Part 1 (1/2)

South American Fights and Fighters.

by Cyrus Townsend Brady.

PREFACE

The first part of this new volume of the _American Fights and Fighters Series_ needs no special introduction. Partly to make this the same size as the other books, but more particularly because I especially desired to give a permanent place to some of the most dramatic and interesting episodes in our history--especially as most of them related to the Pacific and the Far West--the series of papers in part second was included.

”The Yarn of the _Ess.e.x_, Whaler” is abridged from a quaint account written by the Mate and published in an old volume which is long since out of print and very scarce. The papers on the _Tonquin_, John Paul Jones, and ”The Great American Duellists” speak for themselves. The account of the battle of the Pitt River has never been published in book form heretofore. The last paper ”On Being a Boy Out West” I inserted because I enjoy it myself, and because I have found that others young and old who have read it generally like it also.

Thanks are due and are hereby extended to the following magazines for permission to republish various articles which originally appeared in their pages: _Harper's_, _Munseys_, _The Cosmopolitan_, _Sunset_ and _The New Era_.

I project another volume of the Series supplementing the two Indian volumes immediately preceding this one, but the information is hard to get, and the work amid many other demands upon my time, proceeds slowly.

CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY.

ST. GEORGE'S RECTORY,

Kansas City, Mo., February, 1910.

PART I

SOUTH AMERICAN FIGHTS AND FIGHTERS

I

Panama and the Knights-Errant of Colonization

I. The Spanish Main

One of the commonly misunderstood phrases in the language is ”the Spanish Main.” To the ordinary individual it suggests the Caribbean Sea. Although Shakespeare in ”Oth.e.l.lo,” makes one of the gentlemen of Cyprus say that he ”cannot 'twixt heaven and main descry a sail,” and, therefore, with other poets, gives warrant to the application of the word to the ocean, ”main” really refers to the other element. The Spanish Main was that portion of South American territory distinguished from Cuba, Hispaniola and the other islands, because it was on the main land.

When the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were a Spanish lake, the whole circle of territory, bordering thereon was the Spanish Main, but of late the t.i.tle has been restricted to Central and South America.

The buccaneers are those who made it famous. So the word brings up white-hot stories of battle, murder and sudden death.

The history of the Spanish Main begins in 1509, with the voyages of Ojeda and Nicuesa, which were the first definite and authorized attempts to colonize the mainland of South America.

The honor of being the first of the fifteenth-century {4} navigators to set foot upon either of the two American continents, indisputably belongs to John Cabot, on June 24, 1497. Who was next to make a continental landfall, and in the more southerly lat.i.tudes, is a question which lies between Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci.

Fiske, in a very convincing argument awards the honor to Vespucci, whose first voyage (May 1497 to October 1498) carried him from the north coast of Honduras along the Gulf coast around Florida, and possibly as far north as the Chesapeake Bay, and to the Bahamas on his return.

Markham scouts this claim. Winsor neither agrees nor dissents. His verdict in the case is a Scottish one, ”Not proven.” Who shall decide when the doctors disagree? Let every one choose for himself. As for me, I am inclined to agree with Fiske.

If it were not Vespucci, it certainly was Columbus on his third voyage (1498-1500). On this voyage, the chief of the navigators struck the South American sh.o.r.e off the mouth of the Orinoco and sailed westward along it for a short distance before turning to the northward. There he found so many pearls that he called it the ”Pearl Coast.” It is interesting to note that, however the question may be decided, all the honors go to Italy. Columbus was a Genoese. Cabot, although born in Genoa, had lived many years in Venice and had been made a citizen there; while Vespucci was a Florentine.

The first important expedition along the northern coast of South America was that of Ojeda in 1499-1500, in company with Juan de la Cosa, next to Columbus the most expert navigator and pilot of the age, and Vespucci, perhaps his equal in nautical science as he {5} was his superior in other departments of polite learning. There were several other explorations of the Gulf coast, and its continuations on every side, during the same year, by one of the Pizons, who had accompanied Columbus on his first voyage; by Lepe; by Cabral, a Portuguese, and by Bastidas and La Cosa, who went for the first time as far to the westward as Porto Rico on the Isthmus of Darien.

On the fourth and last voyage of Columbus, he reached Honduras and thence sailed eastward and southward to the Gulf of Darien, having not the least idea that the sh.o.r.e line which he called Veragua was in fact the border of the famous Isthmus of Panama. There were a number of other voyages, including a further exploration by La Cosa and Vespucci, and a second by Ojeda in which an abortive attempt was made to found a colony; but most of the voyages were mere trading expeditions, slave-hunting enterprises or searches, generally fruitless, for gold and pearls. Ojeda reported after one of these voyages that the English were on the coast. Who these English were is unknown. The news, however, was sufficiently disquieting to Ferdinand, the Catholic--and also the Crafty!--who now ruled alone in Spain, and he determined to frustrate any possible English movement by planting colonies on the Spanish Main.