Chapter 3
The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria
THE FRENCHMAN HAD TURNED TO THE AMERICANS for refuge – but it was the Spanish who determined Rose’s fate in 1818 . . . and four hundred years earlier.
IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, the marriage of two Monarchs, Prince Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, created the powerful kingdom of Spain. As part of their reign, the new rulers commissioned Christopher Columbus to find a western route to the Far East, to spread Christianity, while seeking the riches described by Marco Polo. Serendipitously, the explorer took a wrong turn and “discovered” the Americas, landing on the morning of October 12, 1492, at an island in the Bahamas, which Columbus named San Salvador. Following were many expeditions culminating in 1520 when the Conquistadores of Harnàn Cortés subdued the Emperor Montezuma and conquered the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico (Mexico City).
Spain vanquished Central America and Mexico and then headed for North America. The first expeditions reached the San Antonio area of North America in 1691, where a mission was established by Franciscan fathers. (By the early 1800’s, that mission was converted to a makeshift fortress, named “The Alamo” by the Spanish cavalry, whose home base was in El Alamo, Mexico.)
Spain soon began attempts to colonize the land above the Rio Grande – but to conquer this new continent required populating it. Unlike England and France, Spain, a relatively sparsely settled nation, did not have large populations to settle the West. So foreigners were invited in. Initially only non-American foreigners if they pledged loyalty to Spain; then former Spanish subjects in Louisiana were solicited, along with colonists from the interior of Mexico. But these efforts failed to populate Texas – failed mainly because of the Indians . . . and their horses.
It was the 16 horses that Cortés and his small band of soldiers rode into Mexico that had mesmerized (and helped defeat) Montezuma’s thousands of subjects who had never laid eyes on a horse. They thought they were seeing the supernatural, dragons – or even a centaur: a monster with the head and arms of a man and the body and legs of a mysterious animal. But after the Spanish brought those same horses to Texas, it was they who saw monsters: the Comanche! Ferocious once mounted, these Indians became the best horsemen in the world, spreading terror throughout Texas. The Spanish suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands (and hoof beats) of the Comanche, who also pushed out the Apache, forcing them to migrate south, raiding mercilessly below the Rio Grande.
With attempts to colonize faltering in large part because of Indian problems, in desperation, Spain agreed to welcome in the land-hungry Americans.
IN 1776, FORMER BRITISH SUBJECTS in the New World had declared independence from Britain for their “rebelling 13 colonies” – which became the first 13 states of the United States. Seven years later, the Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolution, as Britain recognized the sovereignty of the United States and transferred to it most of the land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River – an immense domain, almost one-third of the continent.
Spain had once claimed the New World from Florida to the Pacific Ocean: most of the South, and all of the West from the Louisiana Territory through Texas to California. But Britain was moving down out of Canada, the French up from New Orleans, the Russians downward from the Pacific Northwest, while the next door neighbors, the land-hungry Americans, inched westward – all competing for a foothold in the new frontier.
Spanish control over America diminished in the 1790’s when Spain chose the losing side (the Royalists) during the French Revolution, earning the enmity of Napoléon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoléon forced Spain to surrender to France the Louisiana Territory: 800,000 square miles, amounting to the middle third of the New World. Much more than the future state of Louisiana, it included almost all the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains: what became Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South and North Dakota.
The beleaguered Spanish tried to put a positive face on their loss. They hoped the Louisiana Territory transfer would at least place a French buffer between the aggressive Americans to the east and Spain’s most valuable holdings to the west: gold and silver mines in Santa Fe – as well as in Mexico, which it called “New Spain.”
But in 1803, Napoléon transferred the Louisiana Territory to U.S. President Thomas Jefferson for $15 million dollars. This Louisiana Purchase doubled the land mass of the United States – now the U.S. controlled virtually two-thirds of the continent – and placed the young republic on the doorstep of that part of Spain known as Texas. Napoléon sold the territory, he said, to raise money to finance his war against the British and to give the world a “rival” to Britain, “which in time will lay low her pride.”
And that rival now cast longing eyes on the vast, undeveloped territory of Texas.
This was the state of the United States – and Texas – when Rose left Le Champ d’Asile in 1818. And his new Louisiana home in New Orleans was a stones throw from the international boundary line separating the United States from Spain.
BUT IT WAS NOW EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER – 1836 – and memories of Napoléon, France and Spain faded as once again Rose looked across the Travis Line. Rose searched out the face of his gallant friend, Jim Bowie, with whom he had come to the Alamo. Differing from Napoléon, Bowie’s adage was: “Never surrender or retreat!” The French soldier in Rose gave way to Rose the Texan, yearning to join his closest friend, as Bowie, raising his head from his sickbed, gently prodded his comrade: “You seem not to be willing to die with us, Rose!”