Bristol

An English port city that played a key role in the expansion of English foreign trade and exploration.

Long before the seafaring ventures of John Cabot and Sebastian Cabot, British sailors looked westward,

Dreaming of discovering new lands and trade opportunities. By the early 16th century Bristol’s merchants and sailors had developed three kinds of trade. First, they established and maintained commercial ties with the Iberian Peninsula. They exported iron, timber, sculptured alabaster, lead, tin, corn, barley, and malt and they imported exotic and highly profitable goods to be found in Spain and Portugal, including fruits, oils, leather, and Spanish iron. Second, they maintained and extended commercial links with Ireland. By the 15th century Bristol’s vessels docked in Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Youghal, Galway, Burrishoole, Kinsale, and Sligo, many of them hauling peninsular wines. Before returning home the vessels would fill their holds with Irish goods destined for the Low Countries. Third, they moved beyond Ireland and established trade with residents of Iceland. Although the Norwegians and Danes did their best to exclude foreigners from the Icelandic trade, Iceland’s fisheries proved too alluring to English traders. Merchants out of Bristol sent vessels loaded with foods, cloths, wine, luxuries, ironware, and weapons—and just about anything else deemed necessary for sustaining life on Iceland. In return they brought back full cargoes of COD, pollack, salmon, and herring. The Icelandic market became so lucrative that the English made numerous attempts to establish permanent business settlements on the island, but however successful such commerce became, eventually the volume of trade fell off and the English who sailed west from Bristol had to find new targets for their entrepreneurial energies.

As early as 1497 John Cabot and his more famous son Sebastian Cabot left the port of Bristol en route to the English discovery of Newfoundland, identifying it as Vinland of the legendary Norse sagas. The rediscovery deepened the Bristolians’ interest in exploration. Much, however, remained a mystery, as sailors who arrived in the city told wild tales of seas populated by demons, strange animals, and still stranger humans. Nevertheless, Bristol’s practical merchants remained undaunted. Still, despite their enthusiasm for trade, the death of King Henry VII depressed English interest in exploration. Concentrating on the more familiar game of European politics, Henry VIII turned his back on exploration while Spain, Portugal, and even France expanded their efforts in the Atlantic basin.

Within Bristol a small group, including the brothers Robert, William, and Thomas Thorne, Robert Thorne the Younger, Hugh Elyot, John Latimer, and Roger Barlow kept the spirit of transoceanic exploration alive during the first half of the 16th century. Robert Thorne, Latimer, and perhaps Barlow authored the Declaration of the Indies, while Barlow wrote his Brief Summe of Geographie. These tracts outlined the feasibility of finding a Northwest Passage via a north-polar approach. These Bristol visionaries served as precursors to later English promoters of exploration and colonization. It was of little surprise that

Richard Hakluyt the Elder and Richard Hakluyt the Younger both found receptive audiences among the merchants of Bristol. The younger Hakluyt often visited the port city, urging the merchants to undertake new ventures. Bristol did not disappoint, continually bidding farewell to new expeditions throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

Further reading: C. M. Macinnes, Bristol: A Gateway of Empire (New York: Augustus M. Kelly Publishers, 1968); David H. Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450—1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); J. A. Williamson, Maritime Enterprise, 1485— 1558 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1913);-, A Short His

Tory of British Expansion (London: Macmillan, 1922).

—Matthew Lindaman

Bry, Theodor de (1528-1598) artist A Flemish engraver who understood the power of the printing press to disseminate information widely, Theodor de Bry produced for European audiences the most accurate renderings of the Western Hemisphere and its peoples during the late 16th century.

De Bry was born in Liege in 1528, when that city was under the control of Spanish Catholics, an unfortunate circumstance for Protestants (including his family), who often found they could not live as they had hoped. Like many other early modern Europeans, such as the Hungarian scholar Stephen Parmenius, de Bry believed that he had to leave his homeland in order to pursue his career as a goldsmith and engraver. In 1570 he fled Strasbourg and traveled westward, eventually making his way to London. There he took whatever work he could find, including the preparation of a series of engravings based on drawings of Sir Philip Sidney’s funeral procession. While in the city de Bry met the English promoter of colonization Richard Hakluyt the Younger. They soon began to work together to illustrate travelers’ accounts of their experiences across the Atlantic.

De Bry always had an interest in engraving American scenes. Unable to do a series of illustrations based on Jacques Le Moyne’s drawings and paintings relating to Florida, the Flemish engraver, working with Hakluyt, began to transform the images he received from travelers such as John White, the English governor of the failed settlement at Roanoke. Using White’s illustrations, originally done in watercolor, de Bry prepared the copperplate engravings that created the illustrations for Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, which appeared in four languages (Latin, English, French, and German) in 1590. After Le Moyne’s death de Bry began to work on the Florida illustrations, but Hakluyt convinced him to publish the Roanoke materials first. Upon completing the pictures for Harriot’s book,

An engraving by Theodor de Bry after a watercolor by Jacques Le Moyne (Hulton/Archive)

De Bry then set out to do more than engrave Le Moyne’s images. He took it upon himself to engrave a massive series of scenes that was published over the course of the 1590s in various languages. These volumes are known now as the Grands Voyages, which depicted American peoples and places, and the Petits Voyages, which portrayed sights from Africa and the East Indies.

By the time of his death in 1598, de Bry had managed to create a series of precise images of the world beyond Europe’s borders. Those pictures proved to have lasting worth and remain the most striking set of visual evidence that survives from what historians often call the “age of discovery.”

After his death, the workshop he created continued to produce images, including many about life and cultural encounters in the Americas. For reasons that remain obscure but presumably relate to his perception of the market for his images, the workshop primarily produced books in German. During the early decades of the 17th century, these books continued to appear, including one in 1634 that included an imagined view of what the uprising of PoWHATAN Indians against the English in 1622 looked like. The images from the workshop continued to influence European styles of representation of non-Europeans. Though scholars have suggested that de Bry and his fellow workers rendered Native Americans in poses reminiscent of classical antiquity and reflected representational strategies from the Renaissance, these images nonetheless became the dominant visual European evidence relating to Americans. In the early 18th century, the legacy of the de Bry workshop could be found in Bernard Picart’s multivolume Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World. De Bry’s work lives on today too; most American history textbooks continue to include at least one of his images.

Further reading: Michael Alexander, ed., Discovering the New World Based on the Works of Theodore De Bry (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of deBry's Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez (ca. 1490-ca. 1557) conquistador, colonial governor

A member of the ill-fated Florida expedition of Panfilo DE Narvaez in 1527, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca survived shipwreck, hunger, and slavery before returning to Spain in 1536 and writing a report of his experiences that became one of the crucial European documents relating to North America during the first half of the 16th century.

Cabeza de Vaca was second in command when Narvaez landed in Florida with an expedition of between 300 and 400 men on April 14, 1528. The expedition found itself in trouble from the beginning. They had left Cuba without enough supplies, and of the 180 HORSEs they had brought, only 42 survived the trip to Florida. They spent two weeks exploring the area, hoping to find GOLD. They met Indians but found no gold and so moved on. Narvaez, against the advice of Cabeza de Vaca, divided the party in two. A hundred men were to sail north along the coast of Florida, while the rest of the party traveled overland. The two parties soon lost contact with each other, and the sea party, after searching for a year, returned to New Spain. The land party, with Narvaez in command, covered only about eight miles a day. They found almost nothing to eat, relying instead on bacon and biscuits that they had brought. For 15 days they saw neither Indians nor settlements. After crossing a large river they met a party of Indians who fed them maize (see corn). Later in the journey they met another party of Indians, who brought them more maize and then followed them at a distance. By the time the expedition reached northern Florida, near present-day Tallahassee, relations with the Indians had deteriorated, and the Spaniards were exhausted and battling illness. Having discovered no gold, they decided to return to New Spain. They built five boats and set sail in September 1528, heading west. They drifted past the Mississippi River and toward Texas. The trip was very difficult; the survivors had very little food and did not have enough water to drink. By the time Cabeza de Vaca reached land, in November, three of the boats, including the one commanded by Narvaez, had disappeared.

The other two boats, with Cabeza de Vaca and an unknown number of additional survivors, landed on a sandbar or island near Galveston Bay. In the years that followed, almost all the Spanish died. Some starved, died from exposure to the cold, or were killed by Indians; others traveled out of the area and were lost. Of the men who had landed in Florida, only four ever returned to Spain.

Soon after their shipwreck, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions encountered Karankawa Indians who indicated that they should heal the sick. When Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were unwilling, the Indians refused to feed them until they tried. The Spaniards prayed over the sick Indians, and Cabeza de Vaca reported that “all those for whom we prayed told the others that they were well and healthy.” For a time the Indians treated them well, giving them food and hides. Because of linguistic and cultural barriers, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions did not understand the peoples they met, and for reasons that are unclear the Indians later enslaved them. Cabeza de Vaca remained in slavery for more than a year. He then resolved to escape, for, as he wrote,

I could not bear the life I was leading. . .for among many other labors, I had to gather the roots they used for food, under water and among the reeds where they grew on the land; and my fingers were so lacerated from this that if a blade of straw touched them they bled, and the reeds tore me all over my body because many reeds were broken and I had to go into the middle of them with the little clothing that I wore.

Cabeza de Vaca escaped from the Karankawas and established himself as a healer and trader, traveling from one Indian group to another through what is now Texas and northern Mexico. Along his journey he encountered three other survivors of the Narvaez expedition: Alonso del Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevanico, an African slave. Beginning in September 1534 the four of them traveled together. They learned to communicate with members of various Indian nations and presented themselves as holy men and healers. As they wandered they were accompanied by Indians who fed and protected them.

Cabeza de Vaca and his surviving companions encountered Indian groups about whom very little is known, and their relations with them are hard to interpret. His experience was unlike that of most Spaniards in the New World: when he washed up on a Texas island, he had neither weapons, horses, nor European technology. He, rather than they, was powerless. As he traveled his opinion of the Indians improved, and he later sought to defend them against Spanish abuses. Like other Spaniards of his time, he believed that the Indians must convert to Catholicism and that the Spanish had a right to colonize Indian lands. When he met Spanish slave raiders in northern Mexico in 1536, they wanted to enslave the Indians with whom he had traveled. Cabeza de Vaca was angry at the thought and portrayed himself as a very different kind of Spaniard. According to his account, the Indians refused to believe that Cabeza de Vaca and the Spaniards were really of the same people. They said that “the Christians were lying, for we came from where the sun rises and they from where it sets; and that we cured the sick and they killed the healthy; and that we had come naked and barefoot and they well dressed and on horses and with lances; and that we did not covet anything, rather we returned everything that they gave us and were left with nothing, and the only aim of the others was to steal everything they found. . . .”

After eight years of travel, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions reached the village of Culiacan in April 1536. Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain and stayed there for more than three years, during which he edited his account of his travels in America.

Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, appointed Cabeza de Vaca adelantado (frontier governor) and governor over the region of the Rio de la Plata. When Cabeza de Vaca later returned to the New World, his authority extended over a vast area including southern Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. This second expedition, however, was hardly more successful than the Florida expedition had been. His attempts to raise taxes and halt abuses of the Indians helped engender a revolt. In April 1544 rebels captured Cabeza de Vaca. They accused him of abandoning 13 of his men, committing crimes against both Spaniards and Indians, and substituting his personal coat of arms for the symbols of the Crown. They sent him back to Spain, where he lived in poverty. The lawsuits against him, begun in 1546, were eventually decided against him in 1551. As a result of these verdicts, he was stripped of his titles, forbidden to return to the Indies, and condemned to exile in Algiers. Near the end of his life the king granted him a small pension, but Cabeza de Vaca never regained the honors he had had earlier in life.

Cabeza de Vaca’s words cannot be taken entirely at face value. As the literary scholar Rolena Adorno has observed, he was anxious to present himself as a providing a “saintly example,” and his account of the events is the only one that has survived. Nonetheless, his experiences in Florida, Texas, and Mexico seem to have changed him from a typical conquistador to one who, while still believing that the Spanish had a right to conquer, sought to do so in a humane way.

Further reading: Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, Alvar N-unez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); David A. Howard, Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997); Enrique Pupo-Walker, ed., Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, trans. Frances M. Lopez-Morillas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

—Martha K. Robinson