The Conquest of New Granada, Being the Life Of

i UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ¥ AT LOS ANGELES THE CONQUEST OF NEW GRANADA BEING THE LIFE OF GONZALO JIMENEZ DE QUESADA 86^3 From Hkrrkra'.s ''Historia nt las Ixdias." THE CONQUEST OF NEW GRANADA BEING THE LIFE OF GONZALO JIMENEZ DE QUESADA BY R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM *' Climas pase, mude constelaciones golfos innavegables navegando." Alonso de Ercilla: La Araucana. 4 5 inn BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1922 Printed in Great Britain L Z 72' J z-i •&. 'M- 1' A DON GUILLERMO VALENCIA EXCELSO POETA ORADOR ARMONIOSO E IRRESISTIBLE HONRA DE LAS LETRAS ESPANOLAS EN AMERICA Sketch Map of Ouesada's Expedition. — PREFACE The names both of Pizarro and Cortes are household words. The conquests of Peru and Mexico are known to everyone. The Aztec and the Inca empires are generally assumed to have been the only two states in the Indies the conquerors found, that were well organized, and had evolved, or were evolving, a civilized society. The story of their conquest reads like a fairy-tale, and Pizarro and Cortes are taken as the archetypes of the conquerors. The history of the conquest of New Granada—that is, Colombia—has passed almost unnoticed as far as English letters are con- cerned. Quesada's name is fallen into oblivion, even in Spain itself. Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada was as great as were Pizarro or Cortes, confronted equal perils and endured far greatei hardships, conquering an empire just as interesting as was Peru or Mexico, far more remote and inaccessible. Pizarro and Cortes knew more or less where they were going to; Quesada fell upon his conquest by accident, just as a chance stroke with a pick sometimes reveals a rich lode in a mine. There has been but one real conquest worthy of the name that of the New World. The human race in all its annals holds no record like it. Uncharted seas, unnavigated gulfs; new constellations, the unfathomable black pit of the Magellan clouds ; the Cross hung in the sky ; the very needle varying from the pole; islands innumerable and an unknown world rising from out the sea; all unsuspected races living in a flora never seen by Europeans, made it an achievement unique in all the history of mankind. viii PREFACE Tliis was a conquest worthy of a race of heroes, nor were thr men wlio undertook it. vanquishinpf difficulties rendered more arduous by the element of the unknown, in the main unworthy of their task. Cruel, no doubt, they were; but vet not all of them—witness the names of Alvar Nufiez, Balboa, and of him I am to write about. Cruel, perhaps; but who are we to cast a stone at them ? Steadfast, rndurinp. patient in hardships to an incredible degree, lesourceful, valiant, loyal to their King and country to a fault, they had the virtues and the vices of " conquista- tlores." Money they loved; but they loved glory more. Through ;iJI their actions ran a vein of true nobility. It was no craven spirit that impelled Cortes to bum his ships. When, in the Isle of Tumbez, Pizarro and his thirteen companions waited alone for reinforcements from Panama, preferring death to giving up their enterprise, knowing there was a populous empire to confront, even when the scanty help they could expect arrived, fear was a word beyond their comprehension. So of all of them. In the dank everglades upon the Magdalena, when racked with fever, starving, and exposed to ceaseless and unseen attacks; with poisoned arrows rained upon them from the thickets killing the soldiers and the precious horses— for after God, as say the chroniclers, they owed the victory to the horses—Quesada never faltered for an hour. The conquerors plundered, and they slew, all in God's name, holding, just as we do ourselves, that they were chosen to bring light into the darkest places of the world. In all the chronicles of this great adventure, no name stands higher than Quesada's for pmdence, valour, and, on the whole, for his good treatment of the Indians. Pizarro and Cortes had wider theatres and a better press in Spain, for they brought gold, and were received as only thtisc who bring gold with them ever are received. Oucsada only brought renown, a history of marvellous adventures, an account of perhaps the strangest meetinc^ prefa6e ix in the Colombian uplands on the wind-swept plains of Bogota, of three brave captains, fate-led and brought together by the invisible loadstone of chance, that the world ever saw. He brought the tidings of an unknown empire, rich both in interest and antiquity, having its calendar, its own theology, traditions of the creation of mankind almost as reasonable as our own, and, lastly, a system of society adequate to its needs, almost Arcadian in its simplicity. It may be that the years I have spent with the descendants of the conquerors have fitted me in some degree to writ the life of one of them, to whom scant justice has beeu done. The music of the wind in the dried grasses of the Southern Pampa, the icy nights upon the frosty sierras, dank trailv in Paraguay and in Colombia through the impenetrable forests, where lianas whip you as sharply when you pas as does a sheet torn from your hands at sea, and humming birds flit jewelled in topaz and in amethyst across th* clearings—all these, and the long days behind the cattl*^, on a tired horse with heels a-jogging ceaselessly against h' sides, the ache between the shoulders growing intolerabl. as the slow hours move on, may serve as links between me and the man of whom I write. Those weary hours were the true sauce to the hospitality of the straw rancho, camp-fire beside the stream, or of the white hacienda, buried in its grove of peach-trees, when the day was done, for hunger is as old as is the world. For all his perils, his adventures, for the great empire that he conquered with such scant resources, Quesada had the usual guerdon of the conqueror from the Court of Spain, ingratitude and base neglect of his past services. That it was usual, witness the chains Columbus ever carried with him—for remembrance; the lonely deathplace of Cortes in Castillejos de la Cuesta and the adobe building near the sulphur springs hard by Tocaima where Quesada, himself a leper, by his last testament left a jar of water always to be kept for travellers on the road. Yet, if the conquistadores X PREFACE were men of blood and iron, careless of life and suffering, and mostly dying cither by violence or broken-hearted by the ingratitude of those they served, the Indians owed them little, either in valour or in the fortitude with which they met their fate. Their chieftains, treated as gods, borne on the shoulders of their subjects, refined, intelligent, and far more reasonable in controversy than were their conquerors—boldly met the onslaught of a race of men who fell upon them, as it were, from the skies—a race of beings sheathed in steel, riding on animals that seemed a part of them, who breathed out fire, as the Indians thought, taking the harquebus as in some way connected with the horse. With their poor arms and quilted cotton doublets, their poisoned arrows and their fire-hardened spears, they faced those " children of the sun," dying in heaps, just as Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans died for their fatherland. No chronicler has preserved the fame of their heroic deeds; yet still the conquerors, here and there, when they were soldiers who had taken up the pen after the sword had grown too heavy for their hands, now and then have done them scanty justice, calling them " valiant Indians," just as a man may pat his bull-dog on the head when it has battled valiantly. Wrapping themselves in the stoicism of their race, no men have died more bravely than did their chieftains and their kings. Guatimozin upon the bed of coals, in Mexico, when he reproached his followers' groans, saying, " Am I upon a bed of roses ?" the Inca Atalhualpa, strangled and betrayed, and the last King of Bogota, tortured inhumanly, the blot upon Quesada's name that he paid for so bitterly in after-years, in money and in pangs of conscience, died like the martyrs that they were, showing themselves the conquerors* equals, both in high feeling and in contempt of death. A wondrous adventure it was most certainly, calling forth all that was best and worst, both in the victors and the vanquislied. No man that is a man can read the PREFACE xi history of the Spanish conquest of the New World unmoved. Of all the stirring episodes of the strange epic, there is none stranger than Quesada's life. He and the conquest are so bound up together, that to write either of them is to write the other. He was the conquest, and the conquest both made and marred him; but still left his name one of the first in all its chronicles. As a conquistador he is the equal of Pizarro and Cortes, and far less bloodthirsty than was either of them. His one lapse was remembered and is recorded to his shame, for he brought little treasure with him on his return to Spain. Theirs were washed out in gold. If there is justice anywhere on earth, in heaven, or in the waters underneath the earth (those of oblivion), surely the errors of his youth must be wiped out by the achievements and the sufferings of his eighty years of conquest and of strife.

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