"Fray Alonso de Benavides Reports New Mexico
Indians Eager for Conversion"

Reprinted in Major Problems in American Colonial History

Published in 1993

"...here, where scarcely thirty years earlier all was idolatry and worship of the devil, without any vestige of civilization, today they all worship our true God and Lord."

Italian explorer Christopher Columbus paved the way for the European conquest of North America after his 1492 journey to the Bahamas. During the early 1500s the Spanish established settlements on other Caribbean islands—present-day Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba—that had been visited by Columbus. While Columbus's wild promises of huge deposits of gold and other riches failed to materialize, the Spanish still managed to make comfortable profits from tobacco, sugar, and ranching in the Caribbean. Soon they...