Juan de Salazar y Espinosa

Statue in honor of Juan de Salazar y Espinosa in Asunción

Juan de Salazar y Espinosa , also Salazar de Espinosa (* 1508 in Espinosa de los Monteros , † 1560 in Asunción ), was a Spanish conquistador and explorer in the area of ​​the Río de la Plata .

Life

The river system of the Río de la Plata

Establishment of the La Plata colony

Juan de Salazar de Espinosa left Spain at the age of 27 on the South America expedition , commanded by the Adelantado Don Pedro de Mendoza y Luján , one of the largest armadas to be equipped to the New World. On August 24, 1535, the flotilla of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, consisting of two galleons , two caravels , a nao and several smaller ships, set sail. Salazar de Espinosa himself commanded the Patache Anunciada on the crossing . In mid-January 1536, the conquerors reached the mouth of the Río de la Plata and built the Fort Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre (near today's Argentine capital Buenos Aires ). Mendoza sent a group of conquistadors led by Juan de Ayolas inland to explore the course of the Silver River, hoping to find a route between the La Plata area and the Spanish possessions in the province of New Toledo ( Peru and Bolivia) ) to find. When the expedition did not return and the crew of Buen Ayre was in distress due to Indian attacks and lack of resources, Mendoza sent a second group, led by Juan de Salazar de Espinosa, to search for Ayolas. In their search, the Salazar group followed in the footsteps of Ayola up the Paraná and Paraguay towards the north. On August 15, 1537, Juan de Salazar de Espinosa founded the fort and the settlement Nuestra Señora Santa María de la Asunción , from which the city of Asunción would emerge, the future capital, opposite the point where the Río Pilcomayo flows into the main stream of the Río Paraguay Paraguay . The following year, the survivors of the previous expedition arrived there, led by Domingo Martínez de Irala , after Juan de Ayolas had reportedly been killed by Indians in the Gran Chaco area .

Since Pedro de Mendoza had left South America in April 1537 and died on the crossing to Spain, Salazar de Espinosa and Martínez de Irala took over the leadership of the La Plata colony. In 1538 Juan de Salazar was elected mayor ( Alcalde ) of the new settlement Asunción, while Irala apparently received the title of governor , at least exercising royal authority in the absence of an officially appointed official. In 1541 Martínez de Irala ordered the resettlement of the leaderless residents, weakened by Indian attacks, from Buenos Aires to Asunción, which became the center of the new colony in the Rio de la Plata area. On September 16, 1541, Asunción was granted city rights by Charles V.

Return to Spain

The successor of Mendoza, the Adelantado Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca , who set out from Cádiz in 1540 and was appointed by the king , landed with 400 men on Isla Santa Catalina off today's Brazilian coast and embarked on a strenuous jungle march to Asunción, which he did in March Reached 1542 and the government took over. The politically awkward, in the eyes of the settlers too "tyrannical" and Indians-friendly acting Adelantado was overthrown by his opponents (including Irala) after numerous protests and various conspiracies in 1544 and sentenced to return to Spain after ten months in prison, while Irala was sentenced by the colonists to Governor was elected and took over leadership of the La Plata area. Juan de Salazar de Espinosa, who had been fundamentally loyal to Cabeza de Vaca and thus got into a political conflict with Irala, was supposed to accompany the deposed Adelantado and accuse him of abuse of power in Spain, but also to justify himself for his attitude. They embarked in Asunción in March 1545 on board the ship El Comunero in Paraguay. In fact, Núñez was convicted in Spain, but the king did not recognize the rule of Irala and in 1547 appointed a new Adelantado . Salazar, who himself had been acquitted of accusations, was also appointed royal "Treasurer of the Silver River" (Tesorero del Río de la Plata) and was supposed to appoint the newly appointed governor, the extreme petty nobleman Juan de Sanabria, along with 600 settlers and soldiers (among whom were royal Instruction should also find 100 marriageable women and young families in order to “populate” the colony) to Asunción. However, Juan de Sanabria died in Seville in 1549 while preparing for his crossing , before his departure. After difficult negotiations with the crown, the heirs and the Indian royal authority agreed that Sanabria's underage son, Diego , would inherit the Adelantado title and that Sanabria's widow, Mencía Calderón , Diego's stepmother, would lead the expedition together with Juan de Salazar de Espinosa . The costs and risks of the company were borne exclusively by the outfitters, i.e. the heirs of the late Adelantado and his co-entrepreneurs. On the part of the Crown, great importance was attached to the transport of the settlers, with which above all “ blood-pure ” (i.e. not descending from Jews or Moors ) Castilian families with children, young married couples and nobility of nobility capable of marrying were to be brought to the colony the small number of settlers and the lack of women feared to counteract the risk of mixing Spaniards and Indians (mestizaje) .

Sanabria expedition

Departure, personnel, ships

The trip was to take place in two groups of three ships each, of which Salazar de Espinosa, accompanied by Mencía Calderón, was to lead the first three-ship expedition, which started in 1550. The 18-year-old Adelantado Diego de Sanabria was to follow ten months later with the remaining three ships and take over the leadership of the La Plata colony on his arrival. However, both partial expeditions disappeared for a long time without a trace or were lost out of sight: Diego, who set out late in 1552, never arrived in the La Plata region and was missing with his ships after wandering the Caribbean ; his stepmother and Juan de Salazar de Espinosa only reached Asunción in October 1555 and early 1556 in two separate groups with a total of a little more than 50 people, including 21 women.

The fleet, consisting of three ships, set out from Seville on April 9, 1550 and set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda the next day after taking up the cargo on the coast. The main ship commanded by Salazar himself, the San Miguel , was probably a four-masted carrack or Nao, while the two smaller ships of Salazar are alternately referred to as brigantines and caravels. There were around 300 people on board, including around 80 women, including the 33-year-old widow Mencía Calderón de Sanabria with her three daughters and other married and unmarried women from Extremadura, Spain . The mostly very young, "marriageable" girls traveling alone and families with children were embarked on the San Miguel (around 50 female passengers), while married couples and women traveling with their fathers were accommodated on the Asunción . On the third ship, the San Juan , mainly armed men and cattle were transported.

Odd journey in the South Atlantic

The ships reached La Palma as scheduled on April 20th , where they waited for more favorable winds to continue. During the two-month stay on the Canary Island there were disputes and an attempted mutiny by dissatisfied fellow travelers, which could be ended lightly. Salazar planned to deviate from the usual Spanish Atlantic route, which led from the Canary Islands westwards towards the Caribbean , to follow the southern Portuguese sea route to Brazil, which led along the African coast into the Gulf of Guinea and from the Portuguese archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe from the South Atlantic crossed. Salazar's chief helmsman and navigator Juan Sanches had no experience with this route, nor did he have the nautical charts and knowledge of the use of navigational devices such as the astrolabe , which Portuguese navigators were familiar with.

Nonetheless, the flotilla commander Salazar de Espinosa, who was not very competent as a military in matters of navigation, was on the travel plan, which the historiography sometimes blames him for. After setting off on June 21, the fleet soon got into a very severe storm behind Cabo Verde , in which the two smaller ships were lost and the San Miguel was driven to the coast of Guinea . The tour group spent a month on the West African coast repairing the ship and retrieving supplies.

Shortly after the departure, the San Miguel was seized and robbed by French corsairs on July 25, 1550 . After negotiations with Espinosa, the corsair captain, who called himself Escource and worked for a piracy company from La Rochelle , left the settlers their weapons and promised to leave the women untouched. Mencía Calderón and Juan de Salazar de Espinosa drew up a report of this under witnesses after the attack, because the suspicion that the largely unmarried girls on the San Miguel had been desecrated by the pirates would have ruined their chances of getting married in the colony.

Subsequently, the onward journey turned out to be very difficult because the supplies had to be replaced again, there was a notorious lack of water and uncertainty about the position and the course to be taken. The navigation instruments had been lost or stolen and the island of São Tomé was not shown on the Sanches nautical chart , as Salazar de Espinosa complained in a later letter. For more than a month the ship crossed the Gulf of Guinea in search of the right starting point for the crossing of the Atlantic, and finally came across the Portuguese island of Ano Bom on September 8, 1550, rather by chance . Food and water were stashed there, and after waiting fifty days for the right wind conditions, Salazar and his helmsman set off for a voyage across the ocean to South America. After a stopover on the island of Saint Helena , which was also occupied by Portuguese , the San Miguel reached the island of Santa Catalina off today's coast of Brazil in mid-December , which was then claimed by the Spanish and agreed as the meeting point for the ships. There the Asunción was found again, which had sailed across the ocean under Captain Cristóbal de Saavedra, a confidante of Juan Salazar, who had already reached the meeting point in November 1550 after a stopover in São Tomé. However, the Asunción was caught in several bad storms during the crossing (which the German Hans Staden describes, who took part in this voyage), had lost human life and cargo and was badly damaged. The third ship of the expedition, the transporter San Juan under the command of Juan de Ovando from Cáceres , did not reach Santa Catalina and was lost.

Stay in Brazil

The progress of the expedition developed into a multi-year odyssey after the main ship San Miguel was pressed against a rock face on the island and shattered, and the heavily overloaded Asunción , with which all expedition participants now had to be brought to the mainland, sank after being crossed twice. Among the eleven dead was the owner of the ship, Francisco Becerra, who had made the crossing from Spain with his family on the San Miguel and now went down with his own ship. According to Salazar's report, a total of 80 men and "forty women, girls and children" were stranded in a port bay called Mbiazá south of Catherine Island , where they built a settlement named in memory of Becerra San Francisco . During the years of forced residency on the Brazilian coast, the shipwrecked lived off fishing, small reptiles and other small animals hunted. Initially, they waited for the ships of the future Adelantado Diego de Sanabria to arrive, but he did not arrive. The attempt to get help from there through embassies to Asunción failed several times because Irala detained the envoys and otherwise did nothing. The group split into different factions, and Juan de Salazar de Espinosa was deposed as captain by Mencía Calderón for unexplained reasons and replaced by her son-in-law Hernando Trejo, a nobleman who fell in love with her older daughter on the trip and married her in Mbiazá would have. In this way Trejo inherited the title of Alguacil mayor of Paraguay.

Finally, in 1553, Salazar de Espinosa decided to build a new ship with which he wanted to get to the island of São Vicente with twelve armed men, including Hans Staden, the first Portuguese colony in Brazil founded in 1532, where around 600 settlers lived at the time. The adventurous escape ended in June 1553 with another shipwreck in a winter storm. The men saved themselves on rafts made from ship planks to the settlement of Itanhaém on the Brazilian coast, from where they got to Santos , at that time a small Portuguese base on São Vicente. Tomé de Sousa (1503–1579), the new Portuguese governor of Brazil, who was well informed about the disastrous outcome of the Spanish Sanabria expedition, arrived on the island in the spring of the same year . He offered to send ships to pick up the rest of the castaways from Mbiazá. However, Salazar took the services of the Flemish sugar cane plantation owner Pero Rose, who provided him with a small ship to transport the women and soldiers who were left behind. In São Vicente Salazar also met Uz Schmidel again, a German participant in Pedro de Mendoza’s expedition, who was stopping off on the island with his slave on his way home from Asunción because he had inherited ten thousand ducats in Germany. On the island, Mencía Calderón learned of the failure and the presumed death of her stepson. There were diplomatic entanglements with the Portuguese authorities, which prohibited the Spaniards from continuing their journey. Tomé de Sousa was interested in keeping women in particular as colonists on São Vicente. He paid each of them a hundred ducats from the king of Portugal's box and strictly forbade them to leave Santos. Hans Staden was also poached and assigned as arquebusier to the crew of the Portuguese border fort Bertioga .

Return to Asunción

The Castilian crown sent the Genoese Bartolomeo Giustiniano (Spanish: Bartolomé Justiniano) to São Vicente, a conquistador who came to the La Plata colony with Pedro de Mendoza and Juan de Salazar and returned to Spain in 1545 with Salazar and Cabeza de Vaca was. He brought a letter of safe conduct for the stuck Spaniards with him and then traveled on to Paraguay, where he brought Irala the appointment as royal governor. This made it clear that Charles V now intended to accept the political conditions in Asunción and, after the disappearance of Diego de Sanabria, no longer sought a change of power there. The group around Salazar and Mencía de Calderón was left on their own without a clear perspective, especially since the Portuguese rulers did not recognize the Spanish travel permit and continued to forbid the castaways from leaving.

Finally, in February 1555, Salazar de Espinosa separated from the group of the other survivors in Santos and fought with about 20 companions, including the widow Francisco Becerras and her daughters as well as seven Portuguese deserters, on an eight-month walk over more than 1400 km through the jungle to Paraguay through. He reached Asunción in October 1555, a month after Bartolomé Justiniano and several months before Mencía Calderón and the rest of the expedition, who had chosen a different route under Hernando Trejo and arrived in the city in the spring of 1556. The Irala, now officially appointed by the king, continued to rule there.

Retirement

After his death in 1556 and the appointment of Gonzalo de Mendozas as his successor, who was a follower of Espinosa, he spent a quiet retirement and died five years later at the age of 52 in the city of Asunción, which he himself founded.

filming

The fate of Sanabria expedition led by Juan de Salazar, of Hugo Silva is displayed (* 1977) is the subject of of Globomedia -produced six-part Spanish miniseries El corazón del océano , the January-March 2014 the Spanish television station Antena 3 was broadcast.

Remarks

1. ↑ According to Anna Greve ( The construction of America. Picture politics in the "Grands Voyages" from the workshop de Bry. Cologne 2004, p. 139 and note 472), which probably follows older biographies of Hans Staden (Rupp 1956, Fouquet 1957 ; see ibid. p. 138 and note 469), the ships made a longer stopover in Lisbon before their voyage to the Canary Islands due to adverse winds . The Spanish secondary literature on the Sanabria expedition, on which this article is based, knows nothing about this.
2. ↑ In contemporary sources also Wiessay , from Salazar laguna de enbiaçá , also called Inbiassapé by Staden ; according to Enrique de Gandía probably identical with the old "duck port" Puerto de los Patos , today often identified with the city of Laguna ; see. Duffy / Metcalf p. 42 and Note 71; Franz Obermeier (ed.): Journey to the La Plata area, 1534–1554. The Stuttgart autograph in a modern version ( Fontes Americanae series , = Straubinger Hefte 58), Straubing 2008, p. 45 u. Note 97; Enrique de Gandía: Una expedición de mujeres españolas al Río de la Plata, en el Siglo XVI. Buenos Aires 1932.
3. ^ A. Mencos: Así fue la verdadera expedición que narra "El Corazón del Océano" que "salió" de Seville. In: ABC , March 6, 2014, accessed August 30, 2018.

literature

• Eve M. Duffy, Alida C. Metcalf: The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the Atlantic World. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2012, ISBN 978-1-4214-0345-8 , pp. 38-46 (Sanabria Expedition).
• Enrique de Gandía: Una expedición de mujeres españolas al Río de la Plata, en el Siglo XVI. In: ders .: Indios y conquistadores en el Paraguay. Libr. García Santos, Buenos Aires 1932, pp. 117-147 (first given as a lecture in Buenos Aires on October 3, 1931 at the American Society for History and Numismatics). Reprint u. a. in the journal Yachting Argentino (published there in two parts, Buenos Aires 1944, online ).
• Paola Domingo: Naissance d'une société métisse. Aspects socio-économiques du Paraguay de la Conquête à travers les dossiers testamentaires. Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, Montpellier 2006, ISBN 978-2-8426-9755-6 , especially Chapter III (“ De la conquête à la colonization ”), pp. 163–225.

Web links

• Olinda Massare de Kostianovsky: Juan de Salazar de Espinoza . Short biography from the Diccionario biográfico of the Real Academia de la Historia (Spanish)