The imperial expansion of Spain in the New World occurred at a pace rarely matched in world history. One hundred years after Columbus’s first crossing of the ocean, Spain, a small European country of no more than eight million people, had managed to discover, conquer, and colonize a distant and vast territory more than ten times her size and with a far greater population. The quick pace of expansion was made possible by Spain’s ability to establish settlements immediately following a region’s conquest. These settlements instantly became bases for further land and sea expeditions. While crown officers, churchmen, and some settlers moved in to solidify colonial rule in the new outposts, a small but indefatigable group of some twenty thousand ubiquitous conquistadors continued to spread the Spanish presence in the New World with a restless activity that took them from one campaign to the next without stop.
A vast number of reports, letters, accounts, and histories serve as testimony of the successes and tribulations of the New World explorers, and their encounters--many times violent--with the native inhabitants. Understandably, most of the early writings were written by protagonists of expeditions and military campaigns whose primary interest was getting the facts known, justifying their own role in the events, and ultimately getting due recognition for their services to the crown. After the exploration, conquest, and eventual settlement by the Spanish, a good number of authors tended to shift their interest towards the collection of natural, ethnic, and linguistic information about the territories.
V.1. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Relación. Zamora, 1542.
Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (16th cent.) was the treasurer of the first major expedition organized to explore the coast between Florida and Mexico, led by Pánfilo de Narváez. After most of the men, including Narváez, died on the Texas coast, Nüñez was captured by Indians. This capture marked the beginning of an extraordinary adventure of endurance, skill, and cultural adaptation, in which Nüñez and four other survivors worked their way up among the Indians from being virtual slaves to the noble status of healers. Using Indian means of survival and orientation, they crossed Texas, the desert of Sonora, and the Sierra Madre, finally reaching a Spanish outpost on the Pacific coast eight years after the beginning of the expedition.
Alvar Nuñez’s 1542 Zamora edition is now one of the rarest books of Spanish colonial history. In 1555 a second edition appeared in which Nuñez added an account of his later activity in South America.
V.2. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá. Historia de la Nueva México. Alcalá de Henares, 1610.
Villagrá (d. 1620) was born to a family of illustrious captains in Puebla, Mexico. He went to Spain and graduated from the University of Salamanca. Soon after returning to New Spain, he enlisted in Juan de Oñate’s expedition to New Mexico, and played a major role as one of its captains. Villagrá’s poem is a true history of the conquest of New Mexico in thirty-four cantos for which he used both documents and personal recollections. Villagrá’s merits as a poet are few indeed, but the historical value of his poem is indisputable. It provides not only the earliest and most accurate information on Spanish expeditions to New Mexico, but also unique information on the Pueblo Indians not found anywhere else. Villagrá’s work is the first printed history of any territory now part of the United States.
V.3 Bartolomé de Flores. Obra nuevamente compuesta. Seville, 1571.
By the mid-sixteenth century the French were interested in settling in Florida to look for riches and to create a base to raid the Spanish fleets loaded with bullion. In 1562, the Huguenot captain Jean Ribaut founded Fort Caroline on the Saint John’s River, in today’s South Carolina. The Spanish lost no time in sending a punitive expedition led by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, which attacked and destroyed Fort Caroline in 1565. This event is exalted in this poem by Flores as an act of divine punishment against the Lutherans. The 375-line poem ends with a detailed description of the land and its native people; Florida, depicted as a natural paradise, is called the New Valencia. This hyperbole attests to the propagandistic nature of the Obra, whose underlying purpose was to recruit settlers for Menéndez’s colonizing enterprise in what proved to be a rather harsh and hostile territory.
V.4. Garcilaso de la Vega. La Florida del Ynca. Historia del adelantado Hernando de Soto. Lisbon, 1605.
Hernando de Soto (1492-1542) served under Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of Perú. Back in Spain he learned of Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s failed expedition to Florida, and quickly organized another one. Soto and his men landed at Tampa on May 15, 1539, and then proceeded inland until reaching Appalachia. After descending to the Alabama coast, they penetrated into the interior to the northwest, and on May 8, 1541, were the first Europeans to view the Mississippi River near today’s Memphis. Traveling west they reached Arkansas where the cruel winter stopped them, and Soto died of fever. The rest of the expedition returned to the Mississippi and sailed along its course, the remaining survivors finally reaching Tampico, Mexico, in September 1543. Although based on an eye-witness account, Garcilaso’s history is at times fanciful and prone to associations with Classical mythology.
V.5. Cristóbal de Acuña. Nuevo descubrimiento del gran río de las Amazonas. Madrid, 1641.
Acuña (b. 1597) entered the Jesuit order at the age of fifteen, and in about 1636 went to the New World. After the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal had been unified under the Spanish monarch in 1580, a project was developed to explore the possibilities of establishing commercial shipping up and down the Amazon. Acuña joined Pedro Texeira’s scientific expedition, which accomplished a remarkable nine-month voyage upstream along the river from Pará to San Francisco del Quito in 1539. From first-hand observation, Acuña provided descriptions of the flora and fauna, but his brief account is especially rich in information on the Indians, especially their religious rites and their legends.
Soon after the publication of the Nuevo descubrimiento, Spain and Portugal again separated. The book was then banished and most printed copies seized (it has become indeed one of the rarest), so as to prevent the Portuguese from using Acuña’s valuable and precise information. The effort failed, for the book was soon translated and published in several languages.
V.6. Alonso de Ovalle. Histórica relación del reyno de Chile. Rome, 1646.
Ovalle (1601-1651) was born in Santiago, Chile, and joined the Jesuit Order in 1618. During a stay in Rome he wrote this book, which was both the first and the best history of Chile written in his time. In the first two chapters he eloquently described the land and the life of its two groups of inhabitants, the Mapuche Indians and the descendants of the Spanish colonists like himself, followed by a history of the conquest. The last part of the book deals with the missionary work of the Jesuit Order in Chile. The Histórica relación, written in an elegant style, has been considered the first expression of a national Chilean identity. It was also one of the most lavishly produced histories of that time. Spanish and Italian editions were published simultaneously, and the book became an instant success. The first English edition was published in 1703.
V.7. Manuel Rodríguez. El Marañón y Amazonas. Madrid, 1684.
Rodríguez (1633-1701), a Jesuit with long experience in the Amazon area, wrote a history of all the expeditions along the river, using several first-hand accounts. The first expedition was the celebrated trek of Francisco de Orellana, who discovered the sources of the Amazon river in Perú and sailed its complete course with his men in improvised boats in 1542. Because the explorers encountered some women among the Indians who attacked them, the river, also known as Marañón, took the name of the mythical female fighters, the amazons. Rodríguez’s history concentrates on the ensuing expeditions in which his religious order had a prominent role, with the intention of claiming major successes in the evangelization of the Indians.
V.8 Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Historia general de las conquistas del nuevo reyno de Granada. Antwerp, 1688.
Fernández de Piedrahita (1624-1688), a mestizo, was born in Santa Fe, Colombia, and had a distinguished career as a churchman in the New World, serving as bishop of Santa Marta, Colombia, and Panama. For his history he used his direct knowledge of the area as well as many documents, particularly the long and detailed account by the conquistador, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, which in the seventeenth century was still in manuscript. The Historia, which carries the story forward to 1566, is divided into twelve books. The first two deal with Indian history and are indispensable for the ethnographic understanding of the area. The remaining ten books narrate the events of the conquest.
V.9. Antonio de Morga. Sucesos de las islas Filipinas. Mexico, 1609.
In his Bull of 1493, Pope Alexander VI had established a line of demarcation between Spain’s and Portugal’s rights of possession. Following the Magellan expedition (1519-1522), a hot debate ensued between the two countries about the limits of that line in the Far East, until it was finally agreed that it would run between the Molucca Islands (part of today’s Indonesia) and the Philippines. Antonio de Morga (1559-1636), a career royal official, arrived in Manila to serve as the first lieutenant governor of the Philippines, a post he held for eight years. Morga’s Historia is a priceless resource for the natural and ethnographic history of the islands. He makes a notable attempt to differentiate the multiple ethnic groups and their languages and also records some interesting consequences of the encounter, such as the Pintado Indians’ newly acquired habit of wearing shoes and punishing adulterous wives.
V.10. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes. Madrid, 1768.
Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532?-1608?) was a multitalented man, as proven by his success as a soldier, astrologer, cosmographer, and historian. After Sir Francis Drake had raided the Spanish settlements in the South Pacific in 1579, the Spanish launched an expedition to look for possible sites for settlement on the Chilean coast that would prevent English attacks. Sarmiento served as official cosmographer and wrote this splendid report of his navigation. It provides detailed descriptions of such maritime concerns as the coastline and sea currents, and can thus be used as a practical guide.
The Viage remained in manuscript until 1768, when it was published in Madrid. It was used extensively in the eighteenth century by all Spanish expeditions into the area. An English edition was published by the Hakluyt Society in 1895.
Exhibition Exhibition text written by Angel Delgado-Gomez;
installed by Susan Danforth.
in the reading room from MAY 2, 2010, to July 31, 2010.