by Hugh Thomas
On October 10, Soto reached the outskirts of Atahachi with his host. He sent Luis de Moscoso to greet Tuscaloosa. Moscoso made a successful display of horsemanship, and then Soto arrived. Tuscaloosa offered dinner. Afterwards, Soto requested the king to give him women and porters in order to carry their burdens onward on the next stage of the journey. Tuscaloosa declined, explaining that he was not accustomed to serve anyone. At that point, as Doroteo Teodoro should have told Tuscaloosa would be likely to occur, Soto detained him. The two then rode through Atahachi, the king in his litter, the conquistador on his horse. Tempers were worsened by the death of two Spaniards at the hands of Indians, and Soto was even more angry when he was informed that the Indians were preparing an attack at Mabila, their next port of call.
The Spaniards went there with Tuscaloosa remaining in virtual freedom. Three to four hundred Indians in ceremonial feathers were ready to greet them. It was a substantial town, for there were eighty large houses, and stockades with towers. Soto and Tuscaloosa walked to a place of honor in a square, most of the former’s army being left outside. Tuscaloosa succeeded in meeting his captains, and they decided to act right then and there against Spain. Cristóbal de Espíndola observed that the houses around the square were full of soldiers, and Baltasar Gallegos tried to persuade one of Tuscaloosa’s captains to fetch the king. He refused, and Gallegos cut off his arm. At that, Tuscaloosa gave the signal to move against the Spaniards.
Soto was trapped in a fortress-like town with his horsemen unable to move freely. Five of his guards were killed instantly; Gallegos was wounded. All the porters deserted. But Soto managed to find a mount and escape. This became the most serious battle in which the Spaniards had been engaged since their landing in North America. But with Soto outside, the Spaniards were able to besiege the town, and they did so, setting on fire the houses nearest to them. In this combat, it seems that Tuscaloosa and his son and heir were burned to death. About twenty Spaniards were killed, and 250 were wounded. Twelve horses were killed, and almost all the baggage was lost. Soto remained outside this fatal city of Mabila for several weeks, his men forced to cover themselves in native blankets, not Spanish dress.
Next, the expedition went south again, crossing the river Alabama. They found maize at Talicpacam but not enough. At Mozulixa, the Indians disappeared without leaving any food. Soto seized food at two villages belonging to the Apafalya people, capturing a chief, whom he afterwards used as a guide. Crossing the cold river Tombigbee, the Spaniards reached the capital of the Chickasaws, which had twenty houses and was full of maize. The people fled; the chief presented Soto with 150 rabbits, some skins, and blankets. This friendly tactic was a ruse, for the Chickasaw Indians sought to steal Soto’s pigs and horses. In fact, they did kill about four hundred pigs and nearly sixty horses, as well as eleven Spaniards. It took two months for Soto’s 450 Europeans to organize their defenses once more.
Shortly thereafter, they reached the Mississippi, near what is now Memphis. The mouth of that great waterway had been observed years before, in 1520, by Alonso Álvarez Pineda. Here, Soto saw a fleet of canoes with painted warriors on board wearing white plumes in their hats, led by a chief from a town called Aquixo. This dramatic appearance suggested once again to the credulous invaders that they might be on the edge of a land of gold.
On June 18, 1541, Soto carried his men across the Mississippi, going first to Aquixo, then to Casqui, where they found buffalo, maize, walnuts, plums, and mulberries. Soto was making for Pacaha, which he besieged and then broke into while it was being abandoned. The chief escaped and hid successfully, leaving Soto to observe the fine pottery made in the place, the elaborate system of irrigation, the blankets and deerskins, the shirts, the leggings of hide, and cassocks. Soto stayed in this town for a month making local forays. They were probably then near what is now Helena, fifty miles south of Memphis.
They continued down the Mississippi, reaching the river Arkansas in mid-September, and finding in Tula a people who deformed their heads at birth to make them longer. They also pricked their faces and lips with flint needles in order to color them black. They used long lance-like poles against buffalo and as defensive weapons. They had the eccentricity of weeping profusely as a greeting.
Soto and his army spent the winter of 1541–42 near Redfield, on the river Arkansas, where they had gone because rumors of wealth in that territory had reached them. There were, however, only beans, dried plums, and nuts. In the spring, they went south again, to follow the Mississippi. Soto sent Juan de Añasco ahead to report how far off the sea might be. He rode fifty miles down the river but saw no sign of it. Unlike Orellana in somewhat similar circumstances on the Amazon, he returned. Soto was gloomy at his apparent isolation. He again told a local chief that he was the Son of the Sun, at which the chief replied that if Soto were really a god, he should dry up the great river.16
In the spring of 1542, Soto abandoned his mission. He died soon after. Did he die from exhaustion, or was there a fever or other infirmity? It is impossible to say, but he was not old. We hear, though, that Baltasar Gallegos sought to console him by speaking of the shortness of life in this world, attended as it was by so many afflictions. God showed particular favors to those whom he called away early. Sweet were the uses of adversity. Elvas commented that Soto “died in a land and at a time that could afford him little comfort in his illness.”17 Before he died, Soto named Luis de Moscoso as his successor.
Moscoso buried Soto first at the gate of the town, but then, to avoid questions from Indians, his body was committed to the great river. Moscoso told the local chief that Soto had not died but had gone to the skies. All the same, he immediately set about selling the mobile property of Soto: two male slaves, two females, three horses, and seven hundred swine. Moscoso himself made evident that he had no more interest in Soto’s enterprise. On the contrary, he longed “to be again where he could get his full measure of sleep rather than govern and go on conquering a country so beset for him by hardships.”18
It appeared sensible to all to march westward. In that direction, as all knew, lay New Spain. They were surprised not to find the gold, silver, and cotton that Cabeza de Vaca had assured the emperor Charles was to be found on the way, but they concluded that that was because they were marching into the interior, whereas Cabeza had gone along the coast. Some grieved to return to civilization. They would rather have continued to live in peril than leave “Florida” poor.
Moscoso hoped to reach New Spain in the summer of 1542. But they found the country in Texas too dry to maintain the army, so they returned to the Mississippi, near Guachoya, where Soto had died. There they spent the winter making rafts to float down the river.
The expedition eventually reached Pánuco by boat in September 1543. They numbered 311. The viceroy Mendoza welcomed them and gave orders that they should be fed as they required. The news was soon taken to Havana. Thus what had been assumed there was confirmed. Soto was dead, and Isabel, his widow, was in consequence disconsolate.
Soto’s expedition was one of the oddest of the Spanish adventures in the New World. It would have seemed heroic had it had a true destination. As it was, Soto and his constantly dwindling band of experienced Spaniards and their horses traveled on and on, always expecting to find a new Peru or a new Mexico, with Soto himself and his senior colleagues always believing in stories that fifty leagues ahead, there was just such a realm with vast resources of gold—not just maize and persimmon, or other delicacies such as watercress or cabbages, or chestnuts and grapes, not to speak of the “symmetrical and tall” girls of the Macanoche tribe or the robust Mochila ladies. Many self-deprecating comments had been made to the Spaniards: “I entreat you to forgive me for the error I committed in not waiting to greet and to obey you since the occasion should have been for me (and is one) a matter of pride,”19 or “Very high, powerful and good master. Think what must be the effect of me and mine of the sight of you and your people … What pride was ours when the fierce brutes of your ho
rses entered with such speed and fury into my country … I hope you will tell me who you are, whence you come, and what it is you seek.”20
The Spaniards were often cruel: We read “of those made captive, the governor sent six to the chief with their right hands and their noses cut off.” Or, “the governor having been led for two days out of the way ordered that the Indian [guide] should be put to the torture, when he confessed that his master, the chief of Nondaco, had ordered him to take them in that manner … He was commanded to be cast to the dogs.” Sometimes the distress was caused by “the intolerable torment of a myriad of mosquitoes.” The sails of Spanish vessels might seem covered with insects at daylight. It is hard to sympathize with Hernando de Soto. Yet his plight was genuine. We cannot forgive him his brutalities, nor can we forget his multiple tragedies.
38
The Magic Lure of the New World
I could not die in peace without having seen the Indies.
PHILIPP VON HUTTEN TO BISHOP MAURICE VON HUTTEN
We are in Venezuela. The great expedition of Federmann had long before vanished into the Andes. The few Spanish settlers at Coro maintained an austere life, interrupted from time to time only by demands for more slaves from the Caribbean islands, which they could not meet.1
Coro remained important, however, as a place from which expeditions could be mounted. Hence the arrival there of Philipp von Hutten. His temperament was one that seemed to have been formed by an excessive diet of romantic novels. He was the second son of a powerful family in Frankfurt. The young Philipp’s benefactor in his early youth had been the Emperor’s friend Henry of Nassau, and he was for a time a companion of the prince, later emperor, Ferdinand. Still in his twenties in 1535 (he had been born in 1511 at Birkenfeld, Frankfurt) he went to the New World in search of honor: “After having passed a great part of my life among friends, I want to come back with my name and my family honoured, so that no one laughs at me.”2 He had a lot to live up to. A Hutten had led the army of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa against the Hungarians; he was a cousin of the humanist reformer and rebel Ulrich von Hutten, who had died so young so recently; and his elder brother was Maurice, bishop of Eichstatt. The Indies were for Philipp the curtain against which he hoped to display his personality, the ideal of a Renaissance man. “God is my witness,” he wrote to his brother the bishop, “that, in this journey, I have not been for a second moved by a desire for wealth, rather I have been affected by a strange dream. It seemed to me I could not die in peace without having seen the Indies [No hubiera podido morir tranquilo si no hubiese visto las Indias].”3
He went on Federmann’s (first) unfortunate expedition to the plains, in which three-quarters of the soldiers died. Hutten came to admire Federmann, whom he had met in Seville. “I believe,” he wrote, “that the future of this province depends on him.” He wrote to his brother the bishop: “I ask you to think that it would be an honour for you and for our friends if I came back heavily laden with debts for, for the moment, I cannot expect to bring any other booty.”4 His letters then take on a darker character: “If you could know what an effort and danger the riches from here entail, and how many thousands of Christians the Indies have cost and how many fleets one loses before one finds a Peru … !” He added, “It is a great comfort to those who are here in the desert [a green desert of jungle, not of sand] to receive a letter from home … I well know that, with this long drawn out journey, I have given my parents a sad and restless old age … You cannot believe what a good cook hunger makes. Please wish me a glass of wine which I have not drunk for almost four and a half years, except for the drop I receive in the chalice when I take communion.”5
Hutten achieved some success in Venezuela. Thus in 1540, he was in Barquisimeto when he received the news of the death of Espira. Hutten had been a part of the little army led by Lope Montalvo de Lugo, Espira’s favorite captain. He returned to Coro, where he met Bishop Bastidas, who had brought two hundred men, including 150 horsemen. Bastidas named Hutten captain-general to pursue the plans of Espira. The nomination was received by Hutten with much happiness, though just then he also heard from Germany that his father had died.
He set off in August 1541 for what he fondly expected would be El Dorado, the source of fabulous gold supplies, with a hundred horse and a few foot. He took with him as his second-in-command Bartolomé Welser the Younger, the innocent son of Bartolomé Welser, as well as Fray Frutos de Tudela. He expected to join or indeed absorb the army of Montalvo de Lugo, but that captain, horrified by the nomination of Hutten as captain-general, had left for New Granada. So Hutten and Welser went ahead by themselves.
They crossed the river Opia by canoe and entered the territory of the Guaypiés Indians. Hutten went along the base of the Andes, and they were soon at San Juan de los Llanos, where they supposed that Jiménez de Quesada had been. They moved west and seem to have found the source of the river Uaupés, a tributary of the great Amazonian river Negro. Pedro de Limpias, a skilled linguist and experienced explorer, who could not bear being considered in an inferior position to the spoiled Bartolomé Welser, went for a three-month reconnaissance down the river Guaviare, which eventually joins the Orinoco. The entire expedition then went on to a town that seemed to be called Macatoa. There the chief told Hutten that “alongside a certain range of mountains which could be observed on clear days, there were vast towns of rich people who possessed enormous wealth.”6 Once again, an Indian chief was seeking to divert a potential conqueror with a tale of wealth just round the corner; and as usual, the diversion worked, for Hutten and his army made for where they had been directed.
This was the town of the Omagua people, and Hutten and his company saw in the center of it a fine house, in which, they were assured, were wonderful objects, including a woman made of gold who was their goddess. With a friend, Arteaga, Hutten went to seize two Indians who, however, defended themselves well. They wounded both the conquistadors. The Europeans retreated to the jungle, where Diego de Montes operated on the two captains to save their lives (he investigated the interior of an Indian to see how such wounds affected the body). Hutten then reached the conclusion that he did not have enough men. He resolved to return to Coro to recruit reinforcements.
The return was nearly one thousand miles, and the journey took them from January to May 1545. They reached the Río Pauto, whence Hutten sent on Welser in command of twenty men, alongside Pedro de Limpias, who had been on one of Federmann’s journeys. But relations between Welser and Limpias were still bad, and anyway, the former did not want to go to Coro: He suggested that they go to Cubagua, where there were by then good houses and whence they could return to Santo Domingo and escape forever the fortunes of Venezuela.
In Hutten’s absence, there had been both natural and human catastrophes on the coast of Venezuela. In 1541, a hurricane had destroyed Cubagua, which had become prosperous because of the pearls found there. Two years later, in July 1543, French pirates in five big ships fell on the ruins and seized what remained there.7 But in addition, a decision had been taken in the Council of the Indies to take a residencia in Coro and in particular of the actions of Hutten. A judge of Santo Domingo, Cervantes de Loaysa, was appointed. But illness prevented him from going there. Instead, he sent Juan Frías, prosecutor of the supreme court in Santo Domingo, to be governor of Venezuela once the residencia was over; and Juan de Carvajal, one more member of the vast family of that name who played such a part in the history of the Americas, and relator (rapporteur) of the audiencia, would be his lieutenant in Coro. He accompanied the nomination with a sensible proviso: Carvajal was not to be allowed to go into the interior of Venezuela, as so many governors or their lieutenants had done.
Carvajal went to Coro, to find the place utterly miserable. This must have played a part in his reaction, for the settlers seemed primarily in pursuit of Indians, particularly Caribs, so that they could send them to be sold as slaves in Santo Domingo. The few remaining natives had, unsurprisingly, an implacable hostility to al
l Spaniards.
Unable to survive there, Carvajal went by ship eastward along the coast, so far as to enter the valley of the Tocuyo, where he founded a new town, Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Tocuyo, more or less at the mouth of the river. This was a more fertile region. He even felt able to grant encomiendas, which he did with the help of the skillful Juan de Villegas.
Limpias, meantime, bade Welser goodbye at Barquisimeto and, with five friends, went immediately to the camp of Carvajal, where he was given a safe-conduct as well as a pardon for breaking with Hutten. But both Hutten and Welser followed Limpias and clashed violently—in words, that is—with Carvajal. At first, it is true, they dined together, and they even observed a play of canes. Carvajal suggested that Hutten suspend his march to Coro and that they both collaborate in the government. Then Carvajal said that he wanted to go to the so-called valley of Pamplona, said to be full of riches. He suggested to Hutten that he for his part go to the island of Margarita, the center for pearls, and that he buy some horses there with money borrowed from his own soldiers. Hutten refused and said that he had to go to Coro in order to report to the Crown what had been done. Carvajal then held another dinner, but he suspended the play of canes and asked Hutten to present himself at his camp tent. The sympathies of his soldiers for Hutten were confused, for they had suffered great privations without much reward. They saw in their mind’s eye the possibility of having to go again to distant lands in search of mythical El Dorados. The Germans seemed to bring bad luck. Carvajal seemed better organized. At least he could provide food.
