FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[3]As he himself complains: "The very tailors turned explorers."

[3]As he himself complains: "The very tailors turned explorers."

While Columbus was sailing back and forth between the Old World and the new one which he had found, was building towns and naming what were to be nations, England seemed almost ready to take a hand. All Europe was interested in the strange news which came from Spain. England moved through the instrumentality of a Venetian, whom we know as Sebastian Cabot. On the 5th of March, 1496,—four years after Columbus's discovery,—Henry VII. of England granted a patent to "John Gabote, a citizen of Venice," and his three sons, allowing them to sail westward on a voyage of discovery. John, and Sebastian his son, sailed from Bristol in 1497, and saw the mainland of America at daybreak, June 24, of the same year,—probably the coast of Nova Scotia,—but did nothing. After their return to England, the elder Cabot died. In May, 1498, Sebastian sailed on his second voyage, which probably took him into Hudson's Bay and a few hundred miles down the coast. There is little probability in the theory that he ever saw any part of what is now the United States. He was a northern rover,—so thoroughly so, that the threehundred colonists whom he brought out perished with cold in July.

England did not treat her one early explorer well; and in 1512 Cabot entered the more grateful service of Spain. In 1517 he sailed to the Spanish possessions in the West Indies, on which voyage he was accompanied by an Englishman named Thomas Pert. In August, 1526, Cabot sailed with another Spanish expedition bound for the Pacific, which had already been discovered by a heroic Spaniard; but his officers mutinied, and he was obliged to abandon his purpose. He explored the Rio de la Plata (the "Silver River") for a thousand miles, built a fort at one of the mouths of the Paraña, and explored part of that river and of the Paraguay,—for South America had been for nearly a generation a Spanish possession. Thence he returned to Spain, and later to England, where he died about 1557.

Of the rude maps which Cabot made of the New World, all are lost save one which is preserved in France; and there are no documents left of him. Cabot was a genuine explorer, and must be included in the list of the pioneers of America, but as one whose work was fruitless of consequences, and who saw, but did not take a hand in, the New World. He was a man of high courage and stubborn perseverance, and will be remembered as the discoverer of Newfoundland and the extreme northern mainland.

After Cabot, England took a nap of more than half a century. When she woke again, it was to findthat Spain's sleepless sons had scattered over half the New World; and that even France and Portugal had left her far behind. Cabot, who was not an Englishman, was the first English explorer; and the next were Drake and Hawkins, and then Captains Amadas and Barlow, after a lapse of seventy-five and eighty-seven years, respectively,—during which a large part of the two continents had been discovered, explored, and settled by other nations, of which Spain was undeniably in the lead. Columbus, the first Spanish explorer, was not a Spaniard; but with his first discovery began such an impetuous and unceasing rush of Spanish-born explorers as achieved more in a hundred years than all the other nations of Europe put together achieved here in America's first three hundred. Cabot saw and did nothing; and three quarters of a century later Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake—whom old histories laud greatly, but who got rich by selling poor Africans into slavery, and by actual piracy against unprotected ships and towns of the colonies of Spain, with which their mother England was then at peace—saw the West Indies and the Pacific, more than half a century after these had become possessions of Spain. Drake was the first Englishman to go through the Straits of Magellan,—and he did it sixty years after that heroic Portuguese had found them and christened them with his life-blood. Drake was probably first to see what is now Oregon,—his only important discovery. He "took possession" of Oregon for England, under the name of"New Albion;" but old Albion never had a settlement there.

Sir John Hawkins, Drake's kinsman, was, like him, a distinguished sailor, but not a real discoverer or explorer at all. Neither of them explored or colonized the New World; and neither left much more impress on its history than if he had never been born. Drake brought the first potatoes to England; but the importance even of that discovery was not dreamed of till long after, and by other men.

Captains Amadas and Barlow, in 1584, saw our coast at Cape Hatteras and the island of Roanoke, and went away without any permanent result. The following year Sir Richard Grenville discovered Cape Fear, and there was an end of it. Then came Sir Walter Raleigh's famous but petty expeditions to Virginia, the Orinoco, and New Guinea, and the less important voyages of John Davis (in 1585-87) to the Northwest. Nor must we forget brave Martin Frobisher's fruitless voyages to Greenland in 1576-81. This was the end of England in America until the seventeenth century. In 1602 Captain Gosnold coasted nearly our whole Atlantic seaboard, particularly about Cape Cod; and five years later yet was the beginning of English occupancy in the New World. The first English settlement which made a serious mark on history—as Jamestown did not—was that of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1602; and they came not for the sake of opening a new world, but to escape the intolerance of the old. In fact, as Mr. Winsor has pointed out, the Saxon never took any particular interest in America until it began to be understood as acommercialopportunity.

ONE OF THE MOQUI TOWNS.ONE OF THE MOQUI TOWNS.See page 87.

But when we turn to Spain, what a record is that of the hundred years after Columbus and before Plymouth Rock! In 1499 Vincente Yañez de Pinzon, a companion of Columbus, discovered the coast of Brazil, and claimed the new country for Spain, but made no settlement. His discoveries were at the mouths of the Amazon and the Orinoco; and he was the first European to see the greatest river in the world. In the following year Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a Portuguese, was driven to the coast of Brazil by a storm, "took possession" for Portugal, and founded a colony there.

As to Amerigo Vespucci, the inconsiderable adventurer whose name so overshadows his exploits, his American claims are extremely dubious. Vespucci was born in Florence in 1451, and was an educated man,—his father being a notary and his uncle a Dominican who gave him a good schooling. He became a clerk in the great house of the Medicis, and in their service was sent to Spain about 1490. There he presently got into the employ of the merchant who fitted out Columbus's second expedition,—a Florentine named Juanoto Berardi. When Berardi died, in 1495, he left an unfinished contract to fit out twelve ships for the Crown; and Vespucci was intrusted with the completion of the contract. There is no reason whatever to believethat he accompanied Columbus either on the first or the second voyage. According to his own story, he sailed from Cadiz May 10, 1497 (in a Spanish expedition), and reached the mainland eighteen days before Cabot saw it. The statement of encyclopædias that Vespucci "probably got as far north as Cape Hatteras" is ridiculous. The proof is absolute that he never saw an inch of the New World north of the equator. Returning to Spain in the latter part of 1498, he sailed again, May 16, 1499, with Ojeda, to San Domingo, a voyage on which he was absent about eighteen months. He left Lisbon on his third voyage, May 10, 1501, going to Brazil. It is not true, despite the encyclopædias, that he discovered and named the Bay of Rio Janeiro; both those honors belong to Cabral, the real discoverer and pioneer of Brazil, and a man of vastly greater historical importance than Vespucci. Vespucci's fourth voyage took him from Lisbon (June 10, 1503) to Bahia, and thence to Cape Frio, where he built a little fort. In 1504 he returned to Portugal, and in the following year to Spain, where he died in 1512.

These voyages rest only on Vespucci's own statements, which are not to be implicitly believed. It is probable that he did not sail at all in 1497, and quite certain that he had no share whatever in the real discoveries in the New World.

The name "America" was first invented and applied in 1507 by an ill-informed German printer, named Waldzeemüller, who had got hold of AmerigoVespucci's documents. History is full of injustices, but never a greater among them all than the christening of America. It would have been as appropriate to call it Walzeemüllera. The first map of America was made in 1500 by Juan de la Cosa, a Spaniard,—and a very funny map it would seem to the schoolboy of to-day. The first geography of America was by Enciso, a Spaniard, in 1517.

It is pleasant to turn from an overrated and very dubious man to those genuine but almost unheard-of Portuguese heroes, the brothers Gaspard and Miguel Corte-Real. Gaspard sailed from Lisbon in the year 1500, and discovered and named Labrador,—"the laborer." In 1501 he sailed again from Portugal to the Arctic, and never returned. After waiting a year, his brother Miguel led an expedition to find and rescue him; but he too perished, with all his men, among the ice-floes of the Arctic. A third brother wished to go in quest of the lost explorers, but was forbidden by the king, who himself sent out a relief expedition of two ships; but no trace of the gallant Corte-Reals, nor of any of their men, was ever found.

Such was the pioneering of America up to the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century,—a series of gallant and dangerous voyages (of which only the most notable ones of the great Spanish inrush have been mentioned), resulting in a few ephemeral colonies, but important only as a peep into the doors of the New World. The real hardships and dangers, the real exploration and conquest of the Americas,began with the decade from 1510 to 1520,—the beginning of a century of such exploration and conquest as the world never saw before nor since. Spain had it all to herself, save for the heroic but comparatively petty achievements of Portugal in South America, between the Spanish points of conquest. The sixteenth century in the New World was unparalleled in military history; and it produced, or rather developed, such men as tower far above the later conquerors in their achievement. Our part of the hemisphere has never made such startling chapters of conquest as were carved in the grimmer wildernesses to our south by Cortez, Pizarro, Valdivia, and Quesada, the greatest subduers of wild America.

There were at least a hundred other early Spanish heroes, unknown to public fame and buried in obscurity until real history shall give them their well-earned praise. There is no reason to believe that these unremembered heroes were morecapableof great things than our Israel Putnams and Ethan Allens and Francis Marions and Daniel Boones; but theydidmuch greater things under the spur of greater necessity and opportunity. A hundred such, I say; but really the list is too long to be even catalogued here; and to pay attention to their greater brethren will fill this book. No other mother-nation ever bore a hundred Stanleys and four Julius Cæsars in one century; but that is part of what Spain did for the New World. Pizarro, Cortez, Valdivia, and Quesada are entitled to be called the Cæsars of the New World; and no other conquests in the history ofAmerica are at all comparable to theirs. As among the four, it is almost difficult to say which was greatest; though there is really but one answer possible to the historian. The choice lies of course between Cortez and Pizarro, and for years was wrongly made. Cortez was first in time, and his operations seem to us nearer home. He was a highly educated man for his time, and, like Cæsar, had the advantage of being able to write his own biography; while his distant cousin Pizarro could neither read nor write, but had to "make his mark,"—a striking contrast with the bold and handsome (for those days) autograph of Cortez. But Pizarro—who had this lack of education as a handicap from the first, who went through infinitely greater hardships and difficulties than Cortez, and managed the conquest of an area as great with a third as many men as Cortez had, and very much more desperate and rebellious men—was beyond question the greatest Spanish American, and the greatest tamer of the New World. It is for that reason, and because such gross injustice has been done him, that I have chosen his marvellous career, to be detailed later in this book, as a picture of the supreme heroism of the Spanish pioneers.

But while Pizarro was greatest, all four were worthy the rank they have been assigned as the Cæsars of America.

Certain it is that the bald-headed little great man of old Rome, who crowds the page of ancient history, did nothing greater than each of those four Spanish heroes, who with a few tattered Spaniardsin place of the iron legions of Rome conquered each an inconceivable wilderness as savage as Cæsar found, and five times as big. Popular opinion long did a vast injustice to these and all other of the Spanishconquistadores, belittling their military achievements on account of their alleged great superiority of weapons over the savages, and taxing them with a cruel and relentless extermination of the aborigines. The clear, cold light of true history tells a different tale. In the first place, the advantage of weapons was hardly more than a moral advantage in inspiring awe among the savages at first, for the sadly clumsy and ineffective firearms of the day were scarcely more dangerous than the aboriginal bows which opposed them. They were effective at not much greater range than arrows, and were tenfold slower of delivery. As to the cumbrous and usually dilapidated armor of the Spaniard and his horse, it by no means fully protected either from the agate-tipped arrows of the savages; and it rendered both man and beast ill-fitted to cope with their agile foes in any extremity, besides being a frightful burden in those tropic heats. The "artillery" of the times was almost as worthless as the ridiculous arquebuses. As to their treatment of the natives, there was incomparably less cruelty suffered by the Indians who opposed the Spaniards than by those who lay in the path of any other European colonizers. The Spanish did not obliterateanyaboriginal nation,—as our ancestors obliterated scores,—but followed the first necessarily bloody lesson with humane educationand care. Indeed, the actual Indian population of the Spanish possessions in America is larger to-day than it was at the time of the conquest; and in that astounding contrast of conditions, and its lesson as to contrast of methods, is sufficient answer to the distorters of history.

Before we come to the great conquerors, however, we must outline the eventful career and tragic end of the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. In one of the noblest poems in the English language we read,—

"Like stout Cortes, when with eagle eyesHe stared at the Pacific, and all his menLooked at each other with a wild surmise,Silent upon a peak in Darien."

But Keats was mistaken. It was not Cortez who first saw the Pacific, but Balboa,—five years before Cortez came to the mainland of America at all.

Balboa was born in the province of Estremadura, Spain, in 1475. In 1501 he sailed with Bastidas for the New World, and then saw Darien, but settled on the island of Española. Nine years later he sailed to Darien with Enciso, and there remained. Life in the New World then was a troublous affair, and the first years of Balboa's life there were eventful enough, though we must pass them over. Quarrels presently arose in the colony of Darien. Enciso was deposed and shipped back to Spain a prisoner, and Balboa took command. Enciso, upon his arrival in Spain, laid all the blame upon Balboa, and got him condemned by the king for high treason.Learning of this, Balboa determined upon a master-stroke whose brilliancy should restore him to the royal favor. From the natives he had heard of the other ocean and of Peru,—neither yet seen by European eyes,—and made up his mind to find them. In September, 1513, he sailed to Coyba with one hundred and ninety men, and from that point, with only ninety followers, tramped across the Isthmus to the Pacific,—for its length one of the most frightful journeys imaginable. It was on the 26th of September, 1513, that from the summit of the divide the tattered, bleeding heroes looked down upon the blue infinity of the South Sea,—for it was not called the Pacific until long after. They descended to the coast; and Balboa, wading out knee-deep into the new ocean, holding aloft in his right hand his slender sword, and in his left the proud flag of Spain, took solemn possession of the South Sea in the name of the King of Spain.

The explorers got back to Darien Jan. 18, 1514, and Balboa sent to Spain an account of his great discovery. But Pedro Arias de Avila had already sailed from the mother country to supplant him. At last, however, Balboa's brilliant news reached the king, who forgave him, and made him adelantado; and soon after he married the daughter of Pedro Arias. Still full of great plans, Balboa carried the necessary material across the Isthmus with infinite toil, and on the shores of the blue Pacific put together the first ships in the Americas,—two brigantines. With these he took possession of thePearl Islands, and then started out to find Peru, but was driven back by storms to an ignoble fate. His father-in-law, becoming jealous of Balboa's brilliant prospects, enticed him back to Darien by a treacherous message, seized him, and had him publicly executed, on the trumped-up charge of high treason, in 1517. Balboa had in him the making of an explorer of the first rank, and but for De Avila's shameless deed might probably have won even higher honors. His courage was sheer audacity, and his energy tireless; but he was unwisely careless in his attitude toward the Crown.

While the discoverer of the greatest ocean was still striving to probe its farther mysteries, a handsome, athletic, brilliant young Spaniard, who was destined to make much more noise in history, was just beginning to be heard of on the threshold of America, of whose central kingdoms he was soon to be conqueror.

Hernando Cortez came of a noble but impoverished Spanish family, and was born in Estremadura ten years later than Balboa. At the age of fourteen he was sent to the University of Salamanca to study for the law; but the adventurous spirit of the man was already strong in the slender lad, and in a couple of years he left college, and went home determined upon a life of roving. The air was full of Columbus and his New World; and what spirited youth could stay to pore in musty law-books then? Not the irrepressible Hernando, surely.

Accidents prevented him from accompanying two expeditions for which he had made ready; but at last, in 1504, he sailed to San Domingo, in which new colony of Spain he made such a record that Ovando, the commander, several times promoted him, and he earned the reputation of a model soldier.In 1511 he accompanied Velasquez to Cuba, and was madealcalde(judge) of Santiago, where he won further praise by his courage and firmness in several important crises. Meantime Francisco Hernandez de Cordova, the discoverer of Yucatan,—a hero with this mere mention of whom we must content ourselves,—had reported his important discovery. A year later, Grijalva, the lieutenant of Velasquez, had followed Cordova's course, and gone farther north, until at last he discovered Mexico. He made no attempt, however, to conquer or to colonize the new land; whereat Velasquez was so indignant that he threw Grijalva in disgrace, and intrusted the conquest to Cortez. The ambitious young Spaniard sailed from Santiago (Cuba) Nov. 18, 1518, with less than seven hundred men and twelve little cannon of the class called falconets. No sooner was he fairly off than Velasquez repented having given him such a chance for distinction, and directly sent out a force to arrest and bring him back. But Cortez was the idol of his little army, and secure in its fondness for him he bade defiance to the emissaries of Velasquez, and held on his way.[4]He landed on the coast of Mexico March 4, 1519, near where is now the city of Vera Cruz (the True Cross), which he founded,—the first European town on the mainland of America as far north as Mexico.

The landing of the Spaniards caused as great a sensation as would the arrival in New York to-day of an army from Mars.[5]The awe-struck natives had never before seen a horse (for it was the Spanish who brought the first horses, cattle, sheep, and other domestic animals to the New World), and decided that these strange, pale new-comers who sat on four-legged beasts, and had shirts of iron and sticks that made thunder, must indeed be gods.

Here the adventurers were inflamed by golden stories of Montezuma,—a myth which befooled Cortez no more egregiously than it has befooled some modern historians, who seem unable to discriminate between what Cortezheardand what hefound. He was told that Montezuma—whose name is properly Moctezuma, or Motecuzoma, meaning "Our Angry Chief"—was "emperor" of Mexico, and that thirty "kings," calledcaciques, were his vassals; that he had incalculable wealth and absolute power, and dwelt in a blaze of gold and precious stones! Even some most charming historians have fallen into the sad blunder of accepting these impossible myths. Mexico never had but two emperors,—Augustin de Iturbide and the hapless Maximilian,—both in this present century; and Moctezuma was neither its emperor nor even its king. The social and political organization of the ancient Mexicans was exactly like that of thePueblo Indians of New Mexico at the present day,—a military democracy, with a mighty and complicated religious organization as its "power behind the throne." Moctezuma was merely Tlacatécutle, or head war-chief of the Nahuatl (the ancient Mexicans), and neither the supreme nor the only executive. Of just how little importance he really was may be gathered from his fate.

Having founded Vera Cruz, Cortez caused himself to be elected governor and captain-general (the highest military rank)[6]of the new country; and having burned his ships, like the famous Greek commander, that there might be no retreat, he began his march into the grim wilderness before him.

It was now that Cortez began to show particularly that military genius which lifted him so far above all other pioneers of America except Pizarro. With only a handful of men,—for he had left part of his forces at Vera Cruz, under his lieutenant Escalante,—in an unknown land swarming with powerful and savage foes, mere courage and brute force would have stood him in little stead. But with a diplomacy as rare as it was brilliant, he found the weak spots in the Indian organization, widened the jealous breaches between tribes, made allies of those who were secretly or openly opposed to Moctezuma's federation of tribes,—a league which somewhat resembled the Six Nations of our own history,—and thus vastly reduced the forces to be directly conquered. Having routed the tribes ofTlacala (pronounced Tlash-cáh-lah) and Cholula, Cortez came at last to the strange lake-city of Mexico, with his little Spanish troop swelled by six thousand Indian allies. Moctezuma received him with great ceremony, but undoubtedly with treacherous intent. While he was entertaining his visitors in one of the huge adobe houses,—not a "palace," as the histories tell us, for there were no palaces whatever in Mexico,—one of the sub-chiefs of his league attacked Escalante's little garrison at Vera Cruz and killed several Spaniards, including Escalante himself. The head of the Spanish lieutenant was sent to the City of Mexico,—for the Indians south of what is now the United States took not merely the scalp but the whole head of an enemy. This was a direful disaster, not so much for the loss of the few men as because it proved to the Indians (as the senders intended it to prove) that the Spaniards were not immortal gods after all, but could be killed the same as other men.

As soon as Cortez heard the ill news he saw this danger at once, and made a bold stroke to save himself. He had already strongly fortified the adobe building in which the Spaniards were quartered; and now, going by night with his officers to the house of the head war-captain, he seized Moctezuma and threatened to kill him unless he at once gave up the Indians who had attacked Vera Cruz. Moctezuma delivered them up, and Cortez at once had them burned in public. This was a cruel thing, though it was undoubtedly necessary to make somevivid impression on the savages or be at once annihilated by them. There is no apology for this barbarity, yet it is only just that we measure Cortez by the standard of his time,—and it was a very cruel world everywhere then.

It is amusing here to read in pretentious text-books that "Cortez now ironed Montezuma and made him pay a ransom of six hundred thousand marks of pure gold and an immense quantity of precious stones." That is on a par with the impossible fables which lured so many of the early Spaniards to disappointment and death, and is a fair sample of the gilded glamour with which equally credulous historians still surround early America. Moctezuma did not buy himself free,—he never was free again,—and he paid no ransom of gold; while as for precious stones, he may have had a few native garnets and worthless green turquoises, and perhaps even an emerald pebble, but nothing more.

Just at this crisis in the affairs of Cortez he was threatened from another quarter. News came that Pamfilo de Narvaez, of whom we shall see more presently, had landed with eight hundred men to arrest Cortez and carry him back prisoner for his disobedience of Velasquez. But here again the genius of the conqueror of Mexico saved him. Marching against Narvaez with one hundred and forty men, he arrested Narvaez, enlisted under his own banner the welcome eight hundred who had come to arrest him, and hastened back to the City of Mexico.

Here he found matters growing daily to more deadly menace. Alvarado, whom he had left in command, had apparently precipitated trouble by attacking an Indian dance. Wanton as that may seem and has been charged with being, it was only a military necessity, recognized by all who really know the aborigines even to this day. The closet-explorers have pictured the Spaniards as wickedly falling upon an aboriginalfestival; but that is simply because of ignorance of the subject. An Indian dance isnota festival; it is generally, and was in this case, a grim rehearsal for murder. An Indian never dances "for fun," and his dances too often mean anything but fun for other people. In a word, Alvarado, seeing in progress a dance which was plainly only the superstitious prelude to a massacre, had tried to arrest the medicine-men and other ringleaders. Had he succeeded, the trouble would have been over for a time at least. But the Indians were too numerous for his little force, and the chief instigators of war escaped.

When Cortez came back with his eight hundred strangely-acquired recruits, he found the whole city with its mask thrown off, and his men penned up in their barracks. The savages quietly let Cortez enter the trap, and then closed it so that there was no more getting out. There were the few hundred Spaniards cooped up in their prison, and the four dykes which were the only approaches to it—for the City of Mexico was an American Venice—swarming with savage foes by the countless thousands.

The Indian makes very few excuses for failure; and the Nahuatl had already elected a new head war-captain named Cuitlahuátzin in place of the unsuccessful Moctezuma. The latter was still a prisoner; and when the Spaniards brought him out upon the housetop to speak to his people in their behalf, the infuriated multitude of Indians pelted him to death with stones. Then, under their new war-captain, they attacked the Spaniards so furiously that neither the strong walls nor the clumsy falconets, and clumsier flintlocks, could withstand them; and there was nothing for the Spaniards but to cut their way out along one of the dykes in a last desperate struggle for life. The beginning of that six days' retreat was one of the bitterest pages in American history. Then was the Noche Triste (the Sad Night), still celebrated in Spanish song and story. For that dark night many a proud home in mother Spain was never bright again, and many a fond heart broke with the crimson bubbles on the Lake of Tezcuco. In those few ghastly hours two thirds of the conquerors were slain; and across more than eight hundred Spanish corpses the frenzied savages pursued the bleeding survivors.

After a fearful retreat of six days, came the important running fight in the plains of Otumba, where the Spaniards were entirely surrounded, but cut their way out after a desperate hand-to-hand struggle which really decided the fate of Mexico. Cortez marched to Tlacala, raised an army of Indianswho were hostile to the federation, and with their help laid siege to the City of Mexico. This siege lasted seventy-three days, and was the most remarkable in the history of all America. There was hard fighting every day. The Indians made a superb defence; but at last the genius of Cortez triumphed, and on the 13th of August, 1521, he marched victorious into the second greatest aboriginal city in the New World.

These wonderful exploits of Cortez, so briefly outlined here, awoke boundless admiration in Spain, and caused the Crown to overlook his insubordination to Velasquez. The complaints of Velasquez were disregarded, and Charles V. appointed Cortez governor and captain-general of Mexico, besides making him Marquis de Oaxaca with a handsome revenue.

Safely established in this high authority, Cortez crushed a plot against him, and executed the new war-captain, with many of the caciques (who were not potentates at all, but religious-military officers, whose hold on the superstitions of the Indians made them dangerous).

But Cortez, whose genius shone only the brighter when the difficulties and dangers before him seemed insurmountable, tripped up on that which has thrown so many,—success. Unlike his unlearned but nobler and greater cousin Pizarro, prosperity spoiled him, and turned his head and his heart. Despite the unstudious criticisms of some historians, Cortez was not a cruel conqueror. He was not only a greatmilitary genius, but was very merciful to the Indians, and was much beloved by them. The so-called massacre at Cholula was not a blot on his career as has been alleged. The truth, as vindicated at last by real history, is this: The Indians had treacherously drawn him into a trap under pretext of friendship. Not until too late to retreat did he learn that the savages meant to massacre him. When he did see his danger, there was but one chance,—namely, to surprise the surprisers, to strike them before they were ready to strike him; and this is only what he did. Cholula was simply a case of the biter bitten.

No, Cortez was not cruel to the Indians; but as soon as his rule was established he became a cruel tyrant to his own countrymen, a traitor to his friends and even to his king,—and, worst of all, a cool assassin. There is strong evidence that he had "removed" several persons who were in the way of his unholy ambitions; and the crowning infamy was in the fate of his own wife. Cortez had long for a mistress the handsome Indian girl Malinche; but after he had conquered Mexico, his lawful wife came to the country to share his fortunes. He did not love her, however, as much as he did his ambition; and she was in his way. At last she was found in her bed one morning, strangled to death.

Carried away by his ambition, he actually plotted open rebellion against Spain and to make himself emperor of Mexico. The Crown got wind of this precious plan, and sent out emissaries who seizedhis goods, imprisoned his men, and prepared to thwart his secret schemes. Cortez boldly hastened to Spain, where he met his sovereign with great splendor. Charles received him well, and decorated him with the illustrious Order of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. But his star was already declining; and though he was allowed to return to Mexico with undiminished outward power, he was thenceforth watched, and did nothing more that was comparable with his wonderful earlier achievements. He had become too unscrupulous, too vindictive, and too unsafe to be left in authority; and after a few years the Crown was forced to appoint a viceroy to wield the civil power of Mexico, leaving to Cortez only the military command, and permission for further conquests. In 1536 Cortez discovered Lower California, and explored part of its gulf. At last, disgusted with his inferior position where he had once been supreme, he returned to Spain, where the emperor received him coldly. In 1541 he accompanied his sovereign to Algiers as an attaché, and in the wars there acquitted himself well. Soon after their return to Spain, however, he found himself neglected. It is said that one day when Charles was riding in state, Cortez forced his way to the royal carriage and mounted upon the step determined to force recognition.

"Who are you?" demanded the angry emperor.

"A man, your Highness," retorted the haughty conqueror of Mexico, "who has given you moreprovincesthan your forefathers left youcities!"

Whether the story is true or not, it graphically illustrates the arrogance as well as the services of Cortez. He lacked the modest balance of the greatest greatness, just as Columbus had lacked it. The self-assertion of either would have been impossible to the greater man than either,—the self-possessed Pizarro.

At last, in disgust, Cortez retired from court; and on the 2d of December, 1554, the man who had first opened the interior of America to the world died near Seville.

There were some in South America whose achievements were as wondrous as those of Cortez in Mexico. The conquest of the two continents was practically contemporaneous, and equally marked by the highest military genius, the most dauntless courage, the overcoming of dangers which were appalling, and hardships which were wellnigh superhuman.

Francisco Pizarro, the unlettered but invincible conqueror of Peru, was fifteen years older than his brilliant cousin Cortez, and was born in the same province of Spain. He began to be heard of in America in 1510. From 1524 to 1532 he was making superhuman efforts to get to the unknown and golden land of Peru, overcoming such obstacles as not even Columbus had encountered, and enduring greater dangers and hardships than Napoleon or Cæsar ever met. From 1532 to his death in 1541, he was busy in conquering and exploring that enormous area, and founding a new nation amid its fierce tribes,—fighting off not only the vast hordesof Indians, but also the desperate men of his own forces, by whose treachery he at last perished. Pizarro found and tamed the richest country in the New World; and with all his unparalleled sufferings still realized, more than any other of the conquerors, the golden dreams which all pursued. Probably no other conquest in the world's history yielded such rapid and bewildering wealth, as certainly none was bought more dearly in hardship and heroism. Pizarro's conquest has been most unjustly dealt with by some historians ignorant of the real facts in the case, and blinded by prejudice; but that marvellous story, told in detail farther on, is coming to its proper rank as one of the most stupendous and gallant feats in all history. It is the story of a hero to whom every true American, young or old, will be glad to do justice. Pizarro has been long misrepresented as a blood-stained and cruel conqueror, a selfish, unprincipled, unreliable man; but in the clear, true light of real history he stands forth now as one of the greatest of self-made men, and one who, considering his chances, deserves the utmost respect and admiration for the man he made of himself. The conquest of Peru did not by far cause as much bloodshed as the final reduction of the Indian tribes of Virginia. It counted scarcely as many Indian victims as King Philip's War, and was much less bloody, because more straightforward and honorable, than any of the British conquests in East India. The most bloody events in Peru came after the conquest was over, when the Spaniardsfell to fighting one another; and in this Pizarro was not the aggressor but the victim. It was the treachery of his own allies,—the men whose fames and fortunes he had made. His conquest covered a land as big as California, Oregon, and most of Washington,—or as our whole seaboard from Nova Scotia to Port Royal and two hundred miles inland,—swarming with the best organized and most advanced Indians in the Western Hemisphere; and he did it all with less than three hundred gaunt and tattered men. He was one of the great captains of all time, and almost as remarkable as organizer and executive of a new empire, the first on the Pacific shore of the southern continent. To this greatness rose the friendless, penniless, ignorant swineherd of Truxillo!

Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, subdued that vast area of the deadly Araucanians with an "army" of two hundred men. He established the first colony in Chile in 1540, and in the following February founded the present city of Santiago de Chile. Of his long and deadly wars with the Araucanians there is not space to speak here. He was killed by the savages Dec. 3, 1553, with nearly all his men, after an indescribably desperate struggle.

There is not space to tell here of the wondrous doings in the southern continent or the lower point of this,—the conquest of Nicaragua by Gil Gonzales Davila in 1523; the conquest of Guatemala, by Pedro de Alvarado, in 1524; that of Yucatan by Francisco de Montijo, beginning in 1526; that of New Granadaby Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, in 1536; the conquests and exploration of Bolivia, the Amazon, and the Orinoco (to whose falls the Spaniards had penetrated by 1530, by almost superhuman efforts); the unparalleled Indian wars with the Araucanians in Chile (for two centuries), with the Tarrahumares in Chihuahua, the Tepehuanes in Durango, the still untamed Yaquis in northwestern Mexico; the exploits of Captain Martin de Hurdaide (the Daniel Boone of Sinaloa and Sonora); and of hundreds of other unrecorded Spanish heroes, who would have been world-renowned had they been more accessible to the fame-maker.

FOOTNOTES:[4]This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.[5]Tezozomoc, the Indian historian, graphically describes the wonder of the natives.[6]Another specific act of treason.

[4]This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.

[5]Tezozomoc, the Indian historian, graphically describes the wonder of the natives.

[6]Another specific act of treason.

Before Cortez had yet conquered Mexico, or Pizarro or Valdivia seen the lands with which their names were to be linked for all time, other Spaniards—less conquerors, but as great explorers—were rapidly shaping the geography of the New World. France, too, had aroused somewhat; and in 1500 her brave son Captain de Gonneville sailed to Brazil. But between him and the next pioneer, who was a Florentine in French pay, was a gap of twenty-four years; and in that time Spain had accomplished four most important feats.

Fernão Magalhaes, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan, was born in Portugal in 1470; and on reaching manhood adopted the seafaring life, to which his adventurous disposition prompted. The Old World was then ringing with the New; and Magellan longed to explore the Americas. Being very shabbily treated by the King of Portugal, he enlisted under the banner of Spain, where his talents found recognition. He sailed from Spain in command of a Spanish expedition, August 10, 1519; and steering farther south than ever manhad sailed before, he discovered Cape Horn, and the Straits which bear his name. Fate did not spare him to carry his discoveries farther, nor to reap the reward of those he had made; for during this voyage (in 1521) he was butchered by the natives of one of the islands of the Moluccas. His heroic lieutenant, Juan Sebastian de Elcano, then took command, and continued the voyage until he had circumnavigated the globe for the first time in its history. Upon his return to Spain, the Crown rewarded his brilliant achievements, and gave him, among other honors, a coat-of-arms emblazoned with a globe and the motto,Tu primum circumdedisti me,—"Thou first didst go around me."

Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida,—the first State of our Union that was seen by Europeans,—was as ill-fated an explorer as Magellan; for he came to "the Flowery Land" (to which he had been lured by the wild myth of a fountain of perennial youth) only to be slain by its savages. De Leon was born in San Servas, Spain, in the latter part of the fifteenth century. He was the conqueror of the island of Puerto Rico, and sailing in 1512 to find Florida,—of which he had heard through the Indians,—discovered the new land in the same year, and took possession of it for Spain. He was given the title of adelantado of Florida, and in 1521 returned with three ships to conquer his new country, but was at once wounded mortally in a fight with the Indians, and died on his return to Cuba. He, by the way, was one of the boldSpaniards who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to America, in 1493.

Autograph of Hernando de Soto.Autograph of Hernando de Soto.

More of the credit of Florida belongs to Hernando de Soto. That gallantconquistadorwas born in Estremadura, Spain, about 1496. Pedro Arias de Avila took a liking to his bright young kinsman, helped him to obtain a university education, and in 1519 took him along on his expedition to Darien. De Soto won golden opinions in the New World, and came to be trusted as a prudent yet fearless officer. In 1528 he commanded an expedition to explore the coast of Guatemala and Yucatan, and in 1532 led a reinforcement of three hundred men to assist Pizarro in the conquest of Peru. In that golden land De Soto captured great wealth; and the young soldier of fortune, who had landed in America with no more than his sword and shield, returned to Spain with what was in those days an enormous fortune. There he married a daughter of his benefactor De Avila, and thus became brother-in-law of the discoverer of the Pacific,—Balboa. De Soto lent part of his soon-earned fortune to Charles V., whose constant wars had drained the royal coffers, and Charles sent him out as governor of Cuba and adelantado of the new province ofFlorida. He sailed in 1538 with an army of six hundred men, richly equipped,—a company of adventurous Spaniards attracted to the banner of their famous countryman by the desire for discovery and gold. The expedition landed in Florida, at Espiritu Santo Bay, in May, 1539, and re-took possession of the unguessed wilderness for Spain.

But the brilliant success which had attended De Soto in the highlands of Peru seemed to desert him altogether in the swamps of Florida. It is note-worthy that nearly all the explorers who did wonders in South America failed when their operations were transferred to the northern continent. The physical geography of the two was so absolutely unlike, that, after becoming accustomed to the necessities of the one, the explorer seemed unable to adapt himself to the contrary conditions of the other.

De Soto and his men wandered through the southern part of what is now the United States for four ghastly years. It is probable that their travels took them through the present States of Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the northeastern corner of Texas. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River; and theirs were the first European eyes to look upon the Father of Waters, anywhere save at its mouth,—a century and a quarter before the heroic Frenchmen Marquette and La Salle saw it. They spent that winter along the Washita; and in the early summer of 1542, as they were returning down the Mississippi, brave De Soto died, and his body was laid to rest in the bosom of the mighty river he had discovered,—two centuries before any "American" saw it. His suffering and disheartened men passed a frightful winter there; and in 1543, under command of the Lieutenant Moscoso, they built rude vessels, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in nineteen days,—the first navigation in our part of America. From the Delta they made their way westward along the coast, and at last reached Panuco, Mexico, after such a five years of hardship and suffering as no Saxon explorer of America ever experienced. It was nearly a century and a half after De Soto's gaunt army of starving men had taken Louisiana for Spain that it became a French possession,—which the United States bought from France over a century later yet.

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