The Conquest of the River Plate (1535-1555). active 16th century Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
he was the son of a Spanish prince, this monarch was born at Ghent, and had been educated by Flemings. His ministers, his counsellors, the bankers who supplied him with the funds for his wars, were Flemings. Great was the favour enjoyed in Spain and Portugal by those very wealthy bankers and merchants, Fugger and Welzer of Augsburg, and Erasmus Schetzen of Antwerp. The first two had opened branches of their business at Seville, the centre at that time of trade with America, and the third had done the same at Lisbon, the metropolis of the Portuguese colonies in the Indies. The house of Erasmus Schetzen, as Hans Stade tells us, had sugar factories in the recently colonised captaincy of San Vicente, since converted into the province of San Pablo. One of his agents, Peter Rosel, had established himself there, and had acquired, in the name of Erasmus, the great factory established by the grantee, Captain-Major Martin Affonso de Souza, together with other partners.[3] Charles V had made a gift of the whole province of Caracas to the bankers Welzer, and the affairs of the Fuggers were so vast that the family name was adopted into the Castilian vernacular as fucar, explained by the dictionary of the language to signify a person of great wealth.
[3] Fray Gaspar da Madre de Deos, Memorias para a historia da Capitania de S. Vicente, 1797.
Charles V had inaugurated his reign by showing his partiality for the Flemings, by whom he was surrounded, bestowing on the Baron de la Bresa, his counsellor and majordomo mayor, the first contract for the exclusive privilege of introducing negro slaves into the West Indies, against the advice of his Spanish counsellors, who rejected the project of the famous protector of the Indians, Bartholomé de las Casas.[4] These favours shown to the Flemings gave rise to that picturesque phrase of Pedro Martyr de Anghiera, that the Flemings had gone with Charles V to Spain to destroy the vine after having gathered the vintage.[5]
[4] Antonio de Herrera, Historia General de los Hechos de los Castellanos, etc., Década 2, Libro 2, cap. 20; Quintana, Vida de las Casas.
[5] P. Martyr, Opus Epistolarum, carta 703.
This explains how the Spanish Government, exclusive and jealous of all foreign interference in its affairs in the Indies, allowed Germans and Flemings, with their vessels, their merchandise, and their men, to take part in such considerable numbers in the expedition of Don Pedro de Mendoza. The Flemings were at that time as much Charles’s subjects as the Spaniards, and the owners of the ships in which Schmidt and his countrymen sailed, were bankers—allies and favourites of the young Emperor.
It appears that Schmidt was not enlisted among the soldiers of Mendoza, but came as an employé of the house of Welzer and Niedhart, who owned the vessel which took him. Its factor was the Fleming Heinrich Paine, and it was manned by eighty Germans. The cargo was destined to exchange for the silver which Sebastian Cabot, after his recent voyage of discovery, had made it believed in Spain, abounded among the Indians he had encountered on the Paraguai. The Rio de Solis then took the name of Rio de la Plata, and it was this magic word that raised the desires of so many in Spain to take part in the expedition of Don Pedro de Mendoza, that it was necessary to close the lists of applicants and hasten the departure of the armada, in order to calm the fever of emigration which prevailed on this occasion among persons desirous of making their fortunes rapidly. This expedition, as the historian Fernandez de Oviedo, who saw it sail from Seville, expressed it, “was a company fit to make a goodly show in Cæsar’s army and in any part of the world.”
Don Pedro de Mendoza began by establishing himself in the port of Los Patos, at the southern extremity of the island of Santa Catalina, which was included in his jurisdiction, as may be seen on the accompanying map. He then passed to the Rio de la Plata, and, on the 11th June 1535, laid the foundations of the city of Santa Maria de Buenos Aires. Soon afterwards he nominated as his second in command his intimate friend, Juan de Ayolas, and sent him with a detachment to explore the Rio Paraná, and open a road by means of this river to the Pacific Ocean, which was the advance or front limit of his province.
The brigantines, or little feluccas in which the explorer Ayolas set forth, were under the orders of the Biscayan, Domingo Martinez de Irala, and in his company went Schmidt, but it is unknown in what character. In his book he acquaints us with the events that happened to that expedition, and all those in which he took part, almost always in the company of his captain, Irala, with whose fortunes he linked his own from the beginning. Our only authority for this statement is the adventurer himself who has given his name to the book. I know of no document mentioning Schmidt, nor is he noticed by the chronicler Francisco Lopez de Gomara, by his successor, Antonio de Herrera, in his history of the Indies, or by Ruy Diaz de Guzman, himself born on the Paraguai, a grandson of Domingo Martinez de Irala, or, finally, by Alvar Nuñez in his Commentaries.
Schmidt relates that he was present at the foundation of Buenos Aires and its desertion six years afterwards, by order of Irala, who possessed himself of the command after the deaths of Don Pedro de Mendoza and his lieutenant Ayolas. Schmidt was also present at the events which took place during the governorship of the second Adelantado, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, from 1541 to 1544. He assisted at his violent overthrow and deportation under the direction of Irala, made all the journeys of exploration which, starting from Asuncion, ascended the Rio Paraguai to Matto Grosso, and explored all the country of the Cheriguanos, now known by the name of Moxos and Chiquitos, to the confines of Peru. He remained with Irala till the arrival on the Atlantic coast of the expedition of the Adelantado Sanabria, with whom Hans Stade sailed to America.
At the end of twenty years of travels and strange adventures, of combats with Indians, of anarchy, poverty, and disorder among the conquerors of Paraguai, when Domingo de Irala, by force of audacity and machiavelism, had definitely possessed himself of the government of this unfortunate colony, obtaining, a short while afterwards, the royal title of Governor, his faithful and inseparable companion Schmidt received a letter from the banker Niedhart, transmitted to him from Seville by the agent there of the wealthy Fugger, in which he begged him to return to Antwerp. Schmidt obtained leave of absence from his chief, set out on his journey, with six deserters and twenty of his Indian slaves, by the rivers Paraguai and Paraná to the river Iguazú, and thence crossed the province of Guaira by the route opened by Alvar Nuñez, arriving at the Portuguese colony of San Vicente. Here he met with the agent of Erasmus Schetzen, who gave him a passage to Lisbon in a vessel belonging to his principal, which was laden with a cargo of sugar and brazil wood. Schmidt landed at Antwerp on the 25th January 1554, as I have already said.
Hans Stade was a prisoner of the Tapiis, or Tupis, in the immediate vicinity of San Vicente, when Schmidt passed that way on his homeward journey, and only succeeded in obtaining his liberty one year later, embarking at Rio de Janeiro on one of the French ships which trafficked with the Indians occupying that magnificent bay. His adventures during his captivity were published at Marburg in 1557. It is very strange, therefore, that Schmidt should not make the slightest mention of his countryman, though he also was acquainted with Peter Rosel, agent of Erasmus Schetzen, in the Portuguese colony. It would seem most natural that they should have spoken on the misfortunes that had befallen Stade, and on the various fruitless efforts made to rescue him from captivity, and as to the means to be employed in order to restore him to his country. Not a word of all this do we find in Schmidt’s narrative.
The voyage of Ulrich Schmidt to the Rio de la Plata was published, as we have seen, at Frankfort-on-Maine in 1567, in the collection of Sebastian Franck, wherein also appeared for the second time that of Stade, side by side with his countryman Schmidt’s. This proves the interest taken in these narratives of travel in those days of theological controversies and religious wars, when the French Protestants were trying to set foot in Brazil, while Villegaignon, under the protection of Coligny, was taking possession of the port of Rio de Janeiro, one year after the abdication of Charles V and the accession to the throne of the sombre Philip II, whose tyranny became