The Xenophile Historian

Before 1607

	Introduction
	It Began With the Ice Age
	"Five Hundred Nations"
	The Mound Builders
	The Cliff Dwellers
	Who Really Discovered America?
	The Egyptians
	The Chinese
	The Celts
	The Vikings
	How Many Indians?
	America's Forgotten History
	The First English Explorations
	The Conquistadors Who Drew the Map of North America
	The Seven Cities of Gold
	The Cross and the Sword
	Santa Elena
	The Chesapeake Mission
	The Ultimate Corsair
	The Search for a Northwest Passage (continued)
	The Lost Colony
	Epilogue
	Go to Page Navigator

If you have read any other history papers on this website, you know I am used to looking at the big picture. For my papers covering ancient and medieval history, I have not had much to say about America, because it had no impact on the rest of the world in those days. After Europe discovered America, it remained much the same story until about 1850 A.D.; the only countries affected much by America were those western European nations that had colonies on the other side of the Atlantic. Nor did Americans give the rest of the world much attention until they had tamed their own continent. Since that time, however, America has usually dominated Western civilization. The United States became an industrial giant in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century it transformed its industrial power into military, financial, and cultural power. Today the United States is the last remaining superpower, and with the citizens of other countries watching American movies, listening to American songs, eating at American-style fast food places, and wearing American fashions, it seems that much, if not all of the world, is within the American sphere of influence. Talk about an iron fist in a velvet glove; few empires have imposed their will as thoroughly as the United States is doing today, nor did so many people willingly accept it; in most cases the Americans took over without firing a shot!

The story of how America went from being an unknown frontier to a world leader may not be as long as the stories of the Roman, Egyptian, or Chinese civilizations, but it isn't boring, and (so far) it has a happier ending. First of all, it is because North America has been richly blessed with all manner of natural resources. Resources by themselves are not enough to ensure a nation's success--some places with abundant resources (e.g., Africa and Russia) don't seem to be going anywhere, while Switzerland and Japan show us that you can be resource-poor and still do well--but you have to admit they help a lot! The other critical factor is the mind-set of the people; can they use their resources responsibly, to benefit as many people as possible, rather than let the ruling class keep the goodies for themselves? With the United States and Canada, the answer is yes, and that has put both of them in the G-7 group, the exclusive club for the world's richest nations.

This brings us one more factor that makes Anglo-America unique, and it may be the most important one; the United States and Canada are both social experiments on a grand scale (hence the title of this work). Because of the time lag involved with communicating with a government across the ocean, Americans got used to governing themselves in day-to-day affairs long before they declared independence, with little interference from the Crown or Parliament. After independence came, only a representative government would do for them, and since then Americans have been known for cherishing their freedom, though only after World War II did they try introducing American-style governments to the rest of the world. Also along that line, Americans have been a bolder than average sort; they are unwilling to follow tradition for its own sake, they look to explore where no one has gone before, and they tend to have an optimistic view of the future. Unlike Europe and the Middle East, they don't see their best days as being in the past. It's a similar story with Canada, because Canada was the first former British colony to achieve Dominion status, becoming independent without breaking its ties with the mother country, thereby setting the example for all colonies that London has turned loose since then.⁽¹⁾

So far I have been talking mostly about the United States. It seems to be a national sin for Americans to take Canadians for granted, ignoring them most of the time; alas, I've done it myself. Throughout its history, Canada has lived in the shadow of its boisterous southern neighbor. Because of Canada's harsher climate, Americans outnumber Canadians by 10 to 1, so there aren't as many events to report on the north side of the 49^th parallel. Yet in the name of fairness I will try to give Canada equal time in this work. To any outside observer, Canada should not have survived as an independent nation, and when the United States was expanding, many Americans expected that some day Canada would join them by default. Instead, Canada not only survived but also prospered, and the story of how it succeeded will be covered in a separate paper, after I am done with the United States.

It Began With the Ice Age

The ice age affected both the north and south polar regions, but in the north the bulk of the ice formed on North America. If you draw a circle around the part of the northern hemisphere covered, the epicenter would be in the Arctic Ocean, between Ellesmere and Devon Islands (two of Canada's northernmost islands) and Thule Air Force Base on Greenland. This is only a few hundred miles from the present location of the north magnetic pole, and since magnetic poles don't stay in one place like the geographic poles, the epicenter could be right on the ancient location of the north magnetic pole, for all we know. Apparently the formation of the ice age glaciers was controlled by the earth's magnetic field, through a process that is not clear to us. What is means for this narrative is that at their height, the glaciers covered nearly all of Canada, and the northeastern portion of the continental United States; in Illinois and Virginia they stretched as far south as latitude 37^o, more than half way to the equator. By contrast, on the other side of the Arctic, Siberia was largely ice-free, which is amazing when you consider that today Siberia is colder than Europe or North America.

Other geographical changes were caused by the drop of world sea levels by more than 300 feet, as a result of so much water from the seas being frozen. The Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America have a wide continental shelf, so the continent's eastern shore would have been much farther out than it is today, an average of 50 miles in most places. Being a peninsula, Florida was affected the most of all; it was twice as wide in those days, with Tampa Bay near the middle of the state, instead of on the west coast. On the other hand, the Pacific coast wouldn't have changed much; it is on a geologic fault line, part of the Pacific "ring of fire," and thus it has a narrow continental shelf and a relatively steep slope into the trenches of the Pacific Ocean.

Finally, a cooler climate meant slower evaporation, so existing lakes were often much larger than they are today. As a result, geologists give them different names until they reached their current dimensions: Great Salt Lake was part of Lake Bonneville, Lake Tahoe used to be Lake Lahontan, Lake Ontario was once Lake Iroquois, and Lake Agassiz, a veritable fresh-water sea in the middle of Canada, shrank after the earth warmed up to become Lake Winnipeg. Other lakes formed because their outlets were blocked by the ice; an example of this was Lake Missoula in western Montana, which existed as long as glaciers in the Rockies kept water in the area from draining out via the Columbia River.

Lake Bonneville, superimposed on a map of modern Utah.

An artist's conception of how Lake Missoula might have looked.

It now appears that the first Americans came to the New World in several waves, and at least one of them did not start from Siberia. The latest theory, based on comparative DNA studies, suggests that the first Americans came over in three or four groups, with the largest having just seventy individuals. The ancestors of most of the tribes throughout the Americas would have arrived in the first group. The second group would have been the Na-Dene or Athabascans (also spelled Athapaskans), a group of related tribes found mostly in Alaska and western Canada, plus a few tribes in the western United States (e.g., the Apaches). The Eskimos⁽⁴⁾ came over with the third group, and while they have done a marvelous job of surviving in an environment that would have killed off anybody else, the game they pursued (mostly fish and seals, later on they learned to add the occasional whale) forced them to stay in the coast lands of the far north; they never even tried to settle more temperate places. Around 500 A.D., they got as far south as Port aux Choix in Newfoundland, but even that was only a seasonal hunting camp. If there were any non-Asiatic Indians, they may have come in a tiny fourth group, perhaps by following the edge of the northern icecap across the half-frozen Atlantic from Europe.⁽⁵⁾

In regards to the ice barrier in Alaska, I will propose an alternative way past it. The ocean currents in the northern Pacific move in a clockwise direction that closely follows the Asian and North American coasts, from Japan to California. A boat in that current would have gone to North America with little or no effort; we have reports from the nineteenth century of disabled Chinese and Japanese ships drifting to the west coast of the United States and Canada. Therefore I believe that while the ancestors of the Na-Dene and Inuit may have come directly across the Bering Strait/Beringia, the ancestors of the main Indian group would have traveled by sea, made landfall in California, and stayed there for several generations, increasing in numbers, before moving into other parts of the Americas. On this journey they would not have even been out of sight of land for long, if they followed the Aleutian islands. The only tricky part would have involved dodging icebergs, which formed off the coast of Alaska, and any other place where glaciers touched the ocean. Recently it was pointed out that the Chumash, a tribe that lived on the California coast near Santa Barbara, had seagoing vessels almost identical to the outrigger canoes of the Polynesians; maybe this is the connection we're looking for.

The ethnographic distribution of the Indians seems to back up my theory of a sea migration. If you look at a map of native language groups in North America, you will see a few widespread groups like the Algonquians, the Iroquoians, and the Muskogeans in the east, while in the west there are far more tribes and languages. In fact, the distribution of tribes in California is too complicated to show on maps that cover the whole United States. This makes sense if California was the first home in America for most Indians; after they split into tribes, many of them would have stayed in California while the most adventurous among them went east. For a political example of the same process, just look at a map of Anglo-America; because Europeans settled the east first, and went west later, we have fifteen states and five provinces on the east coast, but only four states (five if you count Hawaii) and one province along the Pacific.

"Five Hundred Nations"

Within a few centuries of the earth's warming up, mammoths and most of the other big game animals of the ice age became extinct. Man probably hastened their extinction by hunting them. We know how they did it, because throughout North America they left distinctive large spear heads, called Clovis points; for that reason, we refer to Paleo-Indian sites containing these spear heads as belonging to the Clovis culture. Once the largest animals were gone, they switched to hunting buffalo, caribou or moose if they could get them, or smaller game like deer, bear, turtles, fish and birds. For most of these they used a spear with a smaller head than the Clovis point, called a Folsom point (hence the Folsom culture), sometimes combined with a hook-shaped stick called an atlatl, which, when placed on the back of a spear before throwing, increased its range and penetrating power. They also supplemented their diet with whatever nuts, berries and seeds they could gather.

Usually organized into bands of 25 to 75 individuals, the Paleo-Indians spread out from their base sites in the west as their numbers permitted them to do so. By 1000 B.C. they had settled every part of North America, and maybe South America as well. The story of how they explored and colonized the western hemisphere must have been an extraordinary one; too bad nobody was able to write it down for us. Every few hundred miles, they encountered a new ecological zone. They had to learn which plants and animals were safe for food and medicine, and which ones could harm or kill them--and no other people were around to teach them, so many mistakes must have been made in the process. Finally, they had to explore as much territory as possible, to find the sources of food, water and materials for making tools, and to locate potential hazards, so most of the land must have been scouted out, long before it was occupied.

Because of the different climates, the Indians developed different techniques to survive in every new home they found. This led to the development of different lifestyles, and then different cultures, and finally different tribes and different languages. On the Great Plains, for example, they had to be constantly on the move to keep up with their game (mainly buffalo), so they retained the highly mobile lifestyle which must have characterized most Indians in the early years, using the tepee, an easily dismantled tent, as their shelter. By contrast, the tribes that settled in the forests east of the Mississippi could find plenty of food in one spot, so they were able to build more or less permanent houses of wood. Permanent houses also went up in the desert southwest, though here the building material was adobe (a form of clay), and this region was better suited for gardening than for hunting, so when the Paleo-Indians living here learned how to grow plants, the stuff they used to gather went from being a supplement to their staple. On the Pacific Northwest coast the tribes had an abundant supply of seafood--so much, in fact, that here you could see something hardly ever seen elsewhere--fat Indians.⁽⁷⁾

One special characteristic of the Indians, brought about because of their division by climate, is that they have never been united in their history. Sometimes a tribe might be called a nation, but it was never clear what Indians or Europeans meant by the term; an Indian "nation" could be a single family, several families organized into a band, or even a widespread confederacy like that of the Iroquois, which in its heyday occupied much of the land that would later become the northeastern United States. In addition, individual groups of Indians could break up, disappear, or merge into larger groups, so the total number of "nations" must have changed constantly. Around 1700, French and English settlers estimated that there were fifty or sixty Indian "nations" in the east, while the Spaniards counted fifty more in the west. The Indians themselves are not sure how many tribes or nations exist, so sometimes they use the phrase "five hundred nations" as a carry-all term to include all of them.

The Mound Builders

These Indians built artificial hills for various reasons. The earliest mounds, known as middens, were simply trash heaps, piles of shells, bones, ashes and broken pots that accumulated when people lived in the same spot for centuries. Then between 1700 and 700 B.C., the Indians of northeast Louisiana began building mounds for other purposes. The largest of these new mounds, at Poverty Point, LA, was shaped like a bird, rising 70 feet high and between 700 and 800 feet wide. Also at Poverty Point were six concentric rows of earthen ridges surrounding a large plaza, and five smaller conical mounds. Nobody knows what these mounds were for; they may have been used for some forgotten religious rite.

Suddenly around 600 B.C., the Indians of the Ohio River valley developed a more sophisticated culture. Called the Adena culture, from one of their sites, they began building mounds that were as much as twenty feet high; these hills were shaped in various polygons (circles, squares, pentagons, etc.), and used as graves for important people. This means that the population in and around Ohio, like that of Louisiana, had grown large enough to engage in big projects. However, the population density per square mile was still quite low, so each mound must have serviced a considerable area.⁽⁸⁾

As time went on, Adena graves grew more elaborate. Tribal leaders were buried in log-lined tombs, while others continued to be buried in shaft graves, or simply cremated. The bodies of the elite were sprinkled with ocher or graphite to give them a lifelike color. Some were buried with bracelets, amulets, ritual axe heads, stone pipes⁽⁹⁾, slate tablets, animal decorations made from sheets of mica, and an occasional extra skull (a war trophy?). The mounds also got larger, because new graves would be put on top of the old ones. The most spectacular mound of all had no graves in it, and may have been strictly a place of worship. This was the Serpent Mound, a quarter-mile-long hill in Ohio that was made to look like a snake swallowing an egg.

The Serpent Mound.

In return for all the items that came in from other places, the Hopewell exported chert, a stone very similar to flint that was ideal for making tools, weapons and pipes. The latter were artistic masterpieces, carved realistically to look like various animals, sometimes with eyes and teeth made of inlaid bone or pearl. They also improved on the pottery that had been made in Adena times, sometimes made figurines that showed young women in daily life, and were better farmers than the Adena had been. However, there still weren't very many of them; a Hopewell village might contain just one or two thatch-roofed houses, that were home for a few families. As a result, today's scholars don't understand how either the Adena or the Hopewell got enough people together to build the mounds and clear the land surrounding them.

The Hopewell faded away much like the Adena; after a high point in the fourth century A.D., they went into their own decline. We see poor-quality grave goods going into the mounds from 400 A.D. onward, and after 500 no more burial mounds were built, just a few more hills in the shape of animals. The usual culprits of famine, epidemics and war have been nominated, but we don't have enough evidence to point to any of them; it may have been something as simple as an economic collapse, caused by the trade network breaking down. In 2005 the author came to believe in the 535 A.D. catastrophe theory, which proposes that a natural disaster in that year, like a huge volcanic eruption or a meteor strike, changed world climates for the worse and made life miserable for everyone; perhaps this finished off the Hopewell. In eastern North America, a dark age of sorts followed until 800 A.D., as the population readjusted and grew to reach the critical mass necessary for the rise of the next culture. During this period, somebody in North America invented the bow and arrow. Because an arrow can travel three times as far as a thrown spear, this replaced the spear, becoming the weapon that has been associated with Indians ever since.

The culture that arose in the ninth century was quite different from both the Adena and the Hopewell. For a start, it was not based in the Ohio River valley but in the area where the Missouri and Ohio Rivers merge with the Mississippi, so we call this culture the Mississippian. Second, it raised new mounds on a more ambitious scale than had been attempted before, huge earthen pyramids all up and down the Mississippi valley, and in several locations throughout the southeast. The latter include Owl Creek in eastern Mississippi; Moundville in Alabama; Etowah, Rock Eagle, Ocmulgee, Lamar and Kolomoki in Georgia; Lake Jackson in the Florida Panhandle; and Town Creek in North Carolina. These mounds were used to glorify the living as well as honor the dead; meeting lodges, temples and the homes of chiefs were often placed on top. As for the burial mounds, they contained more artwork of excellent quality; in addition to the usual animal motifs, there were pictures and figurines of people, done with astonishing realism. Finally, the Mississippians were the first tribe north of Mexico that grew corn on a large scale (corn, also called maize, had been a minor crop to the Hopewell). By growing corn with beans, squash and pumpkins, the Mississippians were able to feed five people per square mile, compared with the one person per square mile that had been fed in the days of hunting, foraging, and part-time gardening. A population boom must have resulted, forcing the Mississippians to expand outward and take more land from their neighbors. They also went to war looking for victims; Mississippian art sometimes features warriors holding the heads of defeated enemies as trophies, and we believe some of the bones in the burial mounds came from servants sacrificed at funerals, killed so they could serve their masters in the next life.⁽¹⁰⁾

The Mississippians were strongly centralized, with a hierarchy that does not appear to have existed among their predecessors. Their most important community--indeed, you can call it their capital--was Cahokia, Illinois (modern East St. Louis). Around 900 A.D. they began building an enormous ceremonial complex here, which eventually numbered 85 mounds, with the central ones surrounded by a wooden stockade. The largest mound of all, Monks Mound, covered 16 acres and stood 100 feet high. At Cahokia's peak, around 1100 A.D., it was home to as many as 20,000 people. When the French explored the Mississippi valley in the late seventeenth century, the presence of Cahokia's mounds encouraged them to found St. Louis on the opposite bank of the river, and even today St. Louis is sometimes called the "Mound City" because of those earthen works.

A bird's-eye view of Cahokia in its heyday.

Probably the last remnant of the powerful Mississippian authority was among the Natchez tribe, in the modern state of Mississippi. French explorers in the early eighteenth century reported that the Natchez chief, known as the Great Sun, lived in a house on top of a mound, while most of the tribe lived in seven villages nearby. The Great Sun had absolute power over everyone; servants carried him everywhere, so that his feet never touched bare earth, and his relatives had to crawl before him, though they were called Lesser Suns and held the highest ranks among the warriors and the priesthood. Below them in the hierarchy came nobles, and then "honored men" (war heroes, artisans and traders), and finally most of the commoners and slaves were at the bottom, called "stinkers" in the Natchez language. If members of two different social classes got married, the individual from the lower class was not promoted, but any children they might have automatically became members of the higher class. Sometimes an ambitious individual could win special treatment by offering a wife, son or daughter as a sacrifice. Human sacrifices also took place when the Great Sun or one of the Lesser Suns died; then their wives, concubines, and a few male advisors and servants would be strangled and buried with them. Later on, when US citizens arrived to settle in the areas containing mounds, they couldn't believe that Indians had built them, and speculated that an advanced, pre-Indian culture was responsible. It took an examination of several mounds and the artifacts they contained in the late nineteenth century, to confirm that they were indeed Native American products.

The Cliff Dwellers

Whereas the mound-building cultures followed one after another in a series, each of the cultures in the southwest got started around the same time, 200 A.D. These were three farming communities: the Hohokam, in the Gila valley of southern Arizona; the Mogollon, in the mountains of New Mexico; and the Anasazi, in the mesas and canyons of the Four Corners region (where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet). Apparently they were far more peaceful and egalitarian than the Mississippians; no evidence has been found of warfare between the tribes, or of a social hierarchy like the one that characterized the mound builders in their latter days.

Using only pointed sticks, the Hohokam dug ditches and built dams until they had an efficient irrigation system, which made the most of their limited water supply. This allowed them to plant two corn crops every year, and they also grew beans and squash. Around 500, cotton, another plant from Mexico, was added to their list of crops. Between harvests, or during seasons when the crops didn't do well, they would go into the desert to gather cactus fruit, mesquite seed pods, and plants like rhubarb, wild mustard and pigweed, or hunt jack rabbits, muskrats, birds, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and bighorn sheep. When not busy getting food, the Hohokam painted fine pottery⁽¹²⁾, performed ritual dances on adobe platforms, and played the same ball game that was so popular among the Mayans in Central America. This game took place in a ball court that had two large rings fastened onto sloping walls. The ball was a hard rubber sphere, made from the sap of a local plant called guayule. The rules resembled modern-day soccer, in that the object was to make the ball go through one of the rings, but not by hitting it with hands or feet, so the players had to use their elbows, hips and knees. Goals were so uncommon that when a player succeeded in getting one, he could claim the clothing of the spectators; the good news is that the Hohokam didn't sacrifice the losing team after a game, as the Mayans sometimes did.

Living in the mountains, the Mogollon had less land suitable for farming, but more edible plants and animals in the neighborhood, so they preferred to do hunting and gathering; sometimes they traded with the Hohokam for corn and beans. Because this lifestyle didn't feed as many people, the Mogollon communities were small, usually with no more than a dozen small houses. Houses were made by digging a pit that was 10-16 feet wide and 3-5 feet deep, and giving it wooden walls and roof of mud, branches and thatch. One house was typically larger than the others, and used as a meeting place, where the men smoked pipes, played a game with wooden dice, prepared themselves for ceremonies, and made things like tools, traps, bone flutes, baskets and black-and-white pottery. After 700, the Mogollon expanded southwards, establishing communities in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora.

In the long run, the Anasazi had the most impressive achievements of all. We are not sure where they came from originally; the word Anasazi comes from today's Navajo, and it means "old ones." However, they apparently arrived on the Colorado Plateau after the other two cultures arrived in their locations, because they lived by hunting until the fifth or sixth century, when they switched to farming and learned how to make pottery from the Mogollon. They also built Mogollon-style pit houses at first, but here they quickly ran out of space as their families grew, so around 750 they began building their houses completely above ground. This marked the beginning of the pueblos, large, multistory apartment buildings made out of stone and adobe. The original pit-house design was now used to make kivas, circular underground chambers that served as places for ritual dances, the settling of disputes, and the teaching of tribal lore to the children; a typical pueblo had several of them.

The change in architecture may have also been prompted by the arrival of unfriendly neighbors. At some point between 500 and 1000 A.D., several Athabascan tribes migrated south from Canada. A few Athabascans, like the Hupa and Tolowa, went to the Pacific coast and occupied a small area on both sides of the California-Oregon border, while the main body moved into the southern Rockies and settled down in eastern Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas and Chihuahua. Because several tribes were involved, they had several names for themselves, such as Tinneh, Tindi, or Dini, which always meant "the people." The tribe that moved into northeast Arizona became today's Navajo, while the rest are usually called by the name the Zuni tribe gave them--Apache, meaning "enemy." One tribe in Utah, the Paiute, was hit so hard by Apache raids that they abandoned their farms, going back to hunting/gathering. Others moved into the pueblos, figuring that it made sense to gather the population in homes that were more easily defended. This caused several of the pueblos to grow until they housed more than a thousand people.⁽¹³⁾

While facing the Apache challenge, the Anasazi enjoyed their best years. Worldwide, the climate was milder than usual between 800 and 1000 (a similar warming trend in Europe caused the Viking invasions and helped end the Dark Ages), and that allowed bigger crops than ever. An improved irrigation system conserved more water, making it possible to cultivate more land. Turkeys were domesticated, for feathers to use in costumes as well as for food, and they learned how to grow and weave cotton from the Hohokam. As for the pueblos, a dozen were built around Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico. Even more impressive were the complexes at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona and Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado, which were built on the sides of cliffs to make them nearly inaccessible. In these cases the buildings resembled fortresses and were wedged into crevices halfway up a cliff side; the only way to get to the buildings was by ladders and some steep paths, which could be nothing more than a precarious series of toeholds. On the flat tops of the canyons these communities were in, the residents grew corn, beans, squash, piñon pines and juniper trees (Mesa Verde is Spanish for "green table"). Clearly defense, and safety in numbers, were first on the minds of the people who build these communities.

A civilization may last longer than a ripe melon, but it is just as mortal. All three of the southwestern desert civilizations began to decline after peaking in the twelfth century. Since a good climate led to the good years, we think a change of climate for the worse (the so-called "little ice age") was responsible for the end of those times. Tree ring data has recorded several years of droughts, stretching from 1276 to 1299; no doubt that made it tougher to make a living. By 1300, both Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, as well as the Mogollon settlements in the Mimbres valley, were deserted, becoming the oldest of what people in the western United States call "ghost towns." Apache harassment may have also been a factor; it looks like local populations dropped to a point that the Apaches could no longer be kept out of each community, forcing another series of relocations.⁽¹⁴⁾ Still others have suggested that an epidemic from the tropics brought the population down, or that the natives had caused the droughts by cutting down too many trees--a self-inflicted ecological disaster.

The Hohokam were the last to go; their communities appear to have been done in by several years of major river flooding, followed by longer periods when there wasn't enough water. During the dry spells, they reconfigured their canals to capture more water; then around 1355 they were walloped by a catastrophic flood. Between 1355 and 1450, the Hohokam abandoned Casa Grande and their other large settlements, moving into the desert or to more dependable streams. When the Spaniards explored southern Arizona in the late seventeenth century, all they found along the Gila River were villages inhabited by the Pima tribe.

We can't really call the civilizations of the southwest "lost civilizations," because we believe survivors from all of them are with us, though they don't have a record of how they got here. We already mentioned that the Pimas are probably descendants of the Hohokam; there is a general consensus among archaeologists that the Mogollon culture gave rise to the Zuni, and the Anasazi became today's Hopi; other southwestern tribes like the Rio Grande Pueblo and the Papago may also have ancestors from the older cultures. A few years ago one archaeologist, Gary Matlock, wrote that to consider the Anasazi a lost culture "is roughly comparable to viewing those who left England for the New World as having mysteriously disappeared." What he is saying is that the fall of the pueblos isn't really that mysterious, the inhabitants simply packed their bags and left--we only call them "lost" because we don't know exactly where they went. In fact, they don't appear to have gone far, and since the desert southwest was the last part of the United States to be conquered and settled by the white man, today it is the best place to meet Native Americans, as the largest existing tribes are all in this region.

Who Really Discovered America?

Over the years all manner of theories have sprung up concerning people who could have sailed from the Old World before 1492. Candidates for this honor include the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Celts, the Vikings, the Minoans, the Phoenicians, the Basques, or __________ (insert your favorite seagoing culture here). In most cases a few artifacts are cited as evidence for a pre-Columbian crossing. The Phoenician evidence, for example, comes from some Phoenician inscriptions that may have been faked, found in New Mexico and Brazil, while the Negroid appearance of some enormous stone heads carved in Mexico, plus a legend about a king of Mali attempting to sail in the Atlantic, have generated theories about a possible Black African crossing. Others have proposed that North or South America, or an island like Cuba, was the lost continent of Atlantis, and that the transoceanic crossings we should be paying attention to went the other way, from the new World to the Old. For this narrative we will look at the evidence concerning the first four cultures on the above list, because they are the ones most talked about.

The Egyptians

The Egyptian diffusion theory got a big boost in the late 1960s, when Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian anthropologist, built an Egyptian-style papyrus boat, the Ra I, and launched it from Safi, Morocco. An error in Ra's construction caused it to come apart in the middle of the Atlantic, so Heyerdahl built a second boat, the Ra II, and this one made it to Barbados, the easternmost Caribbean island. Heyerdahl was quick to point out that he had not proven that Egyptians once sailed across the ocean, only that they could have done it if they wanted to. Detractors, on the other hand, claimed that Heyerdahl had proven nothing except that Norwegians are still good sailors!

My own theory is that the similarities between the Egyptian and New World cultures are real, but instead of coming from diffusion, they were caused by both having been descended from an older civilization, namely that of Babel. See what I wrote about the Heliolithic culture, in Chapter 12 of The Genesis Chronicles, for details. I also have a problem with dates that rules out diffusion. Nearly all of the New World structures we call pyramids were built after 1 A.D.; that's more than a thousand years after the Egyptians got tired of building them. This was probably caused by slower progress in the New World, due to three factors: a smaller population to start with, fewer useful animals, and no use of the wheel except as a children's toy. As a result, by 1492 A.D., the New World was at a societal, technological and population level that matched the Old World around 2500 B.C. I also talk more about this in Chapter 12.

The Chinese

Is it possible that the Chinese tried exploring at an earlier date, and forgot about it? Several papers, articles and books⁽¹⁶⁾ have discussed Hwui Shan (also spelled Hoei Shin or Huishen), a Buddhist missionary, who claimed to have made the crossing in 458 A.D. According to the story he later told the emperor, Hwui Shan sailed east for 20,000 li (6,000 miles?), found a wonderful land he named Fusang, and preached among the people of Fusang for forty years before returning to China. Fusang's name came from the Fusang tree, a plant that the natives grew for its small, red pear-shaped fruits. A few scholars have tried to identify Fusang with Japan, but Chinese ships had already been going to Japan for some time, at least since the third century A.D. Others have suggested that Fusang was Mexico and the nearest parts of California and Arizona, and that the Fusang plant was either a variety of corn bearing small ears ("strawberry popcorn"), or the prickly pear cactus. Currently this appears to be the most likely explanation. Finally, a few doughnut-shaped stones have been found off the California coast; there's no way to prove it, but some believe these could have been anchors from Chinese ships like Hwui Shan's.

One more Chinese story may be the most amazing of all. Chinese legend reports that around 2250 B.C., China was devastated by a terrible flood. After the country had recovered, Yu, the official in charge of the recovery effort, was sent out on mapping expeditions, to see how the flood might have affected the rest of the world. After Yu returned, he became king of China (the founder of the Xia dynasty, traditional date 2205 B.C.), and his report was preserved as a work called the Shan Hai King. Originally the Shan Hai King had thirty-two books, but only eighteen have survived through the ages, and they have been edited and condensed many times, especially around 200 B.C., when scholars were trying to rewrite the books that had been destroyed in a recent wave of book-burnings. At that time they looked at the Shan Hai King, and failed to find many of the mountains and other places described in it, so they changed its classification from geography to mythology. That was the way things stood until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when a few Western scholars took at look at the work. Their conclusion was that the Shan Hai King's author intended it to be a scientific journal, not a collection of made-up stories.

From our point of view, the fourth book of the Shan Hai King, "The Classic of the Eastern Mountains," is the most interesting. It is divided into four sections, each one listing a series of landmarks, usually mountains; it states the distances between the landmarks, and has a detailed description of each, including interesting rocks, plants and animals. One paragraph, for example, describes a sea creature with a man's face that would swim on its back and beat its abdomen (the sea otter), while another describes a funny animal that avoided its enemies by playing dead (an opossum, no doubt!). If there was once an introduction, it no longer exists, so the book gives no information on how to get to the first place in each section.

No mountains in China or any other Asian country match the ones described in the fourth book--but mountains in western North America fit the descriptions. Assuming these descriptions are accurate, the first section began with the Sweetwater River in Wyoming, and went due south along the Rockies, listing these landmarks:

• Medicine Bow Peak (WY)
• Longs Peak (CO)
• Grays Peak (CO)
• Mt. Princeton (CO)
• Blanca Peak (CO)
• North Truches Peak (NM)
• Manzano Peak (NM)
• Sierra Blanca (NM)
• Guadelupe Peak (TX)
• Bald Peak (TX)
• Chinati Peak (TX), in the Big Bend area of the Rio Grande.

• Hart Mountain (MB), near Lake Winnipegosis
• Moose Mountain Provincial Park (SK)
• Sioux Pass (MT), at the junction of the Missouri & Yellowstone Rivers
• Wolf Mountain (WY)
• The Big Horn range (WY)
• Medicine Bow Peak (WY)
• Longs Peak (CO)
• Mt. Harvard (CO)
• Summit Peak (CO)
• Chicoma Peak (NM)
• South Baldy (NM)
• Cook's Peak (NM)
• Madera (Chihuahua, Mexico)
• Pamachic (Chihuahua, Mexico)
• Culiacan (Sinaloa, Mexico)
• Triangulo, near Mazatlan (Sinaloa, Mexico)

• Mt. Fairweather (AK)
• Mt. Burkett & Kate's Needle (AK)
• Prince Rupert (BC)
• Mt. Waddington (BC)
• Mt. Olympus (WA)
• Mt. Hood (OR)
• Mt. Shasta (CA)
• Los Gatos (CA)
• Santa Barbara (CA)

• Mt. Ranier (WA)
• Mt. Hood (OR)
• Bachelor Butte (OR)
• Gearhart Mountain (OR)
• Crane Mountain (OR)
• Mahogany Peak (NV)
• Trident Peak (NV)
• Capitol Peak (NV)

The Celts

Unfortunately, Mystery Hill suffers from the same problem as the pyramids of Mexico; it was built centuries after its Old World counterpart. Furthermore, we no longer believe that the Celts built the megalithic monuments in Europe, let alone North America. A few modern-day Druids still show up every year at Stonehenge to celebrate the first day of summer, but they ignore the fact that Stonehenge was already old when the first Druids arrived in the British Isles. The coins and inscriptions hint at a date near the end of the classical era (fourth century A.D. at the earliest), so some have suggested that any Celts who came west were Christians, seeking a country where they would be free from persecution.

Along that line, we have the tales told by St. Brendan (circa 486-578?), an Irish monk who really liked to travel. When not building monasteries, he went on journeys across the sea, reportedly visiting the Hebrides, Shetland, Faeroe and Canary Islands, Brittany, Iona, and Scotland. His travels became the subject of a popular medieval romance, The Voyage of Saint Brendan, recounting his fabulous adventures. Influenced by this romance, medieval and early modern mapmakers included a St. Brendan's Island on their maps, between the Antilles and Cape Verde Islands. It also inspired some modern adventurers to build a coracle, a leather-covered boat like the ones the Celts used, to re-enact Brendan's crossing of the Atlantic in 1976. We may never know if Brendan reached America, though; his stories are so garbled and fanciful that nobody knows for sure where he went. He claimed, among other things, that he met "sea cats," giant sheep and talking birds on his journey, and once he made a fire on an island that turned out to be a whale! Most likely the uncharted land he visited was Iceland, for we know that other Irish monks went there from the eighth century onward.

Finally, there is the possibility of a Welsh crossing in the Middle Ages. A librarian named Ellen Pugh believed this happened; in her book Brave His Soul,⁽¹⁸⁾ Pugh proposed that in 1170 a Welsh prince named Madog chose not to get involved in the bloody politics of his homeland, going out to sea instead. Supposedly he made it to Alabama's Mobile Bay, left a few colonists behind, and returned to Wales to get some more. He was never heard from again after his second trip west, and hostile Indians forced the colony to move to the part of the Appalachians where Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee meet. Later on, Cherokee attacks dislodged the Welsh from this location, too, so they followed the rivers to the Mississippi, and went up the Missouri River until they disappeared. After European settlers crossed the Appalachians, there were occasional reports of Welsh-speaking Indians. This was enough to make Thomas Jefferson, himself of Welsh ancestry, tell Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for Welsh-speaking Indians when they explored the northern Great Plains. Sure enough, the Mandan tribe of North Dakota reportedly had some members with light-colored hair and fair skin. Unfortunately, the Mandans died out before the white man could learn much about them; a smallpox epidemic killed most of their nation in the 1830s. The few hundred who survived do not look any different from other Indians, and their main claim to history is that they are the only Indian tribe that never fought a war with the United States.

The Vikings

Unlike the Egyptian, Celtic and Chinese claims, we have solid archaeological evidence that Leif Ericson reached America, in the form of his campsite, found at L'Anse aux Meadows, in northern Newfoundland, in 1961. Still, not everyone is satisfied by this discovery, for Leif called the place he tried to settle Vinland, naming it after the wild grapes that grew there. This suggests a temperate climate, and Newfoundland is barely warm enough to be called temperate (nearby Labrador is downright subarctic). Is it possible he and Karlsefni tried exploring the coast to the south, and if so, how far did they get? Over the years there has been a lot of speculation about other places the Vikings might have visited, with 50 sites, 73 artifacts and 100 inscriptions attributed to them. Probably the most famous site is Newport, Rhode Island, which has a curious 24-foot-high round tower; once thought to be a church built by Christian Vikings, it has since been identified as a seventeenth-century construction. As for the artifacts and inscriptions, many of them, when examined, have turned out to be forgeries, like the Vinland Map and the Kensington Rune Stone. Therefore we are left wondering if Leif Ericson pulled the same trick as his father, Eric the Red, who lured settlers to the ice-covered place he discovered by naming it "Greenland."

Other Europeans did not visit the lands discovered by the Vikings, simply because they never heard about them. The only people who remembered were the Icelanders, and they wrote down Leif Ericson's story in the form of a Norse saga. Thus, Vinland became just another fabulous island in the Atlantic, no more real than Atlantis or King Arthur's Avalon. After that the New World played no part in Old World Affairs, and vice versa, for nearly five hundred years, until Christopher Columbus made it across the Atlantic.

How Many Indians?

If this was the only issue I wouldn't bother to write about it; scholars, after all, can believe any figure they want. But the debate does not stop there; some have increased the estimated population by one or even two orders of magnitude, meaning they actually believe there could have been more than 100 million Indians in the Americas! Numbers on this scale violate common sense; indeed, Europe's population did not reach the 100-million mark until the mid-seventeenth century. If the New World had that many people, many of them would have been crowded together in big cities. Where are the pre-Columbian equivalents of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago? Mexico had impressive cities like Tenochtitlan, but north of the Rio Grande, the largest communities that we know of were either religious centers like Cahokia, or oversized apartment complexes like Mesa Verde. Could they have been home for thousands? Yes. Millions? No.

In addition to that, we must keep in mind that while North American tribes knew how to grow crops, none of them gave up hunting and fishing. In other history papers I have pointed out that farming the land full-time produces more food than herding, hunting or gathering, and because the Indians lived a lifestyle that was nomadic or semi-agricultural at best, they would have had a hard time feeding everyone if there were more than a few million of them. When European settlers begin to tell us how many Indian neighbors they had, their figures work best with a pre-Columbian population of one or two million.⁽²⁰⁾

Of course, those who want the big numbers have an explanation. They will argue that the colonial-era figures are correct because the white man was an unsanitary character who brought diseases like smallpox, and they killed off most of the Indians by 1600 (see footnote #11). We know for a fact that a lot of Indians died because they had no immunity to Old World microbes, but the revisionist historians want you to believe in a 90+% mortality rate, to cut the population from 20 million or more to 2 million or less. Alas, there is no record anywhere of an epidemic that virulent. Even the worst plague in Old World history, the Black Death, is estimated to have killed about a third of Europe's population, not 90 percent. The only place where tribes were completely wiped out before 1600 was in the Caribbean, and there the brutality of the Spaniards was also a factor.

What I am trying to say is that it is a politically correct fantasy to claim that Anglo-America once had tens or hundreds of millions of Indians. It's part of the effort to describe pre-Columbian society as a Utopia, where non-white peoples lived in perfect harmony, both with nature⁽²¹⁾ and each other. Think of it as another version of Rousseau's "noble savage." Elsewhere you may hear like-minded folks claim that hundreds of millions of Africans perished in the Atlantic from the slave trade, or that thousands of witches fell victim to a series of persecutions called "the burning times"; the same kind of thinking is at work here, promoting multiculturalism by making Western civilization look bad. Finally, there's the guilt that white Americans feel over what their ancestors did to the Indians, and they try to atone by promoting Indian cultures. Unfortunately the truth isn't so attractive. Indian children were as likely to die from diseases as anyone else's children, the various tribes fought frequently, and some of them elevated torture to an art, considering it a good deed if a warrior tortured a captured enemy to give him a chance to prove his courage.⁽²²⁾

In some of my other works, I used Occam's Razor to decide which side to take; I did it with the creation-evolution controversy, and I did it with ancient Egyptian chronology. This famous maxim has been around since the fourteenth century, when William of Occam declared that the simplest solution which explains all the facts is likely to be the correct one. I am applying Occam's Razor to American populations as well, using his words "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less." Besides, claiming that the evidence for millions of Indians was destroyed by epidemics sounds a little like a classic conspiracy theory. I never was fond of conspiracy theories, which assume that one person or a small group can plan for everything that can possibly go wrong, in this unpredictable world. Somebody once said that a conspiracy theorist is like an undertaker who only has one size of coffins; if he gets a body that doesn't fit, he's going to alter the body, not the coffin.

The original "Department of Homeland Security."

America's Forgotten History

Thanks to recent calls for "political correctness," the contributions of the American Indians are now getting the attention they deserve; hence, the pre-Columbian narrative that fills the chapter up to this point. However, there is still a period in American history that we overlook, to the point that most Americans are not even aware of it--the sixteenth century. This is probably because the years from 1492 to 1588 were the golden years of Spain; many call this "the Spanish century." The story of those people, mostly Spaniards and a few Frenchmen, who tried to establish new homes in America, is both exciting and tragic. Before the founding of Jamestown, no European community north of the tropics was able to keep itself going without a constant stream of supplies and colonists from the mother country, and as long as that was the case, every advantage would lie with the Indians. As a result, most of the early colonization attempts failed; the futility of those ventures will probably remind the reader of Don Quixote attacking the windmill. Eventually Spain and France were forced to abandon all efforts between Florida and Canada. When a nation did successfully colonize the mid-Atlantic seaboard, it would be one that had no interest in the fact that others had tried and failed; English settlers never saw the Spanish and French misadventures as part of their heritage. For that reason, you will probably recognize a few of the names mentioned in the rest of this chapter (e.g., de Leon, de Soto, Coronado), but most will be brand-new ones, participants in a drama that has recently has been rediscovered. Read and enjoy!

The First English Explorations

However, Cabot's son, Sebastian Cabot, wanted to go out again. A veteran of the first expedition, he made an attempt of his own in 1509, sailing far enough north to touch Greenland. He ventured into both the Davis and Hudson Straits before turning south to follow the coast of Labrador and New England. Although he made it back safely, he seems to have been convinced that there was no practical northwest passage.

The Portuguese must have heard the report about John Cabot finding the Great Khan's realm, for in 1500 they sent Gaspar Corte-Real to check it out. On the first voyage he continued up the west coast of Greenland until icebergs forced him back; on the second (1501) he brought his brother Miguel, and together they went first to Greenland, then Labrador, and finally Newfoundland. There they captured a number of Indians and Miguel brought them back to Portugal while Gaspar sailed on south. When Gaspar failed to return by May 1502, Miguel was sent out in search of him; nothing was heard from either brother again. Expeditions like this made it clear that the barren land visited by the Cabots was no China. Except for seasonal trips to the Grand Banks fisheries, off the coast of eastern Canada, the voyages of the two Cabots were not followed up.

When it came to turning a profit, the first expeditions to the Americas failed miserably. Instead of opening a shortcut to the Orient, Columbus had discovered some islands of dubious worth inhabited by natives whose accumulated stock of gold was exhausted in a few years. As for northern explorers like John Cabot, the most important thing they found was a great spot for fishing. But soon everyone except Columbus would recognize these discoveries as the periphery of a new world; if there was any land besides the places already discovered, it might be rich enough to make up for the lack of gold found so far. Soon rumors of such a treasure-filled country were flying, and the gullible, the greedy and the brave began searching for El Dorado.

The Conquistadors Who Drew the Map of North America

Of course the USA as we know it did not exist at this early date, and most of the western hemisphere was still a blank spot on the map, so de Leon never realized what he had done. He thought Florida and Yucatan were just big islands like Cuba, so it might be possible to get to China by sailing between them. The next conquistador to enter the area, Juan Pineda, was sent by the governor of Jamaica in 1519 to look for such a passage. Beginning with Florida, he sailed north, then west, following the Gulf Coast perfectly. He came to grief, however, when he landed in northeast Mexico; Huastec Indians quickly overwhelmed the small force. The survivors, including Pineda, were taken prisoner, and sacrificed on a Huastec pyramid (1520). Few explorers have ever suffered an end as inglorious as this, but Pineda succeeded in filling a major gap in geographical knowledge. His expedition proved that Florida and Mexico were part of the same landmass, and that there were two American continents, not one. For the past twenty years Spain and Portugal had been sending explorers to South America; now they had a North American continent to explore, too.

As the known portion of America grew, so did efforts to get around it. This was especially true with North America, which the conquistadors found less attractive than Central and South America. The lands north of the Rio Grande just didn't seem to have anything the early explorers and colonists wanted: no gold or silver, no jewels, no spices, and not even enough Indians to work on the farms they might set up.

While Pineda was filling in the boundaries of the Gulf of Mexico, Ferdinand Magellan set forth on the first globe-circling expedition. Magellan succeeded in finding a way to the Indies--the real Indies--but this passage, at the tip of South America, was not a very useful one. It was far enough south to see dangerous weather almost daily, and the route was too long to compete with Portugal's passage around Africa and through the Indian Ocean.⁽²⁵⁾ If a strait through the Americas was ever going to be worth using, it would have to be at the same latitude as most of Europe, meaning somewhere north of Florida. Both France and Spain sent ships to explore this unknown area in the 1520s.

The French hired an Italian sailor, Giovanni di Verrazano, for their first mission, and he headed west in early 1524. Before summer ended, he returned with the bad news. Starting at North Carolina's Cape Fear, he followed the coast all the way to Newfoundland without finding anything that looked like a passage. In fact, he didn't even try very hard; most of the time he stayed a few miles offshore and the only places where he dropped anchor were New York Harbor, Narragansett Bay, and Maine's Casco Bay. This caused him to completely miss Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and the Bay of Fundy, all of which would have looked like the beginning of the sought-after passage. Where Verrazano made his mark was in his expressed opinions. He remarked that New York Harbor would be a great place to build a port, prompting today's New Yorkers to name a bridge after him. In Narragansett Bay he said that nearby Block Island looked a lot like the Greek island of Rhodes, so we've called it Rhode Island ever since.

Verrazano seems to have known the coastline he was sailing was a continuous one, but he told the French king otherwise. He reported that there were many openings through the Carolina Banks, and he could see nothing but water on the other side. Could this "Sea of Verrazano" be the Pacific Ocean? Verrazano had seen the Venetian Lagoon, so he must have known the answer was no. The fact that he wasted no time exploring the inlets and sand bars of the banks tells us that he didn't really think there was any passage here. Presumably he was trying to get the king to hire him for another mission. If so, he failed; only a few cartographers took his "sea" seriously, and no follow-up expedition was sent to the Carolinas. The next French ship to cross the Atlantic went to Canada instead.

Though he came up empty-handed, Verrazano did better than his Spanish rivals; at least he got back alive. Juan Ponce de Leon returned to Florida in 1521; this time his main goal was to claim the "island" of Florida for Spain, by building a fort and maybe a town, so he brought two ships with 200 settlers. Unfortunately he showed that he had not learned enough from his first expedition, for he chose to build his fort in the southwest, right where the Calusa had chased him off last time. The Calusa still didn't want any Spaniards in their neighborhood, and one of them wounded de Leon in the thigh with an arrow. De Leon ordered everyone back to Cuba, and died there a few weeks later.

Also in 1521, a wealthy lawyer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, hired Francisco Gordillo to go looking for slaves in the vicinity of Florida. Gordillo left Santo Domingo (Spain's capital in the Caribbean), and at Great Abaco in the northern Bahamas, his caravel met another one, belonging to a friend, Pedro de Quexo. Quexo had heard of a mysterious "island of giants" in the north, so the two pilots decided to explore together. Sure enough, they reached land on the feast day of St. John the Baptist, so they called it the "Land of John the Baptist." Nearby was a river which they christened the Jordan (South Carolina's Santee River?), and an Indian village. These Indians were unusually tall, and the visitors traded for three weeks; then they suddenly seized sixty natives and headed home. On the way Gordillo's worn-out ship sank, so his captives and crew had to be crowded aboard Quexo's vessel.

At Santo Domingo most of the Indians died quickly. One who didn't said the name of his land was Chicora, so Ayllon named him Francisco de Chicora. Then Ayllon went to Spain to get an official claim to the new land, taking Francisco with him. Upon his return in 1525 he sent two more caravels, commanded by Quexo and Esteban Gomez, to survey the land that was now his. Gomez followed part of Verrazano's route in reverse, going south from Cape Breton Island to Cape Cod, but apparently found nothing of interest. Quexo made some useful discoveries; starting in the south, he went from Georgia to Virginia, proving that Ayllon's land was joined to Florida. In the north Quexo discovered Chesapeake Bay and called it the "Bay of the Mother of God." His voyage persuaded a cartographer named Juan Vespucci (Amerigo's nephew) to make a map of America that labeled most of the southeastern U.S. "The new land of Ayllon."

Ayllon himself arrived at the Carolina coast in 1526, with six ships and 500 colonists. His flagship ran aground and sank in the mouth of the Jordan River, taking most of the supplies with it. Then Francisco de Chicora showed how pointless it was to civilize him; as soon as he realized he was home, he disappeared into the bushes. Ayllon decided to move down the coast 150 miles, and set up a settlement named San Miguel de Gualdape. However, his fortunes were no better here. Autumn storms, disease and Indian attacks soon killed off 200 Spaniards; then on October 18, Ayllon died. A wild mutiny broke out that night, which burned so many houses and killed so many men, that the survivors had no choice but to abandon the colony. Of them, a hundred and fifty made it back to Santo Domingo. Their only accomplishment was to give the Carolinas the name "land of Ayllon" for the next fifty years.

The next Spaniard who tried was a one-eyed soldier, Panfilo de Narvaez. In Florida he made so many mistakes that his experience was a lesson in how not to start a colony (1527). First he landed 400 men in Bahia Honda (Tampa Bay), and immediately sent away the fleet before the settlement was firmly established. Then when he saw that the local Indians had some gold ornaments (no doubt merchandise they had received by trading with a distant tribe), he attacked them, instead of intimidating or befriending them. Because they had not brought much food, the Spaniards also ransacked Indian villages for corn, and the Indians struck back accordingly. Forced to pull out of the neighborhood, Narvaez and his party went to the Tallahassee Hills, where they thought the Indians had gotten their gold, and marched aimlessly in West Florida for the next four months. By the time they found the Gulf of Mexico, illness and Indian attacks had cut the size of the expedition in half. The 200 survivors decided to leave Florida altogether, and built five long canoes, hoping they could sail westward around the Gulf to Mexico. They misjudged the distance involved, and Narvaez was lost in a storm. The farthest any of the boats got was Texas, where two were wrecked around Galveston Island in 1528.

The Seven Cities of Gold

The four were separated at first, and treated as captives by the Indians. As Cabeza de Vaca put it, "I was in this country nearly six years, alone among the Indians, and naked like them." They survived by using their wits and their bartering skills, while learning as much as they could. In 1534 they found each other, and when the tribes gathered at the Yupe River for the summer cactus harvest (their main holiday), they escaped. In the course of looking for Mexico, they journeyed all the way across the continent, from Texas to Sonora, but understandably they could not record the path they took on this astonishing trek. Fortunately, they entered more fertile lands west of the (Texan) Colorado and Pecos Rivers, where corn-growing people lived in "fixed dwellings." Because the party knew a bit of European medicine, they gained acceptance as wandering medicine men, received buffalo robes and were soon welcomed with celebrations wherever they went.

In the Sonora valley, Cabeza de Vaca saw an Indian wearing a Spanish horseshoe nail as an amulet, and knew they were headed in the right direction. Not long after that, the four were picked up by the slavers and taken to Mexico City, where they were questioned by Hernando Cortez and his viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza. All the tribes they had seen were dirt poor; however, they had also heard rumors of tribes in the north who had cities and were much richer. So maybe North America had gold and silver after all.

The conquistadors had heard stories like these already. After Hernando Cortez looted Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, rumors circulated about the Indians to the north living in seven cities, each of them as big as Tenochtitlan, and they were so wealthy that even poor families cooked their food in silver pots. Spaniards called these cities "the Seven Cities of Cibola," after an old legend which claimed that in the Middle Ages, a Spanish priest had sailed across the Atlantic to escape the Moorish invasion of Spain, discovered a new land, and founded an incredibly wealthy kingdom there. However, the conquistador who explored northwest Mexico in the 1520s, Nuno de Guzman, failed to find any of the seven cities, and that's where things stood until Cabeza de Vaca turned up.

The official response to de Vaca's report was to send two more conquistadors in search of the cities of gold, Hernando de Soto and Francisco Coronado. De Soto, the governor of Cuba, went first, taking 570 men to Tampa Bay in 1539. He had traveled with Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru, brought back a fortune from South America, and was a thoroughly ruthless leader; if there was anything worth taking in North America, he would be the one to find it. Instead, he spent three years wandering through Florida, Georgia, the western part of the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. He squeezed some supplies out of the Indians he met, but found the land too underpopulated to support any kind of city.⁽²⁶⁾ Nor did the Indians have any gold or silver. In 1542 he discovered the Mississippi River, and called it "the Father of Waters"; shortly after that he died of a fever and was buried in the river. Before the end, he must have realized that this was a fruitless chase. His men tried to cross Texas, turned back, headed down the Mississippi and followed the Gulf coast to Mexico. Surprisingly, more than 300 of them made it.

In February 1540 Coronado marched north from Mexico with 400 Spaniards and 1,300 Indian auxiliaries, a large army by New World standards. Unlike de Soto, Coronado thought he knew exactly where the cities of Cibola were. He sent two scouts ahead of the main party: Esteban, the black companion of de Vaca, and a Franciscan missionary named Brother Marcos.

They got off to a great start. Esteban did his medicine-man act, and it so impressed the Indians he met that they sent him on to the nearest "city" they knew of, a Zuni pueblo called Hawikuh. Unfortunately, the Zuni did not fall for it. When this black man told them about white gods, they killed him, figuring that he must either be an enemy, or dangerously insane. Brother Marcos returned to tell Coronado's men. He also reported that he had followed Esteban to Cibola (his name for Hawikuh), and though he did not enter the city it looked rich enough to be one of the legendary places they seeked. The expedition entered Arizona in high spirits.

Their good mood did not last long after they reached Hawikuh. They had marched a thousand miles, expecting to sack something like the treasure houses of the Aztecs, and instead they found a miserable little pueblo, whose wretched inhabitants didn't have enough gold between them to make a single piece of jewelry! The unlucky soldiers wanted to have a few words with Brother Marcos, but even here they were disappointed. The talkative little friar had seen how things were going, and hurried back to Mexico before anyone could stop him.

Coronado refused to be discouraged. Before leaving Mexico, he had sent part of his party up the coast; they made it to the mouth of the Colorado River, proving that Lower (Baja) California was part of the North American mainland. One of his lieutenants went due west from Hawikuh, passed through Hopi country, and discovered something truly amazing, the mile-deep Grand Canyon. As for Coronado and the main force, they found a cluster of pueblos on the upper Rio Grande; then they continued for several hundred miles across the Great Plains, becoming the first Europeans to see the tepees of the buffalo-hunting tribes. All three groups had made important geographical discoveries, but the natural wonders they found couldn't line anyone's pockets. Coronado returned to Mexico to find that his expedition had been declared a failure, because it did not produce any revenue.

Exploring the southwest by sea proved equally unrewarding. Francisco de Ulloa, a lieutenant of Hernando Cortez, charted both sides of the California peninsula in 1539-40. Two years later another explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, took two ships up the Pacific coast as far as Bodega Bay. Here much of the shore was hidden by fog, and it kept Cabrillo from finding the west coast's most splendid harbor, San Francisco Bay. When winter came, he pulled back to San Miguel Island (next to modern Santa Barbara), and succumbed to an old wound. Bartolomeo Ferrer took command of the expedition, and headed north again the following spring. He reached a point near the California-Oregon border before turning back for Mexico (1543). On the return trip he took such a fearful battering from stormy seas that no one else wanted to repeat the exercise. Because of that, one of the most desirable places to live in today's world was ignored for the next two hundred years.

One more tale of failure remains to be told, the first French attempt to set up a colony in Canada. In 1534 the king of France commissioned Jacques Cartier to search for a passage to China. He chose to look on the far side of Newfoundland, and explored most of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1535 he came back and sailed up the St. Lawrence River to the Huron villages of Stadacona (modern Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal); he wintered at the latter before going home with his report.⁽²⁷⁾ Cartier visited a third time in 1541, this time with 150 colonists. The site they chose for their fort was just upstream from Stadacona, and they named it Charlesbourg-Royal. That winter they defended it against Huron attacks, but by spring morale was falling, only about half the colonists were still alive, and there was no sign of the promised reinforcements. Cartier decided to take the survivors back to France; off Newfoundland he met the delayed follow-up expedition, but even this didn't make him change his mind. He headed across the Atlantic, while the new settlers moved into Charlesbourg-Royal, suffered the same hardships and came to the same conclusion. By September 1543 they too had returned to France.

The Cross and the Sword

The losses and bad luck of North America's Spanish explorers was truly discouraging; many Spaniards, like King Philip II, now thought that any activity north of the tropics would only waste more money and lives. However, others took an interest in the region. In 1494 Pope Alexander VI had drawn a line at longitude 45^o West, and declared that every new land discovered east of that line belonged to Portugal, while every new land west of that line would go to Spain. The other seagoing nations of Europe felt put out by this; even the Catholic French were dismayed that the pope left nothing for them. By the middle of the century, many non-Iberian Europeans, especially Protestants like the English, began thinking that they could stake a claim to any territory Spain and Portugal hadn't occupied already.

On May 1, 1562, another European ship appeared off the coast of Florida. This vessel belonged to France, not Spain; her captain, Jean Ribault, didn't sail under the orders of any king, either. Ribault was a Huguenot, a French Protestant. Europe at this time was engulfed in the commotion of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic response, the Counter-Reformation (see Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 of my history of Christianity). It was an age that knew no quarter, when people could get killed just for attending the wrong church. Ribault was in America to find a place where his co-religionists could live and worship in peace.

He sailed up the Atlantic seaboard until he found a spot he liked, Parris Island in South Carolina. There he founded a fort named Charlesfort, left it with a garrison of 30 men, and sailed for home. Unfortunately for Ribault, a religious war broke out in France while he was away. He returned to find his home port, Dieppe, under siege from a Catholic army; when it fell he fled to England.

Queen Elizabeth I, being a Protestant herself, was very interested in Ribault's story, and offered to send him back to Charlesfort with some English ships. Such an offer, if accepted, would have effectively handed over the outpost, and possibly all of North America, to England; Ribault would have none of that. He tried to escape the country, but the queen had him arrested and thrown in the notorious Tower of London.

Across the ocean, Charlesfort languished. The fort's commander became homicidal; he hanged one man by his own hands and sentenced another to slow death by starvation. The exasperated men killed him in a mutiny, named Nicolas Barre as their new leader, and built a pitiful boat out of pine, vines and moss. Once they finished, everyone climbed aboard except seventeen-year-old Guillaume Rouffi, who said he would rather take his chances with the Indians. He did the right thing; the overloaded lifeboat was becalmed in the Atlantic for 21 days. The men aboard ate their clothing, drank their own urine, drew lots to see who must die for the sake of the others, and killed and ate the one who drew the unlucky number. Finally an English patrol ship found this boat of horrors drifting off the coast of Europe, her crew too weak to land without help. In August Queen Elizabeth interviewed the recovered Nicolas Barre and sent him to the Tower of London, too.⁽²⁸⁾

Rene de Laudonniere, Ribault's first mate, crossed the Atlantic in 1564 with three ships, 300 men and four women, ready to make a second attempt at building a Huguenot colony. Meanwhile in Spain, King Philip loathed heretics, so he sent 25 men and a fighting caravel from Havana, commanded by Hernando Manrique de Rojas, to destroy Charlesfort; they did not know it had already been abandoned. Rojas reached the Carolina coast on June 12, and the Indians brought Guillaume Rouffi to him. Directed to Charlesfort by the young Frenchman, Rojas burned what was left, and returned to Havana, thinking he had destroyed the French presence in America. A few days later, Laudonniere sailed into the mouth of the St. Johns River, dropped anchor and built Fort Caroline, within the city limits of modern Jacksonville.

Fort Caroline may have gotten off to a better start than Charlesfort, but it suffered from the same problems that had afflicted other American colonies. First the men got involved in a war between two Indian tribes in the neighborhood; then they began lusting after for gold and silver, which they heard was in the "Apalatchy Mountains." Consequently they failed to prepare for the upcoming winter, and when it arrived, the colony was faced with starvation. Laudonniere got the blame for this hardship. When he discovered that some discontented colonists were plotting to blow him up with a keg of powder, thirteen rebels took off with a small boat. They made it to Cuba and captured a Spanish ship, dramatically announcing that the French were back in the Americas.

A few weeks later, 66 more mutineers stole a ship. They also headed for the Caribbean, where they intended to land on Christmas Eve and "enter into the Church while Mass was sayd after midnight, and to murder all those they found there." Instead they encountered a Spanish fleet, and 40 were killed in the resulting battle; the rest, however, managed to capture a Spanish brigantine and escape with it. Then they returned to Fort Caroline with their prize. If they expected mercy from Laudonniere, they were terribly mistaken; he shot the leaders and hung their bodies on gibbets.

After that weeks went by without relief for starving Fort Caroline. In August of 1565, four English ships arrived. The commander was John Hawkins, an enterprising merchant who made a living by selling slaves to the Spanish colonies, an illegal business that was both very risky and very profitable. He and Laudonniere made a deal; Hawkins would leave one of his ships and 50 pairs of shoes behind for some cannon and powder. The desperate colonists were planning to use the ship to go back to France, but the winds blew the wrong way for several days. While the colonists waited for a fair wind, seven more ships came in. Jean Ribault had finally escaped from England's Tower dungeon, and was in command of the long-awaited supply fleet.

Philip of Spain was furious when he heard that the Huguenots had another outpost in his overseas empire. This time he sent one of his best captains, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, to drive them out "by what means you see fit." Menendez left Spain with 18 ships and 1,504 people, but a hurricane scattered his fleet, so when he got to Florida, he had just five ships and 600 soldiers and settlers with him. Nevertheless, that was still enough to do the job. Making landfall at Cape Canaveral, he turned north and caught the French ships anchored offshore. The Spaniards tried to board them in a night battle, but the French cut their cables and got away. Menendez turned back, and found a harbor south of Fort Caroline that was suitable for a base. His men promptly built a fort around an Indian chief's council house, and on September 8, 1565, Menendez came ashore and named the place St. Augustine. Unlike all previous efforts, St. Augustine survived; it became the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States.⁽²⁹⁾

Back at Fort Caroline, the French ships regrouped, and Ribault decided that if they were ever going to defeat Menendez, they must attack now. He started south with twelve ships and 600 men, but when he got to the Spanish fleet, he noticed that Menendez's big flagship, the San Pelayo, wasn't there, and went looking for it. It was a fatal mistake; the strong north wind became a storm that wrecked the French near Cape Canaveral. Meanwhile, Menendez used the storm to hide the 500 men he marched overland to the now unguarded Fort Caroline. It was still raining when they arrived on September 20, and what followed was sheer slaughter; 132 Frenchmen were killed in an hour. The remaining 45, including Laudonniere, ran through the dark woods to a pair of ships Ribault had not taken with him, and thus escaped to France.

Menendez renamed the captured outpost Fort San Mateo, and returned to St. Augustine. However, the survivors of the French shipwreck were streaming northward in two groups. The first and smaller group, numbering 200, met Menendez and his men on September 29, at an inlet eighteen miles south of St. Augustine. The French could not go any farther without boats, so they surrendered. Menendez ferried them across the inlet in groups of ten, and on the other side had them taken behind a dune, tied up and killed with knives. Only twelve were spared, because they professed to be Catholics. The other group, which included Ribault, arrived on the same beach twelve days later, and Menendez killed all of them as well. That inlet thus gained a grim name--Matanzas ("the Slaughters")--and the Huguenot adventure was over.

Santa Elena

Although Pardo did not find much, his reconnaissance of the Carolinas was quite successful. First he found a large Indian community named Cofitachequi, in the middle of South Carolina. Then he went into the foothills of the Appalachians, built a fort at Joara, and left a company of men under Sergeant Hernando Moyano de Morales to garrison it. Turning east, he marched to central North Carolina; at the Indian village of Guatari he met 30 chiefs. While there he received a note from Santa Elena with "news of the French"; it turned out to be a false rumor, but Pardo decided to go home anyhow. Four soldiers and Pardo's chaplain, Sebastian Montero, stayed behind at Guatari, where they founded the first successful Christian mission in the United States.

As for Sergeant Moyano, by the spring of 1567 he had all the Indian trouble he could handle. Right after Pardo had left Joara, Moyano exchanged insults with a chief from the Chiasca, a tribe across the mountains in Tennessee. The chief threatened to eat both the fort commander and his dog, prompting Moyano to respond with force. He crossed the mountains, found a fortified Chiasca village, and attacked at once. Moyano was wounded but his men got through its wall, burned the buildings, and slew more than a thousand Indians. Once they were finished, Moyano and his company followed the Nolichucky River to another village, Chiaha. Here 3,000 Indian warriors greeted them in peace, and escorted them to the village of the main chief in the area. At this point Moyano built another fort and settled down, waiting for whatever a man waits for in a remote and unknown land.

Back in Santa Elena, Pardo reported to Governor Menendez that the land he passed through did not have an easy road to Mexico, but it was fertile and worth conquering. Accordingly, in September 1567 he headed west again. His second expedition stumbled into familiar ground; Pardo recognized the first Indian village he found, Guiomae, as a place Hernando de Soto had visited a quarter century earlier. From there he followed de Soto's route to Cofitachequi and Joara; it turned out that de Soto had also been to Joara (he called it Xuala). Then he used the valley of the French Broad River to get through the Great Smokey Mountains, and on October 7 he reached Sergeant Moyano at Chiaha. Together they pushed west to another village named Satapo, where a friendly Indian slipped word that a huge army was planning to ambush the Spaniards, so Pardo chose to turn back while he could. On the way back from Tennessee he planted some more forts, and reached Santa Elena on March 2, 1568, bringing sacks of badly needed corn and stories of the western frontier.

Santa Elena needed corn because food was constantly in short supply. Captain Pardo's favorable reports persuaded Spain to send another 193 colonists in 1568, raising Santa Elena's population to 327 (October 1569 figures). The new arrivals included farmers, but the crops they planted (mostly wheat and barley) didn't fare very well. By 1569 the colony was in danger of starvation; the settlers stayed alive by looking for oysters and digging up wild roots. Fortunately a supply ship arrived in the nick of time; it came while everybody was attending a church service, so they saw it as the answer to their prayers. After that the farmers grew corn, melons and squash, which did better in that climate, and Santa Elena managed to make a small profit by exporting sarsaparilla root, cedar, oak and furs to Spain. Prosperity seemed to be just around the corner.

The Chesapeake Mission

After exploring the areas where Jamestown and Williamsburg would some day stand, they built a small church with a thatched roof along the York River. Unfortunately Don Luis, like Francisco de Chicora nearly fifty years earlier, changed his mind about helping white men, now that he was reunited with his own people. Within a week he went to the village of an uncle, and sent back word that he was gathering chestnuts and souls. Juan Bautista de Segura, the Jesuit leader, thought he was really gathering "many wives."

Five months went by, and Don Luis did not return, despite the messages the priests sent to him. Segura fell ill, and only gradually did they realize that they had been abandoned. Finally in February three priests went to visit their Indian "convert." Don Luis agreed to follow them back, and killed all three of them on the way. Then he and his warriors went to the mission and asked for axes so they could chop wood for the priests; instead, they used the axes to cut down every remaining clergyman. Only young Alonso de Olmos was spared.

That summer a relief ship came to Ajacan. The pilot did not see the signals that Segura had promised, but he did see "Jesuits" walking on the shore--costumed Indians. A fight followed; two Indians were captured and taken to Havana for questioning, and thus Menendez learned that Alonso de Olmos was still alive. In August 1572 he gathered a force big enough (three ships and thirty soldiers) to punish the Indians and rescue Alonso. They succeeded in both, and found Alonso "naked as an Indian"; he had been gone so long that he had trouble remembering his Spanish. Menendez hanged eight or nine Indian captives for murdering the missionaries, and let the rest go, but never captured the brave he wanted the most, Don Luis. He vowed he would get revenge some day, and left for Spain, where he died while building a new fleet (1574).

Every colonist feared an all-out Indian uprising, and one erupted in 1576. It began when the Guale tribe of southeast Georgia killed a chief who had been baptized. In response Santa Elena sent a force to the Guale village that killed two chiefs and cut the ears off a third; the Indians retaliated by intercepting a Spanish ship near Sapelo Island and killing everyone aboard. Then the Orista tribe, in the neighborhood of Savannah, jumped in on the side of the Guale. Twenty-one men from Santa Elena marched on the Orista and took their corn, but that night the Indians struck back, killing all but one of them. Among the dead were two individuals who had cheated death in the past: Sergeant Moyano, and a newly recruited soldier--former altar boy Alonso de Olmos. A month later the attacking tribes reached Santa Elena itself, and burned everything the colonists had built over the previous ten years.

Santa Elena's residents managed to escape the destruction by crowding into small boats and going to St. Augustine. Pedro Menendez Marques, a nephew of the first Menendez, came from Spain to restore the situation. He sent the colonists back to Santa Elena with ships full of timber, and they not only rebuilt their community, but also added a fort named San Marcos. During the next four years, Menendez burned 19 Guale villages and defeated a native force of 300 Orista bowmen, before the uprising was finally crushed. When peace returned, it must have looked like North America's future would be written in Spanish, until a certain English privateer appeared on the scene.

The Ultimate Corsair

Two smaller fishing enterprises sprang up near the Grand Banks. For centuries the Basques had been hunting right whales in the Bay of Biscay. When they found out that right whales also migrated along the American coast they quickly took advantage of the opportunity, by sending whalers to the Strait of Belle Isle (between Newfoundland and Labrador). Occasionally ice caught the whalers in their shore stations, but they never planned to spend the winter in Labrador; the cold weather killed those who did. The other business came from those French fishermen who looked for cod in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. What made this group important is that because they were closer to land, they frequently went ashore to trade with the Indians. They gave them iron tools, which the local tribes--the Micmac of New Brunswick and the Montagnais of eastern Quebec--paid for with furs. It was the beginning of an important industry, one that would bring the French back to Canada.

At this stage the Spanish Empire was at its peak. Spain tightly controlled commerce around her colonies, and regarded any non-Spanish ships in those waters as enemies of the state. The first interlopers who ran afoul of the Spanish Navy, like John Hawkins, were forced to fight, and had no choice but to accept the verdict of the battle when they lost. However, Hawkins had a cousin named Francis Drake, who felt very differently about this. Believing that a nation should always negotiate when weak and strike when it is strong, he accused Spain of treachery and called upon God, Queen Elizabeth, and his countrymen for revenge. Then he led a series of raids that left key Spanish colonies like Porto Bello (the main port of Panama) in smoking ruins. Drake hurt Spain, made a fortune in the process, was knighted for his actions, and created the legend of the Elizabethan sea-dog, who humbled the proud dons by showing superior courage and seamanship.

Sir Francis Drake was mainly interested in plundering already-settled areas, but he did make a small contribution to geography. From 1577 to 1580 he sailed around the world, becoming the second person to do so. At first he followed the same path as Magellan, until he entered the Pacific, whereupon he sailed farther up the Pacific coast of North America than anyone else had done. He made this detour because a year before his voyage began, Martin Frobisher (more about him later) went looking for the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. Drake believed Frobisher's report that he had found the passage's eastern entrance, and thought he could find the western end of it somewhere on the Oregon coast. Finding nothing of interest, he soon turned away, and crossed the Pacific to continue his predatory adventures. However, the story does not end here, for a Greek pilot, sailing for Spain under the name of Juan de Fuca, claimed that in 1592 he came to Oregon and found the mouth of the strait Drake had been seeking. Modern scholars are highly skeptical of his story, which is not backed up by reports from anybody else, but because some people believed the tale, the entrance to Puget Sound is named the Strait of Juan de Fuca today.

Drake returned to America in 1586, with 42 ships and 2,000 men. This raid was his biggest success; Santo Domingo, Cartagena (in Columbia) and St. Augustine were all burned to the ground. Spain decided to concentrate its remaining men and defenses in Florida, so one year later the 33 families of Santa Elena received an order to tear down their hard-won settlement, move south, and rebuild St. Augustine. They protested, but eventually complied, and except for some missionaries, Spaniards were no longer seen north of Florida.

The Search for a Northwest Passage (continued)

The souvenir was a great success, for the English reasoned that since the Eskimos look so much like Asians, with their long black hair, slanted eyes, broad faces and flat noses, Frobisher could not have been far from Cathay. Others were impressed by the samples Frobisher brought back of a black stone with gold-colored streaks in them. His gold was no more real than his strait, but it got him the financial backing for two more expeditions, in 1577 and 1578. Both of these were fruitless, the main result being that he found Hudson Strait, though he did not get very far past the entrance. The failure of Frobisher's expeditions to find useful discoveries bankrupted the investors who backed him.

Because no one else wanted to look for the northwest passage after this, Sir Humphrey Gilbert decided he would have to go himself; maybe if he planted a colony close enough to where Frobisher had been, it would encourage new efforts to explore beyond it. In 1583 Gilbert went to Newfoundland with five tiny ships (his flagship, the Squirrell, only weighed 10 tons!), and suffered nothing but bad luck all the way. One ship (the Bark Raleigh, commanded by Sir Walter Raleigh of muddy coat fame), turned back because it ran out of food before they arrived; a second had to be abandoned at Newfoundland because it was no longer seaworthy, and a third ran aground on Cape Breton Island. He stayed at St. Johns for just a few weeks, long enough to announce that henceforth he would tax the catches fishermen made near Newfoundland's shore. Then he tried to return to England with the two remaining ships, only to drown when his flagship sank.

The next Englishman to try the passage, John Davis, was a scientist rather than a freebooter like Frobisher, or a noble like Gilbert. His first voyage (1585) went farther north than Frobisher's and discovered Cumberland Sound on Baffin Island before winter storms forced his return. A second voyage the following year added little knowledge; his third and last journey (1587) took him up high up the coast of Greenland to a point now called Sanderson's Hope. As before, the pack ice forced him to turn back, but he had gone farther north than any other sailor so he was still optimistic. "I have been in seventy-three degrees," he wrote to one of his backers, "finding the sea all open, and forty leagues between land and sea. The passage is most probable, the execution easy." Thus Davis was convinced that the strait which now bears his name was the most likely way to reach the seas of the Orient, but by the time money and support became available for another expedition he was dead.

The Lost Colony

In 1587 Raleigh brought a fresh load of colonists to the same spot, promising that this time the backup would be reliable enough to get the colony through any problems. Unfortunately, the next year was the year of the Spanish Armada, Madrid's mighty response to a decade of English provocation, and every ship the queen could get her hands on was needed to protect the British Isles. Not until 1590 did a relief ship get to Roanoke, only to find the colony completely deserted. Nobody knows what happened to the colonists; the only clue was the word "Croatoan" carved on a tree, suggesting that they tried moving to a nearby island by that name before they all died off. Presumably they succumbed to disease and/or hostile Indians, but for more than a century after that people reported seeing fair-skinned, blue-eyed Indians in the vicinity, leading some to believe that a few colonists "went native," and stayed alive by joining and intermarrying with the Indians. Their disappearance left St. Augustine as the only permanent European settlement on North America's Atlantic coast.⁽³²⁾

Where did Sir Walter Raleigh's colonists go?

Epilogue

In 1600 a French fur trader founded an outpost named Tadoussac, on the Lower St. Lawrence River. In 1604 two French explorers, Samuel de Champlain and Pierre du Guast, the Sieur de Monts, founded an outpost in the Bay of Fundy, at Ile Ste-Croix (on Maine's side of the present-day US-Canadian frontier). This outpost had a military purpose, rather than a commercial one--to keep other Europeans from getting too close to the area that was now turning a profit for the French. They quickly learned how cold a Maine winter can get, and 35 of the 79 colonists died. When the weather warmed up the survivors moved to Port Royal, on the other side of the bay. Here they also had a tough time, but the outpost survived long enough to be considered a success, allowing France to claim the entire peninsula on the east side of the Bay of Fundy (present-day Nova Scotia, the French called it Acadia). A few more French citizens worked on Sable Island, a sand bar-surrounded island ninety miles east of Nova Scotia; they serviced the ships that came for the fur trade.

As the sixteenth century ended, the real mover and shaker in the exploration business was an English writer, Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552-1616). In the 1580s and 1590s, he wrote several exciting books, describing the adventures of the explorers who had done so much to push back the world's frontiers. Whenever possible Hakluyt used eyewitness accounts, and he translated the stories of non-English explorers like Hernando de Soto, but his main interest was in the explorers from England, especially John Hawkins, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. Thus, he argued that the English race ought to settle the unoccupied parts of North America, and he is responsible, more than anyone else, in keeping England interested in Virginia until a successful colony could be established there.

Letting economics finance future exploration, rather than the government or wealthy individuals like Raleigh, the English now floated two companies, the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company, to exploit North America. A few years earlier, the Dutch had shown that when several people pool their resources and agree to share the rewards from a venture, the risk to each member is reduced as well. Their expeditions (to the Spice Islands of Indonesia) brought back a profit quickly, so the English now felt that corporations were the way to pay for ships and crewmen. Anyway, the Virginia Company's charter allowed it to colonize any spot on the Atlantic coast, from Cape Fear to New York Harbor. In 1602 one of the Virginia Company's founders, an English lawyer and privateer named Bartholomew Gosnold, took a small ship, the Concord, and 32 colonists, to make a second attempt at settling Virginia. When he got to the other side of the Atlantic, Gosnold was considerably farther north than where he wanted to be; he made landfall at Cape Elizabeth, in Maine. Sailing south from there, he gave Cape Cod its name, discovered Martha's Vineyard (and named it after his daughter), and finally chose Cuttyhunk Island (then known as Elizabeth's Island), another island off the coast of Massachusetts, as the place for his outpost. However, the settlers did not stay long, and returned to England when they realized that they did not have enough supplies to make it through the winter. Not willing to give up, Gosnold then began calling for another colonization attempt; Jamestown would be his idea.

As for the Plymouth Company, it got a charter to settle the North American coast north of New York Harbor; like the Virginia Company, it claimed the continent's interior at the same latitude as its coastal claim, going all the way to the Pacific (this was called a "sea to sea" claim). In 1607 the Plymouth Company sent George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert to found a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Because Maine was at the same latitude as England, the Company, not knowing anything about how ocean currents affect climate, thought Maine would have temperate, English-style weather. Instead, everybody perished from another Maine winter. As a result, the other colony founded in the same year, Jamestown, would be remembered, while Popham's colony is now all but forgotten.

Modern historians now believe that Don Luis de Velasco was none other than Opechancanough, a half-brother of the famous Powhatan whose long name meant "he whose soul is white." In 1622 and 1644 Opechancanough led the two Indian uprisings that nearly destroyed England's Virginia colony. At the time of the second attack, the chief was about 100 years old, and after it failed he was shot in the back while being held prisoner in Jamestown. The idea that he had traveled with--and fought--Spaniards in an earlier generation, helps to explain how he knew so much about his European opponents.

After Santa Elena's abandonment, some Spanish missionaries remained active in Georgia and the Carolinas. Gradually Franciscans replaced the Jesuits, and their missions grew to number more than 50. The most important of these, Santa Catalina de Guale, was located on St. Catherine's, an offshore Georgia island. They continued their efforts until 1680, when 300 pro-English Yamassee Indians destroyed St. Catherine's in a hail of fire and arrows. By this time English settlers had founded Charleston, and the disappearance of the missionaries allowed them to move into Georgia without Spanish resistance a few years later.

One more ironic story remains. In 1611 a Spanish ship sailed into Chesapeake Bay to spy on England's Virginia activities, claiming that it was searching for a lost ship. It captured and took an English pilot named John Clark to Spain, while three of its crewmen were stranded ashore and jailed by the English. One starved to death, while the second, an Englishman, was hanged for treason. The third, Don Diego de Molina, was released five years later. As for John Clark, he was also eventually returned to his native land, but he preferred the sailor's life, so he found the kind of work he wanted, as first mate on another ship bound for America. That ship was the Mayflower.

1. Despite the clean break, today's Americans feel closer to the United Kingdom than to any other country, because of the common language and culture. A few years ago I heard someone explain this by saying that most European countries can only be allies of the United States, but the British are family! My response is: if you accept this line of thinking, then the Australians are family, too.

2. People may have lived in the western hemisphere before Noah's Flood, but the only evidence of their presence are some out-of-place artifacts ("ooparts").

3. Most ice age animals were larger than their present-day counterparts, because a simple law of physics worked in their favor: large objects don't lose heat as quickly as small ones, due to the reduced surface-to-volume ratio. However, large animals also eat more, so size was less of an advantage when the world warmed up again.

4. Eskimos (also spelled Esquimaux) is really a derogatory term, given to them by nearby Algonquin Indians; it means "raw meat-eaters." Nowadays they prefer to be called Inuit, meaning "the real people." The new name was officially adopted at the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, held in Barrow, Alaska, in 1977. For that reason I may use the term "Eskimo" so that everyone knows who I'm talking about, and then switch to "Inuit" without warning.

5. This is the so-called "Solutrean solution," named after the style of Cro-Magnon artifacts made in Europe at the time of the crossing.

6. Modern technology restored that connection, in the form of the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

7. The most famous symbol of the Pacific Northwest Indians, the totem pole, is a testimony to how much free time they had for art. However, this was a relatively recent development; they only started carving tree trunks into totem poles in the nineteenth century, when they obtained iron tools from the white man.

8. The sixth century B.C. produced a remarkable number of philosophers and religious leaders in the Old World: Thales, Pythagoras, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, etc. In other papers I speculated on a universal spiritual movement causing this to happen. We don't know why the Ohio valley Indians started burying their dead in mounds at this time, but I wouldn't be surprised if a great "medicine man" came along and told them to do it.

9. It is tempting to think that the pipes were used with tobacco, but we don't know if any Indians north of the Caribbean had tobacco this early, or what plant they would have smoked if tobacco wasn't available.

10. Does all this talk about corn, pyramids and human sacrifice sound familiar? Tribes in central Mexico, like the Toltecs, had all of these elements in their civilization, so it is quite possible that the Mississippians were in contact with the Mexicans, and got some ideas from them. If such a cultural transmission took place, it probably involved merchants, missionaries or ambassadors traveling from Mexico along the Gulf coast, until they got to the Mississippi valley. Alternative routes, like an overland march through the middle of Texas, are less likely; that path went through land that was more arid, and thus less inviting, and only the tribes on the eastern frontier of Texas built mounds or practiced any other Mississippian customs.

11. Most Europeans had gotten out of the habit of bathing regularly during the Middle Ages; they stopped going to the public baths of Roman times because they didn't want their belongings stolen while they were in there, and they didn't see any health benefits in keeping clean; afterwards they questioned the morals of those who continued to bathe. As a result, when the white man began exploring the world, he literally came on strong everywhere he went!

12. The Hohokam also developed a technique for etching designs on shells with acid. Europeans didn't learn this trick until the Renaissance.

13. Some of the pueblos built at this time were Taos, Pueblo Bonito, Casa Grande, and the Aztec Ruins. Casa Grande was built on the Gila River, and thus must have been a Hohokam community, whereas the others were Anasazi. All of the above names are modern except for Taos; the "Aztec Ruins" got their name from somebody who thought the Aztecs came from there, and probably have nothing to do with the Mexican Indians by that name.

14. A book published in 1999, Man Corn by Christy Turner II & Jacqueline Turner, looked at evidence of ritual cannibalism at Anasazi sites, especially in Chaco Canyon, and suggested that the Anasazi practiced ritual violence, at least during their latter years. This may be why modern Indians shun Chaco Canyon as a place of bad medicine. Of course the theory is controversial, because it leads us to believe that the Anasazi were not so peaceful after all.

15. A Chinese-American professor, Michael Xu, dropped a bombshell in the 1990s when he announced that he had translated an inscription from the Olmecs, Mexico's oldest civilization, and claimed it was a very old form of Chinese! He brought his Chinese counterpart, Chen Hanping, to the United States, to see the inscription at the Smithsonian, and Chen verified Xu's translation. Unfortunately, there is hardly anyone else in today's world who can read archaic Chinese, so we can't be sure if their interpretation--that the founders of the Olmec kingdom were a group of refugees from Shang dynasty China--is accurate.

16. Mertz, Henriette, Gods From The Far East, New York, Ballantine Books, 1953 (reprinted in 1972).

17. The titles of Mr. Fell's books are America B.C., Saga America, and Bronze Age America, all written between 1977 and 1983.

18. New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1970.

19. Leif Ericson's sister-in-law, Gudrid, became mother to a baby boy named Snorri, the first white child born in the New World. I'm mentioning this for readers who may have heard of Virginia Dare, the baby born in Sir Walter Raleigh's "lost colony" (see the end of this chapter).

20. On at least one occasion, the Indians tried taking a census of the white man. A few years after Jamestown was founded (see the next chapter), Chief Powhatan sent a member of his tribe, Uttamatomakin, on one of the ships returning to England. Uttamatomakin was given two assignments: find Captain John Smith, who had gone back to England on another ship, and count the number of people in the English "tribe." For the latter task, he got himself a long stick when he arrived at the English port of Plymouth, and made a notch in it every time he saw a new person. He gave up when he reached London.

21. The "harmony with nature" bit was popularized in the 1970s by a famous public service ad, which showed an Indian crying when he paddled his canoe to a riverbank fouled by twentieth-century pollution. However, the first Americans could waste the environment if they wanted to. Before they got horses, for example, the plains Indians hunted buffalo by driving a whole herd over a cliff! The most famous of these stampeding places is Alberta's Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, named for an Indian who was killed when he stood too close to the base of the cliff, during one of the hunts. All in all, I would argue that the main reason why the environment stayed intact until the European arrival was because there weren't enough people around to ruin it.

22. Despite all the benefits that we enjoy from Western civilization, there are always some who nostalgically look back to earlier days. One joke along that line has a reporter interviewing an ancient Indian chief. He says, "Chief, you have observed the white man for almost 100 years. You have observed his wars and his material wealth. You have seen his progress and the damage he has done. Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?" The chief replied, "When white man found the land, Indians were running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, woman did all the work, medicine man free, Indian man spent all day hunting and fishing." Then he concluded with a smile, "White man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that."

23. Two hundred years after its writing, The Travels of Marco Polo was still the only reliable guide to Asia that Europeans had. Consequently they thought that descendants of the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, still ruled China.

24. Ponce de Leon may have been on to something, nonetheless. Nowadays thousands of senior citizens retire to Florida every year, as if they want to find what de Leon missed.

25. Sebastian Cabot came this way in 1526. He retraced Magellan's route as far as the Rio de la Plata before he decided to turn back and let Spanish sailors suffer instead.

26. De Soto described Florida as "a land full of bogs and poisonous fruits, barren and the very worst country that is warmed by the sun."

27. Cartier also gave Canada its name. "Canada" comes from k'anata, an Iroquoian word that simply meant "village." Apparently the Indians only applied the name to Stadacona itself, but as early as 1535, Cartier used the name for Stadacona, the surrounding land, and the St. Lawrence River, which he called the rivière de Canada. Within ten years, European books and maps were calling the French colony Canada as well.

28. The historical record does not tell us if Barre met Jean Ribault in the Tower; if he did, one can imagine how astonished both would have been.

29. Menendez celebrated his safe arrival at St. Augustine by holding a Thanksgiving Mass, and he invited the local Indians, the Timucua, to attend the feast that followed. So this was the real first Thanksgiving dinner, fifty-six years before the Pilgrims had theirs (see the next chapter). However, in the Florida wilderness, turkey and pumpkin pie weren't on the menu; according to the ship's log, the Spaniards ate a stew of pork, garbanzo beans and onions most of the time, so this was probably the main course. This story was rediscovered by a University of Florida history professor, Michael Gannon, and he casually mentioned it in a 1965 book, The Cross in the Sand. Twenty years later Gannon compared the age of the Florida and Massachusetts colonies with this remark: "In the year 1621, when the Pilgrims were having their first Thanksgiving, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal."

30. Some believe that the Portuguese got to the Grand Banks before John Cabot did, and kept their discovery secret (trade competition, you know).

31. The land where the fishermen camped was called Norumbega at this time. Shortly after 1600 it was renamed New England.

32. It is also possible that a hurricane wiped out the colony. Roanoke island is in a vulnerable location for summer and winter storms, and barely above sea level, so one 15 to 20-ft. surge of the waves could have done the job.

© Copyright 2006 Charles Kimball