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Chapter 11 - Exploration And Imperial Rivalry

In the service of God, as well as in search of gold and glory, Spanish conquistadores (conquerors) continued to fan out across the New World and beyond.

On Spain's long roster of notable deeds, two spectacular exploits must be headlined. Vasco Nuñez Balboa, hailed as the European discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, waded into the foaming waves off Panama in 1513 and boldly claimed for his king all the lands washed by that sea.

Ferdinand Magellan started from Spain in 1519 with five tiny ships. After beating through the storm-lashed strait off the tip of South America that still bears his name, he was slain by the inhabitants of the Philippines.

His one remaining vessel creaked home in 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe.

Other ambitious Spaniards ventured into North America. In 1513 and 1521, Juan Ponce de León explored Florida, which he at first thought was an island.

Seeking gold-and probably not the mythical "fountain of youth"-he instead met with death by an Indian arrow.

In 1540-1542 Francisco Coronado, in quest of fabled golden cities that turned out to be adobe pueblos, wandered with a clanking cavalcade through Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating as far east as Kansas.

En route his expedition discovered two awesome natural wonders: the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and enormous herds of buffalo (bison).

Hernando de Soto, with six hundred armored men, undertook a fantastic gold-seeking expedition during 1539-1542. Floundering through marshes and pinebarrens from Florida westward, he discovered and crossed the majestic Mississippi River just north of its junction with the Arkansas River.

After brutally mistreating the Indians with iron collars and fierce dogs, he at length died of fever and wounds.

His troops secretly disposed of his remains at night in the Mississippi, lest the Indian sex Hume and abuse their abuser's corpse.

Spain's colonial empire grew swiftly and impressively. Within about half a century of Columbus's land fall, hundreds of Spanish cities and towns flourished in the Americas, especially in the great silver-producing centers of Peru and Mexico.

Some 160,000 Spaniards, mostly men, had subjugated millions of Indians.

Majestic cathedrals dotted the land, printing presses turned out books, and scholars founded distinguished universities, including those at Mexico City and Lima, Peru, both established in 1551, eighty-five years before Harvard, the first college established in the English colonies.

But how secure were these imperial possessions? Other powers were already sniffing around the edges of the Spanish domain, eager to bite off their share of the promised wealth of the new lands.

The upstart English sent Giovanni Caboto (known in English as John Cabot) to explore the northeastern coast of North America in 1497 and 1498.

The French king dispatched another Italian mariner, Giovanni da Verra zano, to probe the eastern seaboard in 1524.

Ten years later the Frenchman Jacques Cartier journeyed hundreds of miles up the St.Lawrence River.

To safeguard a periphery of their New World domain against such encroachments and to convert more Indian souls to Christianity, the Spanish began to fortify and settle their North American borderlands.

In a move to block French ambitions and to protect the sea-lanes to the Caribbean, the Spanish erected a fortress at St.Augustine, Florida, in 1565, thus founding the oldest continually inhabited European settlement in the future United States.

In Mexico the tales of Coronado's expedition of the 1540s to the upper Rio Grande and Colorado River regions continued to beckon the conquistadores northward.

A dust-begrimed expeditionary column, with eighty-three rumbling wagons and hundreds of grumbling men, traversed the bare Sonora Desert from Mexico into the Rio Grande valley in 1598.

Led by Don Juan de Oñate, the Spaniards cruelly abused the Pueblo peoples they encountered.

In the Battle of Acoma in 1599, the victorious Spanish severed one foot of each surviving Indian.

They proclaimed the area to be the province of New Mexico in 1609 and founded its capi tal at Santa Fé the following year.

The Spanish settlers in New Mexico found a few furs and precious little gold, but they did discover a wealth of souls to be harvested for the Christian religion.

The Roman Catholic mission became the central institution in colonial New Mexico until the missionaries' efforts to suppress native religious customs provoked an Indian uprising called Popé's Rebellion in 1680.

The Pueblo rebels destroyed every Catholic church in the province and killed a score of priests and hundreds of Spanish settlers. In a reversal of Cortés's treatment of the Aztec temples more than a century earlier, the Indians rebuilt a kiva, or ceremonial religious chamber, on the ruins of the Spanish plaza at Santa Fé.

It took nearly half a century for the Spanish fully to reclaim New Mexico from the insurrectionary Indians.

Meanwhile, as a further hedge against the ever threatening French, who had sent an expedition under Robert de La Salle down the Mississippi River in the 1680s, the Spanish began around 1716 to establish settlements in Texas.

Some refugees from the Pueblo uprising trickled into Texas, and a few missions were established there, including the one at San Antonio later known as the Alamo.

But for at least another cen tury, the Spanish presence remained weak in this distant northeastern outpost of Spain's Mexican empire.

To the west, in California, no serious foreign threat loomed, and Spain directed its attention there only belatedly.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had explored the California coast in 1542, but he failed to find San Fran cisco Bay or anything else of much interest. For some two centuries thereafter, California slumbered undisturbed by European intruders.

Then in 1769 Spanish missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra founded at San Diego the first of a chain of twenty-one missions that wound up the coast as far as Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay.

Father Serra's brown-robed Francis can friars toiled with zealous devotion to Christian ize the 300,000 native Californians. They gathered the semi-nomadic Indians into fortified missions and taught them horticulture and basic crafts.

These "mission Indians" did adopt Christianity, but they also lost contact with their native cultures and often lost their lives as well, as the white man's diseases doomed these biologically vulnerable peoples.

The misdeeds of the Spanish in the New World obscured their substantial achievements and helped give birth to the Black Legend.

This false concept held that the conquerors merely tortured and butchered the Indians ("killing for Christ"), stole their gold, infected them with smallpox, and left little but misery behind. The Spanish invaders did indeed kill, enslave, and infect countless natives, but they also erected a colossal empire, sprawling from California and Florida to Tierra del Fuego.

They grafted their culture, laws, religion, and language onto a wide array of native societies, laying the foundations for a score of Spanish-speaking nations.

Clearly, the Spaniards, who had more than a century's head start over the English, were genuine empire builders and cultural innovators in the New World.

As compared with their Anglo Saxon rivals, their colonial establishment was larger and richer, and it was destined to endure more than a quarter of a century longer.

And in the last analysis, the Spanish paid the Native Americans the high compliment of fusing with them through marriage and incorporating indigenous culture into their own, rather than shunning and eventually isolating the Indians as their English adversaries would do.