Columbus had heard of the Amazons on his great voyage. He said, on the 4th of March, 1493, of the Caribs: “They are the same who have intercourse with the women on the first island which is found on the voyage from Spain to the Indies, on which no men live. These do not follow any womanly occupations, but use bows and arrows of cane, like those mentioned above, and cover and arm themselves with brazen plates, of which they have many.” In the same letter the Admiral spoke of a part of the island of Cuba (Juana), “called Cibau, where the people come into the world with tails;” and of another island, “where, as they assured me, the men have no hair.” In such a company, at that time, the Amazons also could not fail to be present.
The legend of the Amazons was unquestionably domiciled upon the American continent by the Spaniards, and was suggested by imperfectly understood accounts of distant tribes given by the natives, to whose words the Spaniards were not inattentive. Keeping pace with the efforts of the Spaniards to penetrate to the north, it appears first in the fourth letter of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V. (October 15, 1524): “And among the reports which he brought from that province [Colima] was an account of a very good harbor which was found on that coast; ... and also he told me of the lords of the province of Ciguatan, that many of them asserted there was an island inhabited only by women without any men, and that from time to time men went out to them from the mainland; ... when they bore daughters they kept them, but the sons were put away. This island is ten days distant from the province, and many persons have gone there from the province and seen them. I was also told that they were rich in pearls and in gold.”
It was Gonzalo Sandoval, Cortés’s most faithful lieutenant and friend, who brought this account. It was not allotted to Cortés himself to pursue the search for the Amazons’ island, for the insurrection which another associate in his conquest of the Mexican tribes, Cristóbal de Olid, excited against him in Honduras forced him into the arduous campaign in that part of Central America, in which he only with great difficulty escaped death. Until that remarkable expedition, which penetrated southward from Mexico to the now hardly accessible interior regions of Chiapas and Yucatan, the Spaniards held the northern coast of the Mexican gulf to the present state of Tamaulipas, but on the western coast they had advanced but little beyond the twentieth degree of north latitude in the state of Jalisco. The subjugation of the tribes of the Rio Pánuco on the eastern coast brought about a conflict in the year 1523 between Cortés and the contemporary discoverer, Francisco de Garay, which ended in Garay’s going to Mexico, where he espoused the natural daughter of Cortés, and then suddenly died. The behavior of Cortés had already aroused the distrust of the Spanish Government. There is no longer much doubt that, feeling his separation from the mother-country, and counting on the support of the natives, which he was beginning to cultivate systematically, he was working for the establishment of an independent kingdom in Mexico. He was therefore dangerous to all who stood near him in importance, and used every means to remove them. To this end he sent the most capable and most popular of his lieutenants, Pedro de Alvarado, to Guatemala, and Cristóbal de Olid to Honduras, while Sandoval, in whose frank and innocent character alone he could trust, was allowed to remain in Mexico. He had managed to get the first commissioner whom the Government sent to Mexico, Cristóbal de Tápia, out of the country; but Garay he permitted to come to Mexico--to die.