Volume I Part 8 (2/2)
The ill.u.s.trious navigator now sailed for the Philippine Islands, so named from Philip, son of Charles V., who succeeded that monarch as Philip II. By the Tordesillas division above described, the islands were properly in the Portuguese hemisphere, but on the earliest maps, made by Spaniards, they were placed twenty-five degrees too far east, and this circ.u.mstance, whether accidental or designed, has preserved them to Spain even to the present time. At the Philippine Islands Magellan was killed in an affray with the natives. One of his s.h.i.+ps, the Victoria, after sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, arrived in Spain, having been the first to circ.u.mnavigate the globe. The voyage had taken three years and twenty-eight days.
[1528-1540]
The disastrous failure of the expedition of Vasquez de Ayllon to Florida did not discourage attempts on the part of others in the same direction.
Velaspuez, governor of Cuba, jealous of the success of Cortez in Mexico, had sent Pamphilo de Narvaez to arrest him. In this attempt Narvaez had been defeated and taken prisoner. Undeterred by this failure he had solicited and received of Charles V. the position of governor over Florida, a territory at that time embracing the whole southern part of what is now the United States, and reaching from Cape Sable to the Panuco, or River of Palms, in Mexico. With three hundred men he, in 1528, landed near Appalachee Bay, and marched inland with the hope of opening a country rich and populous. Bitterly was he disappointed.
Swamps and forests, wretched wigwams with their squalid inmates everywhere met his view, but no gold was to be found. Discouraged, he and his followers returned to the coast, where almost superhuman toil and skill enabled them to build five boats, in which they hoped to work westward to the Spanish settlements. Embarking, they stole cautiously along the coast for some distance, but were at last driven by a storm upon an island, perhaps Galveston, perhaps Santa Rosa, where Narvaez and most of his men perished. Four of his followers survived to cross Texas to the Gulf of California and reach the town of San Miguel on the west coast of Mexico. Here they found their countrymen, searching as usual for pearls, gold, and slaves, and by their help they made a speedy return to Spain, heroes of as remarkable an adventure as history records. These unfortunates were the first Europeans to visit New Mexico. Their narrative led to the exploration of that country by Coronado and others, and to the discoveries of Cortez in Lower California.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Death of Magellan.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Ferdinand de Soto.]
Ferdinand de Soto, eager to rival the exploits of Cortez in Mexico, and of his former commander, Pizarro, in Peru, offered to conquer Florida at his own expense. Appointed governor-general of Florida and of Cuba, he sailed with seven large and three small vessels. From Espiritu Santo Bay he, in 1539, marched with six hundred men into the country of the Appalachians and discovered the harbor of Pensacola. After wintering at Appalachee he set out into the interior, said to abound in gold and silver. Penetrating northeasterly as far as the Savannah, he found only copper and mica. From here he marched first northwest into northern central Georgia, then southwest into Alabama. A battle was fought with the natives at Mavila, or Mobile, in which the Spaniards suffered serious loss. s.h.i.+ps that he had ordered arrived at Pensacola, but de Soto determined not to embark until success should have crowned his efforts. He turned back into the interior, into the country of the Chickasaws, marched diagonally over the present State of Mississippi to its northwest corner, and crossed the Mississippi River near the lowest Chickasaw Bluff. From this point the general direction of the Spanish progress was southwest, through what is now Arkansas, past the site of Little Rock, till at last a river which seems to have been the Was.h.i.+ta was reached. Down this stream de Soto and his decimated force floated--two hundred and fifty of his men had succ.u.mbed to the hards.h.i.+ps and perils of his march--arriving at the junction of the Red with the Mississippi River on Sunday, April 17, 1542. At this point de Soto sickened and died, turning over the command to Luis de Moscoso. Burying their late leader's corpse at night deep in the bosom of the great river, and constructing themselves boats, the survivors of this ill-fated expedition, now reduced to three hundred and seventy-two persons, made the best of their way down the Mississippi to the Gulf, and along its coast, finally reaching the Spanish town near the mouth of the Panuco in Mexico.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A Palisaded Indian Town in Alabama.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Burial of de Soto in the Mississippi at night.]
[1562]
Thus no settlement had as yet been made in Florida by the Spanish. The first occupation destined to be permanent was brought about through religious jealousy inspired by the establishment of a French Protestant (Huguenot) colony in the territory. Ribault, a French captain commissioned by Charles IX., was put in command of an expedition by that famous Huguenot, Admiral Coligny, and landed on the coast of Florida, at the mouth of the St. John's, which he called the River of May. This was in 1562. The name Carolina, which that section still bears, was given to a fort at Port Royal, or St. Helena. Ribault returned to France, where civil war was then raging between the Catholics and the Protestants or Huguenots. His colony, waiting for promised aid and foolishly making no attempt to cultivate the soil, soon languished. Dissensions arose, and an effort was made to return home. Famine having carried off the greater number, the colony came to an end. In 1564 Coligny sent out Laudonniere, who built another fort, also named Carolina, on the River of May. Again misfortunes gathered thickly about the settlers, when Ribault arrived bringing supplies.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fort Carolina on the River of May.]
[1565]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Pedro Melendez.]
But Spain claimed this territory, and Pedro Melendez a Spanish soldier, was in 1565 sent by Philip II. to conquer it from the French, doubly detested as Protestants. He landed in the harbor and at the mouth of the river, to both of which he gave the name St. Augustine. Melendez lost no time in attacking Fort Carolina, which he surprised, putting the garrison mercilessly to the sword. The destruction of the French colony was soon after avenged by Dominic de Gourgues, who sailed from France to punish the enemies of his country. Having accomplished his purpose by the slaughter of the Spanish garrison he returned home, but the French Protestants made no further effort to colonize Florida.
Spain claimed the land by right of discovery, but, although maintaining the feeble settlement at St. Augustine, did next to nothing after this to explore or civilize this portion of America. The nation that had sent out Columbus was not destined to be permanently the great power of the New World. The hap of first landing upon the Antilles, and also the warm climate and the peaceable nature of the aborigines, led Spain to fix her settlements in lat.i.tudes that were too low for the best health and the greatest energy. Most of the settlers were of a wretched cla.s.s, criminals and adventurers, and they soon mixed largely with the natives.
Spain herself greatly lacked in vigor, partly from national causes, partly from those obscure general causes which even to this day keep Latin Europe, in military power and political accomplishments, inferior to Teutonic or Germanic Europe.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Indians devoured by dogs. From an old print.]
[1570]
Moreover, the Spaniards found their first American conquests too easy, and the rewards of these too great. This prevented all thought of developing the country through industry, concentrating expectation solely upon waiting fortunes, to be had from the natives by the sword or through forced labor in mines, Their treatment of the aborigines was nothing short of diabolical. Well has it been said: ”The Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in pa.s.sion. The h.e.l.l which they denounced upon their victims was shorn of its worst terror by the a.s.surance that these tormentors were not to be there. Las Casas, the n.o.ble missionary, the true soldier of the cross, and the few priests and monks who sympathized with him, in vain protested against these cruelties.”
To all these causes we must add the narrow colonial policy of Spain.
Imitating Venice and ancient Carthage instead of Greece, she held her dependencies under the straitest servitude to herself as conquered provinces, repressing all political or commercial independence. A similar restrictive policy, indeed, hampered the colonies of other nations, but it was nowhere else so irrational or blighting as in Spanish America.
CHAPTER III.
EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION BY THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH
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