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Cortés’s fight for control also faced com-
petition from his ambitious countrymen. Just
as Cortés had once declared himself inde-
pendent of Velásquez, Cristóbal de Olid dis-
carded Cortés’s authority and proclaimed
himself governor of Honduras. Cortés dis-
patched a seaborne force to arrest his muti-
nous subordinate. When news reached Cortés
that the fleet had been wrecked in a storm, in
1524 he assembled an army and marched
hundreds of miles overland through Yucatán,
guided by little more than a compass and a
makeshift map of Mayan traders’ trails.
Cortes’s later descriptions of the dense jun-
gles, swamps, and torrential rains his men
encountered presented such a forbidding
portrait of the region that decades passed
before other Spaniards dared to venture along
the same route. At a treacherous mountain
pass he dubbed the Sierra de los Pedernales
(Mountain of the Flints), 68 of the group’s
horses tumbled to their deaths, while the
remainder were maimed by the trail’s jagged
stones.When his force arrived in Honduras,
reduced by illness, starvation, and combat,
Cortés found that Olid had been executed
months earlier by survivors of the ship-
wrecked expedition. Even worse news was
that Cortés and his men were presumed to
haveperished in the jungles and that their
property in Mexico City had been sold.
The increasingly ill Cortés returned north
to regain his leadership, but political enemies
in Spain and Mexico had been busy in his
absence. He was accused of falsely reporting
the amount of treasurehe had seized and
plotting to establish himself as the independ-
ent ruler of Mexico. Cortés returned to Spain
inDecember 1527 and succeeded in clearing
himself of charges before Charles V. Cortés
was named marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca
and granted a huge estate within the land he
had seized. He also obtained royal permission
to organize seaborne expeditions in the
Pacific Ocean, then called the Mar del Sur (Sea
of the South) by the Spanish.CORTÉS AND CALIFORNIA
Cortés’s history of disregarding authority
enabled his Spanish enemies to convince the
Crown to limit his power when he returned to
Mexico in 1530. A royal edict forbade him to
come within 25 miles of Mexico City, as the
Spanish settlement built on the ruins of
Tenochtitlán was now called. Thus prevented
from participating in colonial government,
Cortés built an estate and researched plans for
exploration from Mexico’s west coast. For the
first time, Cortés became a patron of discov-
ery, content to let others explore the unknown
on his behalf.
“They tell me that Ciguatan is an island
inhabited by women,” Cortés wrote to Charles
V. “They also tell me it is very rich in pearls and
gold, respecting which I shall labor to obtain
the truth, and give your majesty a full account
of it.”
The “island” of Ciguatan was actually the
seaside town of Cihuatlan, “the place of
women” in the Nahuatl language. In Cortés’s
time, such confused expectations of discover-
ing an island inhabited only by women caused
the conquistadores to adopt a longer-lasting
place name—California. The name is attrib-
uted to a popular 1510 Spanish romantic
novel by García Ordónez de Montalvo, Las Ser-
gas de Esplandian(The exploits of Esplan-
dian). Montalvo’s hero visits an island called
California, inhabited entirely by Amazons and
mythological creatures such as griffins.
Expeditions sponsored by Cortés set sail
from Tehuantepec and Acapulco, ports along
the southwest coast of Mexico, with three
goals: finding “California”; a route to the Spice
Islands (the East Indies); or the mythical Strait
of Anian (thought by early explorers to link the
northernPacific to the Arctic Ocean and so(^62) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
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