Horizons and Possibilities
On April 21 , 1519 , a small Spanish army led by Herna ́n Corte ́s( 1485 – 1547 )
landed in Ulua, the gate to the Aztec Empire. Thirty bloody months later,
Corte ́s was the ruler of a vast Mesoamerican empire—Nueva Espan ̃a. In
October 1522 , he was officially appointed its governor and began building the
city of Mexico, in Tenochtitlan, the site of the ruined Aztec capital, and started
importing people and goods from Spain. Corte ́s was followed by Francisco
Pizarro ( 1471 – 1541 ), who sailed southward from Panama in 1524 toward the
Incan Empire in the southern part of the continent. By around 1550 , Spanish
America—Peru and Mexico—was a vast territory stretching from present-day
Mexico in the north to Argentina and southern Chile in the south (though
Spain, of course, did not control every single square mile within these terri-
tories, which bordered and included major natural barriers—the Amazon
jungle, the Andean mountains, vast deserts, and tropical forests). In 1572 , the
last independent Native American ruler, Tu ́pac Amaru, was beheaded in
Cuzco. Spain remained the only power on the continent.^9
This history had started with the sailing of Christopher Columbus, under the
Spanish flag, toward the west in 1492 , ushering in an active century of sail,
exploration, conquest, and colonization. Not only military efforts were involved
in this project. Intellectual endeavors accompanied it from the very beginning.
The existence of the American continent, its wonders, and, more important, its
people needed to be explained and thus “possessed” or “assimilated.”^10 Religion,
clergy, and scripture played a pivotal role in the creation of this vast empire.^11
The advent of empire was accompanied, sometimes preceded, by intense
searches for all sorts of things. One of the more interesting places that travelers
sought in the Americas was Ophir. In 1 Kings, we read that King Solomon’s
messengers “went to Ophir and brought back four hundred and twenty talents
of gold” ( 1 Kings 9 : 28 ). Ophir had already been sought elsewhere as well.
(Vasco da Gama had suggested in the late fifteenth century that Ophir was East
Africa.) In the context of the Americas, interest began with Columbus, and
later explorers dedicated much time to finding this legendary biblical loca-
tion,^12 along with El Dorado.^13 Other quests included those for the fountain of
eternal youth for which Juan Ponce de Leo ́n( 1460 – 1521 ) went to Florida and
the Amazon; and for the legendary women in honor of whom Francisco de
Orellana ( 1500 – 1549 ) insisted on naming the Amazon.^14
Searches for the ten tribes in the Americas certainly belong on what
historian Anthony Pagden calls the “horizon of possibilities,” for which Amer-
ica emerged as a “greenhouse.”^15 But whereas the fountain of eternal youth