GOMEZ AND THE NEW YORK GULF 371 



to alleviate his own thirst in the sun-parched deserts, water to 

 sustain his horses and burros and kine, water to vivify the plants 

 of which man and his creatures eat. While the late winter rains 

 are bringing verdure to the mountains and sending slender 

 streamlets into the arid valleys, the tribesmen gradually return 

 to their rancherias, remove the barriers of stones and sticks from 

 their doorways, and await the fit moistening of the soil at the 

 temporales. At the proper day they go forth to plow and plant, 

 and watch the rapid maturing of the crops. With the harvest 

 time the temporale is normally abandoned and the produce 

 transported to the rancheria. At about the same time the fruits 

 of the sahuaro and other cacti ripen, and soon afterward the beans 

 of the mesquite mature, and these uncultivated crops are in like 

 manner gathered and stored. Then follows a season of idleness 

 and feasting, interrupted by primitive ceremonial and attend- 

 ance on Mexican fiestas, perhaps scores or hundreds of miles 

 away ; and as autumn advances, the homes are again deserted 

 by a part of their inhabitants, who wander to other rancherias 

 to participate in the votive festivities or set out on the annual 

 migration southward. 



GOMEZ AND THE NEW YORK GULF 



Some interesting conclusions in regard to early American dis- 

 covery seem to result from the study of an old Spanish map pub- 

 lished by Mr Harrisse in his" Discovery of North America," p. 

 241. Writers on early cartography have identified the Rio de 

 San Antonio of early maps with the Hudson river and found evi- 

 dence thereby that the Spanish were familiar with that stream 

 long before Hudson himself came in 1609. The evidence of Mr 

 Harrisse's map tends to disprove this claim. The map was made 

 to accompany the " Islario Generall," written by Alonzo de Santa 

 Cruz in 1560, and Mr Harrisse gives the opinion that it is based 

 upon the lost Chaves map of 1536. 



Whatever knowledge of the North Atlantic coast from Chesa- 

 peake bay to the Penobscot the Spaniards may have had in 1536 

 depended, so far as we know, on the explorations of Gomez in 

 1525. His exploration had been an official one, resulting, pre- 

 sumably, in fairly accurate data, which would naturally have 

 been used for the official Chaves map seen and described by 

 Oviedo in 1527, but now lost. Efforts to trace Oviedo's descrip- 



