Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus and floated his ships on the South Sea. Prior to 1517 almost every province of the eastern continental seaboard, from Labrador to Patagonia, had been uncovered, save those of the Mexican Gulf, which casketed wonders greater than them all. This little niche alone remained wrapped in aboriginal obscurity, although less than forty leagues of strait separated the proximate points of Cuba and Yucatan.
Meanwhile, in the government of these Western Indies, Columbus, first admiral of the Ocean Sea, had been succeeded by Bobadilla, Ovando, and the son and heir of the discoverer, Diego Colon, each managing, wherein it was possible, worse than his predecessor; so that it was found necessary to establish at Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Indies, a sovereign tribunal, to which appeals might be made from any viceroy, governor, or other representative of royalty, and which should eventually, as a royal audiencia, exercise for a time executive as well as judicial supremacy.
But before clothing this tribunal with full administrative powers, Cardinal Jimenez, then dominant in New World affairs, had determined to try upon the turbulent colonists the effect of ecclesiastical influence in secular matters, and had sent over three friars of the order of St Jerome, Luis de Figueroa, Alonso de Santo Domingo, and Bernardo de Manzanedo, to whose direction governors and all others were made subject.
Just before the period in our history at which this volume opens, the Jeronimite Fathers, as the three friars were called, had practically superseded Diego Colon at Española, and were supervising Pedrarias Dávila of Castilla del Oro, Francisco de Garay governor of Jamaica, and Diego Velazquez governor of Cuba.