The old stone tower at Newport is, in the eyes of some respectable antiquaries, a relic of ancient Catholicity in New England that belonged to a church or monastery, but its mute walls reveal nothing of the sacred catastrophe which overwhelmed the Christian colony of Vinland. The soil of New England was therefore long since dedicated to the God of truth, and let us trust that he will again, in his own good time, claim his heritage.
Turning our eyes to the other extreme of our national boundaries as they now exist, we find that the first Spanish missionaries set foot in Florida in 1528, in company with the expedition of Narvaez. The latter expected to find him an empire rivalling in wealth and extent that of Mexico, so recently subjected to the Spanish arms by the prowess of Cortez. The limits of the new empire were already marked out for a see, which took its title from the Rio de las Palmas, its southern boundary, a river in Mexico between Vera Cruz and Tampico, and extended to the Cape of Florida. The new bishop himself, Juan Juarez, headed the band of missionaries. As Father Juarez, he had been one of the twelve Franciscans who were invited to Mexico by Cortez to be its first apostles, and whom he received with great honor in 1524, five years after his landing. Father Juarez here distinguished himself by his zeal and his love and care for the Indians, and his appointment as the new bishop, which was made on the occasion of a subsequent visit to Spain, was therefore most fitting.
The expedition of Narvaez proved, however, a failure, and in its failure was involved that of the missionary scheme connected with it. No rich empire met the commander’s expectant gaze, no dusky monarch clad in barbaric splendor and surrounded by assiduous courtiers crossed his path to question his purposes or withstand his advance. He encountered only straggling Indians who treacherously led him on to his ruin. At last, weary, disappointed, pinched with want, and decimated by disease or the arrows of ambushed savages, the troops of Narvaez forced their way back through the jungle to the shore they had left. Narvaez had injudiciously, and against the advice of Bishop Juarez, ordered his ships elsewhere, and the only resource of the party was to escape to sea as best they might in the rude boats they constructed for the purpose. Four only remained behind, and these saved themselves by a perilous journey across the continent. The remainder were lost at sea, or were cast away to die a more lingering death by starvation, disease, or the attacks of the natives. Among the latter was the party of Bishop Juarez, which had been driven ashore on Dauphin Island, near the mouth of the Mississippi. Thus the fate of the second bishop who possessed jurisdiction over any portion of our soil is, like that of the first, wrapped in painful obscurity, and the fruits of his mission, if there were any, are equally left without living trace. All that is known of this devoted pioneer and martyr of the South has been recorded by Mr. Clarke in his Lives of the Deceased Bishops.
The four survivors of the expedition of Narvaez traversed Texas and New Mexico, and, reaching the shores of the Gulf of California, reappeared to the gaze of their astonished friends. The accounts they gave of the kingdoms and cities they had passed on their journey—accounts that were doubtless somewhat colored by their imagination—came to the ears of an Italian friar named Mark, and excited his zeal for the glorious spiritual conquest that seemed to lie before him. Placing himself under the guidance of Stephen, a negro, one of the four survivors alluded to, and attended by some friendly Indians, he boldly plunged into the wilderness which skirted the river Gila. Crossing it, he continued his march until he came within sight of Cibola, a city of the Zuñi tribe. Here he sent forward Stephen with a party of the Indian attendants to prepare the way, but the natives drove them back, and even killed Stephen and some of his companions. The friar could only look with longing eyes towards the city where he had hoped to garner a harvest of souls, and then sorrowfully began to retrace his steps. Ere descending the hill from which he bade farewell to the city, he, however, planted the cross, the object of his journey and the emblem of his mission.
The chieftain, Coronado, stimulated by the representations made of the supposed riches of Cibola, headed an expedition fitted out by the government to reduce it. He followed the route previously traversed by Friar Mark, who accompanied him, together with a number of other Franciscans. Cibola was reached, and soon yielded to the invader, but so barren was the prize, that Coronado resolved to press on to the conquest of another fabled empire in the interior, leaving the poor friar, overwhelmed with reproaches, to return home in shattered health. He ended his days shortly after. Coronado, in his researches, crossed to the valley of the Rio Grande, and even to that of the Arkansas, but without result, except in the discovery of the vast herds of bisons which swarmed the plains, and of which he was the first among Europeans to give an account. When Coronado, weary of his fruitless journey, resolved to return, Father John de Padilla, one of the Franciscans, in his younger days a soldier, begged to be allowed to remain at the Indian town of Quivira, west of the Rio Grande. Brother John of the Cross proffered a similar request in regard to the neighboring village of Cicuye, now Pecos. Bestowing upon them a supply of live stock, and some Mexican Indians as assistants, the expedition passed on and left them to their perilous posts. The Indians of New Mexico were, as a race, of morals more than ordinarily pure, and they possessed some familiarity with the arts. Notwithstanding these humanizing traits, the lives of the two devoted missionaries paid the forfeit of their courage and zeal, or they may both have perished by the hands of roving Indians. No tidings were ever heard of the lay brother, and the fate of the father was announced in Tampico by his companions, who fled thither with the news of his martyrdom.
The expedition of Coronado occupied the years 1540-1, or a great portion of them. In the latter year De Soto, who had entered Florida in 1539, led on by the same delusive hopes with which the narrative of the survivors of the party of Narvaez inspired Coronado—stood beside the mighty Mississippi, its discoverer. The following year, its waters were to be at once the grave of the great leader and the haven of refuge for the remnant of his band in their escape from the country. De Soto had brought with him from Spain a number of ecclesiastics, secular and regular. It is not probable that they accomplished anything among the natives, but they at least sacrificed their lives in the attempt, for the last of them perished in the interval between the death of De Soto and the arrival in Tampico of the survivors of his expedition. The dark colors in which those who cater to popular prepossessions delight to paint the conduct of the Spanish invaders are seldom brightened by the testimony that should accompany the picture, of the religious purposes which were never entirely absent from their minds. With some of them religion was, indeed, a controlling motive. Coupled with dreams of worldly conquest, was always the hope and desire of spreading the knowledge of Christian truth throughout the empires that might be won. Let the conduct of our non-Catholic fellow-citizens in the first years of the American occupation of California, in all its characteristics of violence, irreligion, greed, and cruelty to the Indians, be compared with that of the Spaniards of three centuries before, and it may be found that the latter will gain by the comparison. Moreover, no scheme of benevolence in behalf of the poor Indians, no thought of extending God’s kingdom upon earth, ever entered the thoughts of our nineteenth-century adventurers.
In 1544, one solitary soldier of the cross, Father Andrew de Olmos, a Franciscan, acquired a success among the Indians of Texas which had been denied to all his predecessors on the same field. It was the wild race then known as the “Chichimecas,” among whom he fearlessly advanced. Strange to say, many hearkened to his words, and followed him to Tamaulipas, where he founded a reduction for them, and completed their instruction. In the missions of Mexico, Father Andrew had already acquired a knowledge of four Indian languages, of three of which he had prepared grammars and vocabularies, and in two of them had written religious works for the use of the Indians. He now became a proficient in the language of this tribe also, and prepared many books for his spiritual children. Father John de Mesa, a secular priest, a kindred spirit in zeal, and of like accomplishments as a linguist, joined him in his labors, and both of them devoted the remainder of their lives to the Indians of the reduction. Their mission was so fortunate as to be perpetuated by successors, under whom it was also enlarged by the accession of many new Indian converts.
An attempt equally intrepid in character and peaceful in its method, but still entirely ineffectual in result, was the expedition into Florida in 1547 under the direction of Father Cancer de Barbastro, a distinguished missionary of Mexico, attended by several other Dominicans. Fortified with a royal decree from Philip of Spain restoring to liberty all natives of Florida held in bondage in any portion of the Spanish possessions, and provided by that monarch with an unarmed vessel, the missionaries were received with some delusive demonstrations of friendship on the part of the Indians. Untouched by the peaceful character of the mission, however, they seized the first opportunity to massacre Father Diego de Peñalosa, who had entrusted his life in their hands, and not long after Father Cancer himself. The mission was thereupon abandoned by the others as hopeless.
Note.—In addition to the works devoted specifically to the subject, mentioned in the text of this article, we would refer the future historian to the following sources of information as indispensable to an exhaustive treatment of the theme. We offer the suggestion as a partial acknowledgment of the obligation which we, in common with our fellow-Catholics of the United States, are under to a pioneer in this field of investigation—an assiduous and successful student (so far, at least, as his readers are concerned) of early American Catholic annals:
Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley. By John Gilmary Shea. (Embracing the Relations of Fathers Marquette, Hennepin, Allouez, and others, and a fac-simile of the outline map of the region made by F. Marquette.)