Читать книгу Great River - Paul Horgan - Страница 25

4.

The Travellers’ Tales

They were given clothes to wear, and after seven years of nakedness they could scarcely endure the feeling of cloth. They were given beds to sleep in, but for many nights could not sleep anywhere but on the ground. Their rescuers wept and prayed with them giving thanks for their delivery out of the barbarian lands. But there were bitter discoveries to make again of rapacity and greed among their own kind as represented by Governor Guzmán’s men at Culiacan. Still, every sense of the value inherent in their extraordinary—and exclusive—news of vast new kingdoms helped to urge Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on to the city of Mexico, where they arrived on Sunday, July 25, 1536. Here there were two men who, more than anyone else, wanted to see them, to question them, and to glean their treasure of information.

One was the Viceroy, Don Antonio Mendoza, maintaining in his palace a state proper to the direct representative of the Emperor Charles V, with sixty Indian servants, three dozen gentlemen in his bodyguard, and trumpets and kettledrums.

The other—how could it have been otherwise so long as he breathed?—the other was the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, Cortés, starving for a renewal of conquest, and gnawing on his pride like a dog on a bare bone. Still restless, he still saw the new continent as exclusively the vessel of his aging energies.

The sabbatical refugees were splendidly received, now by the Viceroy, now by Cortés, and given fine clothes and other gifts. On the feast day of St. James the Apostle, a bull fight was arranged with a fiesta to honor the heroes. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was put up at the viceregal palace. Interesting interviews followed.

What was the extent of the seven-year journey?

The travellers drew a map for the Viceroy and on it traced their immense passage that spanned the continent from ocean to ocean.

And what had befallen them in that seven-year passion of survival?

The travellers had much to tell:

How seven years before with the whole company they had set out with the Grand Constable in Florida to find the rich inland country of Apalachen where they were promised gold and food, and how when they got there all they saw was a starving tribe of belligerent Indians; how days of roaming brought them nothing better; how the Governor fell ill and irresolute; how they tried to find the sea again and, having found it, how they wondered whether they could build boats in which to go by water to the River of Palms; how they had no tools or crafts with which to build boats; and yet how one day a soldier volunteered to make pipes out of tree branches and bellows out of deerskins; how they turned their stirrups, spurs, crossbows into nails, axes, saws and other tools, and set to work; how in twenty days with only one real carpenter among their number they constructed five boats about thirty feet long, caulked with palm fibre, and rigged with ropes made from horsehair, and sails made from Spanish shirts, and oars carved out of willow; how two hundred and two men embarked for the River of Palms in the five boats on the twenty-second of September in 1528, and how when all were loaded, the sea reached to within the spread of a thumb and little finger of the gunwales, and how men could hardly move for fear of swamping; how nobody in the party knew navigation; how they drifted west in hunger, and thirsted when the water containers made from the whole skins of horses’ legs rotted and would not serve further; how it was when men died from drinking sea water; how when they landed now and then to forage they were attacked by Indians; how winds and currents drove the boats apart from one another; how the Captain-General dissolved his command, saying it was each man for himself, and how he himself in his boat vanished out to sea one night in high weather and was never again seen; how two of the boats were blown ashore and broken on a barren island near the coast; how those who escaped, now only eighty in number, came to land naked and skeletal; how they passed the winter there amidst Indians, digging in the shallows for roots until January; how with spring all went to hunt blackberries; how they agreed to demands by Indians to effect cures of the sick, praying the Pater Noster and the Ave María, which healed the infirm; how certain Indians on meeting one another sat and wept for half an hour, then how he who was visited rose and gave the visitor all he owned who went away often without a word; how they were enslaved as root diggers by the Indians; how Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became a trader between coastal and inland people, taking from the shore such things as sea snail, conch shell for use as knives, sea beads, and berries, and bringing from inland in return skins, reeds or canes to make arrows of, hide thongs, ochre for face-painting, and tassels of deer hair; how one of their companions refused to leave the island to try for freedom overland, and how Núñez Cabeza de Vaca tried each year for several years to persuade him, and, having succeeded, only saw him give up and return to the island where he died; how others of the company died until eighty became fifteen, and those became four, threatened and terrorized by Indians through the years of captivity and constant movement from sea to plains, from plains to rivers, according to the seasons of food; how the company sliced and dried the flesh of their companions who died, and ate it to live; how the Indian people ate ant eggs, and spiders, worms, lizards, poisonous snakes (even those that bore at the tips of their tails little horny pods that shook with the sound of castanets), the droppings of animals, powdered fishbones, and other things to be remembered but not told; how the mosquitoes caused such torment that the people at times set fire to forests and grasses to drive them off; how they saw buffalo, some tawny, some black, with small horns; how the ground fire-hot from the sun in summer burned their bare feet as they wandered naked; how the four friends were separated many times when their Indian masters of different tribes met and parted; how one day after years they heard of the remains of one of the five poor boats and were shown by Indians the weapons and clothes of the occupants who had been too weak to resist as they were killed by the people of the coast; how the friends escaped and came to friendlier tribes inland among whom they became, all four of them, powerful doctors of medicine, making cures by the grace of God, and even as Núñez de Cabeza de Vaca did, restoring to life an Indian admitted to be dead; how after six months with those people, in famine, they found the prickly pears ripening and regaled themselves though the fruit was green and so milky it burned their mouths; how when the Indians set them to scraping skins to cure they scraped diligently and ate the scraps which would sustain them for two or three days; how going naked under the sun they shed their skins twice a year like snakes, and carried open sores on their shoulders and breasts, and were torn by thorns in the heavy brush of the inland country; how they came to be with other Indians who were astonished by their appearance and who overcoming their first fear put their hands on the faces and bodies of the strangers and then on their own faces and bodies almost as though to banish the mystery of human separateness in a gesture of common identity; how the Indians saw and heard better and had sharper senses than any other people they had ever seen; how one day they were given two gourd rattles by Indian doctors who said these had come floating by a river from the north; how another day they saw a hawk’s-bell of copper, carved with a face, which they were told came from a country where there was much copper; how in a new tribe they came among, the men hunted rabbits driving the animal ever closer to each other and finally striking it with a club most accurately thrown; how these people were hospitable and hunted deer, quail and other game for them, and at night made them shelters of mats; how as they moved, the people, three or four thousand strong, went with them and asked of them cures, blessings, and breathings of sanctification upon their very food, until their duties became a great burden; how these people never spoke to one another, and silenced a crying child by scratching it from shoulder to calves with the sharp teeth of a rat in punishment; how through the summers and winters of seven years these and countless other memories came with them in their powerful will to keep walking to the west, to the west; how they avoided the courses of rivers that flowed south and east which would return them to the miseries of the seacoast and its barbarians; and how they looked for rivers that flowed south and west, which might lead them out of the unknown land toward the mapped places of New Spain.…

And by the grace of God, they had indeed found their countrymen. Now—continued the voice of government—after all the abuses and hardships so admirably survived, was there then information as to the material resources seen along the journey?

Nothing but the utmost in degrading poverty for the first six years, until the travellers moved westward through mountains, and encountered the river where the corn-raisers lived. Given rain, it must be good country. They saw it.

Was that all?

Not all, for though they did not actually see, they heard of great cities on the river to the north, with many storied houses, where there were great riches, according to the people who told them so, and in fact, there was some evidence, for the people gave them some turquoises, and five arrowheads carved out of emerald.

Emerald? Where were these? Could they be examined?

Unfortunately, they had been lost in a frontier fracas with Governor Guzmán’s men, but were perfectly real, a bright, polished, though not transparent, green.

And these fabulous arrowheads came from the cities to the north, on the river?

Yes, and had been obtained by trade with southerly Indians, who bartered parrot feathers for them. There were other things of interest, and possibly of value—beautifully made shawls better than those made in Mexico, bangles and ornaments of beads, including coral that was traded inland from the South Sea, that great ocean lying to the west.

Yes, yes, shawls and beads—was there by any chance any sign of gold and silver and other metals?

Not directly, save for a copper hawk’s-bell come upon in the prairies far inland. The trading Indians were asked, as of course all people were asked every time they met anyone, whether gold and silver were in use in the great river houses. The reply was no, they did not seem to place much value on such substances. However, in the mountains through which they had come, reported Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, he and his friends had themselves seen many signs of “gold, antimony, iron, copper, and other metals.”

In other words, though the natives did not employ them, there were deposits of natural wealth?

So the trading Indians had said.

This was curious, in the face of earlier reports that came officially to the viceregal government, through an Indian belonging to Governor Guzmán, who said that as a child he had gone with his father—a trader—to those northern river cities, and he well remembered them, there were seven of them, where there were whole streets made up of the shops of gold- and silversmiths. Still. They might well be the same cities.—What was the way like? A road? Landmarks? A trail?

A trail, principally, once past the northern outposts of Governor Guzmán. It was employed for the travel of traders. There were many such guiding paths to be seen, made by the people who went from place to place for food and barter.

Could the way be followed by strangers to the land?

Probably—certainly, if anyone went along who had once travelled it.

Good. The refugees would please prepare a written report of all they had seen, as fully as possible, to be forwarded to the home government.

It was like the imperceptible rising of a pall of smoke from unknown land which became slowly visible.

All the evidence was translated into visions of wealth. But after all, experience made it seem plausible that the northern country should be another Mexico, another Peru, where in their own terms of gold and silver the conquerors had found wealth so real and heavy that the treasure ships returning to Spain with only the King’s fifth of all colonial income were worth whole fleets of raiders to the French and British. From the very first evidence at the tropical coast, with Montezuma’s gifts to Cortés of golden suns the size of carriage wheels and the rest, there was promise in every report of an unknown land.

Cortés believed that he held moral and legal right to all new conquests in the continent he had been the first to overcome. He spoke privately and urgently with Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and was not amazed at what he heard. In 1528, had he not already petitioned the Emperor for a patent to the northern lands, where this river was that they spoke of? Now it must certainly be his to exploit. Everything would appear to justify his selection as commander of an expedition to the great house-towns of the north—experience, ability, seniority, not to mention what might be due to him in gratitude for his past discoveries, pacifications and enrichments.

But the Viceroy had been given a firm understanding of the crown policy toward Cortés. All honor, consideration, respect—but no power. Power in the hands of the Marquis of the Valley tended to become too personal; too possibly enlarged until the crown itself might in its colonial relationship come to appear somewhat diminished, which would be unsuitable. As interest grew in the conquest of the north, there was talk that the Spanish Governor of New Galicia, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, would be named by the Viceroy to organize and command the new colonization. He had come to Mexico in the suite of the Viceroy a year or so before, and had shown himself to be an able man of government. The Viceroy conversed with him—secretly, for fear of Cortés—and arrived at a plan for further investigation of the north before the full expedition should be sent. The Bishop of Mexico had a remarkable guest, a certain Franciscan friar, called Marcus of Nice, who was known to be bold, saintly and selfless. Let him go north to find, if he could, the seven cities of Cíbola, of which such firm evidence had already been noted, and let him pacify the Indians as he went, and return with news. To guide him, the Moor Estebanico, who had already walked on much of the traders’ trail in the northern wilderness, would be sent along. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had earlier declined an invitation to return to the north, and had sailed for Spain. The other two survivors were settled in Mexico. The Moor was the best one to go.

The plan was agreed upon in the summer of 1538, and from New Galicia Francisco Vásquez de Coronado dispatched the friar and the Moor, with Indians who knew the immediate north, in the mid-spring of 1539. Fray Marcus was robed in a gray zaragoza cloth habit. Estebanico, fleetly accompanied by two greyhounds, went clad in bright clothes with jingle bells at his wrists and ankles, carrying as a badge of importance one of the gourd rattles long ago acquired in the inland plains whither it had floated by river. The party travelled on foot. The Viceroy’s orders to the friar said, in part, “You shall be very careful to observe the number of people that there are, whether they are few or many, and whether they are scattered or living together. Note also the nature, fertility, and climate of the land; the trees, plants, and domestic and wild animals there may be; the character of the country, whether it is broken or flat; the rivers, whether they are large or small; the stones and metals which are there; and of all things that can be sent or brought, send or bring samples of them in order that His Majesty may be informed of everything.… Send back reports with the utmost secrecy so that appropriate steps may be taken, without disturbing anything.…”

Would Cortés be listening?

The faithful friar was back in Mexico by early summer, making his reports first to Governor Vásquez de Coronado at Compostela, and later to the Viceroy in the capital. He told a temperate story, as full of fear as of conjecture, and earnestly hopeful of truth, in spite of its hearsay with occasional exaggerations and inaccuracies. It was a story with its regrets, too. He had gone faithfully northward, observing the land, passing from people to people, by whom he was cordially received, with food, triumphal arches, and requests for blessings. Estebanico he sent ahead with Indian guides, who were to return on the trail to tell the friar what his black man had seen: a small cross if he had seen a moderate-sized settlement, two crosses if a larger one, a great large cross if a big city. Day by day the messengers came back with ever larger crosses, until they bore one as high as a man. The great cities so long imagined must surely be coming into view.…

Meantime, Indians from the west coast brought shells of the kind known to contain pearls. There were deserts to cross, but the land became gentle again, and the journey was feasible. Finally one day came weeping messengers with bloody wounds who told of how Estebanico had halted at a great city at the base of a high mound. There he sent to the chief his ceremonial gourd rattle with its copper jingle bells. On seeing this, the chief hurled it to the ground, crying that it belonged to people who were his enemies and ordering its bearers to retire from the land. But Estebanico had refused, an attack had followed, the Moor had been killed by arrows, along with many of his Indian party. Those who returned to report declared that this took place before the first of the cities of Cíbola, which they said had many stories with flat roofs, doorways paved with turquoise, and other signs of wealth.

Friar Marcus then believed all was lost. His Indian companions were angered against him, for he had led them into a land of danger where many of their relatives had been killed along with Estebanico. He opened his sacks containing articles of trade, gifts received farther back on the trail, and made them presents, and declared that faithfully he would go forward and see but not enter the city of Cíbola. Two of the Indians finally agreed to go with him, and at last he saw the city with his own eyes, from a safe distance. It looked as he had expected—terraced, made of stone, and larger than the city of Mexico, which itself had over a thousand souls. Even so, the Indians told him it was the smallest of the seven cities. Giving thanks to God, he named it the new kingdom of Saint Francis, built a cairn of rocks surmounted by a cross, and solemnly possessing the whole of Cíbola for the Emperor and the Viceroy, retreated to his waiting party.

One more matter needed observation—a valley many days’ journey to the east, where he was told that in well-populated towns there was much gold which the people used for vessels, for ornaments of their persons, and for little blades with which they scraped away the sweat of their bodies. He believed that he saw only the mouth of that valley which lay at the end of the mountains of the north. There he planted two crosses and took formal possession, and hurried back to Compostela and Governor Vásquez de Coronado.

What he told was fitted ardently into the statements of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and into the long-sustained expectation of a true discovery of the lost cities of Atlantis—a dream kept alive in a time of marvels and credulities by Europeans whose exploits had already been marvellous enough to render any rumor plausible.

Excitement was high and gossip general. The Viceroy sent to Cortés, as a common courtesy, a brief of the friar’s report. From his hacienda at Cuernavaca, the Marquis replied with thanks and a formidable offer to co-operate in any expedition of settlement sent to Cíbola. Presently he was in the capital, scornfully letting it be known that in fact he had himself supplied Friar Marcus with most of the information which other people accepted as having been gathered at great personal risk by the Franciscan in his northern journey. The feeling of movement was in the air.

People felt which way the wind was blowing. Cortés called upon Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, whom he knew to be in the confidence of the Viceroy, and proposed himself for the expedition to conquer, settle and exploit Cíbola. Vásquez de Coronado faithfully reported the hungry offer to the Viceroy, who rejected it sharply, and gave his young provincial governor a wigging into the bargain. It was as well to have the position made clear: he had already recommended Vásquez de Coronado to the Emperor for appointment to the command of the expedition to the north; and with no further word to the great, the difficult, the restless Marquis, the Viceroy by royal authority on January 6, 1540, issued the commission to Vásquez de Coronado, with the order “that no impediment or hindrance whatsoever be placed in your way in the discharge and exercise of the office of captain-general in the said lands, that everyone accept your judgment, and render and have others render you, without any excuse or delay, all the assistance that you may demand from them and that you may need in the performance of the duties of your office.…”

It was time to move rapidly.

Cortés was only waiting for the spring sailings from Veracruz to hurry back to Spain, where he meant to press his claims personally upon Charles V.

Already a fleet and an army had left Spain once again for Florida. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had hoped to return to the new kingdom of his long suffering as commander of the present Florida fleet, but he was too late with his petition to the King. A veteran of the Peruvian campaign, Don Hernando de Soto, had already received the commission. De Soto sailed with much of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s information in his head, imagining that he understood the country of his grant, all the way from Florida to the Rio de las Palmas.

Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a fateful man; for in Compostela, and Culiacán, and the city of Mexico, another expedition in consequence of what he had seen, heard, and suffered, now made ready for the north, where waiting to be found in the distance of time and rumor, beyond the cities of Cíbola, was the valley of the long river, with its people who grew corn and wore mantles of cotton.