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