Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition

CHAPTER 6 DOMINGO MARTÍN, THE FOURTH DE OFICIO WITNESS

Chapter 6 Domingo Martín, the Fourth de Oficio Witness A Veteran of the Conquest of México fter the very short testimonies of the first three witnesses, Domingo Martíns declaration on May 31 was one of the longest. He gave lengthy, detailed, matter-of-fact accounts of the incidents about which he was asked. All the witnesses seem to have been very relaxed and comfortable in the presence of licenciado Tejada and his assistants. Litde of the testimony seems reluctantly given and rarely does anyone appear to try to evade an answer. For no one was this truer than for Domingo Martín. His statements make it seem as though he was in a formal but friendly atmosphere . Since what he had to say was almost uniformly supportive of the actions of Vázquez de Coronado and the rest of his company,this easygoing air bespeaks a lack of hostility to the captain general on the part of the judge. Unlike his counterpart, the visitador generalTello de Sandoval,Tejada clearly was no blood-thirsty interrogator. The lack of confrontation betweenjudge and witnesses in the pesquisa is made even more significant by the fact that Tejada selected and summoned the witnesses and that so many of them, like Martín, were cióse associates of Vázquez de Coronado. As he replied to the first ofTejadas questions, "during A Domingo Martín 89 the reconnaissance and subjugation he was always in the companyof and personally with Francisco Vázquez." Martíns position on the muster roll of the expedition shows him as not in any of the companies led by captains, but instead directly under the captain general.1 He was a native of Las Brozas in Extremadura, Spain, born there about 1502 or 1503.2 This was the alleged home town of Marina Gutiérrez de la Caballería, Vázquez de Coronado's mother-in-law, and in the jurisdiction of Cáceres, where his father-in-law Alonso de Estrada had served as corregidor. Martín also had business dealings with Hernando Pérez de Bocanegra,who linked his family tighdy to Vázquez de Coronado s through marriage of three of his sons to daughters of the former captain general.3 It is possible that Martín participated in the expedition because of his connection with the Vázquez de Coronado-Estrada family. Domingo Martín was a longtime resident of the New World. He had been in Cuba as early as 1517, sailed with Juan de Grijalva, and participated in the conquest ofTenochtitlán under Hernán Cortés.4 He was also one of the conquerors of Panuco, where he was granted the pueblo of Yagualicán in encomienda. For at least three years he collected tribute of gold, slaves, clothing, household servants, and provisions. When he returned to Spain to get his wife and children, Ñuño de Guzmán stripped him of his encomienda, even though he had express permission to be temporarily absent. That permission had been conceded by Alonso de Estrada, then acting as lieutenant governor of Nueva España, another reason for a positive connection with the Vázquez de Coronado-Estrada family.5 Martíns connections with Lorenzo de Tejada may have been even stronger; he testified in the oidor s defense during his visita conducted in 1546 by Tello de Sandoval.6 Nevertheless, he was never successftd in recovering the encomienda. His wife died upon reaching the New World and by 1535 Martín remarried . Then, in October 1537 he was granted a solar in México City.7 He left his second wife behind in the viceregal capital when he joined the expedition to Tierra Nueva. As part of his plans for benefiting from the expedition, he and fellow expedition member (and also a witness in the 1544 pesquisa) Cristóbal de Escobar formed a company and purchased livestock to take 90 Chapter6 along for sale.8 Martín was another individual of higher than average status in the expedition, to judge by the four horses he brought along.9 During his testimony before Tejada on the last day of May 1544, Martín consistently maintained that Vázquez de Coronado had behaved properly, even in ordering El Turco killed. In this respect, his testimony is in line with that of the rest of the witnesses, oífering no criticism of the captain...