I really enjoyed our discussion about the failure of Spanish expeditions. I think that when we study history we see the successes and have a tendency to overlook how long it took them to succeed or the people who didn't succeed at all. With the Spanish invasion into America Ponce de Leon opens contact with the Natives in Florida in 1513, then in 1528 Panfilo de Narvaez and his troops marched through Florida only to be chased back to the coast. Cabeza de Vaca and other survivors lived as slaves with local indians off the shore of Texas. You'd think with no success to this point they would figure out that they'd done something wrong. What was most interesting to me was that ten years later, during DeSoto's expedition, the Spanish still caused problems with the Indians and when DeSoto died he was not buried in the normal fashion, his followers tied him to a log and sank it in the Mississippi so that the Indians wouldn't find it. That to me is almost a stubborn attempt to hide the fact that they were defeated in their conquest without good relations with the natives. It still took another 20 years for the Spanish to found St. Augustine which is really their only success story in expedition in Florida until much later.
I personally would like to learn more about the Cortes and what he was thinking when he saw the vast fields of organized agriculture and the huge pyramid shaped temples. the quote by the foot soldier in the book shows that the soldiers were obviously impressed and even in awe of the Aztec communities and culture. Rose gardens, orchards, causeways, and roadways are some of the things he describes and yet Cortes sees this impressive city of 200,000 people and this advanced civilization he walks up to the guy in charge and says "you are now my hostage." thinking that he was just gonna take charge with his 508 soldiers. I cannot even imagine what would've inflated Cortes' ego to this point. Anyway because the Aztec empire did collapse soon after this we attribute this success to Cortes when there was really more to it than just "super" European soldiers coming in and taking over.
2 comments:
I also enjoyed hearing about the defeat of the Spanish. We always think that the Europeans had such an easy time dealing with the Natives but as we have learned the Europeans were often killed and were subject to the ways of fighting that has been shown to be effective throughout time.
It was interesting, in an unfortunate way I suppose, to learn about the countless times the europeans failed to conquer what they came for. You would think that after failing to find or defeat something, technique would change more drastically and the europeans would maybe take some time to learn about the natives before storming in and taking hostages. It was also interesting to learn that, although smallpox did have a tragic affect on many native tribes, it did not affect all regions as drastically as others and in some time, natives were even able to become immune to the horrible disease.
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