Acapulco and the Misleading Horizons

Europeans were convinced that only at the faroff tip of South America was there a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, at the Straits of Magellan, but the remote possibility of a more accessible pasage to the north had not yet been discarded. A legend had spread regarding the Straits of Anian, located along the northern reaches of the continent, and with it wonderful tales of fabled cities. In the same year of 1537 four men, presumably vanished after their exploration of the Florida coast a decade before, appeared in Mexico -and they seemed like ghosts! Their leader, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, encouraged the Viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, with his fascinating tales, and whipped him into a state of incontainable enthusiasm. Don Antonio was not pleased at Cortes” standing, awarded by disposition of the King of Spain, as the superintendant of the Southern Sea and he decided to achieve a glory greater than the conquistador could imagine.

Fray Marcos de Niza, known not only as a doctor of theology but of cosmography and the arts of the sea, a reputation gained as a result of his exploration of New Mexico where he had used, as a guide and interpreter, the famous Estebanico (one of Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s comrades who had been called “the Arab nigger from Azamor”), invented the legend of the seven goleen cities of Cibola. The Viceroy listened with mounting excitement, extolling Cibola in the same vein as he had the myths of Quivira and Tiguex.

In 1539, Antonio de Mendoza ordered Marcos de Niza to march his army to the orders of the Governor of New Galicia, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, and to his aid sent the sailing vessels San Pedro and Santa Catalina, under Hernando de Alarcón and the pilot Domingo del Castillo. They set sail from Acapuco in 1540. Domingo del Castillo was responsable for the only reward of any consequence to be obtained from these two expeditions. He manager the first geographical map of the Mexican Pacific coast, between Tehuantepec and the mouth of the Colorado River at the top of the Gulf of California, a river which Alarc6n designated as the “Good Guide” and which he penetrated for a distance of “some 200 leagues.”

Undaunted by their failure (as fate would have it the “Seven Cities of Cibola” and the “Kingdom of Quivira” turned out to consist of a handful of huts inhabited by “people of desperate poverty,” as reported by Vazquez de Coronado) Don Antonio de Mendoza ordered the continued inspection of the coast, in a northerly direction, under the Portuguese seaman Juan Rodnguez Cabrillo: his orders were to proceed until he found the secret pass. In 1542, under full sail, Cabrillo left the port known as “Christmas” (Barra de Navidad) in Jalisco. As he headed north, instead of turning into the Sea of Cortes (Gulf of California) he followed the peninsula’s western shoreline until he was well along the Upper California coast, which he named Mendocino in honor of the Viceroy. But he learned nothing of the Straits of Anian, the fabled Northwest Passage that had been so earnestly sought by English navigators.