George Parker Winship

“ Livingston's remarkable memory for minute details and his ability to recognize peculiarities in volumes with which he was unfamiliar had long been an important asset which did much to give the house its preëminent position among American dealers in rare old books. These qualities combined with the instinctive confidence which every one who dealt with him felt in his frankness and sincerity, gave the new firm an unassailable position. ”

“ With six or seven Spaniards, and without any of the Indian allies whom he had with him, he forced his way into their villages, killing and destroying and setting them on fire, coming upon the enemy so suddenly and with such quickness and boldness that they did not have a chance to collect or even to do anything at all, until they became so afraid of him that there was not a town which dared wait for him, but they fled before him as from a powerful army; so much so, that for ten days, while be was passing through the settlements, they did not have an hour's rest. ”

“ Sir Humphrey Gilbert on his homeward voyage from the New-found-land in 1583, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, while the Golden Hind was tossed by "terrible seas breaking short and high pyramidwise," is the finest type of the seamen who made the English occupation of America possible. The narrative of Gilbert's fatal voyage, written by Edward Haie, found a place in the ample store-house of adventurous records which makes all who love good reading and virile English the debtors of Richard Hakluyt. ”

“ Livingston never liked city ways, and in 1888 he took up a plot of government land at Melbourne, near the head of navigation on the St. John's River in Florida. The inspiration for this venture came from the books of Thoreau. He was ambitious to emulate the simple life as expounded by the Concord seer. Unluckily the Florida glades concealed no motherly neighbours from whose pantry shelves pockets could be stuffed with doughnuts, and the life proved too simple. After a year of unremunerative grubbing at palmetto roots, Livingston returned to the New York bookstore. ”

“ The priest can hardly be blamed for translating a house entrance into a doorway instead of picturing it as a bulkhead or as the hatchway of a ship. The Spaniards—those who had seen service in the Indies—had outgrown their earlier custom of reading into the Indian stories the ideas of government and of civilization to which they were accustomed in Europe. But Friar Marcos was at a disadvantage hardly less than that of the companions of Cortes, when they first heard of Moctecuhzoma, because his experience with the wealth of the New World had been in the realm of the Incas. ”

“ Arriving at Santo Domingo, which had become the principal town in the Indies, he learned that a number of the colonists had rebelled during his absence, and that everything was at odds. His temperament was ill-suited to dealing with the turbulent crowd who defied his authority, and he could do little toward restoring peace and order. Both sides sent agents and emissaries to Spain, with the result that, on August 23, 1500, Francisco de Bobadilla arrived at the island with royal orders authorizing him to supersede Columbus in the government. ”

“ But even the abundance of food could not wholly satisfy the men whose toilsome march of more than four months had been lightened by dreams of a golden haven. Friar Marcos was there to see the realization of the visions which the zealous sermons of his brethren and the prolific ardor of rumor and of common talk had raised from his truthful report. One does not wonder that he eagerly accepted the earliest opportunity of returning to New Spain, to escape from the not merely muttered complaints and upbraidings, in expressing which the general was chief. ”

“ Bland's narrative goes steadily forward toward the goal and home again, without digression for any merely entertaining purpose from each day's march and the nightly watch against surprise.
The natives supplied the picturesque element for most of the writing of colonial times. To them also were due a number of involuntary journeyings, the accounts of which make an important part of American literature. There is nothing in English, or in any other language, that surpasses these narratives of Indian captivities in vividness or in the bare statement of physical suffering and of mental torment. ”

“ The wonder in Livingston's own mind, during the last few months, was that the chance for a wider fame and a more eminent position in the world of scholars, had come to him, a book seller's clerk who had never entered college.
In 1898 he married Flora V. Milner of Deer Lodge, Montana, a friend of his boyhood. Mr. and Mrs. Livingston made their home at Scarsdale, nineteen miles north of New York City. There he found three acres of woods, cliffs, swamp and proper soil for the garden into which he put the happiest part of every week. ”

“ Who could believe that 1,000 horses and 500 of our cows and more than 5,000 rams and ewes and more than 1,500 friendly Indians and servants, in traveling over those plains, would leave no more trace where they had passed than if nothing had been there — nothing — so that it was necessary to make piles of bones and cow dung now and then, so that the rear guard could follow the army. ”

“ Rarely is there any substantial reason for doubting the honesty of what was reported as the result of actual observation. “What I write, is what I have proved,” remarks one of the frankest of these promoters of a New World settlement in which he hoped to make his fortune, Edward Bland, Merchant. ”

“ Most of his bibliographical work was done with books which were in his hands pending their sale by Dodd, Mead & Company. The unusual value of the catalogues issued by that house was recognized widely for some time before bookmen who were not conversant with the New York trade gossip became aware of Livingston's part in them. The extent to which his notes on rare volumes and peculiar editions have been copied by other book sellers is the convincing tribute to the thoroughness with which he exhausted each subject that he undertook to examine. ”

“ The most desirable employment for all this idle energy would be, of course, the exploration and conquest of new country, or the opening of the border territory for permanent settlement. But no mere work for work's sake, no wild-goose chase, would do. ”

“ If one desires to go to the country of Tiguex, so as to turn from there toward the west in search of the country of India, he ought to follow the road taken by the army, for there is no other, even if one wished to go by a different way, because the arm of the sea which reaches into this coast toward the north does not leave room for any. ”

“ The next day Don Garcia Lopez de Cardenas went to see the villages and talk with the natives. He found the villages closed by palisades and a great noise inside, the horses being chased as in a bull fight and shot with arrows. They were all ready for fighting. Nothing could be done, because they would not come down onto the plain and the villages are so strong that the Spaniards could not dislodge them. The general then ordered Don Garcia Lopez de Cardenas to go and surround one village with all the rest of the force. ”

“ I have said all this in order to show that some things which we consider fables may be true, because we see greater things every day in our own times, just as in future times people will greatly wonder at the deeds of Don Fernando Cortez, who dared to go into the midst of New Spain with 300 men against the vast number of people in Mexico, and who with 500 Spaniards succeeded in subduing it, and made himself lord over it in two years. ”

“ There are no fruits good to eat in the country, except the pine nuts. They have their preachers, Sodomy is not found among them. They do not eat human flesh nor make sacrifices of it. The people are not cruel, for they had Francisco de Ovando in Tiguex about forty days, after he was dead, and when the village was captured, he was found among their dead, whole and without any other wound except the one which killed him, white as snow, without any bad smell. I found out several things about them from one of our Indians, who had been a captive among them for a whole year. ”

“ In truth, they have reason for wishing to know the truth, because most people very often make things of which they have heard, and about which they have perchance no knowledge, appear either greater or less than they are. They make nothing of those things that amount to something, and those that do not they make so remarkable that they appear to be something impossible to believe. ”

“ This vigorous defender of the friar has successfully maintained his strenuous contention that Marcos neither lied nor exaggerated, even when he said that the Cibola pueblo appeared to him to be larger than the City of Mexico. All the witnesses agree that these light stone and adobe villages impress one who first sees them from a distance as being much larger than they really are. Mexico in 1539, on the other hand, was neither imposing nor populous. ”

“ They have dogs which they load, which carry their tents and poles and belongings. These people have the best figures of any that I have seen in the Indies. They could not give me any account of the country where the guides were taking me. I traveled five days more as the guides wished to lead me, until I reached some plains, with no more landmarks than as if we had been swallowed up in the sea, where they strayed about, because there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by. ”

“ He knew the citizens of Mexico, and also declared that not a citizen of Compostela was going on the expedition. Two citizens of Guadalajara were going, one of whom was married to an Indian, and the other was single. As for the many young gentlemen and the others who were going, who lived in Mexico and in other parts of New Spain, it seemed to him that their departure was a benefit rather than a disadvantage, because they were leading vicious lives and had nothing with which to support themselves. ”

“ And the people in these cities are very well clothed. . . . Concerning other provinces farther on, he said that each one of them amounted to much more than these seven cities." All this which the Indian told Friar Marcos was true; and, what is more, the Spanish friar seems to have correctly understood what the Indian meant, except that the Indian idea of several villages having a common allied form of government was interpreted as meaning the rule of a single lord, who lived in what was to the Indians the chief, because the most populous, village. ”

“ For I assure Your Majesty that there is no trace of Christianity where they have not yet arrived, neither little nor much, and that the poor people are ready to receive the priests and come to them even when they flee from us like deer in the mountains. ”

“ There is much very fine pasture land, with good grass. And while we were lost in these plains, some horsemen who went off to hunt cows fell in with some Indians who also were out hunting, who are enemies of those that I had seen in the last settlement, and of another sort of people who are called Teyas; they have their bodies and faces all painted, are a large people like the others, of a very good build; they eat the raw flesh just like the Querechos, and live and travel round with the cows in the same way as these. ”

“ In truth, he who wishes to employ himself thus in writing out the things that happened on the expedition, and the things that were seen in those lands, and the ceremonies and customs of the natives, will have matter enough to test his judgment, and I believe that the result can not fail to be an account which, describing only the truth, will be so remarkable that it will seem incredible. ”

“ I do not blame those inquisitive persons who, perchance with good intentions, have many times troubled me not a little with their requests that I clear up for them some doubts which they have had about different things that have been commonly related concerning the events and occurrences that took place during the expedition to Cibola, or the New Land, which the good viceroy—may he be with God in His glory [2] —Don Antonio de Mendoza, ordered and arranged, and on which he sent Francisco Vazquez de Coronado as captain-general. ”

“ This river of Our Lady flows through a very wide open plain sowed with corn plants; there are several groves, and there are twelve villages. The houses are of earth, two stories high; the people have a good appearance, more like laborers than a warlike race; they have a large food supply of corn, beans, melons, and fowl in great plenty; they clothe themselves with cotton and the skins of cows and dresses of the feathers of the fowls; they wear their hair short. Those who have the most authority among them are the old men ”

“ In this Valley of Hearts we found more people than in any part of the country which we had left behind, and a large extent of tilled ground. There was no corn for food among them, but as I heard that there was some in another valley called Señora, which I did not wish to disturb by force, I sent Melchior Diaz with goods to exchange for it, so as to give this to the friendly Indians whom we brought with us, and to some who had lost their animals along the way and had not been able to carry the food which they had taken from Culiacan. ”