4.4—The Spanish Colonies (13 min video)

N.B. At approximately the 5-minute mark, Mr. Raymond erroneously refers to Balboa accompanying Magellan on his voyage. In fact, Juan Sebastian Elcano finished the expedition when Magellan was killed.

Transcript

_{The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.}

Today we’re going to start out with a quote by Bartolomeu de la Casas. And Bartolomeu de la Casas was actually a Spaniard who was there in the New World when the Spanish first came over here. He actually was one of the people who had in mind evangelism of the natives, which is Columbus’s vision. Now of course, the thing about the Spanish after Columbus is they quickly realized, We’ve got a good thing going here. We can make tons of money and get tons of power over our rivals in Europe by controlling the new world. So he says this about the Spanish. He says, “These people are by no nature the most humble, patient, and peaceable, holding no grudges, free from emboilments, neither excitable nor quarrelsome. These people,” referring to the natives, “are the most devoid of rancors, hatred, or desire for vengeance of any people in the world. “It entered the sheepfold of these innocent natives.” They weren’t innocent, but he says basically they weren’t like the Spaniards. “There came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years down to this present time, for they are still acting like ravenous beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all of this with the strangest and most very new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard before, and to such a degree that this island of Hispaniola, once so populous, having a population that I estimated to be more than three million natives, has now a population of only two hundred natives.

” In other words, one of the things that de Casas points out to us is that the Spanish quickly lost their vision. The Spanish quickly changed their mission from what Columbus intended, and they quickly used exploitation to actually found and build their colonies and their empires.

In fact, it was done for a reason. We find out that the Spanish got so much gold from the Aztecs and so much gold and silver from the Incas that the Spanish began to ship this back to the New World.

Well, let me give you an idea of how much gold and silver they were shipping back to the New World. Nations like England and France, which used to have been the premier players in European history, they grew jealous of Spain because Spain had all this power and all this money.

So England, for example, began to authorize privateers. These were ships that essentially were private ventures. They would get a certificate from the king of England or from the queen of England, and that certificate allowed them to attack Spanish ships.

There’s another word for them. They’re called pirates. Well, these pirates, or privateers if you want to use is the nicer sounding name. These pirates would attack Spanish ships carrying gold and silver from the New World, and they would bring that gold and silver back to England.

They would keep some for themselves, the rest of it would go into the treasury of England. Well, let me give you an idea of how much gold they brought. They were bringing in so much gold and silver just by attacking some of the Spanish ships that it accounted for half of the economy of England at the time.

In other words, half of all the money of all the people in England was made off of stealing gold from the Spanish, which wasn’t, by any means, all of the gold they were getting. So the Spanish had a huge temptation which they gave into here. They literally had, essentially, mountains of gold from the Aztecs and the Incas, but they wanted more of it. Now, with the Spanish, we’ll actually start with some of their explorers, what we call their adelantados, which essentially in Spanish means “advancers.” Now the first of these that I want you to write down was a man by the name of Vasco de Balboa. You might be familiar with him. De Balboa, actually in the year 1513, crossed over that little narrow, tiny piece of land at Panama. It’s called the Isthmus of Panama. And by crossing from the Atlantic side to the Pacific side, he laid claim to all the Pacific Ocean for Spain. It’s kind of funny how explorers did that. They would just see something new and then they would claim it for their king. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. After all, there were already people living there. It’s kind of like if you went down to your local Walmart and claimed it with your flag just because you found it. there’s already people who own that place. It may not go well for you. Please don’t try that at home. But anyway, Dave Balboa did this and it gave the Spanish quick momentum to try and take and seize more things. Now Balboa is also famous because he and a captain by the name of Ferdinand Magellan equipped five ships in the year 1519 to try and sail all the way around the world.

They would have been the first to do it. In fact, they were the first to do it. These ships had to go down south of America. They actually crossed through a place that they named Tierra del Fuego, which means the land of fire. This was an area of the world that was as close to the Antarctic. It has all of these natural wonders, but it also has icy winds as well. And so it was an area that they barely got through. They then made their way into the Pacific where they suddenly experienced a calm. There was no wind. And so for two months they sighted no land. They moved along very slowly until eventually they crept their way up to Guam and the men who were about to starve or mutiny one or the other suddenly found land and found fresh water and food and everything was okay again.

They then traveled over the Philippines and there in the Philippines Magellan got himself into a fight with the local natives and and was killed, and so Balboa became the captain who finished the voyage.

They made their way back to Spain in the year 1521, being gone for nearly two years, but successfully having navigated the world. Now, what’s interesting about this is that out of the five ships that went, only one actually returned. And so it shows you that this wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. When they came back, they noted a few discoveries. One was they had seen these mysterious clouds up in the night time sky. They’re called Magellan clouds to this day, but they’re probably distant galaxies. The other one was they found this strange kind of bird that didn’t fly. It kind of waddled like this, and it had this sleek black coat with a white front, as if it was wearing some kind of fancy suit.

suit. And it also swam and hunted for fish. Now you could probably guess that was a penguin, but they didn’t have that term at the time. The most interesting though that happened to the Magellan and Balboa voyagers when they returned home, even though they had kept the ship log faithfully every single day that they were gone, the ship log was a day off from when they came back.

And they tried to figure out why is it a day off. We kept exact time, we used the hourglass faithfully, we entered every single day in the ship log, well they had to realize around that time that they had crossed what we call the international dateline where you actually go back into tomorrow or yesterday depending on which way you’re going. And so when they crossed that, that explained to them eventually, they figured out why they had lost a day in their logbooks. But no one had really thought about that because no one had actually gone all the way around the world to this time. Another advancer, another adelantado, was Hernando Cortes, who we already mentioned. In 1521, he conquered the Aztecs. Pizarro would later conquer the Incas in the year 1538. And as I mentioned, this gave huge amounts of money to the Spanish. But what this also did was it gave the Spanish a taste of the power that the Incas and the Aztecs enjoyed, and in many ways, which you need to note, the Spanish kind of became like the new Aztec and the new Inca rulers.

In other words, they just kind of replaced things the way that they were. Sure, they got rid of the idols, they got rid of the human sacrifice, but they weren’t exactly kinder masters. As a result, though, of all this wealth and all this power, the Spanish weren’t satisfied. This is how it works. When you do not learn contentment, you’re never going to be satisfied no matter how much you have. And so there were always new Spanish advancers who were trying to find the next big kingdom, the next thing that was made out of gold, or made out of emeralds, or made out of diamonds, whatever it may be.

One of these men, which I want you to note down, was Ponce de Leon. Ponce de Leon was a governor of Florida, and he actually searched Florida looking for cities of gold and most famously the Fountain of Youth.

He, of course, never found it. Another man to note was Cabaza de Vaca, and he was actually on a larger expedition that attempted to conquer all of the Southeast United States, so places like Georgia, Alabama, places like Florida, places like Mississippi, and so forth.

The expedition had hundreds of guys on board, but through things like a hurricane, things like native attacks, and things like just good old-fashioned starving, they didn’t make it very far. In fact, Cabaza de Vaca and two of his companions were about the only ones who made it alive out of the area. And they had been away for years by the time they actually were rescued. But when they came back in, they told these strange stories about these hunchback cows, who today we call buffalo or bison, and the seven gold cities they had seen far off in the distance, there somewhere in the west, a place that would eventually be called El Dorado.

This caught the attention of other advancers, men like Hernando de Soto, who also was a governor of Florida, who also had a huge expedition to try and conquer that territory.

He wasn’t going to make the same mistake, though, as the previous expedition. Instead of starving, he brought along his own food in the form of live pigs. He actually brought along a herd of pigs. So whenever he wanted to, he could stop and basically have a barbecue or a pig roast. It was a brilliant strategy, but the problem with De Soto was De Soto was mean. De Soto, as soon as he came across natives, he always threatened them with death or actually did kill them unless they gave him all of their gold.

And the problem was is in this region of the country, there simply wasn’t much gold. It wasn’t like the Aztecs. It wasn’t like the Incas. And so De Soto was continually disappointed. He also told people that he was the sun god and they better listen to him or he was going to take away sunshine from them.

He really was kind of a meano. But what he actually did, he had the audacity to do this. When he came to the Mississippi River, which he actually is credited with discovering, he had the audacity to die. And the problem with dying as the sun god is it’s kind of bad press for you because then people realize you’re not really the sun god. And so, De Soto died in the Mississippi River and his men had to disguise his death. They actually buried him in full armor, put him in some deer skins with a bunch of sand, and his body and his armor lie somewhere on the bottom of the Mississippi River or in the Gulf of Mexico if the current brought it out there.

So maybe someday when you grow up, if you want to go exploring, you can get a submarine and go try and find De Soto’s remains, maybe they’re still out there somewhere. But De Soto was followed by others. There There was a man by the name of Francisco Coronado, who also tried to go and find those seven cities of gold, which were probably nothing more than simple adobe buildings out in the western United States that look almost like gold when the sun hits them just right and you’re far away from them. But the Spanish never found that additional greed that they were trying to find. In other words, as we conclude our topic here on the Spanish, I want you to note that they really lost the vision of Columbus.

In fact, I’ll leave you with one last fact to help you get your mind around this. In the year 1574, there’s a census that was reported, and it was for the island of Hispaniola. In the year 1574, there were a thousand Spaniards on the island. And that’s interesting because that’s exactly the same number of Spaniards who were there when Columbus lived several decades before, which means that they weren’t growing, which Which means there was no vision of family, there was no long-term commitment. But what had grown was the population of slaves. To the thousand Spaniards, there were 12,000 African slaves. In other words, the Spaniards had turned to simple exploitation to try and satisfy their wants. You need to keep that in mind because it explains why so many of those Spanish colonies still have the scars to show from their occupation by the Spanish.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at some of the bright lights of the Spanish and some of the bright lights of the French as we look at their missions.