My great friend, the late Tanilo Sandoval of Silvis, Illinois, got me started on this three-part adventure involving Columbus.
Tanilo helped me research my first book, Hero Street U.S.A., the award-winning nonfiction account of eight young Mexican American men from one street who died in combat in World War II and Korea. That’s the most deaths from any one street in America.
Three of the heroes were Sandovals—including two who were Tanilo’s brothers, Frank and Joe Sandoval.
Just when I thought I was done with the project in 2009, Tanilo suggested that I research who was the first Sandoval in the Western Hemisphere.
“Sandoval is not an Aztec name,” he told me with a grin.
“I already did the research and know who the first Sandoval was,” he added, “but I won’t tell you because you should do the research yourself. You likely won’t like what you find.”
It didn’t take much digging to learn that the likely first Sandoval in the New World was Gonzalo de Sandoval, one of Hernán Cortés’s chief lieutenants when Spanish conquistadors conquered Montezuma and the Aztec Empire (1519–1522).
Gonzalo Sandoval was reputedly the Spaniard who captured the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc.
As a reward, Cortés gave Sandoval vast tracts of land and countless women. So the name spread.
I decided to take my research one step further—just a quarter-century earlier, to Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World.”
Much to my surprise—shock, really—I read that Columbus was arrested, clamped in irons, and shipped to Spain in 1500.
My wife and I took a trip to the Dominican Republic to visit the site where Columbus was arrested.
We had a very good guide in old colonial Santo Domingo. I asked how I could find a Taíno descendant of the people who first came in contact with Europeans.
“You can’t!” the guide said emphatically. “They are all dead! They were all dead within 100 years of Columbus’s landing.”
Stories that needed to be told—the great hero Columbus’s fall from grace, and the extinction of an estimated one million to two million Indigenous people who lived on Hispaniola when Columbus arrived.
A footnote in one of the many Columbus books I read told of six Taínos being kidnapped by Columbus and taken to Spain in 1493. That led to the first book in my Columbus trilogy, Kidnapped by Columbus, and the creation of the Taíno Guarocuya, who serves as the narrator in Kidnapped by Columbus, Columbus, Slave Trader, and now Columbus in Chains.
When Ginny and I visited Palos, Spain, and the elegant Monastery of La Rábida (where the monks had been of great service to Columbus), we toured the monastery’s fine museum.
To my utter astonishment, the museum has under glass the mighty sword of Gonzalo de Sandoval, a sword that legend claims slew thousands of Aztec warriors.
To my further astonishment, I discovered that Gonzalo de Sandoval was buried beneath the floor of the monastery’s chapel.
I learned that Sandoval sailed back to Spain with Cortés, only to become ill on the trip. At Cortés’s orders, the ship put in at Palos. Sandoval was carried ashore and taken to the monastery, where he died.
Tanilo Sandoval was right. I didn’t like everything that I learned on this adventure, but I sure enjoyed the trip.