Upon November 2, 1537, he embarked at Cadiz with his fleet, consisting of a caravel and two full-rigged ships. All went well up to the Cape de Verdes. On nearing the equator, it occurred to the ‘Maestro del Agua’ to examine his stock of water, and, out of one hundred pipes which had been put aboard, he found but three remaining, and from these the thirty horses and four hundred men who were on board all had to drink. Seeing the greatness of the necessity, the Governor—for Alvar Nuñez almost always speaks of himself in the third person—gave orders that the fleet should make for land. ‘Three days,’ he says in his Commentaries, ‘we sailed in search of it’; and on the fourth, just before sunrise, occurred a very notable affair, and, as it is not altogether fuera de proposito, I set it down, and it is this—‘that, going towards the land, the ships had almost touched on some sharp rocks we had not seen.’ Then, as now, I take it, vigilance was not a noticeable quality in Spanish sailors. Just as the vessels were almost on the rocks, ‘a cricket commenced to sing, which cricket a sick soldier had put into the ship at Cadiz, being anxious to hear its music, and for the two months which our navigation had endured no one had heard it, whereat the soldier was much enraged; and as on that morning it felt the land [sintio la tierra], it commenced to sing, and its music wakened all the people of the ship, who saw the cliffs, which were distant almost a crossbow-shot from where we were, so we cast out anchors and saved the ship, and it is certain that if the cricket had not sung all of us, four hundred soldiers and thirty horses, had been lost.’ Some of the crew accepted the occurrence as a miracle from God; but Nuñez himself is silent on that head, being a better observer of natural history than a theologian. But ‘from there, and sailing more than a hundred leagues along the coast, the cricket every evening gave us his music, and thus with it we arrived at a little port beyond Cape Frio, where the Adelantado landed and unfurled his flag, and took possession for His Majesty.’ The expedition disembarked at Santa Catalina in Brazil. ‘There the Governor landed his men and twenty-six of the horses which had escaped the sea, all that remained of forty-six embarked in Spain.’ The odium theologicum gave the Governor some work at once. Two friars—Fray Bernardo de Armenta and Fray Alonso Lebron, Franciscans—had burnt the houses of some Indians, who had retaliated in the heathen fashion by slaughtering two Christians. The ‘people being scandalized’, the Governor sent for the friars, admonished them, and told them to restrain their zeal. This was the first false step he made, and set all friars and priests throughout America against him. Hearing at Santa Catalina that Buenos Ayres was almost abandoned, and that the inhabitants had founded the town of Asuncion del Paraguay, Alvar determined to march thither by land, and send his ship into the river Plate and up the Paraguay. The two Franciscan friars he told to remain and ‘indoctrinate’ the Indians. This they refused to do, saying they wished to reside amongst the Spaniards in Asuncion. Had they been Jesuits, it is ten to one they had remained and spent their lives ‘indoctrinating’, for the Jesuits alone of all the religious Orders were ever ready to take every risk.
Upon his march the Governor, contrary to all good policy and precedent, ordered that nothing should be taken from the Indians without due payment being made. To insure this being done, he paid for all provisions himself, and served them out to the soldiery. This made him as unpopular with his soldiers as his dealings with the two Franciscans had made him amongst the friars. Surely he might have known that Pizarro, Cortes, Almagro, and the rest, were men who never paid for anything. Still, he persisted in his conduct to the end, and so brought ruin on himself. The Indians seemed to appreciate his method, for he says that ‘when the news was spread abroad of the good treatment the Governor gave to all, they came to meet the army decked with flowers and bringing provisions in great abundance.’ It was, he also says, ‘a thing to see how frightened the Indians were of the horses, and how they brought them food, chickens and honey to keep them quiet and in good humour, and they asked the Governor to tell the horses not to hurt them.’
After passing the river Iguazú, he sent the two friars ahead to collect provisions, and ‘when the Governor arrived the Indians had no more to give.’[40]
So having started from the coast upon November 2, 1541, he arrived at Asuncion on March 2, 1542, having accomplished a march of more than two thousand miles with but the loss of a single man and without the slaughter of a single Indian. Hardly had he arrived at Asuncion before he found himself embroiled on every side. The Indians were in full rebellion, the settlement of Buenos Ayres almost in ruins, and the officers appointed by the King to collect the royal dues all hostile to him to a man.
After having consulted with the clergy to find if they thought it lawful to attack the Guaycurús who had assailed the newly-founded town, he received the opinion ‘that it was not only lawful, but expedient.’ Therefore he sent off an expedition against them, to which was joined a priest to require the Guaycurús to become Christians and to acknowledge the King of Spain. The propositions, not unnaturally, did not seem reasonable to the Indians, who most likely were unaware of the benefits which Christianity confers, and probably heard for the first time of the King of Spain. The Governor, who seems to have doubted of the humanity of the clergy, called another council, which confirmed the previous opinion. Strangely enough, this seems to have surprised him, for he probably did not reflect that the clergy would not have to fight themselves, and that the first blood ever spilt on earth was on account of a religious difference.
Just before the expedition started it was found that the two Franciscan friars who had come with him from Santa Catalina could not be found. It then appeared they had started back to the coast accompanied by a bevy of Indian damsels, thirty-five in all. They were followed and brought back, and then explained that they were on their way to Spain to complain against the Governor. The five-and-thirty dusky catechumens remained without an explanation, and the people were once more ‘scandalized’. The Governor then started out against the Guaycurús. Only those who know the Chaco, or western bank of the river Paraguay, can form the least idea of what such an expedition must have been. Even to-day in the Chaco the change since the beginning of the world can be but slight. As a steamer slips along the bank, nothing for miles and miles is seen but swamp, intersected with backwaters,[41] in which lie alligators, electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach are swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass. After the swamps thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees, chañares, ñandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela, almost like iron; the inhabitants ferocious and intractable as when the Governor himself first saw them; the climate heavy and humid, the air dank with vinchucas[42] and mosquitoes and the little black infernal midget called the jejen; no roads, no paths, no landmarks, but here and there at intervals of many leagues a clearing in the forest where some straggling settlement exists, more rarely still the walls of a deserted Jesuit mission-house or church. Ostriches and deer, tigers,[43] capibaras and tapirs, and now and then a herd of cattle as wild as buffaloes, are seen. Sometimes an Indian with his lance sits motionless upon his horse to watch the vessel pass—a sentinel to guard the wilderness from encroachments from without. So Alvar Nuñez, as he tells us in his Commentaries, started with four hundred men and with one thousand friendly Indians, all well armed and painted, and with plates of metal on their heads to reflect the sun, and so strike terror to their enemies. To save the horses they were put on board,[44] whilst the Indians marched along the bank, keeping up with the ships. Horses at that time in Paraguay and in Peru often were worth one thousand crowns of gold, though Azara tells us that in the last century in Buenos Ayres you could often buy a good horse for two needles, so cheap had they become. Then, as at present, time was of no account in Paraguay, so almost every day they landed the horses to keep them in condition and to chase the ostriches and deer.
Just the kind of army that a thinking man would like to march with; not too much to eat, but, still, a pleasant feeling of marching to spread religion and to make one’s fortune, with but the solitary unpleasant feature to the soldier—the system of payment for provisions which the Governor prescribed. All was new and strange; the world was relatively young. Each night the Governor religiously wrote up his diary, now chronicling the death of some good horse, or of an Indian, or commenting upon the fruits, the fish, the animals, the trees, and ‘all the other things of God which differ from those in the Castiles.’ Occasionally a fight took place with Guasarapos or with Pagayuás, but nothing of much account (de mucha monta); always the tales of gold-mines to be met with further on. Eventually the expedition came to a point not far from where is now the town of Corumbá. There Alvar Nuñez founded a town to which he gave the name of Reyes, which has long fallen into decay. He also sent two captains to explore and search for gold, waiting two or three months for their return, and suffering from a quartan ague which confined him to his bed; then, having failed to find the talked-of gold-mines, he set his face again towards Asuncion. Just before starting he gave the final blow to his waning popularity. Some of his followers, having taken Indian girls, had hidden them on board the ships; this, when he knew it, Nuñez at once forbade, and, sending for the fathers of the girls, restored their children to them. ‘With this,’ he says, ‘the natives were much pleased, but the Spaniards rendered angry and desperate, and for this cause they hated me.’ Nothing more natural, and for the same cause the Spanish Paraguayans hated the Jesuits who carried out the policy which the wise Governor began.
On April 8, 1543, the Governor returned to Asuncion, worn out and ill with ague. There he found all confusion. Domingo de Irala, a clever, ambitious Biscayan soldier who had been interim Governor before Nuñez had arrived, had worked upon the people, saying that Nuñez wished to take away their property. As their chief property was in Indians whom they had enslaved, this rendered Nuñez most unpopular, and the same kind of allegations were laid against him as were laid against the Jesuits when in their turn they denounced slavery in Paraguay. All the complaints were in the name of liberty, as generally is the case when tyranny or villainy of any sort is to be done.
So Alvar Nuñez[45] tells us in his Commentaries that at the hour of the Ave Maria ten or twelve of the ‘factious’ entered his house where he lay ill in bed, all shouting ‘Liberty!’ and to prove they were all good patriots one Jaime Resquin put a bent crossbow to his side, and forced him to get out of bed, and took him off to prison amid a crowd all shouting ‘Liberty!’ The friends of liberty (upon the other side) attempted a rescue, but the patriots[46] were too strong. So the unpatriotic Governor was thrown, heavily ironed, into a cell, out of which to make room they let a murderer who was awaiting death. ‘He’ (Alvar Nuñez grimly remarks) ‘made haste to take my cloak, and then set off down the street at once, calling out “Liberty!”’ That everything should be in order, the patriots confiscated all the Governor’s goods and took his papers, publishing a proclamation that they did so because he was a tyrant. Unluckily, the Indians have not left us any commentaries, or it would be curious to learn what they thought as to the tyranny of Alvar Nuñez. Most probably they thought as the Indians of the Jesuit missions thought at the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, as is set forth in the curious memorial addressed in 1768 by the people of the Mission of San Luis to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, praying that the Jesuits might be suffered to remain instead of the friars, who had been sent to replace them against the people’s will.[47] Having got the Governor into prison, the patriots had to elect another chief, and the choice naturally ‘fell’ upon Domingo de Irala, who, having been interim Governor, had never ceased intriguing from the first. He promptly put his friends in office, after the fashion of all Governors, whether they enter office to the cry of ‘Liberty’ or not. The friends of Alvar Nuñez, in the usual Spanish fashion (long sanctified by use and wont), declared themselves in opposition—that is, they roamed about the land, proving by theft and murder that their love of liberty was just as strong as that of those in power. Things shortly came to such a pass that no one could leave his house by night. The marauding Guaycurús burnt all the suburbs, and threatened to attack the town. Nuñez himself was guarded day and night by four men armed with daggers in a close prison. As he says himself, his prison was not ‘fitting for his health,’ for day and night he had to keep a candle burning to see to read, and the grass grew underneath his bed, whilst for the sake of ‘health’ he had a pair of first-rate fetters on his feet. For his chief gaoler they procured one Hernando de Sosa, whom Nuñez had put in gaol for striking an Indian chief. A guard watched constantly at the prison gate, but, still, in spite of this he managed to communicate almost uninterruptedly with his friends outside. His method was certainly ingenious. His food was brought to him by an Indian girl, whom, so great was the fear of the patriots that he should write to the King, they made walk naked into the prison, carrying the dishes, and with her head shaved. Notwithstanding this, she managed to bring a piece of paper hidden between her toes. The party of Liberty, suspecting that Nuñez was communicating with his friends, procured an Indian youth to make love to the girl and learn the secret. This he failed to do, owing, perhaps, to his love-making being wanting in conviction on account of her shaved head. At last Irala and his friends determined to send the Governor a prisoner to Spain, taking care, of course, to despatch a messenger beforehand to distort the facts and prejudice the King. The friends of Nuñez, however, managed to secrete a box of papers, stating the true facts, on board the ship. At dead of night a band of harquebusiers dragged him from his bed (after a captivity of eleven months), as he says, ‘almost with the candle in his hand’—i.e., in a dying state. As he left the prison, he fell upon his knees and thanked God for having let him once more feel the air of heaven, and then in a loud voice exclaimed: ‘I name as my successor Captain Juan de Salazar de Espinosa.’ At this one Garci Vargas rushed at him with a knife, and told him to recall his words or he would kill him instantly. This he was stopped from doing, and Nuñez was hurried to the ship and chained securely to a beam. On board the vessel, he says, they tried to poison him; but this seems doubtful, as there was nothing on earth to prevent their doing so had they been so inclined. Still, as a prudent man he took the precaution to provide some oil and a piece of unicorn (pedazo de unicornio), with which he tried the food. Unicorns he could not have seen in Paraguay, nor yet in Florida, and he does not explain how he became so luckily equipped.
None the less, of all the discoverers of America he is the man of least imaginative power—that is, in matters appertaining to natural history—so one must conclude he had his piece of unicorn from Spain, where he most probably had bought it from some dealer in necessaries for travellers to the New World.