Transcript
Yo Soy
1519
In March 1519, the Spanish captain Hernán Cortés stopped with eleven ships at Cozumel, an island off Mexico's Yucatán coast. He had heard that two shipwrecked Spaniards were living among the Maya on the mainland, and he sent beads to ransom them.
Days later, a canoe arrived, and a soldier brought one of its paddlers to Cortés.
Hernán Cortés — Díaz’s account, Maudslay’s English translation Where is the Spaniard?
Jerónimo de Aguilar — as reported by Díaz, who was there Yo soy.
He was Jerónimo de Aguilar, shipwrecked in 1511, and after eight years among the Maya, even Cortés had taken him for a Maya.
The only other survivor of that wreck, a sailor named Gonzalo Guerrero, had refused the ransom.
Gonzalo Guerrero — as reported by Díaz, from Aguilar's account Brother Aguilar, I am married and have three children, and the Indians look on me as a cacique and captain in wartime. You go, and God be with you.
Gonzalo Guerrero — Díaz via Aguilar, Maudslay’s English translation But I have my face tattooed and my ears pierced. What would the Spaniards say should they see me in this guise? And look how handsome these boys of mine are!
Aguilar went back to the Spaniards as Cortés's interpreter, and Guerrero stayed with his Maya family.
From the Caribbean to Canada, meetings like these turned on the same things: God, land, the work of men and women, and power.
Are These Not Men?
1511–1512
In December 1511, the colonists of Santo Domingo, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, crowded into church to hear a Dominican friar. Most of them held encomiendas, royal grants that let them put Taíno families to work in their fields and gold mines. The friar, Antonio de Montesinos, told them they were all in mortal sin.
Antonio de Montesinos — as reported by Las Casas …for the cruelty and tyranny you use in dealing with these innocent people.
Antonio de Montesinos — as reported by Las Casas Are these not men? Have they not rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves?
The colonists demanded that he take it back, and the next Sunday he climbed into the pulpit and repeated the charge.
That year, a Taíno leader named Hatuey fled Hispaniola for nearby Cuba and warned its people that the Spaniards were coming. He held up a basket of gold and told them what the Spaniards worshiped.
Hatuey — as reported by Las Casas Behold here is the God of the Christians.
The Spaniards invaded Cuba anyway, and in 1512, after months of fighting, they captured Hatuey and tied him to a stake to burn him alive. A Franciscan friar urged him to accept Christianity, so that his soul would go to heaven.
Hatuey asked whether Christians went to heaven, and the friar said that the good ones did.
Hatuey said he would rather go to hell, so as not to be where Spaniards were, nor see such cruel people.
The stories of Montesinos and Hatuey survive because a Spanish priest, Bartolomé de las Casas, wrote them down. In 1514, Las Casas gave up his own Taíno workers and spent the next fifty years urging Spain's kings to end the cruelty.
Children of the Sun
1528–1539
In 1528, a Spanish army searching Florida for gold fell apart, and its survivors washed up on an island off present-day Texas. Its people sat down beside the starving strangers and wept.
Cabeza de Vaca — his later account wild and untaught, howling like brutes over our misfortunes.
Cabeza de Vaca, one of the castaways, wrote that about the people who were feeding him.
The islanders insisted that the strangers heal their sick, or go without food. So the Spaniards blew on the sick like the island's healers, then prayed and made the sign of the cross.
By 1534, four survivors escaped together: three Spaniards and Estevanico, an enslaved African from Morocco. Africans had come with the Spanish from the start, most of them enslaved, and many, like Estevanico, brought skills the Spaniards depended on. For a year and a half the four walked west as traveling healers, and Estevanico did most of the talking.
Cabeza de Vaca — his later account People came to seek us from many parts, and they said that most truly we were children of the sun.
Choose a stop on their route to see how they were treated along the way.
In 1536, near Culiacán in western Mexico, they met Spanish slave hunters, who told the local people that the four belonged to them.
Sinaloa elder — as reported by Cabeza de Vaca You lie. These came from where the sun rises; you, from where it sets. They heal the sick. You kill the healthy.
In Cabeza de Vaca's telling, they judged the strangers by what they did, and healers and slave hunters could not be the same people.
In Mexico City, the viceroy, Spain's governor there, welcomed the three Spaniards as heroes but kept Estevanico enslaved.
In 1539, the viceroy sent him north to guide a friar toward seven cities rumored to be rich.
At Hawikuh, a Zuni town in what is now New Mexico, Estevanico's messengers delivered his gourd rattle as a sign of peace.
Hawikuh official — companion’s report recorded by Marcos Get out. I know well enough what people you are. Enter the city, and I will kill you all.
Estevanico went on anyway, and the people of Hawikuh killed him. Along his road, people had called the strangers children of the sun, but Hawikuh told its neighbors that Christians were mortal.
Of No Value
1534–1536
In 1534, the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in today's Canada, looking for a sea route to Asia.
At Gaspé that July, Cartier's men raised a thirty-foot cross carved with the words “Long live the King of France.” A fishing party from Stadacona, an Iroquoian town where Quebec City stands today, watched from their canoes.
Their leader paddled out, made a cross with two fingers, and pointed to the land all around. Cartier took him to mean that the land was his, and that the French should have asked permission.
Jacques Cartier the cross had been set up to serve as a land-mark and guide-post
Slide between the two views to see what the French explanation left out. The cross carried the French king's arms, the sign Europeans used to claim land for their rulers. The Stadaconans, who came here to fish, had their own customs about who could use this shore.
Cartier took two of the chief's sons, Domagaya and Taignoagny, to France, and a year later they guided him upriver to Stadacona.
Back from France, the brothers knew what French goods were worth, and told their people to hold out for hatchets.
Cartier — from his voyage account The two rogues … were telling them and giving them to understand that what we bartered to them was of no value.
Cartier saw cheating where Stadacona saw a better price.
That winter, scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, killed twenty-five of Cartier's men.
Cartier noticed that Domagaya had recovered from the same disease, and Domagaya sent two women to show the French the cure. They boiled a tree's bark and leaves in water, and Cartier wrote that the sick men who drank it recovered.
In May 1536, before sailing home, Cartier seized the chief, Donnacona, with his two sons and seven other people and carried them to France. Cartier's voyages ended in distrust, though French fur traders in the next century built lasting alliances with Native peoples.
The Fifteenth Judge
1542–1555
Las Casas kept pressing, and in 1542 King Charles of Spain issued the New Laws to protect Native people. The laws banned enslaving Native people and ordered that each encomienda end when its holder died.
Colonists fought back: in 1545 the king let encomiendas pass to heirs again, and in 1546 rebels killed Peru's viceroy near Quito.
In April 1550 the king paused new conquests in Peru, and that August he called fourteen judges to Valladolid, in Spain, to hear a debate. The question was whether Spain could lawfully conquer Native peoples first and convert them afterward.
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a scholar of Aristotle, argued that Native peoples were inferior by nature, so Spain could justly rule them. Las Casas answered that they were fully human, with their own rulers and laws, and could be won to Christianity only by persuasion.
Sepúlveda argued that war could rescue the victims of human sacrifice.
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda What pious man could deny a good prince’s duty to defend so many innocent people from such terrible injuries?
Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda I believe they can be conquered by the same right by which they can be compelled to hear the Gospel.
Las Casas answered that war killed more innocents than it saved.
Bartolomé de las Casas …we should not move against an immense multitude of persons, including the innocent…
He argued that true conversion required persuasion, and no one could be forced to believe.
Las Casas — written argument, English wording reproduced by Burke and Humphrey What does the Gospel have to do with guns?
Bartolomé de las Casas The Indians are our brothers, and Christ has given his life for them.
Bartolomé de las Casas Why, then, do we persecute them with such inhuman savagery when they do not deserve such treatment?
Choose the argument you would accept, and read what your choice would have allowed.
Whatever you chose, the real judges never issued a joint verdict. They met again in 1551, and still no joint ruling came.
No Native person spoke at Valladolid, and the judges never issued a joint ruling. Ten years earlier, the Caxcan people of western Mexico had risen against Spanish rule in the Mixtón War. Mexico's viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, crushed the rising with a few hundred Spaniards and tens of thousands of Native allies, including Tlaxcalans.
One Caxcan leader, Francisco Tenamaztle, ended up a prisoner in Spain, and in 1555 he fought on with a petition to the king's council.
Tenamaztle — petition prepared with Las Casas This flight, and this natural self-defense, most powerful lords, the Spaniards call, and have always called, misusing the meaning of words, … rising against the king.
Drag through the years to compare what Spain's laws promised with what Spaniards did.
Christ Our Victory
1579–1587
Las Casas's account of Spanish cruelty was printed in English in 1583, and Protestant England used it against Catholic Spain. In 1584, the writer Richard Hakluyt urged Queen Elizabeth to found colonies in America, promising a gentler empire than Spain's.
That year, English scouts brought two Carolina Algonquian men to London: Manteo, from the island of Croatoan, and Wanchese, from Roanoke Island.
In 1585, both men sailed home, and about a hundred Englishmen stayed to settle Roanoke Island.
That July, when a silver cup went missing at the Algonquian town of Aquascogoc, the English burned the town and its corn.
The colonists who stayed on Roanoke were all men, and they had brought no seed corn, so from the start they lived on Algonquian food.
Manteo chose to work with the English as a guide, and Wanchese chose to keep away from them.
In Algonquian towns, women grew the crops, and Thomas Harriot, who wrote the colony's report, noticed that a town of men puzzled them:
Thomas Harriot — A Briefe and True Report, 1588 they noted also that we had no women among us, neither that we did care for any of theirs.
Each side judged the other by its own ideas of what men and women should do.
Soon people were dying in the towns the English had visited, and some Algonquians blamed invisible bullets shot by unseen beings at the Englishmen's request.
Neither side knew about germs, so each explained the deaths with the beliefs it already held.
Wingina, Roanoke's leader, had welcomed the English, but by 1586 he resisted them by telling his people to stop selling them food. His people said the colonists' God was no god if he let them go hungry.
In June 1586, convinced that Wingina was plotting against the colony, Governor Ralph Lane led his men to Wingina's mainland town.
Ralph Lane I gave the watchword agreed upon, which was: Christ our victory.
At that signal, Lane's men shot Wingina and cut off his head. Across the century, colonists' demands for land, labor and food drove some Native peoples to fight and others to bargain.
In 1587, England tried again, this time with families: more than a hundred men, women and children under a new governor, John White. When White's men visited Croatoan, the people there made a request.
Croatoan elder — as reported by White Do not gather or spill any of our corn. We have but little.
Lane's men had wounded some of them by mistake the year before, so they asked for a badge that would mark them as friends.
John White — reporting what the men of Croatoan told him, 1587 Our man Master Howe was slain by the remnant of Wingina's men … with whom Wanchese kept company.
White struck back before dawn, with Manteo as his guide.
John White — his 1587 journal He behaved himself toward us as a most faithful Englishman.
John White But we were deceived, for those savages were our friends, and were come from Croatoan to gather the corn.
Four days later, the English baptized Manteo and named him Lord of Roanoke and of Dasamonquepeuc, the town they had raided. The title gave England a Native lord who answered to the queen, but the people of those towns never agreed to it.
Before White sailed home for supplies, the colonists agreed to carve their destination on a post if they moved, with a cross for danger.
CROATOAN
17–18 August 1590
England's war with Spain kept John White away for three years, and he did not reach Roanoke again until August 1590.
The houses were gone, and a word was carved on one of the gateposts.
John White — from his 1590 narrative CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress
John White — from his 1590 narrative A certain token of their safe being at Croatoan, which is the place where Manteo was born, and the savages of the island our friends.
Choose a mark to sort what White saw from what he concluded.
A storm drove his ships out to sea before he could sail to Croatoan, and he never found the colonists. No one has ever proved what became of them.
Both sides borrowed what worked: Spaniards healed the Native way, Cartier's men drank a Native cure, and Native traders sought iron tools. Most Europeans came to see Native peoples as inferiors to convert, rule and put to work, though reformers like Las Casas fought that view.
Native peoples never answered as one: Hatuey fought, Hawikuh turned the strangers away, the people of Croatoan bargained, and Tenamaztle fought, then petitioned.
Cooperation and violence could come in the same relationship: Stadacona's women cured Cartier's men, and then Cartier seized their leaders.
Europeans, Africans and Native Americans formed new families, as Guerrero had, and by 1600 Spanish America had many people of mixed ancestry.
WHAT THEY MADE OF EACH OTHER