it was said, after leaving Cortés as executor of his will, and Narváez as the inheritor of his hope to colonize the River of Palms.
It was the destiny of this river from the first to be a frontier of rivalries, a boundary of kingdoms, a dividing line between opposing ambitions and qualities of life. During the next three years, three Spanish leaders considered themselves the rightful masters of the Rio de las Palmas.
Cortés planned to settle a colony there in 1523, to help in carrying out the Emperor’s command to find the Strait of Anian, which all believed to open from the coast between Florida and the Rio de las Palmas and to lead by water to Cathay. But affairs in central Mexico took all his attention.
Intrigue in the colonies and at Court worked away to crumble Cortés from below. As a result of representations made to him, the Emperor in 1525 removed the Pánuco from the jurisdiction of Cortés and created a new province of Pánuco-Victoria Garayana, reaching all the way to Florida and including the Rio de las Palmas. Nuño de Guzmán, appointed governor, sailed for his new province which he reached over a year later.
And meantime, with the return of Narváez to Spain petitioning for command of the lands once granted to Garay, the Emperor made still another grant, establishing the province of Florida, reaching from the Atlantic coast to the Rio de las Palmas. Narváez was made adelantado.
Messages, even royal commands, with their replies, took a year for the round trip, for the fleet sailed from Spain in April and returned from Veracruz in the fall. To such delay, again subject to the vagaries of the ocean, and the soundness of little ships and of men, there was added the formal obstructionism of government with its dedicated waste of time. It was no wonder that for years Cortés knew nothing of the royal patents made to Guzmán and Narváez.
Once in residence at the Pánuco, Guzmán established slave trade among the Indians of his region, and word traveled swiftly through the Indian jungles and deserts and river valleys of the cargoes of stolen Indians shipped out at fat prices for the enrichment of the Governor and his followers. He knew of the forty and more reed towns on the Rio de las Palmas; what was more, Pineda had seen Indians wearing golden ornaments somewhere along the Gulf Coast. Guzmán sent his cousin Sancho de Caniedo north to the River of Palms with orders to found a town on its course, reconnoitre the country, and claim it for Guzmán in the name of the King. It was an act of typical ruthlessness, for Guzmán knew then that Narváez by royal authority had been given command of the land taking in this river. He held to his prior claim. There was no news of Narváez. Slaves and gold to the north—let his brave cousin march. Caniedo went overland and spent five months exploring the territory. But where were they, the forty towns on the river? And where the people, with or without golden jewels? He found no towns and no tribes, only a few roving Indians who said yes, there were people, but they had scattered themselves away from the river, far away from what they knew about. To the south, Indian men and women of tribes persecuted in the slave trade had vowed to have no children rather than let them grow up to be captives for sale. Such news travelled. Caniedo returned from the empty lowlands of River of Palms to Guzmán at the Pánuco with neither slaves, gold, nor establishment of a city. Guzmán was later transferred to a command in the western coastal region of Mexico, where after a successful campaign he became the cruel governor of Nueva Galicia.
On September 3, 1526, from Tenochtitlan his capital, where he returned after months of arduous pacification of Yucatan and Guatemala, Cortés wrote to the King, “… I have a goodly number of people ready to go to settle at the Rio de las Palmas… because I have been informed that it is good land and that there is a port. I do not think God and Your Majesty will be served less there than in all the other regions because I have much good news concerning that land.… “That announcement had the air of forestalling in the King’s mind any rival’s similar plans for the River of Palms. On the great map of New Spain Cortés laid a paw here, a dagger point there, a knee elsewhere, a scowl yonder; while he pursued whatever local battle required his presence. When deep in the tropics, away from communication for two years, he finally heard from a loyal friend in Mexico the capital that his government had proved treacherous; that his death and his army’s had been proclaimed and all their possessions confiscated; and that Narváez, his miserable, once-disposed-of rival, had been granted the River of Palms, then a whole day the great commander kept to himself. His soldiers outside his tent could hear that “he was suffering under the greatest agitation.” After Mass the following morning he told them the terrible news, and in the midst of their dejection made plans for a secret return to Mexico, to confound his traitors, regain his empire, and once more beguile the Emperor with triumphs. But in his large affairs, as in his small, a spell seemed to have been broken. The genius for success had abandoned him. Soon he was in Spain arguing for more power; the Emperor deliberated, complimented him, relieved him of his major command, and created him Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca. He returned to Mexico, a lion still hungry but with claws drawn. He never saw the Rio de las Palmas; for, a decade later when he asked for another part of the same long river, far to the north, he was denied in favor of a young officer, a late-comer to Mexico, of whom nobody among the veterans of the Conquest had ever heard.
Meanwhile, Pánfilo de Narváez with his royal charter, four hundred men, eighty-two horses, four ships and a brigantine rode out of the harbor of Xagua in Cuba. His course was charted for the mouth of the Rio de las Palmas. His pilot had been there before, with Garay, and was believed to know the whole crescent of the great Gulf, from Pánuco to Florida. But it was a year of storms, and in early April of 1528 Narváez and his company were driven from their course by a wild south wind that blew them into the west coast of Florida, where they landed on the fifteenth. They were far—how far they could not know—from the River of Palms; but amidst hostile demonstrations by Indians, who yet wore a few golden trinkets, and discoveries of the wrecked ship and the deerskin-wrapped corpses of earlier Spaniards, Narváez concocted high plans. The fleet was to proceed along the Gulf Coast to the Rio de las Palmas, while he and the cavalry and the bulk of the footmen marched to the same future capital by land. There they would meet, and the city would rise, and it would not be Cortés who built it, or poor Garay, but the Adelantado Pánfilo de Narváez, with his failures in Mexico wiped out, his one eye flashing enough for the other one which Cortés had cost him, his marvelous deep commanding voice proper to a wise governor of fabulous lands united to Spain and ennobled by his own courage and zeal. The fleet caught the wind to sea, and in due course, Narváez moved overland into the wilderness, according to plan. He never reached the river that was the western boundary of his vast province. The ships of his original fleet looked for the River of Palms, there to meet him, but either did not sail far enough or passed the lazy waters of its bar-hidden estuary at night, for they never found it. They returned to their starting point on the Florida coast, but there was no sign of their captain-general. They sailed back and forth for nearly a year searching for him and the three hundred men who had disembarked with him; but to no avail; and in the end they gave up and sailed for Veracruz, in New Spain.
For seven years nothing was known of the fate that befell the remainder of the Narváez command. But when the news finally came, those who heard it were lost in marvelling at how it arrived.
3.
Upland River
A thousand miles upland from the mouth of the Rio de las Palmas, dug-out villages roofed with straw, twig and mud sat by the banks of the river. It was the same river, though nobody then knew this. The river-banks were low, here and there shaded by willows and cottonwoods. A little distance back on either side, the ground was hard with gravel. Narrow deserts reached to mountains that lay parallel to the river. The leaves were turning yellow, for the first frost had come, and the hunting parties from the villages had already left for the buffalo plains to the northeast, leaving only a few people at home to care for old persons and to guard the stored harvest of beans, squashes and corn. In mid-November, if the wind was from the north, hard dust was blown up to sting the face, and the sky was wan with long white streaks. If the breeze was southerly, midday was warm and blazed with empowering
