Dr. Iris Engstrand — Who was Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo?

Excerpts from the March 18, 2021 presentation

The full video is at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8XUBS7oEsc


… One claim made about Cabrillo is that he was somehow engaged in genocide … Cabrillo was not involved in what we would call genocide. He was a soldier under the command of the Spanish military for a period in his life. This is an important distinction that should not be trivialized … Murder is the intentional killing of a defenseless individual. Today we do not call our soldiers, sailors murderers when following their military orders …

… There are some who claim Cabrillo was a slave owner. We forget that Queen Isabella of Spain produced laws outlawing slavery in the New World except for prisoners of war captured on the battlefield. Native Americans who willingly acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ and the teaching of the Catholic Church were not to be enslaved in a pre-industrial era. However, slavery was the only source of mass labor, a given necessity.

… It is not fair to single out Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo for perhaps being a sex trafficker, and the comments about him come from questionable sources. In the 16th century sex trafficking … worldwide was not a crime but an accepted fact of life. Cabrillo was a man of his times, not ours …

… It's very hard to pin down the word slavery. They, they actually took the Indians in and took, you know, had them as workers, but they … actually supported them in a sense that we don't really know that much about. They were not cruel to the Indians, and there's a lot of exaggeration of their beatings … We don't know exactly how they treated the Indians, no, the Indians didn't have any written language, so they couldn't write back and say, yeah, I was beaten up today …  We've done a lot of research in the actual archives, and you don't see exactly how they were treated. We know that it probably wasn't a fair trade. I mean the Indians were under this, the control, so to speak, of the Spaniards, but they were also fed and clothed, such as the clothes that they wore by the Spaniards, but there was no out and out deliberate cruelty that we know of, except, I guess, if the Indians were going to run away or beat up somebody they might have punished them. But that's, that just goes on. But all of our, you know, our employment of people from, you know, the United States, slavery, and Brazil, every place in those days there wasn't any mass employment that we know of that you can, you know, go down to the unemployment office and get some workers. So, whatever the word means to different people in different times we can't exactly pin down.

… The Spaniards certainly didn't commit what you'd call genocide today. That's the deliberate annihilation of a race … they were trying to keep their, their workers healthy … the Spaniards wanted them to all be alive and well, and even if they wanted to work for them if they wanted to become Christians, they had, you know, uh, Catholic services and, uh — genocide, that word just doesn't apply to the Spanish motives in the New World. They want to keep the Indians alive even if, you just said, just as workers or even as slaves. They certainly didn't want them to die …

… Cabrillo is the person who gave California to the world. I mean, he has a, you know, an actual history that doesn't, I think, include what people feel is genocide or sex trafficking or those things. So if you want to keep the name I don't think you have to apologize. He was a navigator and made some good discoveries …

… He used Indians. You could say he exploited Indian workers in order to build his ships. But he did a really good job of building the ships …

… I think he's a pretty typical, not cruel, Spaniard. I mean, he was very concerned about the natives, that nobody would ever hurt them. And whether he not he treated them cruelly, we don't have documents that say, well, guess what I did today, I beat that Indian. They don't — if you find those things then you say, yes, they were mean and cruel. Some were and some weren't. It's just like society today. We have people who are cruel and people who would go after them. So it's, it's just up to you, whether or not you want to, to have him as Cabrillo. And I think just, you know, sticking to the positive would be a good thing. And, uh, I wouldn't like to see it change just because I've spent a lot of time with the documents and, and reading about his life, and feel that he's a, he was really a pretty good guy …