Part two can be found here.
Part three can be found here.
2. The Spanish Explorations.
Ever since 1492, Spain had been on something of a mad dash to explore the environs of the Caribbean sea, and by the mid-16th century, had explored much of coastal South America, made significant inroads into the conquest of the archipelagos, Central America, the former Incan and Aztec empires, and kept sending over men interested in fortunes and fame who wore armor and carried guns, as well as men interested in evangelization for the Catholic Church who wore the various robes of different religious orders (though both groups were not necessarily mutually exclusive in their desires). Life was good. Riches kept pouring into the coffers back home on the Iberian peninsula, missionaries and traders alike now had new avenues of expansion available, and stories kept popping up about even more wonders and golden opportunities to be had deeper into the heart of the unexplored north. Even before Mexico was conquered in 1521, Juan Ponce de Leon had explored the coast of Florida. On April 3, 1513, he made a landing somewhere on the Atlantic shoreline, and was simply awestruck by the lushness and beauty of the forests he found there. He found no great cities, he found people pretty much devoid of riches, not even any proof that further inland lay gold and such, but he remained enchanted by the land nonetheless, and made a very important discovery: Florida was either incredibly large for island, or most likely not one at all.
Back in 1497, England had already beaten Spain to North America, and John Cabot (who was actually Italian, but don't tell anyone) had "discovered" what would become Newfoundland. He was actually looking for the legendary Celtic island of Hy-Brazil, which was supposedly rich in trees that could produce a commercially valuable red dye. Needless to say, word caught on among Italian explorers that there was land north of the Caribbean, even though no one knew exactly how much was around, to say nothing of suggesting that a new continent existed there. Sure, some people thought Asia was right around the corner, though with the exceptions of the findings of 1497 and 1513, little else existed north of Cuba, for the European knowledge of the world, other than mists and endless expanses of water. The conquest of Mexico changed all that. While the land did stop at the Pacific Ocean not too far away from the eastern shores, it also got a bit wider the further north that Europeans explored. The explorers also started seeing different landscapes, as rain-forests and glistening beaches gave way to mountains that actually had snow on top of them, forests of pines and oaks that hugged the sides of volcanoes, and finally, vast stretches of desert and grasslands that had herds of buffalo roaming in them, and that actually got cold at night and during the winter. They found different people there too, cultures that sometimes had constructed buildings, but nothing on the vast scale of the empires to their south, and they seemed to live in a more direct relationship with the land. Some of them even told the newcomers that riches lie just beyond the next horizon, probably in attempt to get them to move on.
Unfortunately, the attempt did not work. The newcomers would simply assert control over wherever they went, as long as it was within reasonable striking distance of their established operations further south. On top of this, they would continue to expand in the direction they were pointed, but eventually everything seemed very far away, and the unfolding land kept getting bigger and more mysterious. El Norte, then, as now, was an irresistible lure that was at once both desirable and yet seemingly worlds away. The cost of this was that Mexico was not getting settled and developed as much as some back in Spain would have liked. In the late 1530's, they decided to do something about it, and sent three men northwards. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was sent by sea to explore the Pacific coast, and in 1542 landed on the shores of San Diego bay. He continued up the coast perhaps as far as northern California. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado set off on land to explore the northern desert reaches, and in 1540 he found his way into the Sonoran desert and crossed into modern-day Arizona. His expedition made it as far as central Kansas. Hernando de Soto landed his ships south of Tampa Bay in 1539, hacked into the mangroves, fought pretty much everyone he came across, and wandered the American south, crossing the Great Smokies and reaching his demise on the banks of the Mississippi somewhere in Arkansas, not several hundred miles away from where Coronado was stumbling around in the plains of Kansas. None of them found empires or gold.
They did, however, succeed in establishing that a northern continent did exist. They found lands quite different from what they expected, including more temperate climates, great rivers, endless plains, deserts with strange plants in them, and a lovely, paradise like coastal strip on the Pacific that had a climate very similar to their own in Spain. More importantly, they found a land vast in scale, rugged, and without a unified native empire that they could topple as they had done down south. This, combined with the awareness that Asia was actually someplace else, and that the gold was strikingly absent, led to a rather remarkable development back in Mexico. Conquest was now followed up by colonization. Within the next century, Mexico would be transformed as the conquerors settled down and even mingled and married with the locals, giving us the Mexicans we know and love today, a product of two worlds while also a nation of their own making. In the same century, the concept caught on further north, and England began settling the Carolinas, Virginia, and New England. The French would be drawn to the St. Lawrence valley and the shores of Acadia. Granted, their interactions with the locals would take on an entirely different flavor.
The Spanish explorations of the three ventures would open up a truly new world to people looking for a new destiny back in Europe. The mysterious lands of Mexico, the United States, and Canada were no longer just plunder opportunities for adventurers, but diverse and rich lands with landscapes and climates to suit any number of settlers looking to root somewhere new. Most important of all, the voyages fueled the fire of exploration that would stimulate such powerful growth in the three nations, gold or not. Though they would not properly be known as such yet... Mexicans would march north as missionaries and primitive geologists, north into the bounty of souls and minerals that existed in the desert frontiers nestled between peaks of pines, oaks, and snow. They would settle the paradise-like coast and found the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Canadians would also go forth as missionaries, while others would canoe the most beautiful forests in the world in search of new trading partners who had the miracle-animal known as the beaver in great supply. They would call for their families back across the ocean and settle in strips of land branching out from the great St. Lawrence. Americans would not send as many missionaries, but they would bring their religions with them, and would savor new freedoms as they slowly but steadily worked their way inland from the sandy islands and beaches that stretched from Cape Cod to the Georgia islands. Some of them would continue their search for freedom by joining with the Canadians in the lands around the Great Lakes when their neighbors started getting different ideas of freedom than what they would have, and would then take the name of Canadians as well. The three men did not know it, but they destroyed myths and exposed the continent for what is truly was (to say nothing of the huge size opening up non-Spanish ventures, space for everyone... until the 18th century anyway), thus laying the foundations for the settlement and creation of three nations.
The first footsteps of their sojourns as they crossed into the (now) United States can be found at Cabrillo National Monument, Coronado National Memorial, and De Soto National Memorial.
1. Cortez Not Only Conquers Mexico, but Decides to Consolidate on the Matter.
Until Cortez conquered the Aztec empire, Spanish interests in the Americas were largely confined to plundering the resources of the lands they came across. Missionary work was important, but until the efforts made by Bartolome de las Casas to reform approaches taken in dealing with the local peoples started to change Spanish policies, it took a back seat to economic and personal interests of explorers and conquistadors. One of the policies that de las Casas crusaded against was the use of local people in the encomienda system as slaves, which was extensive enough in practice by even the 1510's to make one think that colonization was proceeding rapidly apace. Instead, the Spanish men were largely absentee landlords, and were more interested in pillaging the next island over rather than setting up house. Cuba and Hispaniola were something of an exception to this lifestyle, and some towns had already been founded by the time Cortez found himself bored with life once again.
Hernando Cortez, you see, was a bit restless, and never quite good at anything other than sudden bursts of opportunism. He went to school in Spain to become a lawyers, and spent a few years as a notary, but the news of excitement and riches to be had over across the waves was far more enticing to him than a legal career. In 1504, he found his way to Hispaniola, acquired a plantation, joined the military, and helped consolidate the conquests of both Hispaniola and Cuba, giving him some experience in how to repeat the matter elsewhere. Eventually, he found Cuba more to his liking than Hispaniola, but even there, stared out at the sea and wanted to take a few more chances. In 1518, plans were drawn up to take control of Mexico, though no one really knew what was there. Cortez was very eager to find out, and set sail for the coast of the Yucatan even as his orders were recalled at the last minute. He slowly moved through the tropical southern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, won some women in a few fights with the locals in Tabasco, and found one in particular to be his kind of woman. Her name was Malintzin, a woman known throughout the ages as either a traitor, a victim, or even the mother of the Mexican people. She spoke all the important languages of the peoples that she and Cortez would come across, and knew enough to tell him how things worked in this part of the world.
Most crucial of all, however, was her relationship with Cortez. While he did acquire her as a slave in battle, he grew fond of his interpreter, probably because she foiled a plot to have him killed. The two fell in love and a son was born to them, perhaps the first Mestizo. Cortez had a house built for her, and even though she ended up marrying another Spaniard a few years later, the relationship must have changed how Cortez saw the land he found himself in. Yes, he went on to pillage, plunder, conquer, and act like a true conquistador, but for a brief while, Cortez had a taste of settlement rather than expedition. Mexico was a very different place from the other lands he had thus far been in during his rounds of adventure, and it was an empire, an empire with a magnificent city, an empire with riches. Mexico, not Spain, was where Cortez would make his own destiny.
He burned his ships to let his men know that he was in command of the venture, and that he was deadly serious about its success. He fought off the Aztecs, he fought of the Spanish who came from Cuba to reassert authority over him, and conquered an empire with 600 men fighting against millions. Then, against all odds, he decided to stay, and encouraged Spaniards to come and do the same. His own relations with Malintzin made marriage with the locals socially acceptable, and the two different worlds started mixing into a new culture, the Mexican culture. He stayed on to build Mexico City in the image of a Spanish colony settlement rather than something Aztec. He built palaces for himself both here, and in Curenavaca, where he enjoyed the climate (his palace there is still a main attraction downtown).
This is not to say that things were flowing easily and peaceably. Consolidating a conquest of an empire of millions was a daunting task, to say nothing of how Spanish culture would be asserted as superior to the native cultures time and again. Christian expansion could not tolerate paganism, and initial missionary efforts took pains to ensure that natives were transformed from being natives. Elements of the local culture did end up in the world of the newcomers, however. Locals married colonists, maize continued to be ground and made into tortillas, attitudes and philosophies of life blended together. The tequila, at least, flowed easily enough. In the end, something neither entirely native or Spanish ended up being created, and this new Mexican culture, a blend of worlds, set the stage for the development of the future of modern North America, something mixed, something neither European, nor Indian. For the first time, the newcomers became something more than raiders and economic entrepreneurs, and the New World was truly born.
The explorations that laid the continent open to planning rather than imagination would compel other newcomers to the north to settle the lands of the United States and Canada, but it was the likes of Cortez and his men, who dared to stick around in an alien land among an alien people, that first sparked the very concept of leaving homelands behind and becoming something altogether new. In Mexico, this resulted in a merging. In the United States, attempts at assimilation. In Canada, a setting apart. The peoples on this continent still argue, still fight, and differences still remain between our three nations, as well as between, yes, immigrants and the native born, but this continent remains the land of new beginnings and is very much its own land, even while being populated by people who came here from everywhere else ever since the Bering straits were dry land. He and his men took a calculated gamble, just as the first Quebecois would, and the first Virginians would, or long ago, the first band of hunters chasing a mammoth just an extra few miles over the horizon did. Worlds have since collided, and the result is the world we now see before us from that stretches from Nome to St. John's, to Miami, to San Diego, to Villa Hermosa.
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