a report about his journey to the King and to the Welsers.

  Carvajal said: “To the King you have to tell this story and not to the Welsers.”

  Hutten returned: “To the King I say I shall give my first account and then to the Welsers.”

  Carvajal replied: “You are not captain-general, indeed you are nothing where I am and, therefore, both you and Captain Bartolomé Welser must go as prisoners to your tents and treat them as a prison.”

  Hutten then said that Carvajal had powers only because it was believed that he, Hutten, was lost and dead in his expedition.

  This remark caused an uproar. Carvajal went forward to seize the two Germans himself, but they, supported by ten of their soldiers, drew their swords to defend themselves. Carvajal withdrew, and Hutten and Welser went to their lodgings. They were soon surrounded by Carvajal’s men. Lance in hand, Welser attacked Carvajal, but only his horse was killed. All the same, the Germans, with some supporters, set off that night on the hundred-or-so-mile journey to Coro. On the way, an agreement was reached between Carvajal, Hutten, and Welser: The latter were to be permitted to go to Coro. This was arranged by Carvajal’s notary, Juan de Villegas. But on the second night of their journey, Carvajal attacked and seized Hutten and Welser in their hammocks. He ordered an African slave to cut off their heads with a machete, refusing them the rite of absolution. “They can make their confession in heaven,” he grimly commented.8

  So ended the brutal implication of Germany in the Spanish empire.

  The conclusion of this chapter of tragedy is quickly told. At the end of 1545, Licenciado Frías at length reached Coro to carry out his task as judge of the residencia. He found the port practically deserted, food almost nonexistent. But at the same time, the Council of the Indies had changed their policy, for they had named Juan Pérez de Tolosa, a licenciado of Castile, in Juan Frías’s stead, at a salary of 645,000 maravedís a year. All other governors, lieutenant-governors, and chief magistrates were suspended. The residencia was to be completed in ninety days.

  Pérez de Tolosa reached Santo Domingo on May 27, 1546. There he was told that Venezuela was in chaos. On June 9, he arrived to see for himself. He found Coro, as Frías and indeed Carvajal had found it, in a deplorable state, for there were only fifteen settlers there. The rest had gone to Santa Marta or to Bogotá. He wrote: “The poverty of those who are to be found in this city … is so great that if it were not for the little I have brought of clothing and footwear I could do nothing. There is no gold, nor silver, nor money and no food except for fish and good things obtainable from hunting.”

  Three weeks after Pérez de Tolosa arrived, he began his investigation of Carvajal, using Juan de Eldua as magistrate. Carvajal was accused of conducting himself as a governor and a captain-general without authority, of removing the colony from Coro to Tocuyo without permission, of robbing peaceful Indians of their goods, and of executing Hutten and Welser without trial. Pérez de Tolosa had Carvajal arrested, and his men accepted the new judge as the new governor. Carvajal presented a long questionnaire with witnesses. He explained that the executions of the Germans were the consequence of their disobedience to his government. He did not improve his cause by saying, “If Prince Philip had committed the crimes of Philipp von Hutten, he would also have had his head cut off.” But he also admitted to saying that “no one in these parts who has a house can do without having women, Spaniards or Indians, it does not matter which.”9

  Carvajal did everything he could to save his life, but on September 16, he was condemned to be “taken from the public gaol where he is to be tied to the tail of a horse; and from this square, he will be taken to the pillory and the gallows; and there he will be tied from the neck with a cord of esparto grass … so that he would die naturally.”10

  The Hutten and Welser families thought that it had been the desire of Carvajal and his friends to rob the two Germans of the riches that they had brought back from El Dorado and that that had obviously been the motive for their arrest and execution. Bartolomé Welser’s father, also Bartolomé, told Bishop Maurice von Hutten that they had brought back great riches.11

  Thereafter, the government of Licenciado Pérez de Tolosa confirmed Carvajal’s encomiendas in Tocuyo and organized several journeys into the interior. Pérez de Tolosa sent his brother Alonso on one of these to the Sierra de Mérida, as it is now known, but he took care not to go himself. He declared Juan de Villegas free from blame in relation to Hutten and Welser, and sent him in mid-1547 to the Valle de las Damas in order to see if a settlement could be established there; and the explorer did find a new route from the interior to the coast. Pérez de Tolosa took a close look at the coast of Venezuela but left his brother and Villegas to investigate the interior. When he died in 1549, Villegas became his successor, and in most senses, the latter inaugurated the colonial era in the country. He founded a road to New Granada, which passed over the headwaters of the rivers Apare and Sarara, and Río de Oro. There were no further disastrous expeditions into the southern jungle. Tocuyo became in effect the new capital.

  Perhaps the best memorial of this era in Venezuela is to be found in the German town of Arnstein, near Würzburg, in Bavaria. There Philipp von Hutten is nobly remembered in the church of Maria-Sondheim in a tomb ordered by his responsible brother Bishop Maurice. He was a victim of his own generous illusions. Nothing in his tragic life shows more vividly the extraordinary connection between the new and the old worlds, and the contrast between reality and the world of fantasy as expressed in the chivalric novels.

  39

  Buenos Aires and Asunción:

  Pedro de Mendoza and

  Cabeza de Vaca

  Some day things will be as God wills and the Twelve Peers will rule. Just as the wild olive shoot is grafted onto the olive tree, out of this Moabite was made an Israelite, and out of a demon-worshipper a handmaiden of the living God.

  ERASMUS, De Vita Christiana

  The capital of the Portuguese colony in Brazil would soon be Olinda, a name taken straight from that of a princess in Amadís de Gaula. Yet the Spaniards were slow in developing relations with, much less conquering and settling, the territory they believed to be theirs that lay beyond the Portuguese colony in Brazil. Their interest there had, however, been awoken by the ill-fated journey of Vespucci’s successor as piloto mayor in Seville, Juan Díaz de Solís, in 1515. Like so many adventurers who followed, Díaz de Solís had been looking for a strait to the Southern Sea; and like them, he found many other things while not finding the strait. Díaz de Solís, as we have learned before, was captured on the banks of the river Plate (Río de la Plata, the river of silver), though that was not yet its name in 1515. His captors were
the Querandí Indians. With those companions who had landed with him on the island of Martín García, he was killed and then eaten, slice by slice, in full view of those who remained in the boats. Those survivors of the expedition understandably did not choose to continue their search for the strait and returned home as fast as they could. The Plate was then named by the Spaniards the Solís.

  The next to risk those waters was Sebastian Cabot, who sailed from Sanlúcar in 1526. He was himself piloto mayor in succession to Díaz de Solís, and now that Magellan had shown the way, it was thought right that Cabot should direct a new expedition to the Spice Islands by Magellan’s route. The expedition of García de Loaisa had made an effort to do so but had been a failure. Cabot left Sanlúcar on April 5, 1526, with three naos and a caravel. He explored the estuary of the river Plate, as well as the Paraná River, and on the Carcaraña River, he built a fort near where is now the town of Rosario. He sent some silver home to the King, hence the name of the great river. Río de la Plata it had become by 1530, and so it has remained, though the English mistranslated the word “plata.”

  Cabot carried out several minor expeditions up the rivers of this territory, and these remain his great achievement. But he was supposed to be heading for the Spice Islands, in what is now Indonesia, and these he did not approach. Indeed he never went farther than the estuary of the Plate. This was partly because of the arrival in that estuary of another Spanish expedition, that of Diego García of Moguer, with two caravels. García claimed to have secured the right to explore and colonize the whole region. The quarrels between Cabot and García brought an end to both expeditions, for the two returned to Spain to engage in a lawsuit. Since Cabot had been expected to go to the Spice Islands, he found himself in disgrace, and he was sent for two years’ exile in Oran.1

  After such small expeditions whose aims had been far beyond the Río de la Plata, it was notable that in 1535, a major expedition should at last be sent to the region under the leadership of Pedro de Mendoza. It must seem right that the conquistador who first established himself in a permanent fashion on the Plate and founded a colony, which has eventually become a great nation, should have been a Mendoza, a member of the family that dominated Spanish history in the early sixteenth century. It is, however, obscure from which branch of the family of the Dukes of Infantado Pedro de Mendoza derived. He probably was an illegitimate son of Íñigo López de Mendoza, count of Tendilla, for he was born in Guadix while Spain was still at war a few miles away in Granada.2 He seems to have lived a good deal at court and to have served in Italy, being present in his thirties in 1527 at the sack of Rome, where he is said, probably falsely, to have increased his fortune. His interests were extravagant, and without proving his capacity for such a mission, he succeeded in having himself named adelantado of the region: “to go and conquer the lands and provinces which there are in the river Solís which is called La Plata where Sebastian Cabot was.” One can sense the proximity of Mendoza to the court by the terms with which the King addressed him: “You, Don Pedro Mendoza, mi criado y gentil hombre de mi casa.” He had no knowledge of where he was going.3

  Mendoza left Sanlúcar in September 1535 with fourteen ships and no fewer than 2,150 men. His expedition was full of high-ranking persons known at court, such as the sea captain Juan de Osorio; the chief magistrate Juan de Ayolas, who came from Briviesca, Castile; the Cáceres brothers; and Pérez de Cepeda de Ahumada, a brother of Saint Teresa of Ávila, who left Spain to avoid persecution as a converso. More important still was Diego de Mendoza, Don Pedro’s brother, who acted as admiral of the fleet. Various wives, daughters, and sisters of the adventurers sailed, too. Oviedo wrote that the expedition was fit to make a “goodly show in Caesar’s army in any part of the world.”4 One ship belonged to Flemish merchants established in Seville, on which traveled Ulrich Schmidt, who wrote an unreliable account. Another vessel was hired by the Welsers, and it carried Sebastian Neidhart, a German from Nuremberg, the captain and factor being another German, Heinrich Paeime.5

  The expedition encountered a storm halfway across the Atlantic, and the ships were dispersed. Some went to Rio de Janeiro instead of the Río de la Plata. But most of the expedition had reassembled on the Río de la Plata by New Year’s Day, 1536. On February 22, Mendoza, in the name of the Emperor, established the first serious settlement at what he named El Puerto de Nuestra Señora del Buen Aire. One of the most remarkable Spanish cities thus had its beginning. The name derived from the Virgin of Buenos Vientos, protector of sailors, a figure of whom used often to be placed in caravels in the center of the compass.

  Some months passed, during which the Spaniards began to establish their settlement. The Indians who had eaten Díaz de Solís appropriately gave them some food, but ceased doing so by May. In June, Mendoza sent his brother Diego to “punish” the Querandí Indians for this omission. There was a fierce battle. The Spaniards won, but Diego de Mendoza was killed, along with four nephews of his and Pedro’s. Soon after, the settlement itself was attacked by an army of natives. They were driven off but not before they had burned four of the adelantado’s ships. Mendoza then had the settlement resited, with new buildings built along the entry of the river Riachuelo into the estuary. He also went to rest at a site found by his lieutenant, Juan de Ayolas, and which he named Buena Esperanza. There he left two lieutenants, one characteristically being an Alvarado (a nephew of Pedro) and the other a Dubrín, and there his kinsman Gonzalo de Mendoza, who had arrived from Brazil, brought an ample supply of food as well as another 150 men. (Gonzalo had been with Pedro at the beginning. He had gone to Brazil in search of supplies the previous year.)

  Now the rule of Pedro de Mendoza was approaching its conclusion. Illness seized him, and he decided to return to Spain. He took two ships. He left one hundred Spaniards in Buen Viento (Buenos Aires) under Juan Ruiz Galán. At the same time, Alvarado and Dubrín were in the Pampas at Buena Esperanza while Juan de Ayolas had been sent up the river Paraguay—successfully, since he reached a place on the Candelaria where he established a settlement, soon to be called Asunción since it was formally founded on the day of that feast, August 15, 1536. Ayolas left behind there as the interim governor Domingo Martínez de Irala, a Basque from Vergara who, like him, had come out with Mendoza. Ayolas was unfortunately killed by Payaqueses on his way back to Buenos Aires. Pedro de Mendoza, too, died at this time, not at the hands of Indians but of a fever on his ship on the way back to Spain, in May 1537.

  The achievement of Mendoza was modest because soon after he left, Buenos Aires was attacked by Indians twice and burned. In 1541, the place was abandoned, and the inhabitants left for Asunción. All the same, Pedro de Mendoza was the founder of the new colony, which eventually was looked upon as a jewel in the Spanish diadem.

  It now seemed necessary in Seville to appoint a new governor in the far south of South America, and the man of the hour in Castile was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, hero of the extraordinary walk across North America, who had just published his account of his journey. He also plainly wanted to return to the Indies. Probably he had been adversely affected by his experience, but then he had always been persistent if tactless. His affection for Indians was proverbial and at the time of his nomination to succeed Mendoza, seemed to be fashionable—in the mode of Las Casas.

  Cabeza de Vaca at first expected to be able to gain the position of adelantado of the region between Florida and New Spain. But Hernando de Soto had obtained that grant. Cabeza, therefore, devised a new territory for himself. It would be the unknown land between the Río de la Plata and Santa Catalina—that is, the part of the continent of South America that lay south or southwest of the Portuguese dominion that would become Brazil. Cabeza de Vaca had never been to this territory, but all the same, he secured nomination as “adelantado, captain-general and governor” as well as “chief magistrate” of it. The King-emperor Charles signed this capitulación on March 18, 1540.6

  Eight months later, Cabeza de Vaca left Sanlúcar de Barrameda with
three ships and four hundred men (this was in November). There was a storm, however, and the fleet was delayed, leaving Cádiz only on December 2.

  The journey was longer than usual, but then they were going to unknown places. They stopped on the way in both the Canary and the Cape Verde Islands, where Cabeza de Vaca secured some supplies without paying for them. They arrived at Santa Catalina, off Brazil, at the end of March. To Cabeza de Vaca’s astonishment, he found on the island a Franciscan, Fray Bernaldo de Armenta, living alone, having come there from Buenos Aires. Cabeza de Vaca sent a small expedition to Buenos Aires to assist its revival as a Spanish dependency; but since it was already the South American winter, it seemed unsuitable to travel far by the Río de la Plata, so they pusillanimously returned. Their return coincided with the arrival of nine further Spaniards who had successfully come up from Buenos Aires.

  Cabeza de Vaca now discovered that most of those Spaniards who had survived from Mendoza’s expedition had established themselves high up the river Paraguay at Asunción. He sent ahead his friend Pedro Dorantes from Béjar (presumably a cousin of that Dorantes, Andrés, with whom he had crossed America) to find out what the territory was like, and he began a journey to Asunción with 250 men and twenty-six horses.7

  This was another great walk for Cabeza de Vaca, for he took four months to reach Asunción from Santa Catalina. He attained his destination without losing any man or horse. On the way, they saw extraordinary sights, such as the waterfall of the river Iguazú.8 In Asunción, Cabeza conducted himself as a man of the new enlightened era of Las Casas, and tried to make his fellow settlers pay taxes and treat Indians as human beings. This caused fury, and he was opposed by Martínez de Irala, who had been serving as interim governor. At one point, Cabeza and his followers lived off worms: “In the hollows of these [bamboo] reeds there were white worms, calandra palmarum, about the length and thickness of a finger. The people eat these, obtaining enough fat for them to fry them very well.”9 The position was rendered more complex by the fact that Cabeza de Vaca was attracted, even seduced, by stories of fabulous wealth in the South American interior. The myth of Alejo García and his journey to the fabulous white chief was current, almost as if it had been a real chivalrous novel. Cabeza organized a new expedition into the interior after hearing promising news along those lines from Martínez de Irala. They sailed up the river Paraguay from Asunción, almost to its source. But they found nothing, and the white chief was notable for his absence. They went back after a year, ill, poor, and unhappy.10