The Spanish Pioneers. Charles Fletcher Lummis
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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 a commercial opportunity.
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 believe that 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 Amerigo Vespucci'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 more capable of great things than our Israel Putnams and Ethan Allens and Francis Marions and Daniel Boones; but they did much 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 of America 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