by Hugh Thomas
This threat persuaded Mendoza to call on Luis del Castillo and Pedro de Alvarado to abandon their planned journeys of discovery in the Pacific. They landed near Colima and made for Guadalajara with one hundred horse and an equal number of foot. That put paid to any Indian advance on that city. Mendoza also sent a hundred men from Mexico under Íñigo López de Anuncibay and ordered another member of the large Alvarado family to move in from Michoacán with thirty horse and a huge number of Mexican foot, perhaps five thousand.
There followed a meeting under Oñate’s direction in Guadalajara to formulate a plan of action. Pedro de Alvarado, impatient to return to his voyage of discovery, told his colleagues that they were children in their timidity and declared that, with his experience, he would soon personally defeat these Indians. Oñate sought to dissuade Alvarado, but the latter reminded all his comrades of their lack of experience in comparison with his. Alvarado set off for the hill of Nochistlán and reached there on June 24, 1541, refusing Oñate’s offers of help and certainly not waiting for support from Mexico.
Alvarado had with him a hundred foot soldiers, a hundred horsemen, and several hundred Indian allies. He first sought to negotiate his enemy’s surrender, then mounted a direct assault, which was repelled with losses. Alvarado rallied, his infantry attacked without the help of cavalry, and the rebels attacked then with great force. Alvarado tried unsuccessfully to rally his men again, and he dismounted to prevent a headlong retreat. It was raining, and the ground had become a bog. Alvarado led his horse backward, but his secretary slipped, leaving Alvarado to be flung into a ravine with his horse on top of him. Watching from a nearby hillock, Oñate saved the day, prevented a complete catastrophe, and carried the wounded Alvarado back to Guadalajara. There Alvarado went to the house of his cousin Juan del Camino, and there, victim of the impetuosity that had always been his hallmark, he died of his wounds in June 1541.
The first great ally of Cortés in his conquest of Mexico was thus removed, leaving a reputation for success in spite of danger; bravery in spite of cruelty; and good looks, which even his enemies admired, in place of prudence.
The Indians besieged Guadalajara. The assault of fifty thousand Mixton Indians was beaten off with difficulty. Beatriz Hernández, surely the same conquistadora who had come to New Spain from Cuba with the great Cortés, was the heroine of this siege. There were several successful sorties, including one in which the tireless apostle Santiago was said yet again to have appeared on his white horse to save the Spaniards from defeat.
Mendoza sent the judge Maldonado to report on the situation in Guadalajara. He returned to say that Mendoza himself was needed. Though he had little military experience, except in the war of the comuneros, it was assumed that a Mendoza could automatically command men in battle. The Viceroy did go up to Guadalajara with 180 horse and a large number of friendly Indians, perhaps several thousand, and also a good quantity of artillery, the new weapons of the day. This was the great challenge to, or test of, his viceroyalty.
The innovation of Mendoza’s army was not only the substantial number of guns, but the fact that friendly Indian noblemen, of Mexican origin, were encouraged to use Spanish weapons, including swords, and to ride on horseback.
Mendoza traveled via Michoacán. He met Ibarra and Juan del Camino at the Tlazazalca tower, near Cuina. Mendoza surrounded that fortress, then feigned flight, returned to the hilltop, defeated the enemy easily, and condemned the Indians whom he captured to death or to slavery. He seems to have felt an exemplary series of punishments was essential: “Many of the Indians taken in the conquest of the said hill were put to death in his presence and by his orders. Some were placed in line and blown to pieces by cannon. Others were torn to pieces by dogs while others still were handed over to negroes [sic] to be put to death. These killed them by knife thrusts.”41
After this repression, Mendoza was able at Acatic, Istlean, and Cuyutlán to negotiate peace. He moved on to Nochistlán. Fray Juan de San Román, Fray Antonio de Segovia, and Diego de Ibarra sought a truce, without success. Mendoza settled down to a siege, cutting off the supply of water and battering down the obstacles with artillery. The Indians offered peace at last, but Mendoza chose to launch an assault, reasoning that anyone who offers peace can be more easily defeated. He triumphed. He moved to Mixton hill, where the bulk of the enemy had gathered. Ibarra and Francisco Maldonado made a new offer of peace, but they were rejected. Mendoza then moved to Suchilpala, where eight hundred Indians appeared in order to sacrifice chickens to the rain god Tlaloc and to sing hymns. He again sent Ibarra to propose peace, but he was again rejected.
Mendoza spent the next three weeks besieging the Mixton camp. There were daily proposals of peace and also daily enfilades of artillery. The Indians on Teul deserted, and betrayed an oath to indicate a secret way to the top of their hill. The hill soon fell; the Viceroy’s horsemen made their presence powerfully felt on the summit. They purposely permitted the Indians to escape, hoping to save lives and so spare the encomenderos the loss of all their Indians. This broke the back of the revolt. The captives were divided up as slaves, and the war ended with the capture of Ahuacatlán. Mendoza returned to Mexico, where his victory was celebrated solemnly, with rejoicing and many festivities. A general rising of Indians, which had seemed for a time a real possibility, was thus avoided. The Viceroy was afterwards accused of causing unnecessary cruelty, a charge that he successfully fended off.
During these celebrations, the news came that Diego de Almagro the younger had rebelled in Peru. Mendoza wrote, “It would appear that the marques del Valle [Cortés] would be a very good person to remedy the problems down there, because of the experience he has of that kind of matter and I would help him as much as possible.”42 It would seem that the Viceroy was seeking a way to rid himself of the brooding Marquess. But if that was so, he was unsuccessful. The crisis in Peru proved anyway to last a short time only. Cortés remained in New Spain.
Mendoza’s victory over the Mixton Indians coincided with many steps taken to demonstrate that the Spanish presence in New Spain was no ephemeral phenomenon. Nothing, for example, could be less transitory than the beginning of the great cathedral of Pátzcuaro, whose inspiration was Bishop Quiroga. He sought to create a building as big as the cathedral of Seville and on the model of the cathedral of Granada. The plan that Quiroga requested of Hernando Toribio de Alcázar was to have five naves culminating in a great central chapel. The construction began and went on for twenty years, but thereafter the pace of building declined.
Another confirmation of Spanish grandeur was Mendoza’s insistence on sending Ruy López de Villalobos on an expedition from Acapulco to the islands off Asia discovered by Magellan, who had died there.43 Villalobos’s expedition was intended to establish a colony in that archipelago. They and their friends did establish themselves in a land that was claimed by Portugal and the Emperor. Eventually, Charles told Mendoza that he accepted the Portuguese mapmaking and that he would have to abandon the settlement. Mendoza wrote to Juan de Aguilar that he hoped that one day he or one of his sons might be permitted to stand on the line of demarcation armed with a sword in order to demonstrate what belonged to them.44 A Spanish ship from this expedition under Álvaro de Saavedra landed in Hawaii, and two Spaniards are said to have survived to marry into the royal line of those islands. All the same, Villalobos gave the Philippines their name in honor of the King’s heir, Prince Philip.
Another expedition was dispatched by Mendoza up the west coast of California, under a Portuguese, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, with a Valencian, Bartolomé Ferrelo, as chief pilot. They left Navidad in June 1542, were at Cabo San Lucas on July 3, and by the end of September, were in what is now San Diego (which they called San Miguel). They continued north, dropped an anchor in Cuyler’s Harbor, and rounded Port Concepción in early November, being already north of San Francisco, whose superb harbor they did not see. Their farthest northern point was approximately Fort Ross, where they turned south again, resting in Cuy
ler’s Harbor, where Rodríguez Cabrillo died in early January 1543. Ferrelo took over and determined to sail north again. He sailed as far as the river Rogue, halfway to what is now Canada. This was a triumph of navigation, for they had returned successfully to Navidad by April 14, 1543.45 We can look on it as one more triumph by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza.
Meantime, Vasco de Quiroga—a bishop after 1537, and consequently richer—was still busy in his attempts to use Utopia as a guide to good governance. We know a good deal of Tata Vasco’s thinking, since he was never silent about his meditations. Thus we hear that after his first reading of Utopia, Quiroga came upon the account by the philosopher Lucian (born about A.D. 120) in the form of a dialogue about the Saturnalia, as translated by More with the help of Erasmus. This led Quiroga to suppose that “the simple people of New Spain would be found capable of dwelling in the state of innocence of the golden age” as indicated by the sophist Lucian. These people were ready for whatever one might make of them. The task of civilization in the New World should therefore consist not in transplanting the old culture among the newly discovered peoples but in raising them to the standards of primitive Christianity. More’s Utopia would be the instrument of the elevation.46
41
Coronado and the Seven Magic
Cities of Cibola
There are guileless people who think that there can be no lies in print.
FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ LOBO, Cortes en aldea y Noches de Invierno
By the late 1530s, successive expeditions by conquistadors had revealed an outline of the geography and much of the social organization of New Spain and Guatemala on the one hand, and Panama on the other. Those one thousand miles of isthmus, mountain, and lakeside no longer held grandiose secrets. It was quite different with the territory to the north.
So it was logical that the viceroy Mendoza, as intelligent as he was curious, should seek an expedition north of New Spain, and north of New Galicia, and of anywhere known to the conquistadors.
Unusually enough, the first such expedition was led by a clever Franciscan. This was Fray Marcos de Niza. Born in Nice (hence his name), he went, already a member of his order, to the New World in 1531. First in Santo Domingo, then in Nicaragua and Guatemala, later he went to Peru with Pedro de Alvarado. There he was the leader of the first Franciscan mission and returned soon after to Guatemala. He became vice-commissioner of the Franciscans in New Spain.
In 1536, Fray Marcos de Niza was sent by the Viceroy as head of a small expedition of discovery to the north. The main part of his group remained in Culiacán while he went on with the legendary Estebanico, Cabeza de Vaca’s Berber companion, and a lay brother, Onorato, across half the continent. They left Culiacán with some Indian bearers on March 7, 1537.1 Onorato became ill and was left behind. Estebanico went on ahead. He found interesting places such as Hawikuh, in what is now New Mexico. He found two large crosses there and reported the place to be one of the Seven Cities of Cibola, a legendary concept that had come to dazzle settlers in New Spain. Cibola is a word used normally by Spaniards as a translation of “bison,” but in the hands of the citizens of New Spain, it signified something magical—an echo of the fantastical novels that played such an important part in forming the conquistadors’ imagination.
Estebanico, though a man of extraordinary resilience, was not one of any delicacy. He mistreated all the Indians with whom he came into contact. His ruthless insensitivity now led to a rebellion in the expedition, causing the murder of his group, including himself, except for three members who escaped by accident.
Fray Marcos was informed of these developments and himself went ahead in Estebanico’s footprints. He wrote back to the Viceroy: “Judging by what I could see … the settlement [of Hawikuh] is larger than the city of Mexico. It appears to me that this is the best and largest of all the lands which have been discovered.”2 The Viceroy and monarch should by that time have been used to such extravagant commentaries about new places. But like everyone else engaged in the expansion of the empire, they had an unfailing appetite for good news. Hawikuh was actually a hamlet in comparison to Tenochtitlan.
At all events, the myth of Cibola was now launched. The Indian settlements concerned were the villages of the ancestors of the Zuni Indians in New Mexico.
In order to stay alive, Fray Marcos divided all the goods that he had with him among his Indians and persuaded, or induced, them to remain with him till he reached the village where Estebanico had been killed. There Fray Marcos raised a cross, and then he returned to Culiacán.
At the end of 1539, the Viceroy decided to follow up this voyage of enquiry with another more powerful one, at whose head he placed a great friend, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, a man who seemed “wise, skilful and intelligent.”
Vázquez de Coronado was a native of Salamanca and had come to the New World with Mendoza himself. He soon set about marrying the beautiful and rich Beatriz de Estrada, daughter of the treasurer Alonso de Estrada. Vázquez de Coronado had first of all been named investigator in the affair of Nuño de Guzmán in the residencia mounted against him as governor of New Galicia.
The expedition that Viceroy Mendoza wanted Coronado to lead was elaborately organized. He had, for example, Lope de Samaniego, an experienced old hand in New Spain, as his general. Samaniego had gone first to New Spain as agent or representative of Peter Martyr and had returned to Spain as guard of the famous silver phoenix of Cortés. The captain of Coronado’s infantry was Pablo de Melgosa; his captain of horse, Hernando de Alvarado—probably a nephew of the great Pedro. Coronado had altogether about 580 conquistadors with him and perhaps two thousand Indians, most of them camp followers, porters, or cattle- or swineherds. Fray Marcos de Niza would travel as the priest-in-charge. Among the captains was Juan de Zaldívar, a pioneer of New Granada, a future pioneer, too, of silver mining in Zacatecas. His house in Mexico was one of the best in New Spain and was always full of guests and visitors.
Mendoza ordered an expedition by sea to escort Coronado, and he asked his chamberlain, Hernando de Alarcón, to lead it. He did so, sailing up to the extreme north of the Gulf of California with three ships, the San Pedro, the Santa Catalina, and the San Gabriel. He set off up the river Colorado, hoping there to meet Coronado. He did not find the latter, but he probably reached as far as Yuma, some fifty miles inland, before he turned back. He then returned to Guatemala, having at the least established that the land called California was not an island.
Coronado’s expedition set off on February 23, 1540, Viceroy Mendoza giving his blessing by accompanying it for the first two days. They set off gaily, pennons and lances to the fore. At Chametla, Samaniego was wounded in the eye by an arrow, but his men were rallied by Diego López of Seville. At that stage, the danger seemed to be the cold, rather than the Indians. The vanguard of Juan de Zaldívar, for example, reported that the excessively low temperature had frozen to death some of the Indians with him. Reaching Culiacán, Coronado determined to press ahead with Tristán de Arellano, one of his highborn captains, and fifty horse. He left the main body of the army under Fernandarias de Saavedra. Pressing on, Coronado captured Fray Marcos de Niza’s town of Hawikuh, while Pedro de Tovar and García López de Cárdenas seized several villages belonging to the Moqui Indians. They became the first Europeans to look into the Grand Canyon. López de Cárdenas spent several days seeking a passage down to the river, which from above seemed to be a mere six feet across, but, when they descended into the valley, proved to be half a league wide.
After three days, Pablo de Melgosa, with Juan Gallego and another who was among the lightest and most agile of the men, made an effort to go down at the least difficult place and “so continued till those who were above could not see them any more. They returned about four o’clock in the afternoon on account of the great difficulties, because what seemed to be easy from above was not so.”3
The whole army marched on to winter in the valley of the Rio Grande, in the country of the Tiguex tribe. On the way, they pass
ed Chichilticale, “where the wilderness begins,” recalled Coronado.4 This town was expected to be one of the magic cities of Cibola but it turned out to be “full of tumbledown houses of red earth” without roofs.
In the spring of 1541, the army of Coronado set out for the city of Cibola, as they supposed it to be. When they arrived, Melchor Díaz would remain in charge while Juan Gallego would return to Mexico-Tenochtitlan with a report for the Viceroy. Fray Marcos de Niza and Tristán de Arellano would remain in the town of Señora with the weakest men, while Melchor Díaz took twenty-five strong and competent soldiers into country that turned out to be very cold indeed. There were said to be giants there, also, one hundred of whom, young and old, slept in one large cabin, each carrying a firebrand as he moved about. They found a message from Hernando de Alarcón buried near a tree fifty miles up the Colorado River, which for a time they called the Tison (firebrand). At Chichilticale, they also saw Rocky Mountain sheep and prickly pears, then they were caught in a tornado that turned to snow, and finally they reached the presumed magic city, their destination, Cibola of their dreams.
Coronado sent into the place a small troop headed by Pedro de Tovar, with Fray Juan de Padilla. The natives offered them presents of copper, cloth, dressed skins, pine nuts, and turquoise mosaics, “but not many.” The place seemed to be governed by an assembly of the oldest men. The Spaniards found the place poor and small, for it was no more than “a crowded village of small houses, one piled on top of the other without courtyards,” which looked as if they had been scrambled together. “Such were the curses that some hurled at Fray Marcos de Niza that I pray that God will protect him from them,”5 Fray Juan de Padilla added, “To tell the truth, I do not know why we have come here.” It is true that there was some food, which the Spaniards seized; and there were about two hundred native soldiers, who did nothing.