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Matagorda Bay resurrection of Sieur de La
Salle’s frigate, La Belle.
Perhaps most important of all its special
features, the text continually incorporates
first-person, contemporaneous accounts of
significant events. The arrival of Hernán
Cortés’s army at the island city Tenochtitlán,
later site of Mexico City, is seen through the
eyes of both Aztec witnesses and a Spanish
adventurer. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
recounts his great story of survival, walking
from the coastal islands of Texas across the
future border states to western Mexico, on a
journey which began amid one of the most
violent of European expeditions and ended
with Cabeza de Vaca’s transformation into a
stubborn advocate for Native American rights.
Pedro de Casteñeda, who rode with Francisco
Coronado, recounts what happened when
Europeans led by Indian guides first halted at
the rim of the Grand Canyon. The book also
cites the revealing journals of Columbus, the
first explorer to actually write about the first
meeting of Europeans and Americans.
The Europeans who figure in this narrative
are predominantly Spaniards. Explorers from
other states and nations—notably Genoa,
Portugal, Florence, Tyrol, France, England,
and eventually the newly constituted United
States—make appearances by the book’s end-
point in 1800. Yet some students may be sur-
prised to learn that by the time English
settlements were first attempted in Virginia,
Spain controlled and administrated imperial
colonies that encompassed all the Caribbean,
stretched from Peru to the future border
between Mexico and the United States, and
were envisaged by explorers sailing up the
coast of California. When the struggling
Pilgrims of Plymouth colony and the Wampa-
noag tribe were celebrating the first Thanks-
giving in the chilly New England autumn of
1621, an entire century had passed since
Cortés had begun building Mexico City amid
the rubble he had made of Tenochtitlán, by
his own description one of the most beautiful
capitals in the world. The premise of so many
history books that present the story of Amer-
ica as beginning on the Virginia coast or at
Plymouth Rock is replaced in this book by the
history of the first explorations to result in an
ongoing relationship between the Americas
and allof the rest of the world.
All peoples are products of the biases of
their own eras and cultures, but this book
attempts to tell its stories as straightforwardly
as possible. To relate the opening of the Amer-
icas with as little bias as possible requires a
stylistic shift away from both the idealized
history books of 50, 100, or 150 years ago and
the harshly critical texts of more recent “revi-
sionists.” Plain speech can be sufficiently
powerful and accurate when dealing with
figures whose actions, for better or worse,
today seem larger than life. Historians of
bygone eras described adventurers whose
actions now appear grotesque as “valiant” or
“intrepid.” Today, writers are free to state
things in words that, with the added clarity of
hindsight, shine a truer light on the original
events and participants. Historian Michael
Golay’s succinct 2003 description of Her-
nando de Soto as “bold, tough, and homi-
cidal” in North American Exploration,for
example, might not have cleared an editor’s
desk in earlier times, but Golay’s short phrase
reflects more of the harsh complexity of the de
Soto story than an entire chapter of anti-
quated hyperbole.
One of the ironies of the age of discovery is
the scarcity of explorers who profited from
their initiative. For all but a handful, their
achievements could not staveoff miserable
ends: neglect, scorn, poverty, murder, impris-
onment, political execution, drowning, or
death from sickness or war. A few managed toxvi B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–