First colonizations of America
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The first European conquest.
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[edit] Portugal and Spain explore and arrive in the Americas
1500
“Who could conquer Tenochitlán? Who could shake the foundation of heaven?”
Unknown Aztec poet.
1520
“We came here to serve God and the king and also to get rich.”
Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, answering the question why he and his men landed in Mexico.
1521
“The city itself is as big as Seville or Córdoba.... [It] has many squares where... markets are held continuously.... There are... many temples.... Among these temples there is one... whose great size and magnificence no human tongue could describe.”
Conquistador Hernán Cortés, describing Tenochitlán (now Mexico City), capital of the Aztec Empire), after his small army and his Indian allies conquered it.
1522
Broken spears lie in the roads; We have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls Are red with blood.
Aztec poet on life after the fall of the Aztec Empire.
1522
“We remained 3 months and 20 days without taking in food... and ate only old biscuit reduced to powder, full of grubs and stinking from the dirt which rats had made on it. We drank water that was yellow and stinking.”
Account of Antonio Pigafetta, a crewman on Ferdinand Magellan’s cruise, the first circumnavigation of the Earth.
1526
“Every day these merchants take our people.... So great is this corruption and evil that our country is becoming completely depopulated.”
King Afonso of the Congo, Letter to the King of Portugal, protesting about the slave trade.
c. 1530
“Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields.... The mortality was terrible. Your grandfathers died, and with them died the son of the king and his brothers and kinsmen. So it was that we became orphans, oh,, my sons! So we became when we were young. All of us were thus.”
Mayan account of the diseases that killed many before and after the arrival of the Spaniards.
1531
“[Atalhualpa] took the book and began to leaf through its pages. And the Inca said, “Why does it not speak to me? This book tells me nothing!” And... [Atalhualpa] threw the book from his hands.”
Incan account of the Incan leader, Atalhualpa, rejecting the Bible of the Spaniards.
1535
“It is their practice to collect Indians into groups and send them to forced labor without wages, while they themselves receive the payment for the work.... The royal administrators and the other Spaniards lord it over the Indians with absolute power.”
Huamán Poma, a Peruvian Indian, Letter to King Philip III of Spain, complaining of the treatment of natives by the Spanish.
1566
“Not only have [the Indians] shown themselves to be very wise peoples and possessed of lively and marked understanding... governing and providing for their nations... but they have equaled many diverse nations of the... past and present... and exceed by no small measure the wisest of all these....
“The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom.... Even beasts enjoyed more freedom when they are allowed to graze in the field.”
Father Bartolomé de las Casas, on the maltreatment of Indians by the Spanish.
????
“We hastened through a vast territory, which we found vacant, the inhabitants having fled to the mountains in fear of Christians. With heavy hearts we looked out over the lavishly watered, fertile, and beautiful land, now abandoned and burned and the people thin and weak....
“They... told us how [Spaniards] had come through razing the towns and carrying off half the men and all the women and boys....
“Clearly, to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way.”
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, report to the King of Spain following his 8-year, 6,000 mile journey across North America.
1680
“Popé... ordered... that they instantly break up and burn... everything pertaining to Christianity..... They were ordered likewise not to teach the Castilian [Spanish] language in any pueblo and to burn the seeds which the Spanish sowed and to plant only maize [corn] and beans, which were the crops of their ancestors.”
Account of the Pueblo Revolt in today’s New Mexico, led by Popé.
c. 1680
“When I was six or seven and already knew how to read and write,... I discovered that in the City of Mexico there was a university... and as soon as I learned this I began to deluge my mother with urgent and persistent pleas to change my manner of dress... so that I might study and take courses at the university. She refused...; nevertheless, I found a way to read many different books my grandfather owned.”
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, on her failed efforts to receive an education during her childhood.
[edit] European conflicts come to the Americas
1564.
“This is the armada of the King of Spain, who has sent me to burn and hang the Lutheran French.”
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, announcement to French Protestant settlers at Fort Caroline, Florida, before his attack on them.
[edit] New France
1534
“I am rather inclined to believe that this is the land God gave to Cain.”
French explorer Jacques Cartier, on Labrador, on the northeastern coast of Canada.
[edit] Native Americans of North America
1570.
“All lords of the Five Nations Confederacy must be honest in all things.... It shall be a serious wrong for anyone to lead a lord into trivial affairs, for the people must ever hold their lords high in estimation out of respect to their honorable positions....
“If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and make known their disposition to the Lords of the Confederacy... and promise to obey the wishes of the Confederate Council, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.”
From the Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy.
