by Hugh Thomas
The expedition, sadly disillusioned, continued with other adventures. They reached a town on the river Sonora, which Cabeza de Vaca, passing that way, had called Corazones because the Indians there had offered him the hearts of animals. Rodrigo Maldonado went to look for Hernando de Alarcón’s ships but found only the very tall Indians (“giants”) of whom mention has been made. Hernando de Alvarado, accompanied by Fray Juan de Padilla, made a special journey to see the bison of Cicuye, of which he had been told. He took twenty companions via Acoma (Acuco), a large village on a rock, where he was offered corn, pine nuts, deerskin, bread made from maize, and cocks.6 They went on with a chief, whom they nicknamed Bigotes (Mustaches), to Tiguex where they were at least welcomed by flutes and drums. An Indian slave whom they nicknamed the Turk, for the simple reason that he looked like one, told Alvarado and Padilla that his country, which lay ahead, was full of gold and silver, so that “they need not look at cows.” When they returned to Coronado to tell him this good news, the Turk went on to say that, in addition, in his country, there were rivers with fish as big as horses, canoes with twenty rowers and with sails, and, on the hillsides, golden eagles. Everyone ate off gold plate and the chief lived under a tree with golden bells.
Coronado found this story promising, and they set off for the Turk’s country. What can explain such fancies? On the way, they were rejoined by Tristán de Arellano, who had demanded of a local cacique three hundred pieces of cloth, which “he needed” because of the cold. The cacique said that that was impossible because the demand would have to be discussed by each town of the region. In the end, the people seem to have taken off their own cloaks to provide the right quantity of cloths.
The army reunited. Gloom rather than enthusiasm characterized the conquistadors. In one village, a Spaniard was accused of having violated an Indian’s wife. That village and others nearby then closed themselves in behind palisades; Spanish horses chased Indians as in a bull-run, and were shot at with arrows. Coronado ordered García López de Cárdenas to surround the village where the violation had occurred. Coronado, Zaldívar, and others seized the upper section of the place. López de Cárdenas did not seem to realize that they had done so, and killed two hundred Indians whom he had made prisoners. There followed a siege of Tiguex for fifty days, with many Indian deaths and some Spanish ones. Here the good faith of the Turk was seriously criticized, for a Spaniard named Cervantes swore that he had seen the Turk talking to the devil, who had appeared in a pitcher of water. The Turk asked Cervantes how many Spaniards had been killed at Tiguex. “None” was the answer. “You lie,” said the Turk, “five Christians have been killed at Tiguex.” That was the truth, but how could he have known it if he had not been in touch with the devil?
The next adventures of the expedition of Coronado were varied and interesting. They became experts on the way to capture bison; they were impressed by the way that they could be easily herded and by their vast numbers. They also noticed how the women painted their chins as well as their eyes. They suffered from hail, which destroyed tents, battered helmets, broke china plates and cups, and terrified horses. Some Spaniards were lost when they went out hunting on their own. Then they reached Quivira, the Turk’s town of Wichita Indians. There the Turk had to admit that he had been lying all the time: There was no gold nor silver to be found, nor, it seemed, had such metals ever been heard of. Coronado sent out captains in numerous directions but “found only roses, muscat grapes, parsley and marjoram.” The Turk was promptly garroted, a victim of the conquistadors’ credulity as well as of his own fantasies.
But the Spaniards did, in the end, find a territory in what is now New Mexico, where there was treasure in the shape of beautiful glazed earthenware with many figures in different shapes, as well as bowls of shining metals, which looked like silver from a distance.
Coronado now began his return journey and passed the winter at Tiguex, where Pedro de Tovar joined them with letters from Mendoza. They whiled away the time with games. Coronado had a race with Rodrigo Maldonado, but he was thrown so badly by his horse that for a time his recovery seemed improbable. With the men weary of the unpromising search for the magic towns, the return to Mexico began with a minor rebellion deriving from a protest headed by Pedro de Ávila. Fray Juan de Padilla stayed on at the Turk’s town of Quivira, and Luis de Escalona did the same at Cicuye. The former was martyred within months, and we must assume that the latter was also soon killed. By June 1542, Coronado and his men had reached Culiacán and went on as fast as they could to Mexico, where the commander, “very sad and very weary, completely worn out and very shamefaced, went to kiss the hand of the Viceroy.”7 Coronado traveled on a litter and reached the capital of New Spain with barely a hundred men, for the rest had deserted.8 Juan Suárez de Peralta, nephew by marriage of Cortés, recalled seeing the return of the expedition, with the Viceroy receiving his old friend in great sadness.9
Yet Coronado had two achievements to his credit: He had learned much of the size of the continent, and he had laid to rest the tales that there were wonderful rich new Perus and Mexicos to the north of New Spain. He later returned to his governorship of New Galicia, but he was soon dismissed because of poor management. A residencia later conducted against him by the judge Tejada talked not only of serious abuse of funds but of mistreatment of Indians on a large scale. Coronado pleaded extenuating circumstances; he was arrested but allowed to go free till his appeal was heard by the Council of the Indies. He knew as well as Viceroy Mendoza that it would be a long time before the matter was resolved.
42
Montejo and Alvarado in Yucatán
and Guatemala
The ominous thing is not the present war but the era of wars upon which we have entered … how much, how very much, that men of culture loved, will they have to cast overboard as a spiritual luxury?
JACOB BURCKHARDT, Reflections on History
After the conclusion of Francisco de Montejo’s unsuccessful attempts at the conquest of Yucatán, in the early 1530s, for several years the rule of authority remained confused. Montejo continued as titular governor and maintained an interest in the territory, but he spent most of his time in the city of Mexico seeking new support in men and money for his far-reaching ambitions. In 1535, he was named governor of Honduras. Montejo’s wish was to exchange that remote territory for Chiapas, then ruled by Pedro de Alvarado as part of his Guatemala. That would enable Montejo geographically to consolidate his interests better. Alvarado, impetuous in politics as in battle, agreed instantly. He had just returned from his humiliation in Peru. The viceroy Mendoza also agreed.
Alvarado immediately went to this, for him, new territory of Honduras. He founded one new town, San Pedro de Puerto Caballos (now San Pedro Sula), a little south of the Gulf of Honduras. He overwhelmed the natives in Zompa. He sent Juan de Chávez to found a city at the remote but remarkable Cape Gracias a Dios, on the extreme east of the peninsula of Honduras. He was not, however, a good peacetime governor, for he permitted every kind of brutality against the Indians. After this, he returned to Spain in August 1536 to tell of his achievements in New Spain, as Cortés had done earlier. He traveled via the Azores and Lisbon, then made straight for the court. There he seems to have convinced the emperor Charles that it would be good to arrange to send a fleet to sail regularly across the Pacific to the Spice Islands from, say, Acapulco. Álvaro de Paz, a relation of Cortés, said that Alvarado deliberately sought new contracts “for the discovery of the west, for China and for the Spice Islands!”1 Perhaps he was in fact thinking of an invasion of China. A friend of Alvarado’s, Álvaro de Loarca, later recalled that he had said that he would set off for China in consequence of a definite contract he had arranged with the Crown.2 This may have been a wild embroidery of the truth, but Alvarado was capable of anything.
Alvarado returned to the Indies from Spain in January 1539 with three ships, the Santa Catalina, the Trinidad, and the Santa María de Guadalupe. On board, he had not only a new wife (Beatriz d
e la Cueva, a sister of his dead first wife, Francisca) but also Andrés de Urdaneta, who had accompanied Loaisa on his abortive journey around the world. Urdaneta was to assist Alvarado in building a Pacific fleet in Guatemala. They stopped at Santo Domingo and reached Puerto Caballos in Honduras in April. For a time, then, Alvarado continued as governor of Honduras-Higueras with Guatemala, though it was known that he was thinking of the Pacific Ocean and of China. But he was distracted and went up to assist the Viceroy in his fatal battle against the Chichimeca in Jalisco, with the disastrous consequences that have been noticed in chapter 40.3
Alvarado left Guatemala to his new wife, Beatriz, and for a while, she acted as the first woman governor in Spanish America. It is astonishing that, given the concern in the twenty-first century with women in politics, she is not remembered better. She lasted as governor for a year, till 1542, when she was killed in a flood-earthquake in Santiago, Guatemala, with her daughter Ana.
Guatemala enjoyed a certain continuity of Spanish rule after Alvarado’s death. But that was not the case in Honduras-Higueras. There, early in 1542, the town halls wrote to Montejo asking him to take over the governorship, since there was chaos in the territory. The disputes between the town halls had been rendered worse by the nomination of the supreme court in Mexico of one of its judges, Alonso de Maldonado of Salamanca, as acting governor of Honduras as well as of Guatemala. Later, in 1544, he would become President of a new short-lived supreme court, that of Los Confines (the Frontiers), a tribunal later briefly established at Gracias a Dios. Maldonado had married the daughter of Montejo, a fellow citizen of Salamanca, and therefore it was not hard to see where his loyalties would lie. He was a man of many interests since, in addition to being a judge, he loved racing and would hold horse races in his garden in Mexico. Maldonado in 1546 would write to the King that it would be for the well-being of the state if Bartolomé de las Casas were assigned to a monastery in Spain rather than a bishopric in the Indies.4
In these years, Montejo seems to have dreamed of a large territory at his disposition. This would extend from Yucatán as far as Tabasco, near Villahermosa, in the north, to the Bay of Fonseca in the South, on the Pacific. He hoped that Honduras would become the commercial center of the whole region. Guatemala would presumably adhere in due course. But still, Yucatán itself remained unconquered. Montejo commissioned his son El Mozo to complete this process.
Much had occurred to alter the balance of forces in Yucatán. For example, in 1535 or 1536, five Franciscans went there, headed by the interesting figure of Fray Jacobo de Testera, a well-connected churchman, who was a brother of the chamberlain to the King of France. Testera went to the Indies in 1529; he was custodian of the Franciscan mission by 1533; he visited Francisco Montejo, “el Mozo,” in Campeche and, after returning briefly to Castile, sent an enlarged mission to Yucatán, headed by the famous Motolinía, to carry out proselytization there and in nearby Kingdoms. Among Motolinía’s twelve followers were four who later made their mark there: Fray Juan de Herrera, Fray Melchor de Benavente, Fray Lorenzo de Bienvenida, and Fray Luis de Villalpando.
Testera himself was powerful because of the strength of his personality more than for his learning. Yet though he knew no Indian language, he preached with Indian pictures (hieroglyphs) and was very effective.5
At the same time, the Franciscan Motolinía secured permission from Montejo, then in Gracias a Dios, to let Lorenzo de Bienvenida enter Yucatán by a southern route on foot via the Golfo Dulce in the Pacific. But in the end, Villalpando, Benavente, and Herrera went to Yucatán via Chiapas and Palenque. Four other Franciscans arrived in Yucatán direct from Spain. Villalpando, meantime, learned Maya and remained in the west of the territory carrying through the conversion of what he claimed were twenty-eight thousand Indians. He also prepared a Maya dictionary and grammar.
In Champoton, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Montejo el Mozo, now a relatively mature conqueror and administrator, received these Franciscans with attention, welcoming them to his house so that the Indians would also respect and worship the Christian deities.6 El Mozo had a church built for the Franciscans in Champoton and told the natives that the friars had arrived to instruct them in the true faith and lead them to a better life.
This was in keeping with the firm instructions of his high-minded father: “You must strive to see that the people who go with you shall live and act as true Christians, keeping them from evil and public sins, and not allowing them to blaspheme God nor His Blessed Mother nor his saints.”7
In 1540, Montejo el Mozo was gathering a new army together. Unlike those who had accompanied his father ten years and more before, the new men seemed chastened individuals, knowing that Yucatán, unlike Peru, could boast embroidered cloths though not gold, but that there were honey, wax, indigo, cacao, and slaves—all good exports.8
El Mozo returned from his army-raising to Champoton and there met a cousin, Francisco de Montejo, “el Sobrino” (the nephew). They both went up to Campeche, which they reestablished as a Spanish town under the name of San Francisco. They had been reinforced by 250 to 300 well-equipped soldiers and many, perhaps one thousand, Indian auxiliaries. The latter included some Mexicans from Montejo senior’s rich encomienda near Mexico-Tenochtitlan at Atzcapotzalco.
El Mozo’s plan for the conquest of Yucatán was a slow process of penetration by the manipulation of a series of pueblos founded by the Spaniards on Indian bases. Each of these would be self-supporting, with a well-ordered system of supply. Every column that attacked in Yucatán would have a system of communication to avoid isolation. The subjugation of any district beyond existing penetration would not occur till sufficient forces had been gathered. Each town would have the citizens needed to ensure its permanent success. The surrounding district would be brought under control before the town was properly settled.
This “admirably conceived system” was described by the learned North American historian R. S. Chamberlain as “Roman” in its efficiency. El Mozo, as well as his father, the adelantado, worked on the strategy. The columns were instructed to advance in three sections: Mounted troops would advance in the center, with on either side well-armed foot soldiers. In pitched battles, the impact was as decisive as ever, for the Maya were never to find any real defense against the horse. The Relación de Mérida, a full account of the conquest published later, repeats the old story that “at the beginning, they thought that the man and mount were all one animal.”9 Firearms, swords, daggers, lances, and crossbows ensured the Spaniards their usual superiority. Though they often stood their ground very well, the Maya also never overcame their fear of artillery.10
The expedition left Campeche in the autumn of 1541, and a captain was sent to the Indian town of Tihó, which would soon become the city of Mérida. There they founded a new and permanent settlement, the chief receiving them well. They naturally found the remains of the old fortifications, which had been thrown up during the previous Spanish occupation of the 1520s. But those apart, Tihó was a typical Indian town. Though the chief welcomed them, the Indians, reported one of the conquistadors, had “haughtiness and stubbornness in their souls.”11
The disputes among the Maya themselves had, admittedly, continued unabated in the years between, with the Cocom of Sotuta in what seemed like permanent war with the lords of Maní. The former had also killed many important leaders of the Xiu people. The inhabitants of the peninsula had wasted much of their maize during their endless wars with the Spaniards, and such a famine fell on them that it seems that they were reduced to eating the bark of trees, especially the tender kumche. The Xiu offered sacrifices to their gods to escape the persecution visited on them, by throwing slaves into the cenote, the large deep natural well of Chichén Itzá.
All the same, there were some resolute enemies of the Spaniards, such as H-Kin-Chuy, a priest from Pebá, a small pueblo near Tihó, who preached a war of extermination against them—so much so that the Spaniards were told at one stage that “more Indians than a pelt o
f a deer has hairs” were threatening them.
Still, on January 6, 1542, Mérida was finally founded in the north of Yucatán. The name was chosen because “on its site they found buildings of worked lime and stone and with many mouldings,” which, as Extremeños recalled, was the case in the Roman city of Mérida in Spain. Seventy soldiers were named residents, and soon there was a town council. A geometrician, a friend of Alonso de Bravo (who had laid out Mexico-Tenochtitlan after 1521), was asked to design a new town. A Franciscan, Fray Francisco Hernández, was requested to plan the church.
There was an immediate Mayan attack. The seventeenth-century historian Fray Diego de Cogulludo thought that as many as sixty thousand Maya fell on the Spaniards, and “only sword-thrusts could defeat our enemies.” The natives who survived, however, fled away and never again offered an open pitched battle.12
El Mozo sent out little bands of Spanish horsemen in all directions to carry the war into outlying districts, while the Indians sought to destroy everything that might be useful to the Spaniards. But the battle of Mérida had broken the Mayan resistance. El Mozo occupied Techoh and Dzilam. The local chieftains were now under control.13
El Mozo and his cousin next made plans for the general area of Conil in the northeast. They also planned to move against Chikinchel and Ecale, two other regions also on the far northeast of the peninsula. They hoped that Conil would become a center of commerce. Independently, El Mozo moved against interior chieftains such as Sotuta, to whom he read the Requerimiento, without, however, much success. He also defeated the proud Nachi Cocom, who was obliged to accept the formal overlordship of the Spaniards. El Mozo allowed him to retain his usual authority, but as a vassal now of the King of Spain (though, as with other natives, whether he really understood the concept must be extraordinarily doubtful).14