Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (6 page)

What became of Christopher Columbus?

Following the first voyage, Columbus arrived in Spain in March 1493 after a troubled return trip. He was given a grand reception by Ferdinand and Isabella, even though he had little to show except some trinkets and the Taino Indians who had survived the voyage back to Spain. But the Spanish monarchs decided to press on and appealed to the pope to allow them claim to the lands, ostensibly so they could preach the Christian faith. The pope agreed, but the Portuguese immediately protested, and the two countries began to negotiate a division of the spoils of the New World. They eventually agreed on a line of demarcation that enabled Portugal to claim Brazil—which is why Brazilians speak Portuguese and the rest of South and Central America and Mexico are principally Spanish-speaking countries.

Columbus was then given seventeen ships for a second voyage, with about 1,500 men who had volunteered in the hopes of finding vast riches. When he returned to Hispaniola, Columbus discovered that the men he had left behind at a fort were gone, probably killed by the Taino. Columbus established a second fort, but it was clear that this was not the land of gold and riches that the Spaniards expected. He sailed on to Cuba, still believing that he was on the Asian mainland, and then landed on Jamaica. Returning to Hispaniola, Columbus then began to set the Taino to look for gold—with harsh quotas established and harsher punishments for failing to meet those quotas. The lucky ones lost a hand. The unlucky were crucified in rows of thirteen—one for Jesus and each of the disciples.

Soon the Indians also began to drop from the infectious diseases brought over by Columbus and the Spanish. Reports of the disastrous situation in the colony reached Spain, and Columbus had to return to defend himself. His reputation sank but he was given a third voyage. On May 30, 1498, he left Spain with six ships and fewer enthusiastic recruits. Prisoners were pardoned to fill out the crews. He sailed south and reached the coast of present-day Venezuela.

Following a rebellion on Hispaniola, there were now so many complaints about Columbus that he was brought back to Spain in shackles. Although the king and queen ordered his release, his pardon came with conditions, and Columbus lost most of his titles and governorship of the islands. But he was given one more chance at a voyage, which he called the High Voyage.

In 1502, he left Spain with four ships and his fourteen-year-old son, Ferdinand, who would record events during the trip. Although Columbus reached the Isthmus of Panama and was told that a large body of water (the Pacific Ocean) lay a few days’ march away, Columbus failed to pursue the possibility. He abandoned the quest for Asia, exhausted, and suffering from malaria, sailed to Jamaica. Starving and sick, Columbus here supposedly tricked the locals into giving him food by predicting an eclipse of the moon. After being marooned for a year, Columbus left Jamaica, reaching Spain in November 1504. Isabella had died, and Ferdinand tried to convince Columbus to retire. He spent his last days in a modest home in Valladolid, and died on May 20, 1506. He was not impoverished at the time of his death, as legend had it. His remains were moved to Seville and later to Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). Some believe his bones were then taken to Cuba; others believe his final resting place is on Santo Domingo. (Scientists are attempting to get permission to do DNA tests on the buried bones.)

Where were the first European settlements in the New World?

While we make a great fuss over the Pilgrims and Jamestown, the Spanish had roamed over much of the Americas by the time the English arrived. In fact, if the Spanish Armada launched to assault Queen Elizabeth’s England hadn’t been blown to bits by storms and the English “sea dogs” in 1588, this might be Los Estados Unidos, and we’d be eating tacos at bullfights.

Following Columbus’s bold lead, the Spanish (and, to a lesser extent, the Portuguese) began a century of exploration, colonization, and subjugation, with the primary aim of providing more gold for the Spanish Crown. The Spanish explorers, the conquistadores, amassed enormous wealth for themselves and the Spanish Crown, while also decimating the native populations they encountered. Many of them died as they lived—violently, at the hands of either Indians they battled or their fellow Spaniards eager to amass gold and power. Among the highlights of Spanish exploration:

1499
Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Hojeda (or Ojeda) sail for South America and reach the mouth of the Amazon River.

1502
Vespucci, after second voyage, concludes South America is not part of India and names it
Mundus Novus
.

1505
Juan Bermudez discovers the island that bears his name, Bermuda.

1513
After a twenty-five-day trek through the dense rain forests of Central America, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crosses the Isthmus of Panama and sights the Pacific Ocean for the first time. He names it Mar del Sur (Southern Sea) and believes it to be part of the Indian Ocean. Political rivals later accuse Balboa of treason, and he is beheaded in a public square along with four of his followers. Their remains are thrown to the vultures.

1513
Juan Ponce de León begins searching for a legendary “fountain of youth,” a spring with restorative powers. Ponce de León, who had been on Columbus’s second voyage and had conquered Boriquén (Puerto Rico), making a fortune in gold and slaves, reaches and names Florida, claiming it for Spain. (Ponce de León dies after suffering arrow wounds during a fight with Indians.)

1519
Hernán Cortés enters Tenochtitlán (Mexico City). Thought to be the returning Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, Cortés captures Emperor Montezuma, beginning the conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico. His triumph leads to 300 years of Spanish domination of Mexico and Central America.

Domenico de Piñeda explores the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Vera Cruz.

1522
Pascual de Andagoya discovers Peru.

1523
A Spanish base on Jamaica is founded. (Arawak Indians, who were the first people to live in Jamaica, named the island Xaymaca, which means land of wood and water.)

1531
Francisco Pizarro, an illiterate orphan and one of Balboa’s lieutenants, invades Peru, kills thousands of natives, and conquers the Incan Empire, the largest, most powerful native empire in South America. The Inca, already devastated by civil war, were decimated by smallpox brought by the Spanish. Pizarro captures and executes the Inca ruler Atahualpa. (In the late 1530s, a dispute between Pizarro and another Spaniard, Almagro, over who was to rule the area around Cuzco led to war. Pizarro’s forces won the conflict in 1538 and executed Almagro. In 1541, followers of Almagro’s son killed Pizarro.)

1535
Lima (Peru) founded by Pizarro.

1536
Buenos Aires (Argentina) founded by Spanish settlers, but they leave the area five years later because of Indian attacks. A group of settlers from Paraguay, led by a Spanish soldier named Juan de Garay, reestablishes Buenos Aires in 1580.

1538
Bogota (Colombia) founded by Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, a Spanish military leader who conquered the area’s Chibcha Indians.

1539
Hernando De Soto, a veteran of the war against the Inca in Peru, explores Florida. He is authorized to conquer and colonize the region that is now the southeastern United States.

1539
First printing press in New World set up in Mexico City.

1540
Grand Canyon discovered.

1541
De Soto discovers the Mississippi River; Coronado explores from New Mexico across Texas, Oklahoma, and eastern Kansas. On May 21, 1542, de Soto dies from a fever by the banks of the Mississippi River. The remains of his army, led by Luis de Moscoso, reach New Spain (now Mexico) the next year.

1549
Jesuit missionaries arrive in South America.

1551
Universities founded in Lima and Mexico City.

1565
St. Augustine, the oldest permanent settlement established by Europeans in the United States, is founded by Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Aviles. A colony of French Protestants, or Hugue-nots, had established a colony in Florida called Fort Caroline. Menéndez attacked the French and wiped them out, and later killed a large number of French sailors who had been shipwrecked in a hurricane.

The settlement of St. Augustine was razed by English privateer Francis Drake in 1586. Spain ruled St. Augustine until 1763, when the British gained control of it. Spain again ruled the settlement from 1783 until 1821, when Florida became a territory of the United States.

1567
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) is founded.

1605
(date in dispute; some say 1609) Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded as the capital of the Spanish colony of New Mexico. Santa Fe has been a seat of government longer than any other state capital. (Proud New Mexicans now argue that the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in Santa Fe.)

If the Spanish were here first, what was so important about Jamestown?

Winners write the history books, so, even though the Spanish dominated the New World for almost a century before the English settlers arrived in Jamestown, the Spanish were eventually supplanted in North America, and the new era of English supremacy began. Just as modern American life is shaped by global happenings, international events had begun to play an increasingly important role at this stage in world history. By the mid-sixteenth century, Spain had grown corrupt and lazy, the Spanish king living off the spoils of the gold mines of the Americas, with a resultant lack of enterprise at home. With gold pouring in, there was little inducement or incentive to push advances in the areas of commerce or invention.

Perhaps even more significant was the revolution that became known as the Protestant Reformation. A zealous Catholic, Spain’s King Philip II saw England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth not only as a political and military rival, but as a heretic as well. His desire to defend Roman Catholicism dictated his policies, including his support of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth. For her part, Elizabeth saw the religious conflict as the excuse to build English power at Spain’s expense. And she turned her notorious “sea dogs,” or gentlemen pirates, loose on Spanish treasure ships while also aiding the Dutch in their fight with Spain. The Dutch, meanwhile, were building the largest merchant marine fleet in Europe.

When the English sank the Spanish battleships—the Armada—in 1588, with the help of a violent storm that smashed more Spanish warships than the British did, the proverbial handwriting was on the wall. It was a blow from which Spain never fully recovered, and it marked the beginning of England’s rise to global sea power, enabling that tiny island nation to embark more aggressively on a course of colonization and empire-building.

What was the Northwest Passage?

If you answer, “A movie by Alfred Hitchcock,” Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. (You’re thinking of
North by Northwest
, the classic thriller including the famous scene in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop duster.)

Almost a century after Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans remained convinced that a faster route to China was waiting to be found and that the New World was just an annoying roadblock—although Spain was proving it to be a profitable one—that could be detoured. Some tried to go around the top of Russia, the “northeast passage.” Sebastian Cabot organized an expedition in search of such a passage in 1553. Cabot had also tried going the other way back in 1509, but the voyage failed when his crew mutinied.

In 1576, Sir Humphrey (or Humfrey) Gilbert first used the phrase “North West passage,” to describe a sea route around North America, and he continued to search for such a route to China. An Oxford-educated soldier, courtier, and businessman, Gilbert also played a hand in the earliest English attempts at colonization. In 1578, another Englishman, Martin Frobisher, set off for the fabled route and reached the northeast coast of Canada, exploring Baffin Island.

Among the others who searched for the route through the Arctic from Europe to Asia was Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch, who embarked on his voyage aboard the
Half Moon
to North America in 1609, the voyage on which he discovered the bay and river later named after him. Sailing as far north as present-day Albany, Hudson met Delaware and Mohican Indians along the way and apparently threw a memorable party at which the Indian leaders got quite drunk. But Hudson realized that this was not the route to China.

Like many of the famous explorers, Hudson left a name for himself but his fate was far from happy. In 1610, a group of English merchants formed a company that provided Hudson with a ship called the
Discovery
. When the
Discovery
reached a body of rough water, later named Hudson Strait, that led into Hudson Bay, Hudson thought he had at last come to the Pacific Ocean. Struggling to sail though massive ice, he headed south into what is now James Bay. But lost, frustrated, and cold, Hudson and his crew failed to find an outlet at the south end of this bay. Forced to haul their ship to ground and spend the winter in the sub-Arctic, Hudson and his crew—who had been promised the balmier South Pacific—suffered severely from cold, hunger, and disease. In the spring of 1611, Hudson’s crew could take no more. They mutinied and set Hudson adrift in a small boat with his son, John, and seven loyal crewmen. The mutineers sailed back to England, and their report gave continued hope that a passage existed between Hudson Bay and the Pacific. But it didn’t prompt Hudson’s employers to send a rescue effort. England based its claim to the vast Hudson Bay region on Hudson’s last voyage and the Hudson Bay Company soon began the fur trade that would bring the wealth that a route to Asia was supposed to deliver. Hudson and his boat mates were never seen again, although Indian legends tell of white men being found in a boat.