Original subtitles

March 15th, 1493.

The hero returns.

Having departed Spain as little more than an eccentric merchant, Christopher Columbus

is swept up in a flurry of fame and legend.

The man who sailed across an impossible Atlantic to stave a swift, safe trade route to Asia.

But contrary to his claims, Columbus hadn't led his tiny fleet to Asia.

His discovery was North America.

He and his crew of sailors had been the first Europeans to set foot on the continent since

the time of the Vikings.

Thirty-nine of his men had been left to further explore the mysteries of the Isle of Hispaniola,

whilst Columbus prepared to set sail westwards, finally reuniting with them once again.

Only on this journey, his mission wasn't discovery and trade, but to convert and colonize.

Columbus was about to spark a firestorm of Spanish brutality across the Caribbean, opening

up the New World to a mass of European explorers.

Bringing with them disease, death, and subjugation, and marking the dawn of the age of the conquistadors.

Columbus certainly was a great self-promoter.

The first exploration, the first voyage is, as we know, involves three very small ships.

He returns to Spain.

He tells the Catholic monarchs about this great land that he's discovered that's ripe

for colonization, for settlement, for Christianization.

In sort of telling that account, what he aims to do is enlist the financial support of the

monarchs and private investors for his exploits.

Columbus probably has some doubts into his mind as to whether or not he has actually

found what he said he was finding.

But in reality, one of the reasons why he's making that claim is that everything that

he had agreed to with Isabella in 1491, before his first voyage, was predicated on him finding

Asia.

As he became increasingly aware that he was probably nowhere near the Asia that he sought,

he still knew that he had to go back.

He had to either try and find the place that he was looking for, or at least try and become

so successful that it wouldn't matter.

In the case of the papal bulls that the Catholic kings received in the aftermath of Columbus

arriving to the Americas, those papal bulls grant the kings authority to spread through

the Americas while converting the native population.

And that's kind of the stipulation, that their most important charge is going to be

evangelization of the people that they encounter.

After the first voyage, once it's become clear that it is possible to cross to these islands,

how you do it, how you get back, that there's potentially sources of wealth and maybe places

where you can create settlements.

The second voyage is really the beginning of a Spanish attempt to create settlements

in the Caribbean.

It's no longer just exploratory.

This is the beginning of a sustained campaign of settlement and invasion.

Ever since he was a young boy helping his father weave wool in their family's humble

workshop, Columbus had dreamt of immense wealth and a gleaming reputation as an unrivaled

seafarer.

Finally, his fantasy was within reach.

The crown's promise to invest an immensely healthy sum in a second voyage attracted a

huge interest from fellow explorers, allowing him to commandeer a far greater fleet.

The second expedition was a large operation with hundreds of individuals, goods, everything

you can imagine to create a functioning Spanish society in the Americas.

Having made it and come back, there are a lot more individuals that are willing to sign

onto the expedition.

People that were dubious of his earlier claims for not really knowing the size of the world

are willing to join this expedition.

You have farmers, you had people from the trades, skilled labor, but you also had clergymen

and you had some nobles.

So it was kind of like a good slice of Castilian society represented in this expedition.

He comes with, we believe to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 ships.

These ships are loaded with the essentials of European life.

They come with wheat and barley to be planted in what they think about as sort of large

fields.

They come with cattle, pigs and horses, as well as sheep and goats.

September 1493, a current of excitement flowed through the bustling port of Cadiz.

Columbus was now a major celebrity, the public firmly rooting for his success.

This was the man who had brought them closer than ever to Asia, with all its exotic goods.

The ships were loaded with vital supplies to feed the thousand voyagers joining Columbus

on his epic quest across the sea.

Sightings of the Lesser Antilles were first made on November 3rd, veering north within

three weeks, Hispaniola appeared on the horizon.

It was here, only nine months earlier, that Columbus had left 39 of his most trusted men

in charge of a newly constructed fortress.

In 1493, when Columbus's second voyage arrived at the site of the original fort that Columbus

and his crew had left behind on the first voyage, they discovered that the place had

been razed, had been burned.

Columbus discovers that the contingent of men that he had left at the site of La Navidad

has been killed.

And in fact, the cacique nearby, Guancanagadi, is in hiding for fear of reprisals from Columbus

for the death of his men.

Eventually Columbus is able to sort of lure Guancanagadi out and sort of deduce that some

of his men had been excessive in their demands of the local community.

It seems possible that actually Spaniards harassed quite a lot of indigenous people

for food.

It's possible that they harassed women also.

It seems that, you know, indigenous people might have resented the abuse that they received

by the Spaniards who were stranded and might have acted against them.

It started a chain of conflicts with indigenous polities.

Columbus then decides to move the settlement a little bit more to the east and establishes

a new community of La Isabela, named after the Queen of Castile.

The problem is that there are a lot more Spaniards.

They don't have enough European food stores.

They haven't brought enough food to sort of readily feed everyone for a long time.

And so they begin to place a lot of demands on the local indigenous groups that they have

created some ties to for food.

He's bringing a lot more mouths to feed, but also a lot more people that want to be able

to profit from the voyage.

And as a result, Columbus begins this march inland with as many men as he can muster to

try and find both the source of the gold that he's been told is there, as well as through

force or through alliance, get access to more indigenous communities that can help

supply this fledgling colony.

Columbus was fully aware that the immediate survival of the Spaniards in these strange

new lands would be solely dependent on allegiances made with the indigenous people.

How else could he build and maintain the thriving colony he had promised Queen Isabella?

It may not be Asia, but at least he could still make a success of Hispaniola.

He would have to, to ensure he wasn't returned to Spain in chains.

When the Spaniards reached the Caribbean islands, those islands and the mainland all around

those islands or the circum-Caribbean was well inhabited and had been inhabited for

thousands of years.

The great Antilles were populated mostly, but not exclusively by, by Tainos.

They spoke a common language, but they were actually divided politically into different

casicascos or chiefdoms.

They had alliances and wars between each other sometimes.

They traded with each other, they married each other.

So it was a complex society, just like any other in that sense.

And the chiefs in the Taino word, or it's a Spanish, a Hispanization of the Taino word

is cacique.

And the Spaniards latch onto that word and they think of those individuals, those local

chiefs or rulers as being caciques.

They actually carry that word onto the mainland and they, and they assign it to indigenous

chiefs all over the Americas.

So it becomes an important concept.

The interaction between Spaniards and indigenous peoples in the Caribbean at first is relatively

peaceful, but very quickly it dissolves into violence.

Then there's this downward spiral that starts, in some ways it starts with Columbus's first

landing, but particularly with a much larger second voyage is when it begins to, to spiral

down.

As the months dragged on, relations between the Spanish invaders and the influential caciques

were rapidly deteriorating, as was the notion of peaceful cohabitation of the islands.

They were completely dependent on indigenous people for food and indigenous people, Tainos,

provided food freely and willingly as a sign of hospitality, but the Spaniards ate voraciously.

There is just not enough supplies.

There's not enough food to go around.

It's going to become a great problem.

There's going to be a great hunger among colonists.

The Spaniards organized expeditions to the indigenous towns to raid for food.

You can imagine what kind of terrible things can be actually executed when you are starved

and you're thinking that everybody around you is conspiring against you.

At the same time, Columbus has a mission, which is to locate the source of wealth.

He wants to find a way to turn a profit.

To do that, he very quickly identifies gold as the commodity that will be most valuable

for export.

Gold in Hispaniola was found normally in riverbeds.

So in the proximity of these sources of gold, he's going to place forts.

There are going to be also forts in proximity to indigenous towns sometimes to kind of keep

an eye on them.

At the same time, Columbus is not going to be afraid of using quite brutal tactics to

scare the population into submission.

If anyone shows resistance, he uses an overwhelming attack, something that the Spaniards term

a fuego y sangre, war of fire and blood, in order to attack those that might resist him.

That kind of violence, it was considered to be the best way to ensure that indigenous

people weren't going to rebel.

It was kind of like the shock, producing a shock with violence that was such that it

would kind of like mute a response.

Communities that initially ally with the Spaniards very quickly feel oppressed by their demands.

That the Spanish are demanding huge amounts of food, they're demanding labor at times.

And as a result, there is a sort of built-in tension even with allied caciques over those

demands.

Columbus was losing control of Hispaniola, of the respect of his men, and of his own

swelling ego.

He struck out to nearby islands, praying he would discover something, anything of value,

which could buy him some time.

But upon his return to Hispaniola, a startled Columbus was shocked to learn that nearly

two-thirds of the Europeans, the people whose lives he was essentially responsible for,

had fatally succumbed to famine and disease.

The Spaniards felt the bitter sting of resentment, their friends and crewmates dead, and for

what?

An aggressive tyrant hell-bent on making a name for himself, whilst claiming every pebble

of gold that they had found.

They saw him as a kind of like a failed leader in many ways.

So opposition against Columbus is going to appear very quickly, and there are going to

be factions of Spaniards who are going to even run away from the Spanish settlements

and go to live with indigenous communities.

Desperation to retain control drove Columbus into survival mode.

If a mutiny broke out, his career, and maybe even his life, would be over.

His solution was to allow the colonists to forcibly extract labor from the native islanders.

This would eventually lead to the Spanish introducing a cruel, formalized system of

domination, the encomienda.

The encomienda was considered a relationship between two individuals.

The encomendero, or is a Spaniard, and then the encomendado, or which is like the person

that is put under the protection of the Spaniards.

These indigenous peoples were entrusted to them.

That's the word encomienda means to entrust.

And so the idea was that this was not tantamount to slavery, but this was in order to protect

the indigenous people.

So the theory was that the overlord, the encomendero, was a protector.

He would see to the well-being of the indigenous peoples.

He would see to their conversion to Christianity.

But in return, he would be able to make some demands, whether in tribute or in labor.

A relationship that was intended to protect indigenous people and to evangelize them,

it was quickly subverted into a form of forced labor.

Without labor to produce food, to mine those precious metals, or to raise livestock, the

new world is meaningless.

And so encomienda really was a grant of land, but the real part of encomienda was a grant

of labor.

And so they abused the native people.

They exploited them.

They beat them.

They raped them.

They overworked them.

They did not want to educate or Christianize them.

And so the mortality rate on these encomiendas was just staggering.

Despite his grand ambitions, Columbus was a mediocre mapmaker, not a master politician.

By the close of the 15th century, his dreadful decisions had cost Hispaniola its peace and

prosperity, turning it into a place of death and subjugation.

Its capital, the newly established city of Santo Domingo, was the dark heart of this

violent regime of cruelty against the local people.

As Columbus becomes more brutal in trying to get gold, more and more caciques become

resistant.

1495, 96, 97 is really a period of quite broad conflict between caciques in the center part

of the island to the south of where the Spanish have established themselves, as well as to

the east, who begin to attack the Spanish.

The Spanish advantage, particularly their steel swords, their crossbows, to a lesser

extent their firearms, made it an incredibly mismatched fight.

It's pretty clear that even a small number of Spaniards, a dozen, 20, could hold their

own against hundreds of Taino warriors.

Military engagements not only killed the warriors that fought the Spaniards in battle, but then

precipitated things like famine, which then only hastened death due to starvation or malnutrition

or eventually disease.

October 1499, enslavement of indigenous people was by now commonplace.

But news of Columbus' sordid moves to suppress and control Hispaniola's inhabitants had spread

back across the ocean, reaching the turrets of Iberia and his royal patron, Isabella.

People in Spain started to question what was going on very early on. Concerns start coming

simultaneously with encomienda. Things went very badly, very quickly with encomienda,

so concerns for the treatment of the Indians.

It comes right away from friars who are there, asked to do the conversion, and being confronted

with conquistadors who are being violent, who are not being a good model, and writing

back saying, how are we supposed to make people like Christianity, who want people to, you

know, wanting to go to heaven if all they can find is these guys around? They think

if they're going to heaven, I don't want to be there. So that sort of conflict among Spaniards

is absolutely simultaneous. It's happening at the same time as the conquest. And how

powerful that was, you know, when the criticism comes from within, that's very problematic.

All this sort of concern is embodied in the person of Isabel, of Castile. And people went

to her, partly in this gendered way, perhaps as a sort of maternal figure, but also she

was the one who was the most vocal.

In Isabella's eyes, the indigenous people of the New World were subjects of the Crown

of Castile, Iberians who ought to be embraced, not enslaved. Columbus was in serious trouble,

and he knew it.

He's shipped back to Spain in chains to answer to Queen Isabel. He's not thrown permanently

in prison, he's released. But his contract is considered to be null and void, and so

he's stripped of the titles that he was able to claim in his contract, that he's essentially

the ruler for Spain of these islands.

Columbus had left chaos in his wake. But Queen Isabella believed that continued intervention

would restore and maintain order across the new lands he had mistakenly discovered in

her name.

The Crown appointed Francisco de Bobadilla, the man who had arrested Columbus on Isabella's

orders, as the second governor of the Indies in August 1500. Following his death during

a hurricane in July 1502, formidable nobleman Nicolás de Ovando took the helm.

Nicolás de Ovando arriving in Hispaniola with a great number of ships and individuals

is kind of like the second, the big second wave, let's say, of colonists arriving to

Hispaniola. And also he's going to be extraordinarily aggressive in his battle against the remaining

indigenous polities that still existed in Hispaniola. He's going to be very successful

in that, but also very, very brutal in the way they actually achieve his goals.

The governorship of Nicolás de Ovando is seen as the moment in which the Spanish grip

over the land was really solidified.

The Crown clearly trusted in the Caribbean's potential. Why else would they continue to

invest in its development? Popular tales of its gold and glory had begun to spread. A

great number of settlers began to make the perilous journey across the Atlantic.

There were all kinds of ideas about the riches that existed in the New World, the sense of

adventure, the sense of possibility.

In the popular imagination, everybody who moved there would be able to discover a great

empire and strike at the riches very quickly.

These are people from very difficult backgrounds, poverty-stricken, very few opportunities.

They used to talk about hacer las Américas, to make oneself in the Americas, most of them

with the intention of then returning home and living life as lords with the booty that

they had accumulated there.

Within three decades of Columbus stumbling across Hispaniola and establishing his fragile

Thousands were leaving Europe each and every year, placing their faith in the New World

and the promise of its riches. They came from a wide range of backgrounds, but would become

known by one collective title, conquistadors.

So the conquistadors are actually quite a diverse bunch of people. We think of them

as Spanish. It's called the Spanish Conquest. Most of them were Spanish, but not all of

them were. There were other Europeans.

By and large, conquistadors were young men, though there are some women, who were looking

to improve their status in Spanish society, whether by creating a noble name for themselves

or more typically serving the crown and receiving sort of lifelong benefits as members of Spanish

society.

Making this fresh start required a traumatic journey over thousands of miles of sea. Discomfort

and danger were among the few guarantees on offer during this agonizing transatlantic

passage.

16th century ships were rather small, shockingly small, say 100, 120 square meters. And in

the space, if you can imagine that, you had anywhere from 100 to 120 people living day

and night with basically no bathroom. The passage between Spain and the Caribbean islands

in the early 16th century would take anywhere from four to six weeks.

It depended on the winds. It depended on the seaworthiness of the ship. It depended upon

the capability of the people navigating the ship. They ran out of food. They ran out of

water. Sailors became sick with scurvy and other kinds of illnesses. They became dissatisfied.

Sometimes mutinies occurred.

There were all kinds of stories out there about what awaited them. Some were very fearful

that they would encounter these half-human, half-beast individuals. There were illustrations

throughout Europe that showed human beings with their faces and their mouths in their

stomachs. There were stories of, you know, 10, 12-foot giants that wandered the land.

If you're lucky, you only make one of these expeditions, only make one voyage, and you

happen to be part of an expedition that discovers, let's say, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire.

Whatever it is, you make enough that if you can then make it back home, you're set for

the rest of your life.

If you had the desire, the nerve, or the necessity, you could jump on a ship and be part of this.

No training. But you knew also that the chances of survival were pretty slim. But if you did

manage to survive, who knows what kind of wealth and what kind of stature you could

achieve in the process.

In many cases, they were private expeditions. And so basically, the leader of this expedition

or captain would also invest his own capital into leasing or buying ships. Individual conquistadors

would bring their own weapons and their own provisions. And so they would be entitled

to additional shares of whatever proceeds they would find. And they would just simply

recruit in Seville.

The financial and physical risks of the New World may have been shouldered by the conquistadors.

But permission to be there was granted by the crown. This was sealed in the form of

a detailed contract.

Some of these contracts were for trading with the natives only. Others were to establish

forts or cities, etc. So there were different possibilities.

The crown, because it gave permission, said it was entitled to a certain percentage of

the wealth that was uncovered as a result of the expedition. This begins to breed some

resentment on the part of those who took all the risks. And it's the crown that's becoming

wealthy off of all of their efforts.

As scores of Spaniards arrived on the sands of the Caribbean, alongside them came an unpredictable

and disturbing peril. Disease.

Now the explanation that we all learn while we were in grade school was about the biological

effects that the Europeans brought. Illnesses for which the natives did not have defenses

for or immunity for. Subvergent soil epidemics. But there was more than that.

If we combined war plus exhaustive conditions, working conditions, and we are also diseased,

indigenous mortality was catastrophic.

The population of Hispaniola, before the arrival of the Spaniards, could be considered

around, let's say, half a million. Half a million individuals. And by 1518, there are

about 3,000 natives left. So in the process of settling and colonizing Hispaniola, Spaniards

depopulated the Caribbean basin. And not only a loss of life, but a loss of culture, a loss

of family life, structure. We're talking about a horrifying event.

As the indigenous population in Hispaniola declined, Spaniards saw themselves looking

for labor elsewhere. It meant bringing forced labor from all the islands of the Caribbean.

In the first 30 years of the 16th century, Spaniards conducted multiple raids to secure

indigenous labor and to bring them as slaves to Hispaniola to work in the gold fields.

So the conquest of Cuba, the conquest of Puerto Rico, conquest to the north in places like

the Bahamas, are really intended not so much to gain access to new areas of land, but really

to capture people that can be put to work on Hispaniola to continue to extract gold

from the island. So Spaniards are going to propel themselves

throughout the greater Antilles, populating every island and trying to control the indigenous

population, which was going to be an ongoing process. And they meant a significant loss

of life for everybody involved. And as those sources of labor themselves become

scarce or become harder to access, the Spanish begin to turn to trade with the Portuguese.

And enslaved Africans quickly come in and are used both in domestic service in cities

like Santo Domingo, in rural service working as ranchers and cowboys to maintain livestock

supplies, as well as to work in the mines and eventually to work on sugar plantations,

which begin to be established in the first couple decades of the 16th century.

When the gold in Hispaniola starts declining, there's going to be a very conscious move

to move towards sugar as the next most important commodity that the island can produce. So

Hispaniola is really the first sugar plantation in the Americas.

We know that in many places, places like Santo Domingo, the population of enslaved Africans

came to meet or in some cases exceed the number of Spaniards.

However, back in Europe, the crown faced a growing opposition to the brutality of its

state-sponsored privateers. Amongst the most famous of the early objectors was Dominican

friar Bartolome de las Casas, a man who had already formed his own complicated relationship

with the Indies.

Bartolome de las Casas came out to the New World as a young man. He settled on the island

of Hispaniola. He participated in the invasion of Cuba, and as a result of his participation

in the invasion of Cuba, was made an encomendero. That is, he was given a grant of Indians who

would pay tribute to him.

In 1511, he heard Antonio de Montesinos preaching a sermon against the abuses of the indigenous

people, peoples who were living in these kind of encomenderos, the cruelty, the kind

of dehumanization.

Bartolome de las Casas then goes through a spiritual transformation. He renounces his

encomienda and he then decides to join the Dominican order. Montesinos had been a Dominican.

And then he became a lifelong advocate for indigenous rise. He's called the apostle of

the Indies. He becomes known as the apostle of the Indies.

He was one of the first ones to denounce the quick disappearance of indigenous people and

try to actually exert some action from the crown. He tried to advocate for some legislation

to protect indigenous people.

His idea was that it was essential to remove natives from the grasp of conquistadors because

that would only lead to their complete extinction.

He is a very, very important figure. Even at the time you will read correspondence which

talks about that Dominican or the Bishop of Chiapas and his troublemaking. So his message

was loud and clear and it was heard in the highest halls of government.

The crown was shocked by this, saying this is not what the church and what God has set

us out to do. So in 1512, Spain enacts the laws of Burgos, which begins to delineate

how Spaniards will treat native people.

The problem, of course, is that from theory to practice it is a long distance. So even

though at certain point indigenous slavery is going to be prohibited, there is always

going to be an asterisk to the law. There is always going to be ways in which Spaniards

can, if not disobey the law, definitely walk around it.

One such loophole was officially written into existence as Spanish law only a year after

the creation of the laws of Burgos.

A jurist in Spain named Justo Palacios created a document that was called the requerimiento.

That means the requirement. Palacios laid out a religious and legal rationale for the

enslavement and total domination of people of the Americas. If the people accept, then

they will be treated well, says the document. If they do not accept, they will be enslaved

and their children and wives will be taken away. They will be killed. This document

made possible things that would not otherwise have been imaginable. Then, from the Spanish

point of view, all of these actions were legitimate.

It's a loophole that's absolutely massive. It's a loophole that you can just sail an

entire conquest expedition right through. And that's what the Spaniards do. So the Caribbean

very quickly becomes a colonial disaster.

Violence was not the Spaniards' only import to the New World. Their arrival in the Caribbean

began a complex biological exchange, which would leave a lasting impact on the Western

Hemisphere.

The Caribbean is a laboratory of empire for Spain. It is at this time that you find many

of the elements that you're going to find later in colonial culture in other places

of the world. They happen first here. They're going to try at least to introduce agricultural

products into the Caribbean with little success, things like wheat, things like grapes to make

wine, things like cattle, like horses, pigs, dogs as well.

They also carry the first diseases from the old world, particularly what we think about

now as swine flu. Within a decade, all the settlements had fallen. The animals had either

died, been eaten, or had run off into the frontier. And diseases had begun to spread,

particularly swine flu, amongst native populations. So it's an abject failure, the first settlements

that Columbus launched. But more broadly, the whole colonial enterprise in the Caribbean

itself is very much similarly a failure through the early period until the mainland becomes

the focus.

We know that relatively early on, there were many instances of rape perpetrated by Spaniards

on indigenous women. But as you moved into the early 16th century, there were some cases

where you see more intentional relationships between Spaniards and indigenous women that

then lead to children that are more part of the Spanish world than part of indigenous

communities. Eventually, by the 1520s, the Spanish have coined a new word to describe

the children born between Spaniards and typically indigenous women. And these children are called

mestizos, which has the same root as the word mixture, right? So these are mixed people.

Having passed away shortly after Columbus's return, Queen Isabella's power had been inherited

by an unsympathetic King Ferdinand. He continued to reject increasingly desperate requests

from the disgraced explorer for the reinstatement of his privileges. Time had run out for Christopher

Columbus. He died in obscurity on the 20th of May, 1506, at only 55 years old.

Columbus was obviously important because he was so tremendously wrong about what he sought

to do. He, of course, is a very controversial figure. He was controversial during his lifetime.

We have to recognize that due to his efforts, the Spaniards did create a colony. They did

create a permanent presence in the New World. And that permanent presence then acted as

the jumping off place for further expeditions. In the second voyage, he learned to master

the winds and currents of the Atlantic, which are fundamental to be able to cross the ocean

in the Age of Sail. It's the voyages that established the permanent navigational route

between Europe and the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas for the next three centuries,

basically. He extensively explored the Caribbean, but he also continued to believe that he had

found a passageway to the east. He never admitted that he had come across lands that had not

been seen or encountered by Europeans before. By 1498, everyone believed that they were

in a new world. People are drafting a new cartography of the globe that includes these

islands that were not a part of India. Most likely, few of the settlers or conquistadors

thought they were actually in India either. The Spanish mission to peacefully Christianize

the Caribbean may have been a failure, but the establishment of colonies on Hispaniola,

modern-day Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba would land the conquistadors with an incredible

opportunity. The Caribbean was a proving ground, wherein the Spaniards were able to identify

and practice strategies of conquest that then would propel them to the mainland, where they

would be able to use those conquests against new peoples in the search for more tribute,

more labor, more income, ultimately more lands for their monarch. Things like the encomienda

is practiced and experimented with in the Caribbean. Plantations are established in

the Caribbean. And settlements, settlements with sort of a Spanish center and indigenous

periphery are experimented with in the Caribbean. You had to have a point of focus with sufficient

individuals there in order to begin the other discoveries. We have enough people on the

islands. We have enough resources to begin to build ships on the island. And so expeditions

no longer have to make the 3,000-mile trip all the way from Spain in order to discover

new areas. And this dramatically changes the nature of the discoveries. Without a base

of operations such as Hispaniola, such as the city of Santo Domingo, the rest of it

just would not have happened. One such expedition in 1513 would see the conquistadors make a

pivotal discovery, offering them their first substantial taste of mainland America. The

conquistadors were coming for Panama. Panama was the first major mainland conquest

after the Caribbean. The campaign led by Pedrarias Dávila was arguably one of the most brutal

campaigns of conquest in all of the Americas. Between those years, it's possible that the

Spanish decimated as many as a quarter of a million Cueva peoples in Panama. From Panama,

the Spanish are able to establish a new foothold that they quickly realize offers access to

another ocean, a monumental discovery for the future course of the conquest of the Americas.

As the second decade of the 16th century draws to a close, one high-ranking politician stuck

in an administrative position in Cuba grows anxious for adventure. Hernán Cortés soon

sets his sights on the mainland. What lay ahead of him would prove to be one of the

greatest and deadliest Spanish conquests, the vast city of Tenochtitlan and the extraordinary

empire of the Aztecs.