America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback Read Online Free PDF Page B

might be given leave to explore Florida, he was disappointed to learn that de Soto had already been named governor of Cuba and granted the right to conquer Florida.
    Before leaving Spain, de Soto briefly met with Cabeza de Vaca.
    But if de Soto had gleaned anything useful from Cabeza de Vaca, he did not put the intelligence to good use. Well schooled in the conquistador’s most brutal techniques, de Soto employed them in a scorched-earth march through Florida and other parts of the American south-east. Starting in 1539, de Soto’s disastrous campaign replayed all of Narváez’s worst mistakes, tragically for both his men and the Indians they encountered. Utterly blinded by the hope of uncovering another Aztec or Incan empire, de Soto led a forced march that was little more than a reign of terror.
    These were the things they brought: crossbows; the harquebus; horses, not seen in the Americas before Cortés; and many war dogs.
    Long used in Europe, these fearsome, armored mastiffs and wolf-hounds were trained to attack and rip humans to pieces. The Spanish employed them with horrible effect against people who had never seen horses or guns, had no steel, and fought their highly ritualized battles with obsidian knives, wearing cotton armor. “Dogs were as standard as horses in the Spanish invasion,” as Paul Schneider described their grim value. “Cortés took them to Mexico, Ponce de León took them to Puerto Rico. In Panama, Balboa used dogs not just in battle but to enforce good Christian sexual mores and dress codes: ‘The (native) king’s brother and a number of other courtiers were dressed as women, and according to the accounts of the neighbors shared the same passion. . . .
    Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.’”14
    Now de Soto put them to deadly use in Florida, setting them on Indian villagers to break any resistance. But in vain. With his army | 27 \
    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory wandering aimlessly, bested by tribes who had learned from their earlier encounters with the Spanish, de Soto’s campaign ended in misery.
    Sickened by disease, he died on the banks of the Mississippi on May 21, 1542. The remnants of his army limped back to Mexico a year later.
    z
    w i t h t h e s e a n d other mounting, costly disappointments, King Philip II, who had succeeded to the throne in 1556, put an end to Spanish attempts to settle Florida in 1561. But when word of the French settlement at Fort Caroline reached Philip in 1562, all that changed.
    Philip II decided to remove the French Protestant menace there. This was no small matter. French “privateers” had been preying on Spanish treasure ships for nearly thirty years, and during an undeclared war in the 1550s they had cut in half the Spanish crown’s take in gold and silver from the Americas.
    Philip selected his ablest naval commander, convicted smuggler Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, also a dutifully loyal Catholic, and directed him “to burn and hang the Lutheran French.” Luteranos was the Spanish term for all Protestants, despite the fact that these French Protestants, or Huguenots, were more accurately Calvinists.
    Like his father, Charles I, Philip II was sworn to stamp out the heresies of the renegade German priest Martin Luther and his growing ranks of followers.
    In October 1517, Luther had written his “Ninety-five Theses” (formally, Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences ), a stinging rebuke of church practices, and supposedly nailed it to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. The Wittenberg church possessed one of Europe’s largest collections of | 28 \
    Isabella’s Pigs
    Christian relics, which included purported vials of the Virgin Mary’s milk and straw from Jesus’ manger. By making a donation to preserve these sacred items, visitors to the Wittenberg church received an “indulgence” that effectively reduced their time in purgatory by more than five thousand