America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (4 page)

This is how the world must have appeared to Spain’s King Charles I, successor to Ferdinand in 1516. On his father’s side, Charles was a member of the royal Hapsburg family and through that association was also named Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519. The future king of Spain was raised in Brussels and did not learn to speak Spanish until after he succeeded to the throne. But he clearly understood the language of conquest. In 1521, he ordered the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, to send an expedition to explore Mexico. Velázquez in turn handed the job to Hernan Cortés. What Cortés discovered and conquered surely confirmed the belief that Spain was favored by | 20 \

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God, as conquistador Bernal Díaz recorded in a subjective account, written some fifty years after the Spanish arrival in Mexico: And when we entered the city . . . the sight of the palaces in which they lodged us! They were very spacious and well built, of magnificent stone, cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet-smelling trees, with great rooms and courts, which were a wonderful sight, and all covered with awnings of woven cotton.

When we had a good look at all this, we went to the orchards and gardens, which was a marvelous place both to see and walk in. . . . The Caciques of that town . . . brought us a present of gold worth more than two thousand pesos; and Cortés thanked them heartily for it . . . telling them through our interpreter something about our holy faith, and declaring to them the great power of our lord the Emperor.

—
Bernal Díaz,
The Conquest of New Spain (
1568
)
After subduing Mexico and commencing to strip its riches, the Spanish began to look elsewhere in this marvelous New World for empires to conquer and heathens to convert. Among these was Florida, where men with grandiose visions of another Aztec city of gold would meet a different end. Florida had first been sighted and named by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León of “Fountain of Youth” fame on Easter Sunday 1513. He called the territory “La Pascua Florida,” the name of a Spanish Eastertime festival, and the Spanish later called it simply “La Florida”; in time, plain Florida is what stuck. The Spanish probably should have taken a cue about their prospects in Florida from Ponce de León’s fate. Returning to Florida in 1521 to establish a colony, Ponce de León was wounded by a poisoned arrow when Indians at-

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tacked during the landing near present-day Fort Myers. Transported back to Cuba, Florida’s “discoverer” died an agonizing death in July 1521, one of many conquistadors done in by the New World.

But the Spanish pressed on. Several years later, another expedition sailed for Florida. Commissioned by King Charles, this group of explorers held out great hopes of uncovering new lands and more gold.

Following its departure from Cuba for Florida in 1528, however, the expedition vanished in Florida’s swamps. Its fate would remain a mystery for nearly eight years.

And then the silence was unexpectedly broken an entire continent away from Florida. Late in the winter or early spring of 1536, a nearly naked man covered in tattoos emerged from the wilderness near what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast. Accompanied by a dozen or so Indians and a black man, he called out to a group of Spanish slave hunters looking for Indian captives. At first, the soldiers who saw this wild man must have thought he was one of the Indians. But then, to their amazement, the man addressed them in Spanish. As he later recounted the meeting, “Next morning, I overtook four mounted Christians, who were thunderstruck to see me so strangely dressed and in the company of Indians. They went on staring at me for long space of time, so astonished that they could neither speak to me nor manage to ask me anything. I told them to take me to their captain.”12

Emaciated and half naked, this strange apparition might as well have been a ghost; his name was that of a man long thought dead. A trusted courtier of Spain’s King Charles I, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had disappeared along with more than four hundred other Spaniards not long after they left Cuba for Florida in the spring of 1528.

Cabeza de Vaca was a member of the Spanish army that had come to conquer Florida and perhaps discover another magnificent New World | 22 \

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empire. But the riches dreamed of in Florida were a myth—fool’s gold.

This ill-fated army encountered little but hunger, disaster, and misery before disappearing from view.

Cabeza de Vaca’s extraordinary odyssey had begun in 1527, when conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez was commissioned to try again where Ponce de León had failed. Narváez had earned his stripes with Diego Velázquez and Cortés in the brutal 1512 campaign to subjugate Cuba, described as “the laboratory of the destruction of the New World: slavery, mining, forced conversions, extermination.”13 In 1520, Narváez had been dispatched by Velázquez with orders to arrest an insubordinate Cortés, then beginning his conquest of Mexico. Alerted to the plot against him, Cortés struck first against his fellow Spaniard. The battle left Narváez wounded, broken, half blind, and festering in a sweltering, mosquito-infested Mexican cell. Cortés went on to conquer Mexico, becoming wealthy beyond dreams and inspiring a generation of conquistadors.

Eventually released from prison, Narváez recovered from his wounds and humiliation, but he still dreamed of finding a civilization the equal of Mexico. Now in his fifties, he left Spain in 1527 with five ships, approximately six hundred men, and a handful of women to serve as cooks and servants. Also on board was Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who acted as “treasurer and chief officer of justice.” The expedition sailed first for Cuba, where Narváez hoped to add fresh provisions, horses, and additional recruits. If the priests who accompanied the expedition had asked for good weather, their prayers went unan-swered. Events in Cuba might have served as a harbinger of what was to come, as a powerful hurricane—a word the Spanish had borrowed from the name of the Mayan storm god, Huracan—struck the fleet, sinking two ships, killing more than fifty men, and convincing many others to remain in Cuba.

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Narváez pressed on with a single-mindedness that is the hallmark of many successful adventurers. But in his case, it proved to be the foolhardiness of a man so desperate for gold and glory that all caution was abandoned. Led by ship’s pilots who talked a good game about knowing the waters off Florida but seemed as lost as anyone, the expedition, now numbering some four hundred, finally arrived in Florida’s Gulf waters on April 14, 1528, reaching the vicinity of what is now Tampa Bay.

From the outset of the expedition, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca did not find Narváez an especially judicious leader. And Narváez viewed this fussy “accountant” as a royal spy. In his forties, Cabeza de Vaca was an educated courtier whose family was reasonably well-to-do.

His name, which literally means “head of the cow,” was an honorific title bestowed, according to family legend, by a grateful king upon an ancestor who, in 1212, had helped the king by marking a secret mountain pass with a cow’s skull, allowing a Christian army to surprise a Moorish enemy. One of his relatives had been a tutor to King Charles I, and Cabeza de Vaca had pulled court strings to secure his appointment. In Cabeza de Vaca’s memoir of the expedition—which must be read with a jaundiced eye, as it is clearly the self-aggrandizing work of a man with an agenda—Narváez is consistently depicted as making poor decisions and ignoring good advice, usually dispensed by Cabeza de Vaca himself. At one point, annoyed at Cabeza de Vaca’s repeated cautions, Narváez suggested that Cabeza de Vaca turn back. The courtier balked at the suggestion that his wariness was cowardice.

Their first significant dispute came when Narváez divided his forces, again ignoring Cabeza de Vaca’s counsel. Disembarking with about three hundred men and some women, Narváez left the other hundred men on the three ships, with orders to sail along the coast | 24 \

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of Florida to an eventual rendezvous with the army—although where this rendezvous would actually take place was never established. Lacking experienced pilots, the men on the ships soon became hopelessly disoriented and headed back to “New Spain” (Mexico), giving up Narváez and his army for lost.

Narváez
was
lost. He was leading his troops inland, moving north, roughly parallel to Florida’s Gulf coast. Their horses and heavy armor were poor choices for negotiating swamps filled with alligators, poison-ous snakes, and mosquitoes in Florida’s tropical heat and humidity.

Relentless in the hope of finding an empire of gold, they recklessly hacked through the wilderness without competent guides or a sense of direction. The Indian encampments they discovered were often empty of both people and maize, as the natives had the good sense to disappear at the first sight of Europeans. Still, Narváez pressed on, spurred by the fact that the few Indians they captured all told tales of bigger villages with more food and the gold that the Spaniards seemed to care for more than anything. “Apalachee” is what the Spaniards thought the Indians called this kingdom. All of these desperate, hungry, and sick conquistadors must have had visions of another gold-encrusted city like Tenochtitlán. But they had fallen for a common trick. Telling the Spanish that the grass was greener in the next neighborhood was an excellent tactic that few Spaniards ever figured out.

After months of debilitating tropical illnesses and constant skirmishes with Indians, and completely demoralized by their failure to find gold or food, the expedition reached the sea at what is now Pensac-ola Bay. With no sign of the three ships that were supposed to rendezvous with them, the survivors of this disastrous foray made a desperate decision. They would build boats and sail to Mexico by hugging the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico.

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With incredible ingenuity, they melted down stirrups and nails, scrounged bits of leather and deerskin, and wove strands of palmetto fiber to create five flimsy boats, tarred with some pine pitch and rigged with sails improvised from their shirts. Holding nearly fifty men each and hardly seaworthy, this patchwork flotilla set sail in late September—“with none among us having any knowledge of the art of navigation,” Cabeza de Vaca noted in supreme understatement. Caught in bad weather and buffeted by the powerful currents produced where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico, the overloaded boats were quickly separated. Narváez and most of his men were never seen again. Fewer than a hundred survivors washed up on the shore of an island that Cabeza de Vaca called the Isle of Misfortune—most likely Galveston Island, off the coast of Texas. It was here that Cabeza de Vaca spent the winter, and the band of survivors was soon reduced to fifteen, some of them resorting to cannibalism to survive. Finally, Cabeza de Vaca found himself alone, except for the natives who eked out a harsh life on the coast.

After years of wandering as a self-described trader in shells and itinerant medicine man, Cabeza de Vaca learned of three other “Christians,” including the Moroccan Estevanico. Together, they set out for New Spain (Mexico). When Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions emerged from the mountains on Mexico’s Pacific coast after eight years, much had changed in Spain’s American empire. Another great civilization had been discovered and devastated in Peru. Led by Pizarro in a conquest stunning in its cruelty, the men who swept into the land of the Inca captured cities and found mines filled with vast wealth, and Spanish galleons were soon sailing for Spain laden with gold and silver. Among Pizarro’s lieutenants was conquistador Hernando de Soto. When Cabeza de Vaca finally reached Spain, hoping | 26 \

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that he might be given leave to explore Florida, he was disappointed to learn that de Soto had already been named governor of Cuba and granted the right to conquer Florida.

Before leaving Spain, de Soto briefly met with Cabeza de Vaca.

But if de Soto had gleaned anything useful from Cabeza de Vaca, he did not put the intelligence to good use. Well schooled in the conquistador’s most brutal techniques, de Soto employed them in a scorched-earth march through Florida and other parts of the American south-east. Starting in 1539, de Soto’s disastrous campaign replayed all of Narváez’s worst mistakes, tragically for both his men and the Indians they encountered. Utterly blinded by the hope of uncovering another Aztec or Incan empire, de Soto led a forced march that was little more than a reign of terror.

These were the things they brought: crossbows; the harquebus; horses, not seen in the Americas before Cortés; and many war dogs.

Long used in Europe, these fearsome, armored mastiffs and wolf-hounds were trained to attack and rip humans to pieces. The Spanish employed them with horrible effect against people who had never seen horses or guns, had no steel, and fought their highly ritualized battles with obsidian knives, wearing cotton armor. “Dogs were as standard as horses in the Spanish invasion,” as Paul Schneider described their grim value. “Cortés took them to Mexico, Ponce de León took them to Puerto Rico. In Panama, Balboa used dogs not just in battle but to enforce good Christian sexual mores and dress codes: ‘The (native) king’s brother and a number of other courtiers were dressed as women, and according to the accounts of the neighbors shared the same passion. . . .

Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.’”14

Now de Soto put them to deadly use in Florida, setting them on Indian villagers to break any resistance. But in vain. With his army | 27 \

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wandering aimlessly, bested by tribes who had learned from their earlier encounters with the Spanish, de Soto’s campaign ended in misery.

Sickened by disease, he died on the banks of the Mississippi on May 21, 1542. The remnants of his army limped back to Mexico a year later.

z

w i t h t h e s e a n d other mounting, costly disappointments, King Philip II, who had succeeded to the throne in 1556, put an end to Spanish attempts to settle Florida in 1561. But when word of the French settlement at Fort Caroline reached Philip in 1562, all that changed.