El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  FARTHER WEST, THE exploration and settlement of California had evolved in fits and starts over the course of a century. In the early 1530s the Spanish were still puzzling over the size of the North American landmass and any potential water routes that might connect the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, which had been first explored for Spain by Vasco Núñez de Balboa some twenty years earlier. Hernando Cortés was also eager to have a second haul of good fortune and so funded a couple of expeditions to explore the north by sea. The first left Acapulco in 1532, and its wreckage was found the following year. The next, in 1533, departed from the west coast and was led by Fortún Jiménez after a brief mutiny, reaching the southern tip of Baja California by late December. Jiménez and some of his men were attacked and killed when they went ashore, but the survivors returned to New Spain claiming they had found an island with a large quantity of pearls. Around this time the area started to be referred to as California.120

  For once, the Spanish name came from mythology rather than Catholicism. “California” is thought to be based on the imaginary island of the same name, which was under the rule of Queen Calafia, a character from a tale written around 1510 by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. Las Sergas de Esplandián is a story of this island, located “due east of the Indies,” which was “populated by black women, with no men among them, for they lived in the fashion of Amazons.”121 They displayed “ardent courage and great strength,” not least by feeding any men on the island—including any they gave birth to—to their terrifying griffins.122 The island was also famed for its “abundance of gold and precious stones.”123 The story was set in the context of fighting between Christians and Muslims where Calafia wades into battle and in the end marries and converts to Christianity.

  Legends aside, the report of pearls was enough to convince Cortés to make the journey himself, and, setting sail from Acapulco, he landed in Baja around 1535. His settlement around modern La Paz, almost directly across the Gulf of California from Culiacán, lasted less than two years.124 Despite its failure, Cortés sent Francisco de Ulloa on another expedition, and in 1539 Ulloa navigated around the Gulf of California. After Ulloa, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo left from the small port of Navidad, on the Pacific coast about 450 miles northwest of Acapulco, in 1542, sailing into a natural harbor he called San Miguel, later renamed San Diego.125 Cabrillo and his men continued along the coast, but he died during the voyage and the ships returned to New Spain. Enthusiasm for further costly exploration diminished as silver was found inland and trade boomed with the establishment of the Spanish in the Philippines in 1565. California, for the moment, fell by the wayside.

  Indeed, its next visitor would be not Spanish, but English. Francis Drake, aboard the Golden Hind, arrived in 1579 at a bay to the north of modern San Francisco, after months of raiding the ports along the Pacific coast of South America. He, too, was seeking the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic. He spent around five weeks in Northern California, naming the territory Nova Albion (New England); it is thought he reached as far north as today’s Alaska before sailing to the Philippines and onward back to England via the Cape of Good Hope.126 Drake later continued to pester the Spanish, this time in the West Indies, raiding, among other spots, St. Augustine in Florida in 1586.

  With the growing Pacific trade between Manila and New Spain, Drake’s foray was a cause for concern. In 1587, Spanish ships returning from Manila were ordered to reconnoiter some of the California coast. While doing so, they were attacked and looted by another English pirate, Thomas Cavendish. He set the galleon Santa Ana on fire before departing, but the Spanish crew managed to return to Acapulco in the burned and blackened remains of the ship, sending a clear message about the growing threat in the Pacific.127

  The next serious attempt to explore California’s coastline did not come until 1594. As had been the case in 1587, the exploration was to happen on a return voyage from Manila. This time it was led by the Portuguese merchant Sebastián Rodríguez Cermeño, who reached the same harbor as Drake and claimed it for Spain in 1595. He also went ashore, meeting the Miwok people there, but a storm later destroyed his vessel and he was forced to make his way back to New Spain in a salvaged launch.128

  Using the ships on return from Manila had proved costly, so the next undertaking originated in Acapulco. This one, in 1602, was led by Sebastián Vizcaíno, who had spent time in Manila and had already sailed around parts of Baja California.129 On this voyage, he reached as far north as Cape Mendocino before bad weather forced him to return, naming San Diego and the bay of Monterey, the latter in honor of the viceroy of New Spain who had sent him on the journey: Gaspar de Zúñiga Acevedo y Fonseca, the fifth Count of Monterrey. He reported to the viceroy in December 1602 that the harbor of Monterey was “well situated” and “secure against all winds,” with a ready supply of pine trees nearby, making it an ideal stopping point for the ships coming from the Philippines; he said it was “thickly peopled by Indians and is very fertile, in its climate and the quality of the soil resembling Castile, and any seed sown there will give fruit, and there are extensive lands fit for pasturage, and many kinds of animals and birds.”130

  Despite the glowing report, there was no further exploration of California for another eighty years, it being too remote and expensive to be a wise use of New Spain’s resources. When initial settlement did happen, it was spearheaded by the Jesuits. They began to establish remote missions in Baja California in 1684.131 Leading the effort was perhaps the best-known Jesuit from this period, Eusebio Kino, who was accompanied by Juan María de Salvatierra. They were not Spaniards but rather from northern Italy, and Kino had been sent by the order to New Spain, arriving in 1681. By 1683 he was exploring the Baja Peninsula, having sailed there from the Pacific port of Chacala. Later, under his leadership, the mission of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (Our Lady of Sorrows) in Sonora was set up in 1687. From there he moved into the Gila and Colorado River basins.132 Like the missionaries in New Mexico, Kino and his men faced resistance from Native Americans, including a 1695 rebellion in which two priests were killed and the mission of San Pedro y San Pablo del Tubutama, now in the modern Mexican state of Sonora, about seventy miles south of the U.S. border, was attacked. Spanish troops became involved in the retaliation, and the fighting lasted for four months.133 Despite the threats, Kino walked or rode thousands of miles, covering the land and meeting numerous Native Americans, many of whom ended up building the priest’s missions, until his death in 1711.

  KINO’S LEGACY CAN be seen about ten miles south of Tucson, Arizona, where the “white dove of the desert” rises out of the bleak browns and muted patches of green, the gleaming towers of the church contrasting with their flat setting, as if the entire structure had been dropped down from the sky. San Xavier del Bac sits around a mile from Kino’s original 1692 site and, unlike the mission of Tumacácori to the south, it remains intact. Today its ornate carved facade is not crumbling, and its interior, framed by an elaborate gilt altarpiece, signals its continued use as a place of worship and as a historical site, a spiritual link between Kino’s world and today’s, as does its continued connection with the Tohono O’odham people.*

  Many other reminders exist of the long seventeenth century that transformed these outer limits of El Norte. San Miguel, in Santa Fe, claims that its foundation dates back to 1610—making it the oldest church in the continental United States. Even the rebellious Acoma preserved San Estevan del Rey, and its smooth facade and towers continue to overlook the far edge of the Sky City. Some Spanish and Pueblo ruins have become park sites, and tourists in New Mexico can walk among the former villages and missions of San Gregorio de Abó, Gran Quivira, and Quarai, all of which date back to the 1620s and today make up the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. Even Unesco has stepped in, deeming the multistoried brown houses of the Taos pueblo a World Heritage Site. The diverse complexity of the world that Oñate, Kino, and thousands of Spaniards found themselves in lives on. The legacy of what took place there, however, remains
contested.

  Just outside the sleepy village of Alcalde, New Mexico, heading north along Highway 68, is a man on horseback. Juan de Oñate sits tall on his bronze steed, riding over rough grass and tall weeds. Behind the statue are bare flagpoles and a faded pink building named Oñate Monument and Visitor Center. The statue sits diminished by these surroundings, as if Oñate had taken a wrong turn. Many people in the area might argue that he had.

  The statue came to national attention in 1998—the four-hundredth anniversary of Oñate’s arrival in New Mexico—when the New York Times reported that a group of Acoma people had sneaked into the site and taken a saw to Oñate’s right foot, seeking vengeance for the punishment meted out to their ancestors.134 This act embodied the region’s competing histories: for the Hispanic population, the Oñate statue was an emblem of their heritage, while to the Acoma it was an insult. Today this statue of Oñate has both feet—for now.

  An even larger seventeen-ton statue of Oñate greets passengers just outside the El Paso airport, with his mighty horse rearing back, ready to head for the horizon. Yet this statue does not bear his name, after Native American groups convinced the city council to call it The Equestrian.135 Dedicated in 2007, the work “commemorates the shared history of Spain, Mexico and the United States at El Paso del Norte.”

  Despite the controversies, the conquistador era continues to loom large in New Mexico. Santa Fe has an annual three-day celebration, the Santa Fe Fiesta, which dates back to 1712 and was established in honor of Diego de Vargas’s entrada in 1692. People wear period costumes, attend religious processions, and commemorate the events of more than three hundred years ago, though the fiesta also attracts protests.136 The New Mexican town of Española, about ten miles south of Alcalde, holds a three-day Fiesta del Valle de Española every June, a festival dating to around 1933 that also commemorates the arrival of the Spanish. This fiesta begins with the naming of a Don Juan de Oñate and the coronation of a queen, La Reina. Oñate is attended by young men dressed as conquistadores, while the queen has her female court, which includes Native American members.137

  In places like the Coronado National Memorial south of Tucson—a forest named in honor of the Spanish explorer—such overlaps and contrasts are more solemn. A sign at the entrance to the park, across from one that bears an illustration of a conquistador, presumably Coronado, on his horse, says: “Smuggling and/or illegal entry is common in this area due to the proximity of the international border.” People who today follow in the Spaniards’ footsteps, moving from south to north through the park’s 4,750 acres, face a similar range of natural threats, such as bears and extreme temperatures in the Huachuca Mountains. Now the additional prowl of the Border Patrol, whose SUVs, complete with built-in holding cells, race up and down the road, acts as a reminder that this region’s past remains complicated by the demands of the present.

  * San Xavier was rebuilt by the Franciscans in 1783.

  Chapter 4

  Fort Mose, Florida, ca. 1600–1760

  WHILE THE SPANISH were pushing into New Mexico and the West, the English and Dutch had been lured to the Atlantic coast of North America. They, too, wanted to see what they could find—at the very least there might be a Spanish ship to capture, though many people persisted in the belief that there would be precious metals. The geographer and colonial enthusiast Richard Hakluyt thought the earlier writings from adventurers and explorers, like Jean Ribault’s account of Florida, held clues. Hakluyt wrote in his 1584 Discourse of Western Planting that there was “in the lande golde, silver and copper.” These were metals that, argued Hakluyt, would be in colonies rightfully claimed by Queen Elizabeth I, a territory stretching “from Florida northward to 67 degrees, (and not yet in any Christian princes actual possession).”

  Hakluyt supported the planting of English colonies in North America for a number of reasons, not least because it would “be greatly for thinlargment [sic] of the gospel of Christe.” Perhaps more important, it would benefit trade, it would bring “manifolde imployment of nombers of idle men.” Such a colony would also allow the English to find the Northwest Passage, and, perhaps best of all, it would humiliate Felipe II because “the lymites of the kinge of Spaines domynions in the west Indies be nothing so large as ys generally ymagined.”1

  The English were already familiar with such enterprises—before they started looking across the Atlantic, they had focused on Ireland. More than one hundred thousand people, mainly Protestants from England, Wales, and especially Scotland, left for Ireland in the seventeenth century, setting up “plantations”—a system that rewarded them with land ownership and altered the dynamics of social and political relations to the detriment of the Catholic Irish. The island had been made a part of Henry VIII’s kingdom in 1541, but the settlement process accelerated under James I’s Plantation of Ulster, in 1609. These developments, however, met with periods of fierce Irish resistance and required the presence of tens of thousands of soldiers.

  Settlement expeditions were costly, and so would-be colonizers had to possess the money themselves or raise it through crown-sanctioned joint-stock companies.2 The first serious attempt to place a colony in North America was promoted by the adventurer Walter Raleigh, who was also an Irish landowner. He received a charter from Elizabeth I to put a settlement in what the Spanish considered to be Florida but the English thought of as being “not inhabited by Christian people.”3 A place was found in 1585 between the long stretch of barrier islands along modern North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the mainland, near the Albemarle Sound. These English settlers lived among the Roanoke people, and so the place adopted that name, in an area they called Virginia, thought to be named in honor of the Virgin Queen, though perhaps also inspired by a powerful local chief, Wingina. Although Raleigh did not join the settlers, he hoped the spot would prosper as a base for privateering attacks on the Spanish fleet. Indeed, Francis Drake sailed there after his May 1586 sacking of St. Augustine.

  The colonists survived through one winter, but they faced many of the same difficulties as the French in Florida had twenty years earlier, especially food shortages and deteriorating relations with the Native Americans. By the time Drake arrived in June 1586, the settlers wanted to return to England and the colony was abandoned. A new batch of hopeful colonists was sent out in 1587, but because of ongoing naval hostilities between England and Spain—a period that included the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588—no resupply ships could reach the colony. When they finally did arrive in 1590, they found no survivors.

  This failure did not dim English enthusiasm for overseas colonies, and plans to try again were aided by the 1604 Treaty of London. This accord ended, for the time being, the hostilities between Spain and England, and trading resumed. James I had come to the English throne in 1603, and his counterpart in Spain, Felipe III, had ascended in 1598. Although James I wanted to improve relations with Spain, many of the English remained distrustful of Catholic Spaniards, while some of the Spanish were wary of England’s designs on the Americas. There were plenty of good reasons to harbor suspicions, as Pedro de Zúñiga, Spain’s ambassador to England, discovered.

  Zúñiga arrived in England in July 1605 and by 1607 was relaying his intelligence about plans “made in great secrecy” to send ships to Virginia and Plymouth.4 Zúñiga managed to gain an audience with James I in October that year, when he reiterated the claim that Virginia “is a part of the Indies belonging to Castile.” James I rejected this, saying such measures were not outlined in the 1604 treaty. Zúñiga reported that “he [James I] had never known that Your Majesty had a right to it [Virginia], for it was a region very far from where the Spaniards had settled.” He told Zúñiga that the participants in these voyages undertook them at their own risk, and so could not complain if the Spanish did capture and punish them. Their meeting ended with a final plea from Zúñiga that “a remedy be found for the Virginia affair,” though none was forthcoming.5

  Zúñiga continued to worry about the implicati
ons for Spain, telling his king in 1609 that he understood the settlements were considered to be “so perfect (as they say) for piratical excursions that Your Majesty will not be able to bring silver from the Indies.” Zúñiga’s advice in dealing with the settlements was to “command that they be crushed as quickly as possible.”6 Felipe III sent Francisco Fernández de Écija, a captain who had served with Governor Menéndez when St. Augustine was founded, to find out more. Although by this point in his sixties, Écija sailed from St. Augustine in June 1609 to gather information about Virginia.7 His report detailed his travels along the coast, including the area around Santa Elena, and his meetings with Native Americans. He sailed near the ruins of the Roanoke Colony, which the Spanish had known about, before heading up to Chesapeake Bay, where his men finally caught sight of an English vessel that “carried two topsails and a great flag at the masthead.” They did not escape detection, and an English ship followed them for a while.8 Once out of the line of attack, the Spaniards continued their investigation, before returning to St. Augustine by late September.9

  By the time of Écija’s report, the Virginia Colony had been well established, with its settlers arriving in 1607. Although at least one hundred thousand Spaniards had emigrated to Spain’s colonies by 1600, with some estimates reaching three hundred thousand, few of them were living anywhere near Virginia—most were in New Spain or farther south—leaving an area the Spanish considered to be theirs undefended.10 The English settlement, organized by the Virginia Company, was farther north than Roanoke, in the Chesapeake Bay area. To the Spanish this had been the ill-fated land of Ajacán that they had abandoned a century earlier, but to the English it was Jamestown, named for James I. In the same year that ships departed for Virginia, other vessels headed farther north, funded by the Plymouth Company, which also had a charter. Those settlers established the Popham Colony in 1607, on the Kennebec River in today’s Maine, and built a small fort. However, after a year—including a harsh winter—its colonists returned to England.