The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542.: Excerpted from the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892-1893, Part 1.Winship, George Parker
History
The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542.: Excerpted from the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892-1893, Part 1.
Winship, George Parker
Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 1510-1554; Southwest, New -- Description and travel
opposite, near Santa Barbara or the Santa Clara valley, gave the
Spaniards additional descriptions of men like themselves in the
interior.
The rest of the year 1542 was spent in this locality, off the coast
of southern California, and then the voyage northward was resumed.
Many points on the land were touched, although San Francisco bay
quite escaped observation. Just before a severe storm, in which one
of the vessels was lost, forcing him to turn back, Ferrel observed
floating drift and recognized that it meant the neighborhood of a
large river, but he was driven out to sea before reaching the mouth
of the Columbia. The return voyage was uneventful, and the surviving
vessel reached the harbor of Natividad in safety by April 14, 1543.
VILLALOBOS SAILS ACROSS THE PACIFIC
Cortes and Alvarado had both conceived plans more than once to equip
a great expedition in New Spain and cross the South sea to the isles
of the Western ocean. After the death of Alvarado, Mendoza adopted
this scheme, and commissioned Ruy Lopez de Villalobos to take command
of some of the ships of Alvarado and sail westward. He started on
All Saints day, the 1st of November, 1542, with 370 Spanish soldiers
and sailors aboard his fleet. January 22, 1547, Friar Jeronimo de
Santisteban wrote to Mendoza “from Cochin in the Indies of the King
of Portugal.” He stated that 117 of the men were still with the
fleet, and that these intended to keep together and make their way as
best they could home to Spain. Thirty members of the expedition had
remained at Maluco, and twelve had been captured by the natives of
various islands at which the party had landed. The rest, including
Ruy Lopez, had succumbed to hunger and thirst, interminable labors
and suffering, and unrelieved discouragement—the record of the
previous months. This letter of Friar Jeronimo is the only published
account of the fate of this expedition.
The brief and gloomy record of the voyage of Villalobos is a fit
ending for this story of the Coronado expedition to Cibola and
Quivira, of how it came about, of what it accomplished, and of what
resulted from it. Nothing is the epitome of the whole story. The
lessons which it teaches are always warnings, but if one will read
history rightly, every warning will be found to be an inspiration.
[p413]
THE NARRATIVE OF CASTAÑEDA
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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