On Monday, February 23, 1540, according to Winship,[26] Captain-General Francisco Vazquez Coronado set out on his ambitious and memorable expedition to the Seven Cities of Cibola. His course lay from Compostela along the coast of Culiacan, and thence northward through what is now Sinaloa and Sonora. On May 9-20, 1540, Hernando de Alarcon set sail on the ancillary expedition by sea; he followed the coast from Acapulco to Colorado river, and although he undoubtedly saw and was the first to name Tiburon,[27] and claimed to have “discouered other very good hauens for the ships whereof Captaine Francis de Vlloa was General, for the Marquesse de Valle neither sawe nor found them”,[28] he made no specific record of any of the features of Seriland or of contact with the Seri Indians. Meantime Coronado’s forces were divided, a considerable part of the army falling behind the leader; and some time during the early summer the belated army, under Don Tristan de Arellano, founded the town of San Hieronimo de los Corazones, which in the following year (1541) was transferred to a place in Señora (Sonora) not now identifiable. From Corazones Don Rodrigo Maldonado went down to the seacoast to seek the ships, and brought back with him “an Indian so large and tall that the best man in the army reached only to his chest”, with reports of still taller Indians along the coast.[29] It is impossible to locate Maldonado’s route with close accuracy, but in view of geographic and other conditions it is evident (as recently shown by Hodge[30]) that he must have descended Rio Sonora and approached or reached the coast over the broad delta-plain of that stream south of Sierra Seri, and thus within Seri territory. The reported gigantic stature practically identifies the Indians visited by him with the Seri, since no other gigantic tribes were consistently reported by explorers of western North America, and since the 6-foot Seri warriors, with their frequent Sauls of greater stature, are in fact gigantic in comparison with the average Spanish soldiery of earlier centuries. There are indications that the fame of these giants of the Southern sea spread to Europe and filtered slowly throughout the intellectual world, and that the fancy-clothed colossi grew with their travels, after the manner of their kind—indeed, there is no slender reason for opining that these half-mythical islanders were the real originals of Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnagians,[31] despite his location of their fabled land a few degrees farther northward on the long-mysterious coast below the elusive “Straits of Anian”.
About the middle of September, 1540, Captain Melchior Diaz, then in command at Corazones, selected 25 men from the force remaining at that point, and set out for the coast on what must have been one of the most remarkable, as it is one of the least-known, expeditions in the history of Spanish exploration; for he traversed either the streamless coast or the hardly more hospitable interior through one of the most utterly desert regions in North America, from the lower reaches of Rio Sonora to the mouth of the Colorado. The record of this journey is meager, ambiguous, and apparently inconsecutive; it indicates that he encountered the Indian giants seen by Maldonado, but confused them with the Indians of the Lower Colorado. On the return journey Diaz lost his life through an accident, and his party reached Corazones on January 18, 1541, after encountering hostility from Indians not far from that settlement. Word was sent to Coronado, then in winter quarters on the Rio Grande, who dispatched Don Pedro de Tovar to the settlement for the purpose of punishing the hostile natives; he, in turn, sent Diego de Alcaraz with a force to seize the “chiefs and lords of a village”. This Alcaraz did, but soon liberated his prisoners for a petty exchange. “Finding themselves free, they renewed the war and attacked them, and as they were strong and had poison, they killed several Spaniards and wounded others so that they died on the way back.... They got back to the town, leaving 17 soldiers dead from the poison. They would die in agony from only a small wound, the bodies breaking out with an insupportable pestilential stink.”[32]
The Coronado expedition had still further experience with (evidently) the same Indians; for as the army approached Corazones on the return a soldier was wounded, and was successfully treated, according to the record, with the juice of the quince. “The poison, however, had left its mark upon him. The skin rotted and fell off until it left the bones and sinews bare, with a horrible smell. The wound was in the wrist, and the poison had reached as far as the shoulder when he was cured. The skin on all this fell off.”[33]
There is some question as to the identity of the Indians met by Diaz’s men, Alcaraz and his force, and the Coronado army near Corazones; but various indications point toward the Seri. In the first place, the several Indian settlements mentioned in the records define what must have been then, as it was two centuries later, the Seri frontier, beyond which lay the “despoblado” of Villa-Señor, i. e., the immense area hunted and harried by roving bands from Tiburon; so that the Seri must frequently have crossed the paths pursued by the Spanish pioneers. In the second place, the accounts themselves seem to be typical records of contact with Seri Indians, which might be repeated for each subsequent episode in their history or century in time. The description of the effect of the poison is especially suggestive of the Seri; as pointed out on a later page, the Seri arrow-venom is magical in motive, but actually consists of decomposing and ptomaine-filled organic matter, so that it is sometimes septic in fact, while the arrow-poison of the neighboring Opata, Jova, and other Piman tribes was (so far as can be ascertained) vegetal; and these accounts seem to attest septic poisoning rather than the effects of any known vegetal toxic.[34]
Such (assuming the validity of the several identifications) are the earliest records concerning the truculent tribesmen and the desolate district known centuries later as the Seri and Seriland.
About 1545 began the Dark Ages in the history of northwestern Mexico; the excursion of Guzman, and the journeys of Cabeza de Vaca and Friar Marcos and of Coronado himself, died out of the memory of the solitary adventurers and scattering settlers who slowly infused Spanish culture and a strain of Caucasian blood into the Sonoran province; even the route taken by Coronado’s imposing cavalcade was lost for centuries, to be retraced only during the present generation, largely through the determinations of Simpson, Bandelier, Winship, and Hodge.[35] It is true that Don Francisco de Ibarra penetrated the territory in 1563, and remained until rumors of gold in other districts drew him elsewhere; it is also true that Captain Diego Martinez de Hurdaide pushed into the province in 1584, and entered on a career of subjugation, waging persistent war with the Yaqui, which resulted in the acquisition of the territory of Sonora by treaty April 15, 1610;[36] yet few records of exploration or settlement were written before the advent of the Jesuit missionaries, toward the end of the seventeenth century.
Still more astounding was the eclipse of knowledge of the gulf. Despite Ulloa’s survey of the entire coast, recorded in an itinerary so detailed that every day’s sailing may readily be retraced, and despite Alarcon’s repetition of the surveys and extension of the discoveries far up Rio Colorado (where his work was verified by that of Melchior Diaz), a mythic cartography arose to shadow knowledge and delude exploration for a century and a half; for “upon the authority of a Spanish chart, found accidently by the Dutch, and of the authenticity of which there never were, or indeed could be, any proofs obtained, an opinion prevailed that California was an island, and the contrary assertion was treated even by the ablest geographers as a vulgar error”;[37] and a mythic strait formed by cartographic extension of the Gulf of California indefinitely northward haunted the maps of the seventeenth century. This error was adopted by various geographers, including Fredericus de Witt in 1662, Peter van der Aa in 1690, and even Herman Moll so late as 1708; but it was consistently rejected by Guillaume Delisle and other French geographers. The myth “was finally punctured by Padre Kino in 1701; though even he and all his erudite co-evangels were apparently unaware that his observations only verified those of Ulloa, Alarcon, and Diaz.
During the stagnant sesquicentury 1545-1695 there was little record of the Seri Indians, though that little indicates recognition of their leading characteristics and their insular habitat. Writing especially of the Yaqui before 1645, Padre Andrés Perez de Ribas declared (freely translated):
There is information of a great people of another nation called Heris; they are excessively savage, without towns, without houses, without fields. They have neither rivers nor streams, and drink from a few lagoonlets and waterholes. They subsist by the chase, but at harvest time they obtain corn by bartering salt extracted from the sea and deerskins with other nations. Those nearest to the sea also subsist on fish; and it is said that there is, in the same sea, an island on which others of the same nation live. Their language is exceedingly difficult.[38]