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Show COMMENTARY ON MARK OF NICE, 1539. 481 [ City of] Mexico, fell upon a river so large and full of water ( coudaloso) that it prevented his crossing; viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, at Tonala, in New Galicia, Nov. 25, 1558. We have these instructions, in Spanish, French, Italian, and English, in divers records; also Friar Marcos' own acknowledgment of their reception by him, as just said. Pursuant thereto, he left San Miguel de Culiacan, in Sinaloa, Mar. 7 » I539> with his guide Stephen, his lay brother Honorato, and the Indians. His course was by the highway northnorthwest to Rio de Petatlan, the modern Rio del Fuerte, where Fray Honorato fell sick and was left behind. Continuing the same course, approximately parallel with, but at considerable distance from, the coast, Fray Marcos crossed the Rios Mayo and Yaqui, and about the middle of April was at a place called Vacapa or Bacapa. This is specially to be noted; for the name has been confounded with a certain San Luis Beltran de Bacapa, in northwestern Sonora near the Arizona line, and thus Fray Marcos has been sent by various writers promenading in a country he never even approached, to the dire confusion of his whole route. But Bacapa was an Indian village on the headwaters of the Rio Matapa, about lat 290, and was at or near the modern town of Matape, in central Sonora, where the Jesuit mission of San Jose de Matapa was founded in 1629. It was this miserable malidentification of Bacapa, traceable back at least to Mange, Mar. 12, 1702,1 which threw Friar Marcos' route out, altogether too far to the northwest, at the hands of many historians or commentators, who fetched him up low down on the Gila, made » At this date, when Mange was with Kino at San Luis de Bacapa, he indulged in the bit of historical and geographical mythology I wish to signalize as such: " Y parece es por la que pas6 el ejircito de Francisco Vazquez Coronado el alio de 1540 cuando fueron a descubrir las 7 ciudades de los llanos de Zivola, pues este nombre mismo le da el cronista Antonio de Herrera en la de cada 4.* descnbriendo este viaje, y que dista 40 leguas del mar, y la misma distancia hallamos en ella," etc. Bacapa! One day's journey from Sonoita! O Coronate/ Quandoque qualescunque quant a-cunque fabulct de te narrantur / It all comes from mistaking this Bacapa for the place on Rio Matape of the same or similar name, which happens to be about the same distance from the gulf. |