A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  I followed Canoabo down to the river, through heavy brush, in hopes of peeling off my sweaty clothes and taking a plunge. But the riverbank was a dump, piled with trash hurled from the bluff above. The garbage stank and buzzed with insects. Gazing down the river in both directions, we couldn’t see any sign of a bridge. The only way out was to backtrack through the labyrinth we’d just traveled.

  “Fine navigating, Admiral,” Caonabo said, swatting away flies. “I doubt even Columbus got this lost.” He slumped on the sand and held his aching head. “I give up. The Spanish, I forgive them. You, no. This has been a fuck of a road trip.”

  AS CAONABO NAPPED with his head under a bush, I went to dip my toe in the fetid Yaque. It was along this river, in 1493, that the Spanish saw their first raw gold in America. Grains “the size of lentil seeds” sparkled in the sand, Columbus wrote, and caught in the hoops of water casks. He named the waterway El Río del Oro. The name hadn’t stuck, but for once Columbus was right; the river did carry traces of gold as it ran down from the mountains of Cibao.

  But the sparkling Yaque—the first tangible evidence of all the rumors he’d chased since arriving in the Indies—led to Columbus’s undoing. The Admiral never needed much to inflate his imagination. He later wrote Isabel and Ferdinand that the Spanish had found “rivers of gold” in Hispaniola, a claim he could never make good on.

  It was this propensity for magical thinking that seemed, in the end, to define Columbus. A bookish man, he read widely, but rarely in search of new knowledge; instead, he sought confirmation of his preexisting fantasy, about an Orient that lay almost on Europe’s doorstep. This dream drove him across the Ocean Sea, where he saw and heard things already in his own head: sirens, cannibals, subjects of the Great Khan, even an island off Hispaniola inhabited by Amazons.

  Other men of his day had clearer vision. “The hidden half of the globe is brought to light,” Peter Martyr, an Italian historian in the Spanish court, wrote upon Columbus’s return from his first voyage, in 1493. The next year, Martyr became the first European to refer to the Indies as ab orbe novo—the new world.

  Yet Columbus never grasped the immensity of what he’d done. The more he saw, the less he learned. Mysticism and dreams of the Orient kept overwhelming the evidence of his own senses. Upon reaching the South American continent in 1498, Columbus realized he’d come upon an enormous landmass—then concluded he was at “the end of the East,” where the sun first rose on Eden. Five years later, on his final voyage, he was still chasing after Asian gold and spice, and believed while in Costa Rica that he was just ten days’ travel from the Ganges.

  “The world is but small,” he wrote near the end, reiterating his old belief. “Experience has now proved it.” He went to his deathbed still convinced he’d reached the Orient.

  In the space of just twelve years, Columbus had introduced Europe to a hemisphere that held 28 percent of the world’s landmass and millions of unknown people. But the Admiral found only what he’d gone looking for in the first place. He never discovered America.

  BY THE TIME Caonabo and I found our way back to Santo Domingo, it was after dark. Returning the Move required as much paperwork as renting it. “Problema,” the STOP agent finally announced. My credit card had been rejected.

  “That’s probably because the people who took an imprint of it yesterday are now on a spending spree,” Caonabo told me. Between us we had just enough pesos to pay the bill, leaving nothing for a taxi to carry us the several miles back to the Zona Colonial.

  We hiked in weary silence and parted beneath a dead street lamp near Caonabo’s shop. In the morning I’d be flying out of Hispaniola, to start following the conquistadors who reached the continent Columbus never touched. “Wanna come?” I asked.

  Caonabo looked at me incredulously. “You think there are still Indians?”

  He lit his last cigarette and offered a final piece of advice. “If the chicharrones strike tonight, do not even think of going to the hospital. Believe me, it is better to die on the street. Or find someone who does voodoo.” He slapped my shoulder and headed off into the dark. “Vaya bien, brother,” he shouted. “Vaya fucking bien.”

  PART II

  CONQUEST

  The frontispiece of a sixteenth-century manual for conquistadors, showing a Spanish captain holding dividers and a sword hilt. The couplet translates: “With the compass and the sword / More and more and more and more.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE GULF COAST

  NAKED IN THE NEW WORLD

  We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.

  —Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico

  FOR FIFTEEN YEARS after Columbus built a fort from the timbers of the Santa María, Spain’s conquest of America was confined to Hispaniola. Not until 1508 did colonists start exploiting nearby islands the Admiral had found—Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba—where they repeated the grim cycle of subjugating natives and importing Africans when Indian labor gave out.

  Then, beginning in 1513, Spain’s small realm exploded out of the Caribbean. Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific; Ferdinand Magellan crossed it, after rounding South America. Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec of Mexico, Francisco Pizarro the Inca of Peru. By 1542, the fiftieth anniversary of Columbus’s first sail, Spain had laid claim—and often laid waste—to an empire larger than Rome’s at its peak.

  One engine behind this extraordinary conquest was Spain’s crusading zeal. The vanquishing of Muslim armies at home had infused Iberians with a confidence and fervor that spilled over to America. “As Christians,” Cortés told his men in the midst of battle against the Aztec, “we were obliged to make war against enemies of our faith.” This was militant Christianity in the literal sense.

  Convinced of their superiority, and the rightness of their conquest, Spaniards also felt entitled to the spoils. In the vanguard of plunder were men from the lowest ranks of Spain’s nobility, called hidalgos—literally, sons of somebody—and caballeros, or gentlemen. Unlike peasants, these minor nobles had the means to sail for America, seeking riches and status unavailable to them in hierarchical Spain.

  Behind them stood a Spanish Crown that needed funds for its ceaseless military campaigns in Europe, and for the lavish life of its court. The Crown kept pressing for the conversion of Indians, and passed laws to protect them, but its overriding interest was the extraction of mineral wealth. Charles I, who succeeded Ferdinand in 1516 and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, made his first public reference to Spain’s American domain the following year. He called it the “gold-bearing world.”

  While colonists had culled a modest amount of gold from the Caribbean, the first great lode was discovered by Cortés. A former Latin student and notary, Cortés landed four hundred men on the coast of Mexico in 1519, for what was intended as an exploratory probe. But upon learning of a fabulously rich empire to the interior, he marched to Tenochtitlan, an island metropolis of more than 100,000 people, comparable to the largest European cities of that era.

  The Aztec ruler, Moctezuma, greeted the Spaniards with gifts of gold. Cortés nonetheless seized him, laid siege to Tenochtitlan, and ultimately destroyed it, toppling a warrior empire that ruled some ten million people from central Mexico to Guatemala.

  Historians have often cast this stunning conquest as a clash of civilizations: European reason and military technology versus Aztec sun-worship and spiked clubs. Less recognized, until recently, was the critical role played by Cortés’s native allies, Indians who resented the Aztec and swelled the small Spanish army by the tens of thousands. Also, a smallpox epidemic swept Tenochtitlan during the battle for the city, enfeebling the Aztec and killing many more natives than Spanish arms.

  But little of this was apparent to Cortés’s contemporaries. To them, his exploits seemed straight from the chivalric romance Amadis de Gaula, one of the most popular books of the sixteenth century (and a favorite of Don Quixote’s). Amadis is a wandering knight who beds maidens, slay
s monsters, finds enchanted isles, and kills 100,000 foes single-handed. Cortés, likewise a man who took many mistresses, outdid Amadis: he brought down a heathen empire that practiced human sacrifice, and he looted gold on a scale that made him one of the wealthiest men in the New World.

  Human sacrifice by the Aztec, who believed in nourishing the sun with hearts. From a sixteenth-century Mexican codex illustrated by native artists.

  His conquest also deepened Spaniards’ sense of themselves as invincible Christian warriors, and provided them a potent model. The riches of the Aztec exceeded the wildest rumors that had circulated since Columbus’s landing in America. With a small but determined force, led by a hidalgo as bold and ruthless as Cortés, what fortunes remained to be found in lands the Spanish had not yet conquered?

  LIKE MOST AMERICANS, I’d learned a little about Cortés in grade school, along with his most famous successor, Francisco Pizarro, the illiterate pig farmer who became conqueror of Peru. As a teenager, I listened to Neil Young wail “Cortez the Killer” and watched my loinclothed brother play a guard to the Inca emperor Atahualpa in The Royal Hunt of the Sun. But “conquistador” was a term I associated with Mexico and Peru. It wasn’t until I began my reeducation campaign that I realized how much of North America the Spanish had invaded, too.

  Their first incursion was also very early, preceding Cortés to Mexico by six years and the Pilgrims to America by more than a century. In 1513, Juan Ponce de León, a veteran of Columbus’s second voyage, set off for a land rumored to lie north of the Caribbean isles already in Spanish hands. Sailing from Puerto Rico, he reached a lushly wooded shore at Easter time, a season celebrated in Spain as the “Feast of Flowers.” Because of the date, and the beauty of the place, he called the coast La Florida.

  Ponce de León’s arrival, near Daytona Beach, marked the first recorded landing by a European on what is now U.S. soil. He was also the first to observe a current “more powerful than the wind” drawing his ship out to sea: the Gulf Stream. By the logic of naming lands after their European discoverers, the future American nation should have been called the United States of Juan, or Ponce de Leónia.

  But the conquistador suffered from bad fortune, and worse publicity. On a return trip to colonize La Florida, he was wounded by an arrow and soon after died. Adding insult to fatal injury, a Spanish historian later claimed that Ponce de León had sailed in 1513 to find a mythic spring, as a cure for his impotence.

  Ponce de León was thirty-nine at the time, and had fathered four children. Moreover, his charter from the Crown made no mention of a “fountain of youth,” only a more familiar grail: gold. But the legend of his quest endured. And so, Ponce de León went down in history as a wistful graybeard, seeking eternal youth, like so many Floridians today.

  WHILE THE NAME Ponce de León was at least dimly familiar to me before I researched his voyages, the same wasn’t true of the hundreds of Spaniards who soon followed in his wake. In fact, as I scanned the roster of expeditions, I recognized a total of two men, De Soto and Coronado, best known to many Americans as the names of bygone automobiles.

  Discovering the depths of my own ignorance no longer came as a shock to me. What did was the astounding journey made by one of these little-known Spaniards. Between 1528 and 1536, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca took a cross-country trek that made Lewis and Clark’s expedition, three centuries later, look like a Cub Scout outing by comparison. His desperate crossing, which transformed him from armed invader to native healer, also demolished my image of Spanish conquest as a relentless steamrolling of America and its people.

  “I wandered lost and naked through many and very strange lands,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote in a chronicle of his journey, the Account. Of his story, he adds, “this is the only thing that a man who returned naked could bring back.”

  Cabeza de Vaca had set off a decade before as a fairly typical Spaniard on the make in America. He came from military stock, including a grandfather who led Spain’s brutal conquest of Grand Canary and sold its natives into slavery. Cabeza de Vaca fought in several campaigns in Europe before joining an expedition to La Florida. “I preferred to risk my life than have my honor questioned,” he writes early in his account, sounding very much the haughty caballero.

  In the years following Ponce de León’s brief probe, “La Florida” had come to designate a vast, vague territory stretching roughly from the Atlantic to Mexico. Somewhere in this uncharted expanse, Spaniards hoped to repeat their pillage of the Aztec. But the man commanding the La Florida expedition, Pánfilo de Narváez, was no Cortés. Upon landing near present-day Tampa in the spring of 1528, he sent his five ships and a quarter of his men to sail off in search of a harbor. This instantly severed Narváez’s land force of three hundred men and forty-two horses from transport or resupply.

  Ill-provisioned and overclad, the Spaniards spent a wretched summer slogging through Florida’s swamps and dense woods. Reaching the site of today’s Tallahassee, they came under attack by Indian archers and fled to the nearby coast, in hopes of rescue by their ships. But the vessels had searched for Narváez’s army in vain and sailed off.

  Abandoned in “that awful country,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, the Spaniards built crude boats, fashioning spurs into nails, horse manes into rigging, and shirts into sails. Then, after eating the last of their horses, the 242 survivors crowded onto five rafts and launched out to sea, “without having anyone with us who knew the art of navigation.”

  Floating west, along the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, they ran out of fresh water and drank from the sea, poisoning men with salt. Then, reaching “a very large river” that “emptied into the sea in a torrent”—this was the Mississippi—the flotilla was pushed from shore and began to separate. Rowing hard, Cabeza de Vaca and his exhausted crew tried to keep up with Narváez’s raft, which “had the healthiest and strongest men.” Cabeza de Vaca called out to his commander for a rope so the boats could stay together.

  “He answered me that it was no longer time for one man to rule another,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote. “Each one should do whatever seemed best to him in order to save his own life.” With that, Narváez “veered away with his raft,” never to be seen again.

  Adrift, in hurricane season near present-day New Orleans, Cabeza de Vaca’s craft was blown back toward shore by a fierce storm. “Near land,” he wrote, “a great wave took us and cast the boat out of the water as far as a horseshoe can be tossed.” Coastal natives, their nipples and lips pierced with cane reeds, approached the Spaniards. “We were so scared that they seemed to us to be giants.”

  The Spanish tried to relaunch their craft, only to have it capsize and then sink in heavy surf, taking down several men and the remains of their gear. “Those of us who survived were as naked as the day we were born and had lost everything we had,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote. “Although the few things we had were of little value, they meant a lot to us.” The weather turned cold, and the men had eaten little except parched corn since boarding their boat two months before. “We were closer to death than to life.”

  It was at this moment, when he was stranded and stripped, that Cabeza de Vaca’s metamorphosis began. The Indians “sat down with us,” he wrote. “They felt such great pain and pity at seeing us in such a state that they all began to cry.” Taking the castaways to simple lodges, natives warmed them by fires while dancing through the night. The Spanish feared they were about to be sacrificed. Instead, the Indians fed their guests and treated them well.

  In all, several rafts and some eighty Spaniards washed ashore at what Cabeza de Vaca called the Isle of Doom, today’s Galveston Island, Texas. This was more men than the island and its natives could support. Over the winter, many of the Spaniards died from hunger, and from a “stomach ailment” that also killed half their hosts. Natives thought the newcomers were the cause (as they may well have been) and decided to kill the fifteen Spaniards still alive.

  The men were spared at the last moment, but denied food unless they healed the sick.
Native practices included blowing on sufferers “where the pain is.” So the Spaniards, who lacked even the poor medical tools and training then current in Europe, blended what they’d seen of native ritual with a bit of Catholic theater. “We did our healing,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “by making the sign of the cross on the sick persons, breathing on them, saying the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary.”

  Miraculously, the sick recovered. Grateful Indians fed the Spaniards and clothed them in hides. Cabeza de Vaca’s regard for his hosts also grew. “These people love their children more and treat them better than any other people on earth,” he wrote. And they shared everything they had.

  But the natives possessed very little, and in spring they put the Spanish to work picking berries and pulling cane from the water. Half-starved, and covered in cuts from the cane, Cabeza de Vaca fled to another tribe on the nearby mainland. A resourceful and adaptable man, he found a new role, as a trader carrying sea snails, flint, and other goods between coastal Indians and their enemies in the interior. He kept at this for more than four years.

  “I liked this trade, because it gave me the freedom to go wherever I wanted,” he wrote. “I was obligated to nothing and was not a slave.” There are stirrings in this passage, and elsewhere in the Account, of the future American story: living free, in a wide land, by one’s own wit and enterprise.

  BUT CABEZA DE Vaca couldn’t leave the Old World behind. Each year, he returned to the Isle of Doom to plead with a fellow Spaniard to flee with him toward “the land of the Christians,” in Mexico. When he finally prevailed, the two traveled a short way before learning that the land ahead was barren. Cabeza de Vaca’s companion, who had gone more native than he, returned to his Indian family.