First, however, the "discovery" of America should be addressed. The Spanish landed in the area in 1492, and we can only imagine their excitement. Here in front of them was this seemingly endless landscape of "Stuff." (Stuff is going to be used in a proper way for dramatic effect.) Stuff was anything from gold to maize to silver to rhubarb. Most importantly, the Stuff was going to make Spain very, very wealthy. So the Spanish went to work taking all the Stuff they could find away from the New World and back to Spain. This is why Spain faded into the background in the continuing history of the New World: because they took everything and went home again. Their intentions of settling the area were minimal; they wanted the bare minimum of occupation and the maximum of Stuff to take home as souvenirs. And their writings reaffirmed that general feeling:
             I tell this so briefly because I believe that there is no need to recount the details of the miseries and hardships in which we found ourselves, for considering the place we were in and the little hope of aid that we had, everyone can easily imagine what we suffered there. (Cabeza de Vaca, 32)
             In this passage from Relacion, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's personal dissertation of his explorations of the Americas, de Vaca skips through a moment of personal suffering. It is something he does frequently throughout his manuscript, and it seems likely that he does so in order to not
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