Kachina and the Cross (3 page)

Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

Tags: #History, #Native American, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Ethnic Studies, #Native American Studies, #test

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Spain, ca. 1490
Turks in 1571. Against this was the continuing rebellion of the Netherlands, whose navy was beginning to challenge Spanish control of the northern European seas. England also became a competitor with considerable naval success including destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588. A rebellion in southern Spain by the Moorish inhabitants that began in 1567 was put down only after several years of bloody fighting.
The discovery and colonization of the New World was one-perhaps the foremostof the seminal events in human history, and in a very short time changed the entire face of the globe. The two hemispheres had developed in relative isolation for millions of years, each producing specialized animal and plant forms. Human beings moved into the New World through a corridor by way of east Asia and Alaska very late in time, near the end of the last great period of earth glaciation, or ice age. Native American populations spread rapidly through North and South America and fitted themselves into a number of environments. From all evidence at hand it would seem that agriculture and animal husbandry were invented separately in the Eurasia-Africa continents and in the Americas. New World plant and animal domesticates were quite different in species (with a
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few exceptions) from those of the Old World. In isolation, a number of the agricultural societies of the Americas developed high cultures with cities, metallurgy, complex social organization, and in a few places written records. Other Indian societies remained hunters and gatherers, living much the same life as had their forefathers over the millennia.
The idea of sailing westward from Europe to find new lands or a shorter way to the great eastern polities of China and Japan was not at all new. An understanding that the earth was spherical was hardly an invention of Columbus; sophisticated people had believed it from the days of Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C. The real question was the circumference of the Earth. A number of estimates had been made; one by Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the third century B.C. was reasonably near the correct figure of about 25,000 miles. Columbus, however, accepted a smaller measure of the Earth's circumference, probably the one being promoted by the fifteenth-century Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli, which in turn drew from the maps of the second-century A.D. astronomer and geographer Ptolemy. Columbus believed that Asia extended farther eastward than was actually the case, and he also had his East Asian latitudes confused. In fact, he reached the edges of the New World at about the place he expected to find Japan.
Columbus was to a large degree a medieval man. He seems to have believed in the geographic correctness of the Judeo-Christian Bible even when it violated the canons of common sense. For example, Columbus took quite literally a statement in the Second Book of Esdras, which he read from the Vulgate. This passage, Columbus believed, proved that the earth was mainly dry land, so that the western ocean must be narrow: "On the third day You commanded the waters to be gathered together in the seventh part of the earth, but six parts You dried up" (2 Esd. 6:42).
There had been other explorations westward and southward before Columbus. For centuries the Europeans had listened to folk tales of lands off to the west. A group of seven Portuguese bishops fleeing the Moors in the eighth century were supposed to have founded seven cities in some new land to the west, a durable legend thattransplanted to northern New Spainhad considerable impact on the early exploration of the Southwest. Large islands, one called Antilia and another St. Brandan or Brendan (after a sixth-century Irish saint), appeared on certain maps in the fifteenth century. By that time Antilia was becoming fused with the older Seven Cities tale.
As opposed to these problematic lands, real islands were discovered by exploring parties from Spain and Portugal. But even earlier, the Canary Islands were contacted by Arab navigators in the twelfth century and may have been rediscovered
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in 1312 by a Genoese ship. Both Spain and Portugal claimed the Canaries, but they were ceded to Spain in 1477. At the time of Columbus a war of conquest with the native Guanches was still underway. By 1492 Spanish control of the islands was sufficient for them to be a base from which Columbus launched his voyage to the New World.
Two other sets of islands were taken over by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. The uninhabited Madeira Islands, north of the Canary group, were colonized by Portugal sometime in the 1420s. Between 1431 and 1439 Portugal discovered and explored the Azores to the north and west of the Madeira Islands and some thousand miles directly west of southern Portugal. In 1443 serious colonization of these islands began. An attempt was made by Ferñaó Dulmo in 1486 to sail westward from the Azores, but because of adverse winds and currents, Dulmo failed to reach the North American coast. It is possible, however, that unrecorded voyages from the Azores and/or trips by fishing vessels from Bristol in western England reached the Newfoundland Banks or the coast of Newfoundland itself before Columbus's first voyage. It should be stressed, though, that the major Portuguese effort for a half-century or more had been sailing south and east, around Africa, with the idea of eventually reaching India and Indonesia. In this they were spectacularly successful, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and reaching the Indian coast in 1497-98.
In any case, the Vikings had touched the coast of North America five centuries before Dulmo and Columbus. In the year A.D. 1001, a Viking explorer named Leif Ericsson, sailing from Greenland, even attempted a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, overlooking the eastern entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle. The site was visited by Leif's brother, Thorvald, perhaps in 1003, and Thorvald spent two winters there. In 1009, an Icelandic ship's captain named Thorfinn Karlsevni, having married Leif's widowed sister-in-law, shipped out from Greenland with both men and women to attempt a permanent colony at L'Anse aux Meadows. The expedition failed, and probably by 1012 the would-be colonists had returned to Greenland. A final attempt in 1014 to settle at Leif's old site failed miserably, partly due to infighting among the settlers. One footnote to history was a boy named Snorri who became perhaps the first European child born in the New World.
But the Viking attempts were bound to fail. They were launched from Greenland, whose peripheral position and lack of basic materials, including timber for ships, made it an unlikely seed bed for colonization. Indeed, the Greenland colonies themselves had failed and been deserted or destroyed by Columbus's time. A concerted colonizing effort launched from Norway or Denmark might possibly have succeeded, but the mainland countries were uninterested.
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Christopher Columbus reached what became known as the Antilles, or West Indies, in the fall of 1492. Though he made three additional voyages over the next twelve years and explored parts of coastal South and Central America, Columbus seems to have gone to his death with the stubborn belief that he had explored the continent and islands of Asia. But even before he died in 1506, events had passed Columbus by. The Spaniards had exhausted the placer gold deposits and destroyed the native population on the main islands of the West Indies and were probing at various points on the mainland.
A Portuguese voyage headed around Africa had touched on Brazil in A.D. 5000, but Portugal's claim to that part of South America was based on the 1493 "donation" by Pope Alexander VI dividing the western Atlantic lands between Spain and Portugal in such a way that present-day eastern Brazil fell into the Portuguese sphere of influence. Although neither nation had any real idea what they were sharing, the division was codified in the Treaty of Tordesillas the following year. Portuguese expeditions in 1501-2 and again in 1503 under Goncalo Coelho also carried a Florentine explorer named Americus Vespucci who reported the voyages. Coelho and Vespucci explored the Brazilian coast and contacted the Tupian-speaking natives of the area. Because of his skillful publicizing of these and other voyages, Americus Vespucci became very well known to mapmakers in Europe. One major result was that the name
America
was given to the new western lands.
Spanish exploration of the New World was very rapid. In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa led a party to the Pacific shore of Panama. The mainland of Mexico was invaded by Hernán Cortés in 1519, and over the next two decades Mexico and Central America were largely overrun by Spanish arms. The viceroyalty of New Spain was set up in 1529 but was not fully functioning until 1535. In the early decades it included much of Mexico and Central America, the Antilles, and after their conquest (1565-71), the Philippine Islands.
Meanwhile Spaniards from the Panama settlements were planning exploration and conquest to the south. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro led an expedition against the Inca Empire, and within a few years his soldiers controlled most of the central Andes. In the thirty years that followed Pizarro, the Spaniards operating from Peru established control over Columbia and northern and central Chile. Venezuela was colonized in the 1560s, and colonies were founded in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay well before the end of the century. Sailing from Spain in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 discovered a way around the southern tip of South America, through the straits that bear his name. He then sailed on to the Philippines, where he was killed in an attack on a native chiefdom. One of his ships, however, managed to continue across southern Asia and
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Sebastian Münster's map of the New World, Basel, 1540 (from facsimile in author; possession)
around Africa, reaching Spain in 1522the first known circumnavigation of the world.
The great and mysterious Amazon River, whose mouth had been entered in A.D. 1500 by the Spanish explorer Vicente Yañez Pinzón, was explored throughout much of its length by Francisco de Orellana in 1541 and by Lope de Aguirre in 1561. Eastern Brazil was considered to be Portuguese, and settlers spread along the coast. Portugal and her empire merged with Spain in 1580.
Spain made several thrusts into what is now northern Mexico and the United States. There was an attempt to settle Florida by Ponce de León in 1521. An ambitious expedition by Pánfilo de Narváez, launched from Cuba in 1528, ended in disaster. Another, even larger expedition led by Hernando de Soto entered Florida in 1539 and explored the southeastern and part of the central United
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States until 1543, when battered remnants of the expedition managed to reach Pánuco on the east coast of Mexico.
Probing into the lower Southwest began as early as 1533, and a major expedition to the upper Southwest and to the western Plains under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado took place from 1540 to 1542. The Greater Southwest was not brought under firm Spanish control, however, until the seventeenth century. (The sixteenth-century Spanish exploration of the Southwest shall be discussed in chapter 3.) A sea expedition in 1542-43 explored the West Coast as far as Oregon, but no settlements were made.
After 1580 the Spaniards considered all the New World to be theirs. This was not really a practical point of view, however, for the east coasts of present-day United States and Canada had received very early attention from both English and French explorers. John Cabot had rediscovered Newfoundland for the Europeans in 1497, reaching landfall probably only a few miles from L'Anse aux Meadows, the ill-fated settlement made by the Viking Leif Ericsson. This was likely an accidental conjunction since Cabot, who had probably never heard of the Viking voyages, was searching for a short northern route to Asia and the spice trade.
John Cabot was lost with his ships in a second attempt to find Asia in 1498. The English and Portuguese made a few more attempts in the next two or three decades to exploit the area. The Portuguese actually established a colony on Cape Breton Island sometime in the early 1520s, but it was deserted after a year or so. By that time fishermen from Brittany and England had discovered the Newfoundland Banks with their riches in cod. The French established a claim with voyages by Jacques Cartier in the 1530s. Returning to the St. Lawrence area in the autumn of 1541, Cartier established the town of Charlesbourg-Royal on the Cap Rouge River, which joins the St. Lawrence a few miles upstream from modern Quebec. However, reinforcements carried by Jean-François de La Roque, Sieur de Roberval, the nominal commander of the expedition, failed to appear, and Cartier deserted the town in June 1542, about the time Coronado was on the march home from the Southwest, and the remnants of the de Soto expedition were floundering their way through the Mississippi Valley. When Cartier met up with Roberval in Newfoundland, he declined to have anything further to do with the colony and returned home to France. Roberval then established his own town, France-Roy, near the deserted Charlesbourg-Royal, but this settlement, like its predecessor, lasted only a year.
In fact, no permanent colonies were established despite various attempts until the first decade of the seventeenth century, when the French at Port Royal (1604), now Annapolis Royal, and Quebec (1608) as well as the English at

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