of Amichel (a name of unknown origin).
Exploration of Amichel, however, would
have to wait. Angered by Alvarez de Pineda’s
slaving raids upon their people from his base
on Mexico’s Rio Pánuco, the Huastec people
of northeastern Mexico killed the Spaniard
and his men in 1520.
Ponce de León also met a violent end. In
1521 he equipped a large expedition for settle-
ment and sailed for Florida. Upon landing,
however, he encountered the same tribe with
which he had clashed earlier, the Calusa. A
battle ensued and Ponce was wounded in the
thigh by an arrow. He was taken to Cuba,
where the infected wound killed him. His
death left the European exploration and set-
tlement of Florida to later adventurers.
MAGELLAN’S LEGACY
The first circumnavigation of the earth was
done by survivors of Ferdinand Magellan’s
expedition in 1519–22. By successfully navi-
gating through the Strait of Magellan into the
Pacific Ocean, they inspired efforts to find a
sea route to the western shores of Central
America (for full coverage of Magellan, see the
Exploring the Pacificvolume). King Ferdinand
of Spain assigned the task to Juan Díaz de
Solís, who had unsuccessfully searched for
such a strait with Juan de la Cosa more than a
decade earlier. Solís’s well-provisioned 1516
expedition ended prematurely on an island off
the coast of modern-day Uruguay. While
exploring the estuary of the Río de la Plata
(also known as the River Plate), Solís was
killed and, according to some reports, eaten
by cannibals.
Spanish ships returned to the Río de la
Plata in 1526, under the command of Sebast-
ian Cabot, who had earlier explored the coast-
line of North America (1497–98) in the
English-sponsored voyages of his father, John
Cabot. Like Solís, Sebastian Cabot was on his
way to the Pacific Ocean, with orders to reach
Asia by retracing Magellan’s route. The loss of
one of his ships and distracting tales of for-
tunes in silver Cabot heard on his southward
passage along the coast of South America con-
vinced him to abandon his goal of reaching
the Pacific and explore the Río de la Plata. He
discovered no great source of silver and col-
lected mostly inaccurate geographical knowl-
edge of the region, but remained there for two
years, establishing fragile settlements and
venturing up the Paraná River in search of an
elusive fortune. Cabot’s failure to find a route
to the Pacific ruined his reputation and ended
his career as an explorer. He spent the rest of
his life drawing maps in England.A REGION IN RUINS
Only 25 years after Columbus’s first arrival in
the Americas, the Caribbean was a depleted
region whose Native societies faced extinction
and whose agriculture lay ruined. Diseases,
warfare, and slavery had decimated the Native
population, upon whose forced labor the
Spanish plantation system depended. Thou-
sands, possibly millions, of Taino, Arawak,
Carib, and other Native peoples died working
in Spanish mines and from maladies that were
common in Europe, but from which the peo-
ple of the New World had no natural immunity.
Like other colonial rulers, Spain’s governor
of Cuba, Diego Velásquez, faced a shrinking
Native slave workforce as new fortune hunters
arrived from Spain. As observed by Bernal
Díaz del Castillo, future author of the True His-
tory of the Conquest of New Spain,Velásquez’s
solution was to promise the new arrivals
Indian workers “as soon as there were any to
spare” and do nothing.
Díaz del Castillo was one of 110 Spaniards
who tired of Velásquez’s promises and decidedA New W orld B 49