Spanish Pioneers by Charles Lummis. Charles Fletcher Lummis, an American traveler, writer, and journalist of the late 19th century, became famous for walking from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. During his journey, he sent regular dispatches to a Los Angeles newspaper, describing his experiences along the way.
I first learned about Lummis through The Library Book, which highlights his important role in the history of the Los Angeles Public Library. That book is excellent, and it introduced me to Lummis’s fascinating life. Interestingly, he and Theodore Roosevelt were college classmates.
Lummis eventually received an honorary title from the Spanish Crown in recognition of this book, which set out to challenge the way Spain’s colonial legacy was portrayed in English-language histories. At a time when Spain was often depicted as cruel and backward, Spanish Pioneers painted a different picture, one of a nation that, despite its flaws, was more inclusive toward Indigenous peoples than other European powers, particularly Britain.
The book opens with the story of Christopher Columbus. Before his famous voyages, Columbus traveled widely, visiting Madeira and even Iceland. The governor of Madeira was his father-in-law. It was likely in Iceland that Columbus heard accounts of lands to the west, stories that may have originated from the Viking explorations of North America nearly five centuries before his first voyage.
Columbus’s first voyage to the New World lasted about two months. Though the contract with the Spanish Crown was signed in April 1492, he had been lobbying for support for years. In exchange, he was promised the grand titles of Admiral, Governor, and Viceroy of all the lands he discovered. His small expedition, three ships and just over a hundred men, many of them unwilling recruits, set out to find a westward route to Asia.
After returning in triumph, Columbus launched a second voyage the following year, this time with 17 ships and 1,500 people. The mission was no longer exploration but colonization. He was ordered to build settlements, bring livestock and supplies, and convert the local populations to Christianity.
Despite his ambitions, Columbus proved to be an ineffective colonizer. He founded a few towns, but these often fell into disorder and rebellion. Illness confined him to bed for long periods in the town of Isabela (now located in Dominican Republic). Due to his poor leadership, the Crown eventually removed him from his post as viceroy and replaced him.
Columbus returned to Spain, but later made a third voyage, during which he reached the mainland of South America. When he saw the mouth of the Orinoco River, he correctly concluded that such a large current must come from a continent.
He returned to Isabela only to find that his brother Bartholomew, whom he had left in charge, had lost authority after a mutiny. To appease the rebels, Columbus sent some of them back to Spain with enslaved Indigenous people, an act that enraged Queen Isabella, who ordered the captives freed. Columbus was arrested and sent back home in chains in 1500.
Though he was later cleared and allowed one final voyage, his reputation never recovered. He died in Spain in 1506, remembered more as a failed governor than a visionary. As Lummis points out, Columbus’s faults lay more in weakness and poor judgment than in deliberate cruelty.
Lummis continues his account with other figures of the early age of exploration. In 1497, King Henry VII of England sent the Venetian navigator John Cabot westward on a voyage of exploration. Cabot reached the mainland of North America, probably the coast of present-day Nova Scotia, in June of that year. He later died, and his son led a second expedition in 1498, but many amongst his crew perished from the cold.
Interestingly, Cabot later entered the service of Spain.
Lummis also contrasts these explorers with Sir Francis Drake, who is often celebrated as a hero in English history. Lummis reminds readers that Drake’s fame rested less on exploration and more on slave trading and piracy against Spanish ships and colonies. Drake sailed through the Strait of Magellan, reached the Oregon coast, and claimed it for England.
Incidentally, another book I reviewed, The Wager, tells the story of an English ship whose mission was to capture a Spanish vessel. The events took place about two centuries after the first European arrivals in the New World. Other books I have reviewed with related themes include Napoleon’s Buttons, The Emigrants, and Trafalgar, among others.
The following chapters recount the stories of several Spanish explorers who played major roles in the conquest and colonization of different regions in the Americas, both South and North. Among them is Francisco Pizarro, who led the conquest of Peru, and Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama and to see the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
In the chapters about the Pizarro brothers and their conquest of the Incas, including the capture and execution of Atahualpa and the seizure of a vast treasure, Lummis does not conceal the brutality or the extreme violence inflicted on the Indigenous people. However, he explains that such behavior was common in that era, noting that similar acts of cruelty occurred elsewhere, for example, the executions of accused witches in Europe and colonial America.
The text also describes Spanish expeditions that traveled from Florida to Arizona, among many others. One entire chapter focuses on Hernán Cortés, who, despite commanding a relatively small force, used his strategic skill to defeat Moctezuma and take control of central Mexico. This achievement was even more remarkable because the governor of Cuba had ordered his arrest for insubordination. Pánfilo de Narváez was sent to capture Cortés, but Cortés showed boldness and tactical brilliance by marching to meet him, ambushing his forces, and defeating them. He then persuaded Narváez’s surviving soldiers to join his own army, greatly strengthening his position before returning to Tenochtitlán.
Although Spanish Pioneers was published about 130 years ago, its language and storytelling remain vivid and engaging. Lummis was a gifted narrator and an exceptional historian for his time. I greatly enjoyed this book.