Perhaps motives were never really concealed.
The Indians were friendly as Camargo and his people landed. Pineda had come and gone in peace, while the Indians watched what he did, and gave him their frail products in return for his cheap colors and shines and pretties, and let him march, if he would, seeing and seeing as if he hungered with his eyes.
Now Camargo settled heavily among the river Indians. He would have food from their stores, for his men. Superior strength in armament at times felt like personal virtue, justifying all, as in a police psychology. Other Indian possessions may have seemed suitable to take—dwellings, women, lordship, honor, liberty. The record of provocations on the one hand, and of treacheries on the other, was meagre. But one day a group of Indians turned against the Spaniards, and open hostility flared on both sides. Camargo made a show of arms, but the river people fought back, and a battle driving them to the ships in the river cost the Spaniards eighteen men and all seven horses of the cavalry. Abandoning one of their ships, the Spaniards weighed anchor in the other two and headed downriver. Indians pursued them in a great fleet of canoes. The clumsy towering ships like great bullheaded fish, imprisoned by the meanders of the river, were exposed to the stinging missies and cries of the Indians in the canoes, and others on the low banks. The distance they had to travel to reach the sea was twice as long by water as by land. But at last they came to the roiled water of the mouth, crossed the shallow bar, and headed south following the coast.
The ships were in bad repair. Unlike Pineda, these expeditioners had not careened their vessels, which—“idle and available” at Jamaica-may have been no good to start with. On board were few stores, because of the unexpected flight from the river country. The stoutest men on board ship were permitted to land on the coast, to make their way overland to Veracruz, foraging for their keep, and heading for the promises of Mexico. The ships went on for Veracruz by sea. The same ambitions filled their companies. Nearing Veracruz, and other Spaniards, one of the ships had to be abandoned. It sank, after the men on board had safely moved to the other ship, which reached Veracruz only to settle and sink in the harbor after ten days.
A little while later, reinforcements came from Jamaica to join Camargo’s colony on the river. It was nowhere to be seen. But the passion of Cortés, shaking the Mexican kingdoms for their gold and glory, called to the men of Garay’s second expeditionary force who, when they had to leave the Rio de las Palmas, turned southward, irresistibly drawn into hardship, catastrophe—and unity with the power of their time.
Three years later, on July 25, in 1523, Governor Francisco Garay himself finally arrived at the Rio de las Palmas from Jamaica with an army of seven hundred and fifty officers and men in sixteen ships, armed with two hundred guns, three hundred crossbows, and artillery. A town was to be founded here and called Garay. The civil administration had already been established, and the alcaldes and councilmen appointed, before the Governor’s expedition had left Jamaica. He had never heard from his other two forces of 1520; but he believed that their attempts to found a colony were successful. His purpose was not only to make his capital on the River of Palms, but also to make good his claims—based on Pineda’s voyage in 1519—to all the region reaching south to the Pánuco River, despite the fiery shadow of Cortés which had already fallen across the territory. Cortés, Cortés—the name, the legend reached into the mind and affairs of every man who turned himself and his fortunes toward the New World.
Garay sent a subordinate up the river to fix upon a proper site for his city. The Governor waited at the arms of the river for a report. It came in four days, when his scouting officer returned to say that what he had seen made him conclude that the river country was unsuitable for the founding of the city of Garay.
Many men were dismayed when the Governor, almost as though seizing upon a pretext for his action, abandoned the plan to settle the Rio de las Palmas. Some urged him to remain. But he turned his face toward the south where on the Pánuco River, as he already knew, Cortés had established the town of Santiestevan. Was this to be endured by that officer of the crown who swore he had a claim to the Pánuco prior to the claim of Cortés? Garay was heard to declare that he would fight for his claim, and ordered the bulk of his army ashore, to join him in an overland march from the Rio de las Palmas to the Pánuco. The fleet he directed to follow the coast. Through hardship and loss, both land and sea forces made their way south to give battle. But what genius of success attended Cortés? On his very way to oppose Garay by force of arms rather than by legal sanction, he received in the jungle a new royal grant giving him jurisdiction over the Pánuco, superseding the one earlier made to Garay, who came only to be swept magnetically into the power of Cortés—Cortés, to whom Garay’s soldiers and sailors were eager to desert, Cortés, who never forgot anything, Cortés, to whom the Rio de las Palmas at the north was an outpost, possibly strategic, to be kept sharply in a corner of his mind, and be done about when the time came.
Garay bowed to the royal cédula and in due course was kindly, even sumptuously, received by Cortés in Mexico. There in the court of New Spain, he met another of the conqueror’s defeated rivals—Pánfilo de Narváez, who had undertaken to represent the Governor of Cuba in a matter of landing in Mexico and arresting Cortés—a venture which had cost Narváez his small army, his reputation, his freedom, and one of his eyes. The two prisoners, given every privilege, exchanged old hopes and severed dreams. To proud men, the very kindness of Cortés could be terrible; for only to rivals rendered harmless could he show so much. Governor Garay died before the new year, of a broken heart it was said, after leaving Cortés as executor of his will, and Narváez as the inheritor of his hope to colonize the River of Palms.
It was the destiny of this river from the first to be a frontier of rivalries, a boundary of kingdoms, a dividing line between opposing ambitions and qualities of life. During the next three years, three Spanish leaders considered themselves the rightful masters of the Rio de las Palmas.
Cortés planned to settle a colony there in 1523, to help in carrying out the Emperor’s command to find the Strait of Anian, which all believed to open from the coast between Florida and the Rio de las Palmas and to lead by water to Cathay. But affairs in central Mexico took all his attention.
Intrigue in the colonies and at Court worked away to crumble Cortés from below. As a result of representations made to him, the Emperor in 1525 removed the Pánuco from the jurisdiction of Cortés and created a new province of Pánuco-Victoria Garayana, reaching all the way to Florida and including the Rio de las Palmas. Nuño de Guzmán, appointed governor, sailed for his new province which he reached over a year later.
And meantime, with the return of Narváez to Spain petitioning for command of the lands once granted to Garay, the Emperor made still another grant, establishing the province of Florida, reaching from the Atlantic coast to the Rio de las Palmas. Narváez was made adelantado.
Messages, even royal commands, with their replies, took a year for the round trip, for the fleet sailed from Spain in April and returned from Veracruz in the fall. To such delay, again subject to the vagaries of the ocean, and the soundness of little ships and of men, there was added the formal obstructionism of government with its dedicated waste of time. It was no wonder that for years Cortés knew nothing of the royal patents made to Guzmán and Narváez.
Once in residence at the Pánuco, Guzmán established slave trade among the Indians of his region, and word traveled swiftly through the Indian jungles and deserts and river valleys of the cargoes of stolen Indians shipped out at fat prices for the enrichment of the Governor and his followers. He knew of the forty and more reed towns on the Rio de las Palmas; what was more, Pineda had seen Indians wearing golden ornaments somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Guzmán sent his cousin Sancho de Caniedo north to the River of Palms with orders to found a town on its course, reconnoitre the country, and claim it for Guzmán in the name of the King. It was an act of typical ruthlessness, for Guzmán knew then that Narváez by royal authority had been given command of the land taking in this river. He held to his prior claim. There was no news of Narváez. Slaves and gold to the north—let his brave cousin march. Caniedo went overland and spent five months exploring the territory. But where were they, the forty towns on the river? And where the people, with