There are those who question even the term of the "Discovery" of America, claiming that nothing was discovered because there were already those who lived there. In principle, it is an entry opposition to the semantic that gives rise to the black legend hovering about those who came to the New World from old Europe. The perfect thing would have been, for these readers of History, that the Earth had returned to its original state as Pangea so that the union between peoples on both sides of the Atlantic would occur naturally.
But History does not conform to the naive desires of so many current "free thinkers." And the Conquest was an exercise of the will to adventure that Juan Eslava Galan it deals with redrawing in its most just and precise reality, with a touch of the romantic that speeds up the reading of the undoubted facts.
That the Spanish Crown sought to expand its empire is unquestionable. That their way of colonizing sought integration rather than domination, submission or even extermination, is absolutely evident in the maintenance of the indigenous population (a clear contrast to the conquest of the West of the United States, without going any further). That abuses would logically occur within the established guidelines, is undeniable. The false idea of superiority of those who came to the New World would lead to dark episodes inherent to the human condition. This parallel aspect that contradicted the royal mandate cannot be denied.
The point is, the discovery and expansion went on for many years. And new discoverers made their way into lush territories from the island of San Salvador to deepening beyond the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico. That is where Eslava Galán introduces that life that grants the romantic, from the tasty dialogues and interventions always in fierce movement parallel to the real events.
The Chronicles of the Indies, in their great heterogeneity, provide the sustenance of this book, between whose changes of registers contradictions and gaps are guessed, blank spaces that invite subjective considerations and, why not, the development and interaction of the real protagonists with others invented by the author to end up complementing what was and that fit perfectly with that current reality of America once conquered and today richly inhabited in perfect compass between the autochthonous and the miscegenation.
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